The following is the paper that served as the basis for Professor Hoppe’s talk “Democratic Peace and Re-Education: the German Experience,” 2025 Annual Meeting, Property and Freedom Society, Bodrum, Turkey (Sep. 20, 2025). A version will be published in the forthcoming book based on the Mises Institute’s Revisionist History of War Conference (May 15, 2025—May 17, 2025)
On War, Democratic Peace, and Reeducation: The “German Experience” in Reactionary Perspective
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
I
All States make war. Indeed, States owe their very origin to war and are the result of war.[1] But there are different sorts of wars. Historically, for instance, there exists the ideal-typical distinction and difference of and between monarchical wars on the one hand and democratic wars on the other.[2]
Monarchical wars typically arose out of disputes over inheritances brought on by a complex network of inter-dynastic marriages and the recurring extinction of certain dynasties. As violent inheritance disputes, monarchical wars were characterized by territorial objectives. They were not ideologically motivated fights but quarrels concerning tangible properties. Moreover, as inter-dynastic property disputes, the public considered wars the king ’s private affairs, to be financed and executed with his own money and military forces. Further, as private conflicts between different ruling families the public expected and the kings felt compelled to recognize a clear distinction between combatants and non-combatants and to target their war efforts specifically (and only) against each other and their respective private property. As late as the eighteenth century, notes military historian Michael Howard, “on the continent commerce, travel, cultural and learned intercourse went on in wartime almost unhindered. The wars were the king’s wars. The role of the good citizen was to pay his taxes, and sound political economy dictated that he should be left alone to make the money out of which to pay those taxes. He was required to participate neither in the decision out of which wars arose nor to take part in them once they broke out, unless prompted by a spirit of youthful adventure. These matters were arcana regni, the concern of the sovereign alone.”[3]
In distinct contrast, democratic wars tend to be undiscriminating, total wars. In blurring the distinction between the rulers and the ruled, – “under democracy we all rule ourselves” – democratic republics promote the identification of the people with a particular – “their” – State. Interstate wars are thus transformed into national wars, i.e. wars of one nation, characterized in terms of a common language, history, religion or culture, against and in contradistinction to another, foreign nation. It becomes increasingly difficult for members of the public to stay neutral and extricate themselves from any personal involvement in the war effort. Resistance against higher taxes to fund the war is increasingly considered treachery or treason. Conscription becomes the rule rather than the exception. And with mass armies of cheap and easily disposable conscripts fighting for national supremacy (or against national suppression), backed by the economic resources of the entire nation, all distinctions between combatants and non-combatants fall by the wayside. Wars will become increasingly destructive and brutal. “Once the state ceased to be regarded as ’property’ of dynastic princes,” notes Michael Howard, “and became instead the instrument of powerful forces dedicated to such abstract concepts as Liberty, or Nationality, or Revolution, which enabled large numbers of the population to see in that state the embodiment of some absolute Good for which no price was too high, no sacrifice too great to pay; then the ‘temperate and indecisive contests’ of the rococo age appeared as absurd anachronisms.”[4]
Historically, the change from monarchical or princely war to democratic war came about with the French Revolution. “With the French Revolution,” writes military historian J.F.C. Fuller, “sansculottism replaced courtiership, and as armies became more and more the instruments of the people, not only did they grow in size but in ferocity. National armies fight nations, royal armies fight their like, the first obey a mob – always demented, the second a king – generally sane …. All this developed out of the French Revolution, which also gave to the world conscription – herd warfare, and the herd coupling with finance and commerce has begotten new realms of war. For when once the whole nation fights, then is the whole national credit available for the purpose of war.”[5]
Ever since the French Revolution, then, wars have predominantly been wars of the democratic type. This holds of the American War of Southern Independence, of the World Wars I and II, of the US wars in southeast Asia and the Middle East as well as the current wars in the Ukraine, Israel and the Levant.
II
In the following, my particular interest is the subject of “democratic peace.” That is: How do (successful, victorious) democratic wars typically come to an end? (Note: as important and interesting as such matters are, my central interest here is not the cause or the conduct of war, but exclusively its end or conclusion, i.e. the ceasefire, truce or peace following a war!)
A first glimpse as to the answer is caught in considering the peace treaty concluded at the end of the Napoleonic wars, during the Vienna Congress of 1814-1815. Revolutionary, republican, democratic, Napoleonic France had made war all over Europe and beyond, but it had ultimately and finally been defeated by a victorious coalition of the dynastic rulers of Russia, Prussia, Austria and Britain. How did the victors treat the loser, who had just made war on them? Napoleon was sent into exile, France was essentially restored within its original, pre-revolutionary borders of 1789, the Bourbon dynasty returned to the throne, a modest indemnity of some 700 million francs had to be paid to the victors – and that was it.
Here, then, a democratic war had ended with a “monarchical peace,” an arrangement among noblemen from all war-parties, designed to avoid or minimize any future vindictiveness on the part of the loser(s). This, emphatically, is how a “democratic peace” does not look like. Rather, any peace negotiated after a victorious war by republican-democrats or democratic-republicans is typically an unreasonable and vindictive peace.
The reason for this is plain: Once wars become ideological wars, i.e. wars between parties of different cultures – of language, ethnicity, religion, history, custom, belief-system, etc. – which, in reverse order by either side to the conflict, are propagated and portrayed as “good” versus “evil,” “right” versus “wrong,” “better” versus “worse,” etc., there can be no “simple” peace to end a war. Even if and insofar as there are territorial issues at stake, a war cannot be ended by the victor simply taking possession of the disputed territory and leaving everything else as before. Because the losing party, apart from (allegedly) “wrongfully” controlling territory owned “rightfully” by the victors and to be restored to them, is guilty also of a wrong, evil, despicable, distasteful, inferior, dangerous, etc., culture and character-structure and must be accordingly punished; and insofar as everyone, all people on the losing side, were somehow involved in the failed war effort, the punishment dished out by the democratic victors accordingly must take the form of some indiscriminate or “collective punishment.”
The most drastic and ruthless form of such collective punishment is the extermination, i.e., the physical annihilation, of the defeated people. History provides countless examples of this. Most famously, we are told in the Old Testament, in Deuteronomy 20:16–17, that God commanded the Israelites, “In the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you.” And a similar command is given by God to the Israelites concerning the Amalekites, in 1 Samuel 15:2–3. – Today, thousands of years later, the modern Israelites are about to repeat this gruesome practice. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, and various other high-ranking officials have explicitly referred to the Palestinians as the modern Amalekites, best to be wiped out root and branch, or at least expelled, once and for all, from the land that they had occupied for ages.
III
A less gruesome but still highly vindictive peace settlement followed the American War of Southern Independence, between the unionist North – the “Yankees” – and the secessionist South – the “Rebels” of the Confederacy.
