In the spring of 1912 I came at last to Munich.
The city itself was as familiar to me as if I had lived for years within its walls. This is accounted for by my study which at every step had led me to this metropolis of German art. Not only has one not seen Germany if one does not know Munichno, above all, one does not know German art if one has not seen Munich.
In any case, this period before the War was the happiest and by far the most contented of my life. Even if my earnings were still extremely meager, I did not live to be able to paint, but painted only to be able to secure my livelihood or rather to enable myself to go on studying. I possessed the conviction that I should some day, in spite of all obstacles, achieve the goal I had set myself. And this alone enabled me to bear all other petty cares of daily existence lightly and without anxiety.
In addition to this, there was the heartfelt love which seized me for this city more than for any other place that I knew, almost from the first hour of my sojourn there. A German city! What a difference from Vienna! I grew sick to my stomach when I even thought back on this Babylon of races. In addition, the dialect, much closer to me, which particularly in my contacts with Lower Bavarians, reminded me of my former childhood. There were a thousand and more things which were or became inwardly dear and precious to me. But most of all I was attracted by this wonderful marriage of primordial power and fine artistic mood, this single line from the Hofbrauhaus to the Odeon, from the October Festival to the Pinakothek, etc. If today I am more attached to this city than to any other spot of earth in this world, it is partly due to the fact that it is and remains inseparably bound up with the development of my own life; if even then I achieved the happiness of a truly inward contentment, it can be attributed only to the magic which the miraculous residence of the Wittelsbachs exerts on every man who is blessed, not only with a calculating mind but with a feeling soul.
What attracted me most aside from my professional work was, here again, the study of the political events of the day, among them particularly the occurrences in the field of foreign affairs. I came to these latter indirectly through the German alliance policy which from my Austrian days I considered absolutely mistaken. However, the full extent of this selfdeception on the part of the Reich had not been clear to me in Vienna. In those days I was inclined to assumeor perhaps I merely talked myself into it as an excusethat Berlin perhaps knew how weak and unreliable the ally would be in reality, yet, for more or less mysterious reasons, held back this knowledge in order to bolster up an alliance policy which after all Bismarck himself had founded and the sudden cessation of which could not be desirable, if for no other reason lest the lurking foreigner be alarmed in any way, or the shopkeeper at home be worried.
To be sure, my associations, particularly among the people itself, soon made me see to my horror that this belief was false. To my amazement I could not help seeing everywhere that even in otherwise wellinformed circles there was not the slightest glimmer of knowledge concerning the nature of the Habsburg monarchy. Particularly the common people were caught in the mad idea that the ally could be regarded as a serious power which in the hour of need would surely rise to the situation. Among the masses the monarchy was still regarded as a ‘ German’ state on which we could count. They were of the opinion that there, too, the power could be measured by the millions as in Germany itself, and completely forgot that, in the first place: Austria had long ceased to be a German state; and in the second place: the internal conditions of this Empire were from hour to hour moving closer to disintegration.
I had come to know this state formation better than the socalled official ‘diplomats,’ who blindly, as almost always, rushed headlong toward catastrophe; for the mood of the people was always a mere discharge of what was funneled into public opinion from above. But the people on top made a cult of the ‘ally,’ as if it were the Golden Calf. They hoped to replace by cordiality what was lacking in honesty. And words were always taken for coin of the realm.
Even in Vienna I had been seized with anger when I reflected on the disparity appearing from time to time between the speeches of the official statesmen and the content of the Viennese press. And yet Vienna, in appearance at least, was still a German city.
How different it was if you left Vienna, or rather GermanAustria, and went to the Slavic provinces of the Empire ! You had only to take up the Prague newspapers to find out what they thought of the whole exalted hocuspocus of the Triple Alliance. There there was nothing but bitter scorn and mockery for this ‘masterpiece of statecraft.’ In the midst of peace, with both emperors pressing kisses of friendship on each other’s foreheads, the Czechs made no secret of the fact that this alliance would be done for on the day when an attempt should be made to translate it from the moonbeams of the Nibelungen ideal into practical reality.
