Childhood Home
And indeed who could study German history under such a teacher without becoming an enemy of the State whose ruling house had so catastrophically influenced the destiny of the nation?
Who, finally, could still preserve his allegiance to the emperors of a dynasty which had betrayed the interests of the German people again and again for its own petty advantage?
Did we not know even as boys that this Austrian state had no love for us as Germans, indeed could have none?
Historical insight into the work of the Hapsburgs was strengthened by daily experience. In the north and in the south the poison of foreign peoples ate into the body of our nation, and even Vienna was obviously becoming more and more an un-German city. The House of the Archdukes favored Czechs wherever possible; it was the hand of the goddess of eternal justice and implacable retribution that overthrew the deadliest enemy of Austrian Germanity, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, by the very bullets he had helped to cast. After all, he was the patron and protector of the attempt to slavicize Austria from above.
The burdens laid upon the German people were enormous, unheard-of its sacrifices in taxes and blood; and yet anyone not altogether blind must have realized it would be all in vain. What hurt us most was the fact that the whole system was morally screened by the alliance with Germany; thus the gradual extirpation of Germanity in the old monarchy was to a certain extent sanctioned by Germany itself. Hapsburg hypocrisy, giving the outside world the impression that Austria was still a German state, fanned hatred for that house into blazing indignation and contempt.
Only in Germany itself the elected members of the government even then saw none of all this. As if smitten with blindness they walked beside a corpse, even thinking they discovered in the symptoms of decay signs of “new” life.
In the fatal alliance of the young German Empire with the Austrian sham state lay the seeds of the World War, but also of the collapse.
In the course of this book I shall have to deal at length with
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