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The German People and the Postwar World: A Study Based on Election Statistics, 1871–1933

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Sydney L. W. Mellen
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Extract

What are the German people really like? A weird assortment of catchwords and formulas have been put forward, most of them as unscientific as Hitler's own racial doctrines: aggressors throughout the ages, perpetrators of a black record of war and aggression, submissive and obedient regiments, cultural and political romanticists, rebels against the established order, victims of a national inferiority complex, sentimentalists, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and so on. And yet unless the people of the democracies attain a realistic understanding of the Germans there will be a poor chance, after the war is finally won, of attaining a permanent solution of the German problem.

In the articles and books written about the German people in recent months and years, little or no attention has been given to one set of historical facts which is capable of providing a trustworthy and statistically balanced background: the record of popular election results from 1871 to 1933. In the long series of Reichstag elections in this period, the German people as a whole expressed their composite preferences concerning the dominant political issues of the times; and the very multiplicity of the political parties, each with more or less distinct character and policies, provides us with fairly extensive breakdowns of public opinion.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , August 1943 , pp. 601 - 625
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1943

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References

1 Crothers, George D., The German Elections of 1907 (New York, 1941), pp. 56–57.Google Scholar

2 The following is quoted from The Origins of the World War, by ProfessorFay, Sidney Bradshaw (2nd ed., New York, 1939)Google Scholar, the standard work on the subject: “One must abandon the dictum of the Versailles Treaty that Germany and her allies were solely responsible. It was a dictum exacted by the victors from the vanquished, under the influence of the blindness, ignorance, hatred, and the propagandist misconceptions to which war had given rise. It was based on evidence which was incomplete and not always sound. It is generally recognized by the best historical scholars in all countries to be no longer tenable or defensible. They are agreed that the responsibility for the war is a divided responsibility. But they still disagree very much as to the relative part of this responsibility that falls on each country and on each individual political or military leader…. Even supposing that a general consensus of opinion might be reached as to the relative responsibility of any individual country or man for immediate causes connected with the July crisis of 1914, it is by no means necessarily true that the same relative responsibility would hold for the underlying causes, which for years had been tending toward the creation of a dangerous situation.” Vol. II, pp. 548–550.

3 The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York, 1920), pp. 168–208.

4 See Le Correspondant (Paris), 25 Mars, 1933.

5 See Inside Germany Reports (issued by the American Friends of German Freedom, New York), particularly No. 22, June, 1942, and No. 23, Nov., 1942.

6 See Hagen, Paul, Will Germany Crack? (New York, 1942), pp. 218–220.Google Scholar

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