As one of the most brutal wars in modern times up until then, it had cost some estimated 700 thousand casualties, more than a million wounded, countless civilian deaths, and the wanton destruction of dozens of mostly southern cities and sites. At the end of the war, in April of 1865, at Appomattox Courthouse, when general Robert E. Lee, the supreme commander of the Confederate troops, surrendered to his northern counterpart, general Ulysses S. Grant, for a short moment a reasonable, conciliatory peace agreement appeared possible. Lee’s surrender was not an unconditional one. Essentially, Lee and the confederate army were only required to lay down their arms, stop fighting and then go home without fear of any reprisal. But quickly popular, “democratic” forces gained power in a Republican Party dominated Congress that was out for revenge and demanded the South to be punished. For how else to justify the sacrifices endured by the North?!
The South was divided into five military districts ruled by commanding generals appointed by the northern victors. The former Confederates were classified into some eleven categories of guilt and accordingly punished. In particular, the former upper-class was stripped of all its political rights, and their property was either outright confiscated or subject to confiscatory taxation. Mob-rule and lawlessness was rampant. The civilian governments fell into the hands of adventurers and crooks arriving from the North – the so-called “Carpetbaggers” – in search of fortunes to be made from the carcass of the old South, and of the “Scalawags,” Southerners of the lowest social class, including many former slaves, out to use the opportunity and grab whatever they could as long as the grabbing was still good.
Naturally, there was resistance and opposition to all this, not only in the South. But it was to take more than a decade, until 1877, for the military occupation of the South to finally end. With this, the period of mob-rule: of disorder, turmoil and terror, came to an end as well, to be overcome and replaced by a period of restauration and a return to some form of normality. However, everything, the whole social order had been turned upside down in the meantime and nothing and no one could be quite restored to his original position or standing. The old South was gone and the new South and Southerners were assigned the lowly rank of the American backwaters, composed of and shaped by supposedly racist elites and landlords, bigots, hicks, hillbillies and yokels. Still, to this day, Southerners, the descendants of former Confederates, are publicly humiliated by the tearing down, destruction, defacing and prohibition of all and everything “Confederate:” their symbols, statues, exhibitions, celebrations, monuments and memorabilia.[6]
IV
My main interest here, however, shall concern the “democratic peace” imposed in particular on Germany following WW I and WW II, which many historians have summarily considered the second thirty-years’ war (lasting from 1914 to 1945). While the collective punishment imposed on the defeated Confederacy by the victorious Union may be considered an example of “spontaneous” (pace Hayek, not everything spontaneous is a welcome development!), disorderly and unsystematic revenge and violence (with some largely open and unpredictable long-term effect on the losers), the case of defeated Germany provides an example of systematic, planned, and successively fine-tuned punishment designed or “socially engineered” for long-term effect on the collective losers.
The first World War began as a monarchical war, motivated largely by rival territorial or imperial ambitions. In 1914, only France was a republic. But with the Russian revolution, in February of 1917 and the abdication (and the later murder) of the Tzar Nicholas II, and in particular with the entry, only a couple of months later, of Woodrow Wilson and the US into the war on the side of the Allies (long sought-after, finessed and finagled by the British), the war ended as a “democratic war” and with a “democratic peace.” With the US and its economic weight on the side of Britain and France, the balance of power had shifted decisively in favor of the Allies and against the Axis powers (essentially Germany and Austria-Hungary). Earlier peace initiatives such as those by Pope Benedict XV and the Austrian emperor Karl appeared increasingly obsolete and instead the ‘knock-out blow’ strategy advocated by David Lloyd George, by then Britain’s strong man, gained the upper hand. The world had to be made safe for democracy, once and for all, in accordance with the fanciful imaginations of Woodrow Wilson.
Finally, after some 20 million deaths and another 20 million wounded or injured, the war came to an end in November of 1918. Assured by Wilson’s high-sounding ‘Fourteen Points,’ that there “shall be no annexations, no contributions, no punitive damages ….. self-determination is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril,” Germany and the Axis powers agreed to an Armistice. As well, on the day following the Armistice, Lloyd George, in an address to his supporters, stated: “No settlement which contravenes the principles of eternal justice will be a permanent one….We must not allow any sense of revenge, any spirit of greed, any grasping desire, to over-rule the fundamental principle of righteousness.”[7] Only a few weeks later, however, he being up for re-election, Lloyd George changed his tune and joined in the popular choir demanding revenge: that the Kaiser be hanged and Germany be punished to the fullest extent possible.
As a matter of fact, Kaiser Wilhelm II was not hanged (nor was the Austrian Emperor or the Ottoman Sultan). However, he (all of them) was forced to abdicate and move into exile. In Wilhelm’s case, he escaped to the Royal Netherlands. Immediately following the Armistice, Wilson had let the German government know that there was to be no negotiation with the monarch and the ruling monarchists. They had to go, otherwise total surrender would have to be the consequence. Hence, when in 1919 Woodrow Wilson, George Clemenceau and David Lloyd George met in Paris for peace negotiations, their opponents were no longer members of the old monarchical elites of the defeated Axis powers, but representatives of various new, revolutionary “people’s republics” – Volksdemokratien – sprung up from the disintegration of the former, defeated empires. And in distinct contrast to 1815, at the Vienna peace congress, when defeated France, prominently represented by Talleyrand, was allowed an active participation in the peace negotiations, these newly installed popular leaders were not invited, and played no role in what was to unfold around Paris, most notably in Versailles with Germany (and then similarly in Trianon with Hungary, in St. Germain with Austria and in Sevres with Turkey). They simply had to sign whatever the Allied victors were to present them.
The “democratic peace” of 1919, then, was essentially the joint dictate of a triumvirate. There was Woodrow Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister, who viewed himself as unfailing and a God-sent. Wilson, as H.L. Mencken said, seemed to believe that he was the obvious candidate for the “first vacancy in the Trinity,”[8] and Clemenceau is said to have remarked that Wilson conducted himself as a “would-be Jesus Christ.”[9] There was George Clemenceau, age 77 at the time, but considered the dominant force during the conference proceedings. Clemenceau, also called the “old Tiger” and a “wild beast,” had but one desire: to cripple Germany forever. “Clemenceau,” said Lloyd George, “has one passion – hatred of Germany. And he sees nothing else.” And then there was David Lloyd George, described in turn by Clemenceau as a “would-be Napoleon” and a “trickster,” who “can talk a bird out of a tree.”
The Versailles treaty hammered out by this triumvirate, then, dictated that Germany had to accept sole responsibility for the war. It was to lose all of its former colonies, and all German foreign properties or investments, whether public or private, were to be confiscated. In addition, Germany was forced to give up some 13% of its former territory with some 10% (about 7 million) of its population. Moreover, Germany was effectively demilitarized and disarmed. And then there were the reparations to be paid: massive reparations, partly to be paid immediately and in kind (mostly in the form of coal) and partly in installments and in monetary form (initially fixed at about 130 billion gold marks in total). (Predictably, only a couple of years later Germany defaulted on her reparation and sunk into a period of hyperinflation.)
The treatment of the other Axis powers was similarly vindictive. “By the terms of the Treaty of Trianon,” Fuller sums up, “Hungary was deprived of 71% of her territory, and 3 million ethnic Hungarians were incorporated in (newly created or constituted) Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Yugoslavia. By those of St. Germain, Austria was reduced to some two-thirds of her German-speaking territory, was prohibited to unite with Germany, and 3.5 million of her German subjects were assigned to Czechoslovakia, and 230 thousand to Italy.”[10] And as for Turkey, France and Britain took divided control of the Near-Eastern (largely Arab) provinces of the former Ottoman Empire.
