Accidentally a Republic

The tenth birthday of the German Republic passed, last week, uncelebrated and ignored. No parades, no holiday. In the words of Minister of Justice Erich Koch-Weser "We look back ten years not to a birth but to a defeat. This is no holiday for Germany!"

Startling to many a German and others in Berlin last week, was a blazingly candid newspaper article How I Accidentally Proclaimed the German Republic, by Philipp Scheidemann, first Chancellor of the Republic (1919).

With meticulous exactitude Socialist Scheidemann writes that he was eating a bowl of "thin 1918 soup" in the Reichstag Restaurant when members of his party plunged in, grabbed him by the arm, and declared that he must appear on a balcony of the Reichstag to address a large, incipiently revolutionary throng.

"I am tired of making speeches," growled Scheidemann over his soup, but nonetheless he mounted the balcony.

Vaguely he began an extemporaneous address, urging the people to be calm and ignore firebrands who wanted to proclaim a Soviet State. Gradually the magnetic fervor of the crowd fired Socialist Scheidemann. Suddenly he found himself shouting: "Long live the German Republic!"

Though a roar of approval went up, Herr Scheidemann attached to it so little importance that he soon went back to his bowl of soup. He did not realize what he had done until jovial Freidrich Ebert, later first President of the Republic, rushed in flushed with indignation and exclaimed: "What have you done? I hear you have proclaimed a Republic! Don't you know you had no right to do that?"

Further potent recollecting was performed, in Berlin, by Poet Ernst Lissauer, composer of the famed Hymn of Hate, popularizer of the exclamation "Gott Strafe England!"

"My poem or song," said Poet Lissauer, "expressed at that time the sentiment of virtually the entire German people. . . . My latest drama Jeptha's Wife, now playing in many theatres throughout the Republic voices the cry of unborn generations against future wars."

One verse of the original Hymn of Hate may be translated:

In the Captain's Mess, in the banquet hall,

Sat feasting the officers, one and all.

One raised his glass, on high to say.

These three words only 'To THE DAY!'

They had all but a single hate. . . .

They had one foe and one alone--England!

Gott strafe* England!

* i.e. ''damn."