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

INTERLUDE 219spring aloft and shatter the Gothic cathedrals. When you hear thatstamping and clashing, take care, ye neighbor children, ye Frenchmen.'At that time France actually did take fright at the German NationalistMovement. If Germany was uniting, let her at least surrender the leftbank of the Rhine to France! Be'ginning in 1840, French politiciansadvanced this demand for more than thirty years on every possibleoccasion. In Germany it met with angry protest. Even Heine, son of theRhineland, rejected the French demand with the proud and magnificentline: 'I cannot surrender the Rhine to you Frenchmen, for the Rhinebelongs to me personally.'In 1848, the Nationalist Movement of the German intellectuals flaredinto revolution. The best brains in the land assembled in Saint Paul'sChurch in Frankfort on the Main, to found a German Reich and give it ademocratic constitution; a minority demanded a republic. The princeswere helpless, for a time even intimidated by bloody uprisings in Berlin,Vienna, and other cities; reactionary ministers were driven from thecountry; the people seemed victorious.But who were the people? New classes had arisen. The proletariatappeared in the large countries. This proletariat, created during the lastdecades by the new industries, the spinning and weaving mills, the greatiron smelteries, machine shops and mines, lived amid frightfulconditions, bordering on starvation and moral decay. The workers sawlittle in democracy and national unity. They wanted to eat. Thepropertied classes, which had previously been democratically minded,took fright and sought the protection of the military reaction; thealliance between property and military force strangled the revolutionand silently drained off the blood of democracy.Thus, in 1852, a military and political adventurer was able to seizepower in France, make himself emperor under the tide of Napoleon III,and create the state which was to become the model for the conspiracyof the Wise Men of Zion. Everywhere world economy was on its way tocreating — in the words of Hegel — a new 'stage' — the worldproletariat. Two German students of