What excitement seized these same people several years later when the time finally came for the alliances to show their worth and Italy leapt out of the triple pact, leaving her two comrades in the lurch, and in the end even becoming their enemy ! That anyone even for a moment should have dared to believe in the possibility of such a miracleto wit, the mirade that Italy would fight side by side with Austriacould be nothing but incomprehensible to anyone who was not stricken with diplomatic blindness. But in Austria things were not a hair’sbreadth different.
In Austria the only exponents of the alliance idea were the Habsburgs and the Germans. The Habsburgs, out of calculation and compulsion; the Germans, from good faith and politicalstupidity. From good faith, for they thought that by the Triple Alliance they were performing a great service for the German Reich itself, helping to strengthen and secure it; from political stupidity, because neither did the firstmentioned occur, but on the contrary, they thereby helped to chain the Reich to the corpse of a state which would inevitably drag them both into the abyss, and above all because they themselves, solely by virtue of this alliance, fell more and more a prey to deGermanization. For by the alliance with the Reich, the Habsburgs thought they could be secure against any interference from this side, which unfortunately was the case, and thus they were able far more easily and safely to carry through their internal policy of slowly eliminating Germanism. Not only that in view of our wellknown ‘ objectivity’ they had no need to fear any intervention on the part of the Reich government, but, by pointing to the alliance, they could also silence any embarrassing voice among the AustrianGermans which might rise in German quarters against
Slavization of an excessively disgraceful character.
For what was the German in Austria to do if the Germans of the Reich recognized and expressed confidence in the Habsburg government? Should he offer resistance and be branded by the entire German public as a traitor to his own nationality? When for decades he had been making the most enormous sacrifices precisely for his nationality!
But what value did this alliance have, once Germanism had been exterminated in the Habsburg monarchy? Wasn’t the value of the Triple Alliance for Germany positively dependent on the preservation of German predominance in Austria? Or did they really believe that they could live in an alliance with a SlavicHabsburg Empire?
The attitude of official German diplomacy and of all public opinion toward the internal Austrian problem of nationalities was beyond stupidity, it was positively insane ! They banked on an alliance, made the future and security of a people of seventy millions dependent on itand looked on while the sole basis for this alliance was from year to year, inexorably and by plan, being destroyed in the partnernation. The day was bound to come when a ‘ treaty ‘ with Viennese diplomacy would remain, but the aid of an allied empire would be lost.
With Italy this was the case from the very beginning.
If people in Germany had only studied history a little more clearly, and gone into the psycholog of nations, they would not have been able to suppose even for an hour that the Quirinal and the Vienna Hofburg would ever stand together n a common fighting front. Sooner would Italy have turned into a volcano than a government have dared to send even a single Italian to the battlefield for the fanatically hated Habsburg state, except as an enemy. More than once in Vienna I saw outbursts of the passionate contempt and bottomless hatred with which the Italian was ‘ devoted ‘ to the Austrian state. The sins of the House of Habsburg against Italian freedom and independence in the course of the centuries was too great to be forgotten, even if the will to forget them had been present. And it was not present; neither in the people nor in the Italian government. For Italy there were therefore two possibilities for relations with Austna: either alliance or war.
By choosing the first, the Italians were able to prepare, undisturbed, for the second.
Especially since the relation of Austria to Russia had begun to drive closer and closer to a military clash, the German alliance policy was as senseless as it was dangerous.
This was a classic case, bearing witness to the absence of any broad and correct line of thinking.
Why, then, was an alliance concluded? Only in order better to guard the future of the Reich than, reduced to her own resources, she would have been in a position to do. And this future of the Reich was nothing other than the question of preserving the German people’s possibility of existence.
Therefore the question could be formulated only as follows:
What form must the life of the German nation assume in the tangible future, and how can this development be provided with the necessary foundations and the required security within the framework of general European relation of forces?
