Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

INTERLUDE 211embodiment has occurred in Germany, in the midst of a high civilization,bruised in its kernel by a disastrous nistory. The Antichrist is arank weed growing out of a wounded culture; and German culturereceived its wound in the days when Richard Wagner stood on theDresden steeple, braving a rain of bullets.Germany was ablaze with rebellion against her thirty-six princes,against the king of Prussia, against the emperor of Austria, or rather hishated, all-powerful minister, Metternich; against the great oppressor ofpeoples through the whole of Europe: the Russian tsar. She was fightingfor her freedom: freedom of speech, press, confession; the rights ofman, equality of classes and races, parliamentary representation; shewas fighting for that great freedom, which in those days was deniedmost of the nations east of the Rhine; the freedom to be a single nation,obeying only itself. That is why awakening Germany, robbed of herinner freedom and desiring it in the form of unity, engaged in the mostpainful and tragic of all the struggles of our epoch, the desperate andfutile struggle against France.In the seventeenth century, Armand Duplessis, Cardinal de Richelieu,established a basic principle of French foreign policy: the security ofFrance demands that Germany must never be united. From then on, thedream of German unity became a vain struggle against superior Frenchstrength, against French conquest, even against the French language,which at times forced the German language out of educated Germansociety. France oppressed Germany out of a panic fear, resulting fromthe Spanish-Habsburg embrace in the sixteenth century. At thebeginning of that century, a Spanish king became German emperor; theruling houses of Spain and Austria (Habsburg) fused, and Spain,vanguard of the Roman Catholic Church in defending its tottering ruleover the souls of Europe, used her increasing power to crush risingProtestantism in Germany as well as encircled France. In Germany theattempt succeeded only partially, but for a hundred years France, tornby her own religious parties and powerful nobles, was strangled by theSpanish-Habsburg ring. Spain interfered in France's internal affairs,dictated French policies, maintained parties in France; and Franceremained Catholic. If France was