The Political Dilemma in Germany

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WHEN Professor Bergsträsser wrote his account of the pre-war German political parties,^[i] he began by pointing out the comparatively recent growth of a "parteipolitisches Leben" in Germany. He traced it back to 1848, thus giving present-day party politics in Germany an age of about two generations of men, to which we might now add a third generation of men and women. Two or three generations do not count for much in the development of a political institution such as parliamentary government by means of party organization, and if we observe in the German parties any of the defects commonly found in callow youth, either in the way of bad manners or of immoderate conceit, we should not feel justified in complaining about them.

But the astonishing thing about the German parties is that their most conspicuous faults and failings are not those which might easily be explained by their not having reached even their first centenary; on the contrary, they are those generally attributed to old age, or even to senility. Garrulous to the point of gossiping and backbiting, obstinate and quarrelsome, these parties show the tendencies of old men who seem to draw their power of outliving younger people from a gruesome pleasure in disappointing expectation of their death; there is all too little of the waywardness, the fine contempt for attachments of any kind, which form such marked traits of post-war youth, at any rate in Europe...