On top of this and above all, not only were the borders redrawn all across Europe and the Near East, often in total disregard of the principle of self-determination, hailed as ‘imperative’ by Wilson, which consequently and predictably resulted in national, ethnic, religious conflict and strife, not seldom lingering on to this day. But, as already indicated, the old monarchical and aristocratic order was completely overthrown. Not only Kaiser Wilhelm II and Kaiser Karl I of Austria (and King Karl IV of Hungary) had to abdicate, but all other Kings (of Bavaria, of Saxony and of Württemberg), all Grand-Dukes, all Dukes and Princes were stripped of their sovereign rights as well (in Germany they were still allowed to keep their former title, while in Austria even all titles were outlawed: thus Archduke Otto von Habsburg became Otto Habsburg and Ludwig von Mises became Ludwig Mises). However, while neither Wilhelm nor Karl were ever to return to their home countries: Wilhelm, because he feared to be arrested and tried, and Karl, because all Habsburg property had been confiscated and all members of the Habsburg family been barred from entering Austria unless they renounced all dynastic claims and aspirations (this so-called ‘Habsburg Law’ would last until 1995) – most other heads of leading German and Austrian noble houses and their families stayed put, at home, and withdrew to private life. With their loss of all sovereign rights, they had to surrender a substantial part of their properties to their new republican rulers, but they were typically left to keep their various, often quite sizable private residences and estates. Some of them administered whatever had been left to them with great success, and a few of them, despite all confiscatory inheritance taxes, managed to preserve or even further enhance their wealth until today. Some impoverished, and most of them were to enter civil professions to make a living.
In their stead, and out of the chaos of regional coups and countercoups, of insurrections and repressions immediately following the German surrender, then. the newly established democratic republican order swept another, different class of rulers to power.
V
On the one hand there was the Marxist left, made up essentially of the SPD (the socialists) and the KPD (the communists). Their common ultimate goal was the socialization or nationalization of all means of production. But while the “reformist” SPD and its sympathizers aimed to achieve this goal by democratic means, through the gradual establishment of an ever more expansive and invasive welfare state, the KPD and its various collaborators aimed for a “revolutionary” change of the present, thoroughly despised “bourgeois” order. Accordingly, the SPD was always concerned to display a certain distance to the revolutionary Bolshevik regime established at the time in Russia by Lenin and in particular Stalin, while the KPD and the communist movement generally looked upon the “great Soviet experiment” favorably, often with open, undisguised sympathy or even praise. Until the last “free” election in November of 1932, the reformist SPD always remained the more popular one of the two rival Marxist parties, consistently drawing more (and sometimes well more) than 20% of the votes (indeed, until 1930 the SPD was Germany’s most popular party). And to the end, the Marxist left, the SPD and the KPD together, consistently managed to draw about 35% of the popular vote, with the revolutionary KPD slowly gaining in relative strength against its reformist rival since the onset of the Weltwirtschaftskrise (the “Great Depression”) in 1929, and their rivalry getting increasingly hostile or even violent.
On the other hand there were various “bourgeois” parties opposed to Marxism and especially its Bolshevik variant. However, they too were profoundly infected and infused by leftist-egalitarian ideas, as indicated by the fact that all of them willingly cooperated with the SPD at one time or another (but never with the KPD). The main difference between them was essentially their degree of nationalism and opposition to the Versailles treaty. There was the DDP (Demokratische Partei), which is nowadays typically described as a “left-liberal” party. (Significantly, it was led initially by Friedrich Naumann, a Lutheran pastor and pre-war founder of the National-Social Association that sought to combine liberalism, nationalism, socialism, imperialism and Protestantism. And interestingly, this Naumann still serves as the namesake for the party-foundation of today’s FDP (Free Democratic Party)). There was the DVP (Volkspartei), the successor of the pre-war National-Liberal Party that had championed political centralization, appealing in particular to the protestant and secular middle-class, and that nowadays would be classified as “right-liberal” or “conservative-liberal.” There was the “national-conservative” DNVP (Nationale Volkspartei), that captured the monarchist and “reactionary” vote and found significant support among large landowners, so-called Prussian or East-Elbian “Junker,” i.e., the landed gentry, and also among big industrialists. There was the Center Party (Zentrum) that catered especially to Catholics, and which as such managed, very consistently until the very end of the Weimar Republic, to garner more than 10% of the popular vote (and with the BVP, its Bavarian sister-party, even above 15%), and which (until the end, and alone of all parties) participated in every single government coalition (16 in total) and was thus to cooperate with every other party at some time or another (except the KPD). And then there was the NSDAP (the National Socialist German Workers Party), which was to play only a minor role until 1928, when it gained no more than 2.9% of the vote, only to emerge two years later, 1930, with the “Great Depression” in full swing, as the second strongest party (behind only the SPD) with some 18.3 % of the vote. It offered socialism in the form of an expansive welfare-state, not much different from what the reformist SPD offered (accordingly, erstwhile SPD voters had little difficulty in later-on switching over to the NSDAP), yet it combined this with a pronounced nationalism, tinged with some racial and anti-Semitic undertones, with an outspoken revanchism (contra the Versailles Treaty) and a vocal anti-Bolshevism.
Only another two years later, in June of 1932, the NSDAP doubled its voter-share to 37.4% and became Germany’s most popular party. More importantly, the KPD won 14.5% in the same election and it thus became impossible to form a government coalition without either one of the two. Either the National Socialists had to be included or the Communists. And in this popularity contest, then, the outcome was clear and decisive (and it has been clear and decisive wherever else the same dilemma was to arise). It took only three years of extraordinary (yet “constitutional”) presidential governments, installed by old, reactionary Paul von Hindenburg, Field-Marshal under Kaiser Wilhelm and elected German President since 1925, for the NSDAP with Adolf Hitler to take over the government and quickly establish an autocratic one-party regime.
In sum: the replacement of the old monarchical world by a new, democratic-republican order after World War I, then, had a two-fold effect on Germany, Austria and beyond (still visible today). On the one hand, it greatly strengthened the socialist, egalitarian and redistributionist tendencies that had already arisen and been fed in the pre-war era with every successive expansion of the franchise. After all: democracy – one-man-one-women-one-vote – is socialism. All political parties were affected by this general leftist-egalitarian shift in post-war Germany and Austria. On the other hand, the historic transformation brought about a new, antagonistic nationalism. With the disappearance of multi-national Empires as well as all sovereign, regional kingdoms, duchies and principalities, the only identification and association left open for a person was essentially that with his nation, especially because it was also his nation that was collectively punished. There were no longer “Habsburgians,” “Hohenzollerns,” “Wittelsbacher,” “Saxonians,” “Hannoverians,” etc., or “Ottomans,” for instance, but only “Germans” or “Turks.” And this nationalism gained further strength as the economic consequences of the Versailles dictate were to take effect – first in the form of hyperinflation and then in form of the “Great Depression” – and it was still more stimulated by the increasing knowledge, in Germany and beyond, regarding the economic disaster and human terror caused and committed at the time by the “internationalist” Bolsheviks running the Soviet Union. That is, within an overall increasingly leftist-egalitarian political environment, then, all parties, including the SPD, gradually and successively moved to the nationalist “right,” and more generally, voters increasingly migrated from less to more nationalistic parties, with “national socialism,” in the form of the NSDAP, ultimately coming out on top in the democratic popularity contest.
