GERMANY: Ein' Feste Burg

(See front cover)

The banker with the Mephistophelian beard, Governor Montagu Collet Norman of the Bank of England, wrote a private letter to Governor Clément Moret of the Bank of France several months ago:

''Unless drastic measures are taken to save it, the capitalist system throughout the civilized world will be wrecked within a year. I should like this prediction to be filed for future reference."

For the past fortnight bankers all over the world have been pondering that prophecy. The greatest economic crisis since the War has arisen in Germany. Was this what Banker Norman was foreseeing? Last week the focus of action swung from Germany to Paris and London (see p. 14). But what was happening inside Germany? What was the German Government doing to defend capitalism?

Germany's new Iron Chancellor 46-year-old Heinrich Brüning, had several things in his favor. The country remained peaceable; there was little rioting. In Düsseldorf, Coblenz and Gelsenkirchen gangs of hooligans threw up barricades, exchanged shots with the police, made desultory raids on food shops. But for the most part people seemed to remember too vividly for repetition the horrors of Germany's other great crisis, the inflation period of 1923. There was no direct parliamentary opposition. For the past year Iron Chancellor Brüning has managed to rule Germany as a semi-dictator, forcing the Reichstag into a three-month dissolution and ruling by Presidential decree.

Behind all his actions has stood, and continued to stand last week, the heroic, the patriarchal figure of Germany's old President Hindenburg.

Reichspräsident. Every German knows by heart the words of Martin Luther's hymn: "Ein' Feste Burg ist Unser Gott" (A Mighty Refuge is Our God). To Germans, both Republicans and Royalists, HINDENBURG is a feste burg too. If, as many thought last week, Germany struggling against disaster was fighting the battle of capitalism, then Hindenburg was capitalism's last prop.

No man had a stranger training to be the mainstay of a republic than Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg. He was born in Posen (now part of Poland), on Oct. 2 1847 and brought up as a perfect little Junker. His father had been a soldier, all his ancestors were soldiers: no other career was considered for him. He never spoke to his father without snapping to attention. When he was three or four he had for a nurse an ancient harridan who had served as a canteen woman in the Napoleonic wars. When little Paul so far forgot himself as to cry. this veteran would bellow "SILENCE IN THE RANKS!" It always worked.

At eleven he went to the Prussian cadet school at Wahlstatt where fierce-whiskered drill sergeants beat all imagination, all desire for originality out of him, taught him the great military virtues: absolute obedience, perfect loyalty, scrupulous honesty. At 18 he saw his first action in the war with Austria and wrote in a letter to his parents:

"At the sound of the first bullets one is overcome with a certain enthusiasm (the first bullets are always welcomed with 'hurrah' by the troops). . . . One thinks for a moment of the dear ones at home as well as about one's old and honorable name, and then one dashes ahead."