A clear examination of the premises for foreign activity on the part of German statecraft inevitably led to the following conviction:
Germany has an annual increase in population of nearly nine hundred thousand souls. The difficulty of feeding this army of new citizens must grow greater from year to year and ultimately end in catastrophe, unless ways and means are found to forestall the danger of starvation and misery in time.
There were four ways of avoiding so terrible a development for the future:
At the same time the diminution of number strengthens the individual and thus in the last analysis fortifies the species.
It is different, however, when man undertakes the limitation of his number. He is not carved of the same wood, he is ‘ humane.’ He knows better than the cruel queen of wisdom. He limits not the conservation of the individual, but procreation itself. This seems to him, who always sees himself and never the race, more human and more justified than the opposite way. Unfortunately, however, the consequences are the reverse:
While Nature, by making procreation free, yet submitting survival to a hard trial, chooses from an excess number of individuals the best as worthy of living, thus preserving them alone and in them conserving their species, man limits procreation, but is hysterically concerned that once a being is born it should be preserved at any price. This correction of the divine will seems to him as wise as it is humane, and he takes delight in having once again gotten the best of Nature and even having proved her inadequacy. The number, to be sure, has really been limited, but at the same time the value of the individual has dirninished; this, however, is something the dear little ape of the Almighty does not want to see or hear about.
For as soon as procreation as such is limited and the number of births diminished, the natural struggle for existence which leaves only the strongest and healthiest alive is obviously replaced by the obvious desire to ‘ save ‘ even the weakest and most sickly at any price, and this plants the seed of a future generation which must inevitably grow more and more deplorable the longer this mockery of Nature and her will continues.
And the end will be that such a people will some day be deprived of its existence on this earth; for man can defy the eternal laws of the will to conservation for a certain time, but sooner or later vengeance comes. A stronger race will drive out the weak, for the vital urge in its ultimate form will, time and again, burst all the absurd fetters of the socalled humanity of individuals, in order to replace it by the humanity of Nature which destroys the weak to give his place to the strong.
Therefore, anyone who wants to secure the existence of the German people by a selflimitation of its reproduction is robbing it of its future.
The objection may still be raised that this future will face the whole of humanity in any case and that consequently the individual nation can naturally not avoid this fate.
At first glance this seems perfectly correct. Yet here the following must be borne in mind:
Assuredly at a certain time the whole of humanity will be compelled, in consequence of the impossibility of making the fertility of the soil keep pace with the continuous increase in population, to halt the increase of the human race and either let Nature again decide or, by selfhelp if possible, create the necessary balance, though, to be sure, in a more correct way than is done today. But then this will strike all peoples, while today only those races are stricken with such suffering which no longer possess the force and strength to secure for themselves the necessary territories in this world. For as matters stand there are at the present time on this earth immense areas of unusued soil, only waiting for the men to till them. But it is equally true that Nature as such has not reserved this soil for the future possession of any particular nation or race; on the contrary, this soil exists for the people which possesses the force to take it and the industry to cultivate it.
Nature knows no political boundaries. First, she puts living creatures on this globe and watches the free play of forces. She then confers the master’s right on her favorite child, the strongest in courage and industry.
When a people limits itself to internal colonization because other races are clinging fast to greater and greater surfaces of this earth, it will be forced to have recourse to selflimitation at a time when the other peoples are still continuing to increase. Some day this situation will arise, and the smaller the living space at the disposal of the people, the sooner it will happen. Since in general, unfortunately, the best nations, or, even more correctly, the only truly cultured races, the standardbearers of all human progress, all too frequently resolve in their pacifistic blindness to renounce new acquisitions of soil and content themselves with ‘internal’ colonization, while the inferior races know how to secure immense living areas in this world for themselvesthis would lead to the following final result:
The culturally superior, but less ruthless races, would in consequence of their limited soil, have to limit their increase at a time when the culturally inferior but more brutal and more natural t peoples, in consequence of their greater living areas, would still be in a position to increase without limit. In other words: some day the world will thus come into possession of the culturally inferior but more active men.