Nor was this development unique to Germany. Of course, there existed numerous differences as regards regional and local circumstances, but the same general pattern: of democracy ultimately leading toward the establishment of autocratic, national-socialist or corporatist regimes (and the defeat of their various “internationalist” socialist competitors) – could also be observed elsewhere at the time. Besides Hitler in Germany, there was Horthy in Hungary, Dollfuss in Austria, Kemal (Atatürk) in Turkey, Mussolini in Italy, Pilsudski in Poland, Salazar in Portugal and Franco in Spain, all of them representing some variation of the same general theme and pattern.
As for Germany, with the ultimate take-over of government by the NSDAP and Hitler, in 1933, successive steps to revise or revoke the impositions of the Versailles treaty were undertaken, much as advertised and promised beforehand. In 1936, Hitler first re-militarized the de-militarized Rhineland, in 1938, Austria was “brought home” into the new “Reich,” and in the same year the German Sudetenland was returned from Czech back to German control. In 1939, however, peace came to an end and the second World War began. Germany, in accordance with the Wilsonian principle of self-determination, demanded some territorial concessions from newly constituted Poland. Poland was intransigent, encouraged in this by some Anglo-French assistance agreement. In response, Germany, on September 1, 1939, invaded Poland, and on September 3, then, Britain, to anglophile Hitler’s great surprise, and France answered with a declaration of war against Germany.
In distinct contrast to the monarchical peace treaty of Vienna, in 1815, then, which had lasted for a hundred years, the vindictive democratic peace treaty of 1919, was to last a mere 20 years.
VI
The war that started in 1939 was essentially a continuation of the war that had begun in 1914. By and large, the same powers lined up against each other. As for the old Axis powers, led by Germany (with former Austria-Hungary), Turkey had dropped out and opted for neutrality, but Italy and Japan were to join in. On the other, Allied side, there were the two great winners of the first war, Britain and France, quickly joined again by the US and, as a novelty, the Bolshevik Soviet Union run by Stalin (instead of tzarist Russia).
From the very beginning, WW II was a “democratic war,” i.e., a war motivated and driven by ideological differences, accompanied by relentless “enemy” propaganda. And it was in particular Britain that proved its mastery of psychological warfare. Already in the 19th century, Germans had often been portrayed in British media as “Huns” and “bloodthirsty beasts,” and British anti-German propaganda had been decisive in getting the US involved in World War I and ultimately winning the war for Britain and France. Now, after the German Blitzkrieg of less than two months, with the occupation of Paris and the French surrender in June of 1940, Germany did not pursue its campaign against the British troops left on the continent to its bitter end. Instead, it eagerly sought a peace arrangement with Britain. Hitler had other plans. He did not seek war on the Western Front, and when it still happened he wanted it to end as quickly as possible. As far as the West: France and Britain, was concerned, the war could have ended right there and then. But Britain categorically refused any and all peace negotiations, and it was British propaganda, then, most prominently mouthed by Winston Churchill, then Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, that (easily) persuaded US-President Roosevelt to come to his rescue and allow Britain to keep the war going (easily, because Roosevelt, inspired by Keynesian ideas, had long been looking for war as a means to solve his growing unemployment problem at home). With the Land-Lease Act, passed in March of 1941, the US Congress allowed Roosevelt to freely hand out material and military assistance to Britain (without any or only the most vaguely defined repayment obligations). And in June 1941, after Germany had started its invasion of the Soviet Union, in accordance with Hitler’s long-held plan of creating additional Lebensraum for the “Arian race” in Eastern Europe, Roosevelt’s Land-Lease program, at Churchill’s urging, was also extended to the Soviet Union (and would there actually turn out to be decisive in the ultimate defeat of Germany on the Eastern Front). That the Soviet Union entered the war on the Allied side, then, was largely the making of Churchill’s, orchestrated in spite of the fact that the Soviet Union had invaded Poland just as much as Germany had (only a few days later) and they had jointly partitioned the country, and notwithstanding the fact (certainly known to Churchill if not also to a more naïve Roosevelt) that Stalin’s Soviet Union was a terror regime responsible for hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths (today estimated at some twenty million) – and all that in peacetime. (In comparison, the death toll in Hitler’s Germany during peace time had been a ‘mere’ couple of hundreds.)
The war that developed out of this initial constellation of antagonistic forces and that was to end with the crushing defeat of the Axis powers and a truly big bang – most dramatically and spectacularly (yet at the same time also characteristic for the entire war-time spirit and mind-set) with the total destruction, in 1945, of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by two atomic bombs, as per order by then US-President Harry Truman – surpassed anything seen before, during the US War of Southern Independence or World War I, in terms of ferocity, cruelty, terror, destruction and deaths. All previously still respected rules of “civilized” warfare fell by the wayside. Whether combatant or non-combatant, everyone and everything was fair game. And there was to be no compromising. Peace was possible only by unconditional surrender. By 1945, then, when both Germany and Japan finally surrendered to the Allied forces, the estimated total death toll of the war had reached some 70 to 85 million, with civilian casualties far exceeding (by a factor of more than two to one) military casualties. And in addition, the number of war-time wounded, whether military or civilian, ran into the dozens of millions.[11]
The war was to be followed by a new, second and (supposedly) improved democratic peace, then, and the general guidelines for this, i.e., the post-war world order, were worked out during a conference held in Yalta, in February 1945, by another triumvirate. This time, there was Winston Churchill, British upper class imperialist, arrogant, opportunistic, pompous, erratic, impulsive, master orator, drunkard and spendthrift, always in debt to generous creditors. He then thought of Germans as Huns. There was Franklin D. Roosevelt, US East-Coast establishment, shrewd and opportunistic, variously described as frivolous and grave, evasive and frank, hard and soft, vindictive and generous, i.e., as multiplex and contradictory, surrounded by a “brain-trust” of lefties, of communist sympathizers such as Harry Hopkins, his closest confidant and advisor, the Rasputin of the White House, and later-on proven Soviet agents such as Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. Nothing was more important to Roosevelt than to beat Hitler. And then there was Joseph Stalin, a native Georgian, of proletarian background, erstwhile bank-robber and revolutionary, cunning, brutal and murderous, for whom Germany offered a great treasure trove.
“Winston,” remarked Roosevelt, “and Uncle Joe (Stalin) and I get along well together because we’re all ‘realists.’” While they made far-reaching and fateful decisions concerning the future of the entire world, it appeared that the ‘realist’ triumvirate had a pretty good time in Yalta, with some heavy drinking, at least on Churchill’s and Stalin’s part.
