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

330 DER FUEHRERhundred scats. It was his worst enemies, the Social-Democrats, whowon these elections.Hitler could stir up the crowds, but he was as yet unable to get theirvotes. Sober reasoning made it clear to the masses that the country mustbe on the right path since it stabilized its currency, got the French out ofthe Ruhr, and finally entered the League of Nations with a permanentseat — that is, the full rights of a great power (September, 1926).Nevertheless, there was an inarticulate feeling that in this structure ofsuccesses there might be a rotten spot, and their very contact with theartificial and formal international apparatus served only to remind thepeople of the frustrated hopes of 1919. What a magnificent world itmight have been, managed and run by a great world administration,directly and vitally connected with the masses of all civilized nations bydirect suffrage! But when by the Peace of Versailles the individualcitizen, taxpayer, and voter found himself again locked within theborders of his national state; when he became aware of the greatincongruity, that, with the increasing complexity of internationalrelations, events on the other side of the globe directly affected his owndestiny while he himself by his vote could not influence the wholeglobe, but only his narrow national state — when this basic limitation,rendering national democracy useless as a guide to world destiny, cameto the consciousness of the individual, it was the end of the democraticpassion which had enriched the nineteenth century, and for a briefmoment in 1919 kindled a light even in Germany.Meanwhile, starting in the fall of 1928, Communism began itsattempt to build Soviet Russia into a socialist model state. Throughunspeakable sufferings, through famine, through the death of wholesections of the population, through the misery of whole regions, JosefStalin, the dictator, drove his first Five-Year Plan forward. Along withbrutal energy and love of personal power, Stalin possessed a gift whichperhaps recalls Hitler's best quality: a worldly experienced eye for thelimits of human strength. He saw possibilities where others despaired;and where fanatics stormed blindly forward, he sensed limits. He calledhis system 'socialism in one country,' indicating that he meant tosocialize without wait-