Mein Kampf
was made good at the eleventh hour. The “Friend of Mankind” set himself with superhuman strength against the negligence of his forefathers, and tried to make up in a decade for that which centuries had neglected. If he had been granted but forty years for his task, and if but two generations had continued the work he had begun, the miracle would probably have succeeded. But when he died, worn out in body and soul, after ruling scarcely ten years, his work accompanied him to the grave, to sleep forever, without reawakening, in the Capuchin Vault. Neither the intelligence nor the will of his successors was equal to the task.
When the first revolutionary heat-lightning of a new age began to flash through Europe, Austria, too, gradually began to catch fire. But when at last the flames broke out, they were fanned less by economic, social, or even general political causes than by forces having their origin in the people.
The revolution of 1848 might have been everywhere else a class struggle; but in Austria it was the beginning of a new war of nationalities. At that time the German, forgetting or not realizing his origin, entered the service of the revolutionary uprising, and thus sealed his own fate. He helped to awaken the spirit of Western Democracy, which soon deprived him of the foundation for his own existence.
The formation of a parliamentary representative body without first determining and consolidating a common state language had laid the foundation for the end of German supremacy in the Monarchy. From that day on the state itself was lost. Everything that followed was merely the historical liquidation of an empire.
To watch the dissolution was as moving as it was instructive. This execution of a historical sentence took place in a thousand separate forms. The fact that most people walked blindly among the phenomena of decay only proved the Gods’ will to destroy Austria.
I do not wish here to lose myself in details, since that is not the purpose of this book. I wish only to submit to more thorough scrutiny those processes which, as unchanging causes of the decay of people and state, still have importance for us today, and which
82