Following the general guidelines for the new democratic peace laid down in Yalta, the last touches and details of the Allied plans were finished and fixed five months later during the Potsdam conference, in July 1945, with Truman taking the place of the meanwhile deceased Roosevelt. By that time, summarizes Fuller, the Soviet armies had taken already control of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, part of Finland, Poland, parts of eastern and central Germany, a third of Austria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria. Vienna, Prague and Berlin were in Soviet hands.[12] And these facts on the ground foreshadowed the coming map of Eastern and Central Europe and its newly drawn up borders. All of Eastern and Central Europe fell and stayed for nearly 50 years (until the early 1990s) in Communist hands. Some territories were directly incorporated into the Soviet Union, while others, within their various newly constituted borders, were turned into Soviet “vassal” states and constituent parts of an inter- and multi-national Soviet Empire. [13]
As for Germany, the central subject here, the peace following its unconditional surrender was to bring this: Germany was to lose almost a quarter of its territory as compared to its pre-war size. Mostly to Poland, but also to the Soviet Union, to Czechoslovakia, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. This loss was accompanied by the ruthless expulsion of some seventeen million Germans from their former lands and homes. Some three million of these refugees did not survive their flight. Their destination, a much diminished Germany, was itself partitioned into an Eastern, Soviet occupied zone (the later East Germany or DDR) and a Western zone occupied by the US, Britain and France (the later West Germany or BRD). Not unlike the practice after World War I, yet on a far larger scale now, Germany’s resources were plundered by the victorious powers: the Soviets initially simply expropriated, dismantled and shipped whatever was deemed valuable and movable to the Soviet Union, whereas the Western powers essentially confiscated and took over control of whatever industries and assets were still standing and to be found. However, in distinct contrast to the long-standing monarchical tradition, adhered to still by and large after the War of Southern Independence and also after World War I, of letting bygones be bygones and abstaining from the personal persecution of former war-enemies, the victorious powers now appointed themselves prosecutor, judge and executioner of German “war crimes and criminals” (notwithstanding the fact that none of the accusers was an innocent neutral party and all of them had committed crimes similar to those of the accused). Apart from the seventeen death sentences handed down by the infamous Nuremberg Trials (widely regarded by jurists as a kangaroo court and condemned by then US-Senator Robert A. Taft, for instance, as representing a blatant miscarriage of justice) some five to six thousand Germans were thus executed as war criminals.
More important: After World War I, Germany had been stripped of large territories, but except for a brief period and a small portion, Germany itself had remained “free,” i.e., un-occupied by foreign troops. The US military actually left Europe altogether. Now, after World War II, and in distinct contrast, Germany was and stayed occupied. The Soviet occupation of East Germany would last until the early 1990s, and the Allied (de facto: US) occupation of West Germany (and then, after 1990, of a re-united Germany) still continues to this day. Nor did the US leave the rest of Europe alone then. Rather, the US military stayed and continued to stay all over Western Europe until today. In fact, the end of World War II in 1945 marks both the beginning of the end of the once mighty British and French Empires and the parallel rise of the US to the rank of the sole and premier Western Empire with all of Western Europe, including Britain and France, as its subordinate satellite “vassal” states (as essentially formalized, in 1949, with the establishment of the US-led NATO pact).
As for Germany in particular, the Allies this time had some rather detailed longer-range plans. (About the Soviet plans only a few observations shall be made at the conclusion of this essay.) Of central interest here are the plans of the Western Allies, and in particular those of the US, not least because it is these that ultimately prevailed and were to have the most profound effect on contemporary Germany.[14]
VII
As General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Western Europe and US occupation forces (and later-on US-President) had explicitly stated, Germany was not occupied for the purpose of its liberation, but as a defeated enemy state. The purpose of the occupation was: De-centralization, De-nazification, De-militarization, De-industrialization and, most importantly and ambitiously, Re-education.
De-centralization was achieved most easily, per command: Germany was partitioned into four separate military occupation zones, Prussia, considered the heart of the German menace, i.e., of everything allegedly wrong about Germany and the Germans, was busted, and a new, re-arranged federation of German provinces (Laender) created.
Considerably more difficult was the De-nazification – and in this regard some interesting parallels to the case of the defeated Confederacy were to appear.
Well before the war’s end Roosevelt had already assembled a grand coalition of writers, journalists, newspapers, radio-stations and Hollywood-studios, tasked with the job of painting a picture of the “ugly German,” i.e., of Germans as an utterly dangerous, depraved, evil, and outright bestial (as well as stupid) people. Accordingly, then, any form of fraternization by the occupying military forces with Germans had initially been strictly forbidden. This failed, of course, because there were plenty of pretty and not so pretty German girls around and lots of profitable deals that could be struck by the occupiers. Distinctions had to be made. Most Germans had not been members of the NSDAP, and of the eight million or so (about ten percent of the population) that were, most had exercised no executive party function (but were party-members only for opportunistic reasons or as a matter of convenience). It was easy to identify, arrest, imprison or otherwise punish the top brass of government, party and military. But what to do with the overwhelming rest of the people? Various categories and degrees of guilt and corresponding forms of punishment had to be defined by the occupiers, ranging from imprisonment to the loss of job, property or pension to the exclusion from future activities, occupations or functions. All Germans, except for children, were to be accordingly sorted and classified by a multitude of military tribunals, with regionally quite different and often inconsistent standards and interpretations. For this purpose, for instance, millions of Germans, especially in the US occupation zone, were required to answer a 131 question questionnaire (the infamous Fragebogen) so as to get a “clean pass” (the so-called Persil-Schein). Predictably, this procedure did not only lead to wide-spread corruption, black-mail and denunciation. Moreover, with the “liberation” of all inner-German prisons and concentration camps, that were by no means filled only and exclusively with innocents and brave anti-Nazis, but also and largely with people that rightly belonged there, the very same policy also provided a welcome opportunity for the mob to run wild and for all sorts of career-criminals and crooks.
General George S. Patton, celebrated American war hero, and representative of the genuine military wing – the military-military – of the occupying forces (in contrast to the political-military wing of the occupiers, as prominently represented, for instance, by General Eisenhower) would openly criticize this policy. It produced uncertainty, civil disorder, delay, mismanagement, strife, conflict and crime, and yet his duty as a military man and troop commander, as Patton viewed it, was it above all to maintain law and order. In his view, Germans were overwhelmingly decent and useful people, and in most cases even a NSDAP membership had no more significance than a membership in the Republican or the Democratic Party in the US. By and large, then, Germans should be left alone, and they might be even considered useful allies in going on and fight and defeat the advancing communist menace in the East.
Upon this intervention, Patton was dismissed from his post, and he shortly thereafter died under somewhat mysterious circumstances in a car crash. From then on, with Patton gone, the dominant power among the occupying forces was to shift permanently from narrowly-military center-posts to various politically-military and ultimately civilian command centers. Henceforth, all decisions concerning the future of Germany were decisions motivated and affected by US politics.
