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

218 DER FUEHRERtsar or the Austrian, emperor controlled the police in Germany and Italy,and pursued fleeing democrats from country to country. Foreignmonarchs were ruling as princelings over larger or smaller parts ofdivided Germany: the king of Denmark was duke of Holstein and of theGerman-speaking parts of Slesvig; an English prince was king ofHanover and, in the best Georgian tradition, broke the swornconstitution of his country; the emperor of Austria was looked upon as atyrant by his German subjects as well as by his Hungarian, Czech,Polish, and Italian.An international police despotism ruled over Europe, and theresistance was international. French, Italian, and German revolutionariesgreeted one another as brothers. Seldom has the decisive role of theintellectual been more clearly discernible. For the national revolution ofthe nineteenth century was his work. Formal education spread,universities were founded. Young men, predominantly of the poorerclasses, studied and were dissatisfied. A stream of democratic students,revolutionary journalists, parliamentarians and bomb-throwers,demagogues and Carbonari, runs through me nineteenth century. TheFrench Revolution had proclaimed the rights of man, and the echoresounded through the big and little nations of central, eastern, andsouthern Europe. This echo was the rights of nations, for the first rightof man is the right to his own nationality. To these nations freedommeant the right to be governed by men of their own language, andtranslated into central European, democracy meant the right of nationalself-determination. Two nations marched at the head of this democraticnational revolution: Italy and — more important — Germany.With mingled foreboding and delight, Heinrich Heine, one ofGermany's sharpest minds, saw the united German nation storming itsway through the future. He saw it trained by German philosophy forworld revolution, freed from the restraints of Christianity. 'If some daythe taming talisman, the cross, should crumble, the savagery of the oldwarriors will again burst forth, the insensate berserk rage, about whichthe Nordic poets sing and say so much. That talisman is rotting, andsome day it will lamentably crumble. The old stone gods will rise fromthe ancient ruins and rub the millennial dust from their eyes. Thor withhis giant hammer will