Then, though in a perhaps very distant future, there will be but two possibilities either the world will be governed according to the ideas of our modern democracy, and then the weight of any decision will result in favor of the numerically stronger races, or the world will be dominated in accordance with the laws of the natural order of force, and then it is the peoples of brutal will who will conquer, and consequently once again not the nation of selfrestriction.
No one can doubt that this world will some day be exposed to the severest struggles for the existence of mankind. In the end, only the urge for selfpreservation can conquer. Beneath it socalled humanity, the expression of a mixture of stupidity, cowardice, and knowitall conceit, will melt like snow in the March sun. Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish.
For us Germans the slogan of ‘inner colonization’ is catastrophic, if for no other reason because it automatically reinforces us in the opinion that we have found a means which, in accordance with the pacifistic tendency, allows us ‘ to earn ‘ our right to exist by labor in a life of sweet slumbers. Once this doctrine were taken seriously in our country, it would mean the end of every exertion to preserve for ourselves the place which is our due. Once the average German became convinced that he could secure his life and future in this way, all attempts at an active, and hence alone fertile, defense of German vital necessities would be doomed to failure. In the face of such an attitude on the part of the nation any really beneficial foreign policy could be regarded as buried, and with it the future of the German people as a whole.
Taking these consequences into account, it is no accident that it is always primarily the Jew who tries and succeeds in planting such mortally dangerous modes of thought in our people. He knows his customers too well not to realize that they gratefully let themselves be swindled by any goldbrick salesman who can make them think he has found a way to play a little trick on Nature, to make the hard, inexorable struggle for existence superfluous, and instead, sometimes by work, but sometimes by plain doing nothing, depending on how things ‘come out,’ to become the lord of the planet.
It cannot be emphasized sharply enough that any German internal colonization must serve to eliminate social abuses particularly to withdraw the soil from widespread speculation, best can never suffice to secure the future of the nation without the acquisition of new soil.
If we do not do this, we shall in a short time have arrived, not only at the end of our soil, but also at the end of our strength.
Finally, the following must be stated:
The limitation to a definite small area of soil, inherent in internal colonization, like the same final effect obtained by restriction of procreation, leads to an exceedingly unfavorable politicomilitary situation in the nation in question.
The size of the area inhabited by a people constitutes in itself an essential factor for determining its outward security. The greater the quantity of space at the disposal of a people, the greater its natural protection; for military decisions against peoples living in a small restricted area have always been obtained more quickly and hence more easily, and in particular more effectively and completely than can, conversely, be possible against territorially extensive states. In the size of a state’s territory there always lies a certain protection against frivolous attacks, since success can be achieved only after hard struggles, and therefore the risk of a rash assault will seem too great unless there are quite exceptional grounds for it. Hence the very size of a state offers in itself a basis for more easily preserving the freedom and independence of a people, while, conversely, the smallness of such a formation is a positive invitation to seizure.
Actually the two first possibilities for creating a balance between the rising population and the stationary amount of soil were rejected in the socalled national circles of the Reich. The reasons for this position were, to be sure, different from those above mentioned: government circles adopted a negative attitude toward the limitation of births out of a certain moral feeling; they indignantly rejected internal colonization because in it they scented an attack against large landholdings and therein the beginning of a wider struggle against private property in general. In view of the form in which particularly the latter panacea was put forward, they may very well have been right in this assumption.
On the whole, the defense against the broad masses was not very skillful and by no means struck at the heart of the problem.
Thus there remained but two ways of securing work and bread for the rising population.
In other words: either a territorial policy, or a colonial and commercial policy.
Both ways were contemplated, examined, recommended, and combated by different political tendencies, and the last was finally taken.
The healthier way of the two would, to be sure, have been the first.