Such was the case regarding both the De-industrialization and the De-militarization plan. Both underwent significant changes with changing political circumstances. Initially, according to the so-called Morgenthau plan (associated with the names of Henry Morgenthau Jr., then US Finance Minister, and Harry Dexter White, his closest advisor) Germany was to be completely de-industrialized and turned into some rural, agricultural country of small scale farms with some peasant population, and it was to be assured that German living standards would not exceed those of any of its neighbors. But when it became clear (very quickly) that such a policy would not only lead to mass starvation of the civilian population (which fact then had to be ‘sold’ at home, to the domestic voters!) but also severely limit the future reparations to be extracted from Germany, this plan was swiftly abandoned. Instead, Germany was allowed to reindustrialize, but subject to some strict interventionist (anti-capitalist, pro-unionists) rules and controls as practiced and “tested” already before in the US, during Roosevelt’s “New Deal.” And similar with De-militarization: Initially, all military organizations were to be dissolved, and all military personnel, from the General Staff on down to the Officers Corps and the plain soldiers to be dismissed. But very soon, with the onset of the Cold War between the Western Allies, led by the US, and the Soviet Union and its satellites, in 1947, with the so-called Truman doctrine, the re-armament of Germany began, culminating with West Germany’s joining NATO and the founding of its new army, the German Bundeswehr, in 1955.
VIII
The most ambitious – and innovative – plan of the Western occupiers, however, was that of a German Re-education. After the defeat of Germany in World War I, Germans had essentially been left alone. The German character had been left unchanged and it was this character that had supposedly led to World War II, just as it had led to World War I before. According to such reasoning, then, this time around, to achieve a lasting peace, the German character had to be systematically changed. This view had been propagated in the US by numerous social scientists: sociologists, psychologists, psycho-analysts, etc., most notably Jewish German refugees, and had gained increasing influence within Roosevelt’s highly interventionist “New Deal” administration. Thus, along with the invading US military, then, almost from the very beginning, came an invading army of “educators.” All schools, universities, newspapers, radio-stations, publishers, movie-producers, theaters, parties, associations, etc., – indeed, everything held to be an opinion-molding or character-forming institution or organization – were to be brought under control. All of them were to be made subject to some license requirement, and it was the invading “educators,” counting in the tens of thousands, that had to decide who would and who wouldn’t get such license.
As a reflection of Roosevelt’s “New Deal” administration, almost all of such “educators” were representatives of what would nowadays be called the “progressive left,” with a good dose of communist sympathizers (if not outright communists) mixed in. Accordingly biased was their screening and selection of new German license holders – foreshadowing much of what was to come.
All license holders were compelled to comply with the politics of the occupying forces. Initially, this meant that a large number of former opinion leaders or “influencers” had to be excluded from employment by them. Yet again, with changing political circumstances, i.e., with the beginning and intensification of the Cold War, these strictures imposed on German license holders were gradually loosened and members of the “old guard,” previously considered “tainted” and “off limits,” were increasingly re-admitted into influential positions. They were considered to be useful in the intensifying ideological war between the “free West,” as represented most prominently by the US, and the “communist East,” as represented by the Soviet Union (and more directly: Soviet occupied East Germany), because of this: combatting Bolshevism and communism had essentially been their job already before the war, in National-Socialist Germany. And they were especially eager to toe the correct political line: of a “pro-US and anti-Soviet-Union” crusade, because they full well knew about the precarious, probationary status of their own position (owing to their tainted past).
While this development appeared to the contemporary observer largely as a period of restauration, of getting back to some sort of “normal,” lasting for well more than a decade, under the surface, US-western re-education was about to produce the “new German,” with a changed character structure. Yet this would take some time before producing any visible results, of course.
The screening and licensing process involved in particular also the entire German education system, from elementary and high schools up to the highest levels of universities, academies and research centers. To raise the new German, the “correct” teachers and professors had to be selected, the “correct” and most important fields of study and learning determined and, above all, the “correct” content and substance of all study and learning identified.
Some aspects of this educational goal were easily identified. All textbooks used in school had to be licensed by the occupier-educators to assure the general acceptance of the “correct” view of history (and especially the most recent past) as seen from the viewpoint of the Western occupiers. Further, given that most of these “re-educators” were social scientists (in the widest sense of this term), rather than engineers or technicians, it was also a given that the social sciences in general were to be given a very high priority in education. One result of this, for instance, was the introduction of a new subject into the general German school curriculum, the field of civics (Gemeinschaftskunde), i.e., of learning “how to be a good democrat.”
The most important and sensitive issue however was the selection of the very university professors that would write such textbooks, that were to teach the next generation of professors, teachers, civic leaders and journalists, and that were to define both what it was that was wrong about the German character and what it was that was needed to engineer the new, “good German” instead.
This search was much facilitated by the great number of German emigrant-intellectuals in the US, however, largely of Jewish provenience. A few of them had landed lucrative and prestigious positions there in the meantime and did not show any interest returning to Germany (but they did not spare with “good advice,” of course). But many of the less successful saw in a return the great opportunity for professional promotion and advancement. Many others felt simply homesick or were convinced that there was still important work for them to do at home. Yet in any case, by and large the re-educators could rely on their loyalty – their common pro-US and Western orientation and their common desire or eagerness of changing and reshaping the Germany and the Germans that had aggrieved and driven them into exile.
In some cases, the returning intellectuals were simply re-installed in their old position as university professors, academicians, lecturers, etc.. However, more frequently they were positioned in newly created departments or institutes of “political science.” Previously, “political science” had not been a specialized field of university study (just as Gemeinschaftskunde had not been considered a regular school discipline). In fact, its status as a “science” had been considered rather questionable (and rightly remains so to this day). Yet today, as a lasting sign of US re-education efforts, there is no German university without its political science department and a sizable pack of political scientists teaching “democracy.”
Reflecting the ideological bias of the occupier-educators, the intellectual re-imports to Germany too were predominantly representatives of the “progressive left:” left-liberals, social-democrats and socialists of various stripes, with a huge over-representation of Jews. And owing to their connection to the US – to US universities, foundations and funds – this first generation of re-imports, then, was able to screen, select, train, mentor and support the next generation of ideologically loyal followers and intellectual leaders, and so on essentially to the present.
Through their joint efforts and in due time, then, the earlier mentioned restauration period in West Germany was slowly but surely brought to an end. This period had been prolonged by the so-called German economic miracle (das Wirtschaftswunder). Following the currency reform of 1948 and the introduction of the DM (the Deutsche Mark), Ludwig Erhard, appointed German director of the Bizonal Economic Council, exceeding his authority, and against the advice of US economic “experts” such as John Kenneth Galbraith as well as against German public opinion at the time, had eliminated all price controls inherited from the National-Socialist regime in one stroke, coup-like, with an over-night decision, and thereby set in motion a momentous economic boom. And this boom, surprising as it was to the German public that had long been indoctrinated with national-socialist economic notions, was to boost the German national pride and even bolstered some reactionary sentiments among the public. In the course of the 1960s, however, the re-education efforts came to fruition and a new period of “democracy” and “progressivism” was initiated. By then, Germans had been sufficiently indoctrinated about what it was that was wrong with them, and large and increasing numbers of them had internalized such teachings.
