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

ADOLPHE LEGALITE 391An unknown young man by the name of Friedrich Zimmermann, whofor two years mystified the German public with his pen-name ofFerdinand Fried, published a book in which he declared that what wasactually declining was the 'West,' as Oswald Spengler had predicted.Geographically speaking, the West was 'the territories bounding theNorth Atlantic and grouped around the three financial and commercialcenters, New York, London, and Paris.' 'Here' — in the 'West' — 'thedaring of the capitalist, which is the true Viking spirit, begins to flag.The tribute of debts' — Fried meant the German reparations and at thesame time the debts of the Allies to America — 'can no longer bephysically assimilated; the West is like an old man who can no longertake nourishment. But with the coldness and hardness of old age itinsists on the collection of interest. It is in an attitude of defense againsta world in revolt. It can maintain itself only by chaining the rest of theworld together in a complicated and subtle system — unfathomable tothe average eye — which is called world economy; in reality the worldis chained by world economy to the interest-exacting West. But thisworld can no longer be held together, it is crumbling apart, and as aresult the West itself is beginning slowly to disintegrate. . . . Protectivetariffs give rise to national autarchies; immense spaces' — Fried had inmind Soviet Russia — 'are disengaging themselves entirely from worldeconomy, perhaps to join with other spaces; state planning and stateintervention become state capitalism or state socialism, in a word, stateeconomy. . . .'Ten years before, John Maynard Keynes in England, one of thekeenest students of capitalism, had predicted the great twilight of thegods in his own way: 'The bluff is discovered,' he wrote; 'the laboringclasses may be no longer willing to forego so largely, and the capitalistclasses, no longer confident of the future, may seek to enjoy more fullytheir liberties of consumption so long as they last, and thus precipitatethe hour of their confiscation.' Keynes had written a book with the title:The End of Laisser-Aller; Fried's book was entitled The End ofCapitalism, and was for years the greatest success among politicalbooks in Germany.The young German intellectuals saw the capitalists of their owncountry failing in their tasks. The German employers made their