9. The “German Workers’ Party”
One day I received orders to find out what was what about an apparently political organization going under the name of “German Workers’ Party,” which proposed in a day or two hold a meeting at which Gottfried Feder was to speak; I was to attend and have a look at the group, and then to make my report.
The curiosity with which the army then regarded political parties was more than understandable. The Revolution had given the soldiers the right to take part in politics, and it was the most inexperienced men who were now making full use of it. Not until Centrist and Social Democratic Parties realized to their distress that the soldiers’ sympathies were beginning to turn from the Revolutionary parties toward the national movement and revival was it thought proper once more to deprive the troops of the franchise, and to forbid political activity.
That Center and Marxism would resort to this measure was obvious, for if they had not thus cut off “civil rights”—as the political equality of the soldier after the Revolution was called—within a few years there would have been no November State, and hence no further national degradation and shame. The troops at that time were well on the way to freeing the nation from its blood-suckers and tools of the Entente within. But the fact that even the so-called “national” parties voted enthusiastically for this correction of the November criminals’ earlier views, and thus helped to render harmless the instruments of a national revival, showed once more whither the wholly doctrinaire conceptions of these most innocent of innocents may lead. This bourgeoisie, suffering from veritable intellectual senility, seriously believed the army would become again what it once had been, namely a
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