And this result, then, was largely the achievement of the Institute of Social Research (the Institut für Sozialforschung) and the so-called Frankfurt School.[15]
IX
The Institute that was established in 1923 in Frankfurt was essentially the creation of two Jewish men: Hermann Weil (1868-1927) and in particular his son Felix Weil (1898-1975). Born in Germany, Hermann Weil had learned the trade of a grain dealer in Mannheim from his future father in law, Isidor Weisman. In 1895, he moved to Buenos Aires to manage the Argentinian branch of Weisman’s enterprise, and one year later he married Weisman’s daughter Rosalie in an orthodox-Jewish wedding ceremony. In 1898, Weil, together with two of his brothers, founded his own company, and within a few years he was to become one of the world’s foremost grain dealers, with more than 3000 employees and a fleet of some sixty ships. In the same year son Felix was born (as an Argentinian citizen). In 1907, for various health reasons, the family moved back to Germany and settled in Frankfurt, then as today one of Germany’s leading commercial centers, and with a sizable and influential Jewish community. Felix attended school there, and in 1920 also received his Ph.D. at the University of Frankfurt. In 1912, his mother Rosalie died and left Felix an inheritance of some 400 million US-dollars in current terms. Not just his father Hermann, but he now too, then, were people of enormous wealth.
During World War I, both Weils conducted themselves as patriotic Germans. Hermann was involved in numerous philanthropic endeavors and remained a highly generous donor to various civic causes until the end of his life. Indeed, in 1917, in recognition of this, he and his son were received to dine with Kaiser Wilhelm II. And as for Felix, like many of his school and student friends, he was eager to join the German war effort and quite disappointed that he was excluded from this on account of his Argentinian citizenship. Consequently, the German defeat, and the horrors, deaths, destruction and misery that his school and student friends had experienced during the war and that he was now to see with his own eyes left him completely disillusioned. He turned to Marxism, advocating the revolutionary change of the old, defeated regime, and the socialization of all means of production to supposedly end all exploitation of men by men.
Accordingly, he struck up friendships with numerous like-minded people that would later-on become associated with the Institute in some more or less significant role or position. Almost all of them were Jewish, as he, and most of them came from wealthy, upper-class or well-off bourgeois families (while none of them figured even remotely in the same wealth-league as Weil himself). (The relationship between well-off bourgeois Karl Marx and super-rich heir and promoter Friedrich Engels immediately comes to mind in this connection.) In any case: there was no proletarian among all of them.
There was Leo Löwenthal, his earliest friend from high school, there was Karl Korsch, Richard Sorge (the later famous Soviet spy), Henryck Grossmann, Max Horkheimer (the later director of the Institute), Friedrich Pollock, Kurt Mandelbaum, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, Erich Fromm, Karl August Wittfogel, Hans Reichenbach, Walter Benjamin, Fritz Sternberg, Adolph Löwe, Julian Gumperz, Otto Kirchheimer, Franz Neumann, and many more. Indeed, the number of intellectuals associated with the Institute at some time or another counted in the hundreds. Practically all of them, as Weil, were professed Marxists of one sort or another. They were all members or sympathizers of the KPD, of the SPD-left, or various other radical socialist groups and associations. And from this initially rather wide spectrum of Marxist or socialist proponents and viewpoints, then, in the course of time, gradually two unifying tendencies emerged. For one, a tendency away from activism and toward intellectual work, combined with a tendency away from any direct party affiliation and toward intellectual independence. And secondly, a tendency of slowly but successively distancing themselves ideologically from an erstwhile highly favorable view of Soviet communism and the Bolsheviks – apart from the increasingly apparent economic failure of Soviet communism this tendency was further strengthened also by a certain condescension felt by Western, assimilated Jews, a la Weil and company, vis-à-vis their Eastern European brethren as prominently represented in Bolshevik leadership positions – and their increased positioning instead as a center of independent, un-orthodox Marxism, complemented and enriched by a good dose of Freudian psychoanalysis.
Only one year after its founding, in 1924, the Institute already had its own impressive building, all funded by Hermann and Felix Weil. Its association with the university had been a matter of contention for some time. In the end, to overcome the reservations of some influential university circles against the association with a bunch of somewhat suspicious leftist radicals, a mutually agreeable solution had been worked out. The university was allowed to use some of the rooms and facilities owned by the Institute, the Weils would endow a new chair at the university, and the professor appointed to this chair, then, was to serve at the same time as director of the Institute. This way, the university was allowed to exercise some sort of indirect control over the Institute’s operations. The first appointee for this new prestigious and well-endowed dual position, then, selected by Felix Weil after some lengthy search and deemed acceptable to the university, was Carl Grünberg. Already in his early sixties by then, Grünberg had been a professor of modern economic history at the University of Vienna. A professed Marxist and prominent representative of the so-called Historical (or “Historicist”) School of economics, Grünberg had been the teacher of many leading “Austro-Marxists,” such as Max Adler, Karl Renner, Otto Bauer, Friedrich Adler and Rudolf Hilferding. (Interestingly, Grünberg, in 1902/03, had also served as doctoral advisor to Ludwig von Mises and his early work on peasant-landlord relations in Galicia – that is: before Mises encountered Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics and, in his own words, “became an economist,” and as such an ardent critic of the Historical School.) However, Grünberg’s tenure at the Institute lasted for only four years, until 1928, when he suffered a stroke and was forced to retire. By then, the Institute had acquired the reputation of a “Café Marx,” frequented by Marxists and other leftists from all over, far and wide, but Grünberg was anything but a theoretician and the Grünberg era, then, did not leave any lasting impression as far as the later shape and reputation of the Frankfurt School was to be concerned.
With Grünberg’s departure this was to fundamentally change. After a brief period with Friedrich Pollock as acting head of the Institute, it was Pollock’s closest friend Max Horkheimer who was to take over the directorship of the Institute from 1930 until his retirement in 1958 (followed then by Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, serving in that position until his death in 1969). Horkheimer was only in his early thirties, he had only recently received his habilitation and his Vita was rather thin at the time. In addition, he was a member of the Philosophical Faculty rather than the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, as was Grünberg. Hence, to install Horkheimer was to require some heavy lifting on the part of Felix Weil. To Horkheimer’s advantage, and in comparison to other potential candidates, he had no official ties to the KPD. Nonetheless, the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences insisted that Grünberg be replaced by someone else and his chair continued to be funded by Weil. A mutually agreeable candidate for that was found with Adolph Löwe, who had long been a part of Weil’s circle of friends. And as for Horkheimer, Weil had to endow a new chair for Social Philosophy, housed in the Philosophical Faculty.
It was under the influence of Horkheimer, then, that the later ideological profile of the Institute was to gradually take on shape. The orthodox Marxist interpretation of history and social evolution as promoted from Moscow and by the Comintern was pushed increasingly into the background and growing attention was paid to the study of psychology. The orthodox interpretation and identification of the so-called proletariat as the source and springboard of social revolution and socialist transformation was obviously deficient. There was no proletarian-led revolution after World War I, as predicted and hoped for by orthodox Marxists. Other, psychological reasons had to be responsible for this failure, and they had to be identified to bring about the desired revolutionary changes. Accordingly, Horkheimer initiated and promoted a close cooperation between a less-than-orthodox Marxism and psychology, and in particular psychoanalysis, and for that purpose he hired Erich Fromm into a prominent position within the Institute.
In 1933, with the take-over of Germany by the National Socialists, Horkheimer and his associates, qua Jews and Marxist Jews on top, were dismissed from their position, and their Institute confiscated and taken over by various national-socialist organizations. However, in wise anticipation of these events, Horkheimer and Pollock, his second-in-command and main administrator and economic advisor, had already transferred all of the Institute’s funds to foreign accounts. They first established a residency in Geneva, and two smaller branches in Paris and London. (The London branch would be closed already in 1936, and the Geneva and Paris branch in 1939, with the beginning of WW II.) Already in 1934, however, as their position as Marxist Jewish refugees in Switzerland was to become increasingly precarious, they moved their center of operations to the US, where they had established some institutional connection with Columbia University, in New York City, as well as some loose ties to the New School of Social Research (where Fromm, early on, and later also Löwe were to find employment). Some other associates of the Institute, such as Adorno and Löwe, first emigrated to England, from where they were later on to join their comrades in the US.
Owing to the Weils,’and especially Felix Weil’s generosity, who threw in another 40 million current USD during these years, and additional funding secured from the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), life in the US for these leftist German exiles was not bad. They were not only equipped to arrange for the emigration of quite a few of their ideological comrades from Germany and Central Europe. Moreover, they were themselves allowed a life of considerable comfort. The Institute’s central figures during these years, Horkheimer, Pollock, Marcuse and Adorno all had their own apartment, car and house-maid in New York. Horkheimer’s annual salary, according to his own affidavit, exceeded 200 thousand present USD, and in conjunction with an ideological Horkheimer-Fromm split, in 1938, the latter was awarded a most generous separation package of some 400 thousand present USD.
In 1941, with WW II in full swing, Horkheimer decided to establish a second center of the Institute on the West Coast, in the Los Angeles area, devoted mostly to theoretical-philosophical matters (while the New York branch was to remain as the center of empirical research). The Horkheimer group included Adorno, Marcuse and also Pollock. They did not have an institutional home, but they lived closely together near Pacific Palisades, and Marcuse’s private residence figured as the Institute’s official address. They gathered for regular meetings – resulting and culminating, in 1944, in the Dialektik der Aufklaerung, Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s supposed magnum opus and centerpiece and core of so-called “critical theory.” As well, as a further sign of their relative affluence, during their California years they enjoyed an active social life. For his house-warming party, for instance, Horkheimer had invited famous figures such as Thomas Mann, his immediate neighbor, as well as Franz Werfel and Lion Feuchtwanger, and during numerous social gatherings and parties, the Horkheimer-circle was to meet and associate with many other prominent exiles, intellectuals and Hollywood celebrities, such as Bertolt Brecht and his circle, composer Hanns Eisler, Aldous Huxley, Hans Reichenbach, Günther Stern (former husband of Hannah Arendt, and after the war: Günther Anders) as well as Greta Garbo, Ava Gardner, Charly Chaplin and Peter Lorre.
As exiles, Horkheimer and the members and associates of his Institute were always cautious and circumspect in their various social dealings and wheelings. And indeed, especially with the onset of WW II, the entire Horkheimer circle, essentially made up of Germans and Jewish Marxist Germans on top, came under increasing suspicion and scrutiny by various US security and watchdog institutions. That notwithstanding, however, since 1943, Herbert Marcuse, Otto Kirchheimer and Franz Neumann, and somewhat later also Arkadji Gurland, came to be employed by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the CIA, Friedrich Pollock temporarily worked as an advisor to the Board of Economic Warfare, and Leo Löwenthal worked for the Office of War Information. Their task: to inform about the German “enemy” and to make recommendations and suggestions about the reconstruction of post-war Germany. As well, as further indication of their influence and prominence in the US (despite their somewhat questionable pedigree), Horkheimer himself too cooperated with the US Ministry of Foreign Affairs and composed memoranda to the effect that education in post-war Germany had to be some fundamental Re-education in matters of democracy. And he advised that it was necessary to create a new German elite that was decidedly pro-US and pro-Western (as well as anti-Soviet and anti-communist) and yet at the same time an elite that was trusted by the German public as “genuine” and “homegrown,” and above and beyond any suspicion of being imposed or “bought” from the outside, by some foreign powers.[16]
X
The end of WW II necessitated a decision by Horkheimer and his entourage. What to do with the Institute and about the further promotion of “critical theory?” Practically all of them were and remained keenly interested in Germany and its future, of course. But many had arranged for a decent or even comfortable life in the US in the meantime, and as for Germany, Germany had been destroyed and was an impoverished country. Hence, Marcuse, Kirchheimer, Neumann, Löwenthal, and also Fromm, for instance, decided to stay in the US and promote their versions of “critical theory” there. Germany merely served as a destination for more or less frequent and extended guest appearances. However, Horkheimer and his closest associates Pollock and Adorno, after a considerable period of hesitation, ultimately decided to return to Frankfurt, to take on the task they had long advocated of re-educating the German public. (Gurland was appointed as head of the political science department of the newly founded Free University (FU) in West-Berlin.)
In 1949, Horkheimer was re-appointed to his former chair at the Goethe University, and Pollock and Adorno, who had both previously been a Privatdozent at the university, were quickly promoted to “extraordinary” and then “ordinary” professors. From the outset, Horkheimer’s conduct and appearance was self-assured and confident. He had been aggrieved, Germany had lost the war, and he had the imprimatur and backing of the victorious US and US-institutions. He was owed, and he could make demands. Thus, from 1951-53 he was not only elected Rector of the Goethe University, but he could also readily present requests for restitution and compensation vis-a-vis various German civil institutions. The Institute’s original building was in ruins, but in only a couple of years another near-by construction site could be secured and a new building for the Institut für Sozialforschung be erected. And as for funding, Horkheimer no longer had to rely exclusively on the original, continuously dwindling Weil fortune, but could now increasingly secure also “public” funds to finance his enterprise. Moreover, he and his institute were greatly assisted in their endeavors by the fact that they, qua re-migrants, enjoyed a preferential access to the various, newly installed license holders in the new German media industry: to publishing houses, newspapers, film studios, radio stations and (later) TV.
As already indicated, by the 1960s, the teachings and doctrines of Horkheimer’s and associates’ had found increasingly wide-spread acceptance in the German public and begun to exert a steady influence on German politics, lasting until today. On the most superficial level, the doctrine entailed the acceptance of a general, pro-US – or “Atlanticist” – and yet decidedly anti-capitalist, leftist attitude, the rejection of all forms of nationalism, the acceptance of exclusive German “war guilt,” and in particular the guilt associated with the so-called Holocaust that was portrayed, elevated and mythologized to the greatest crime in all of human history. Famously, regarding the alleged singularity of the Holocaust, Adorno, already in 1949, had aphorized that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” and thus created a meme that should stay in circulation until today. (In fact, in Germany, to this day, any public expression of even the slightest deviation from the official Holocaust narrative, is punishable, and is indeed punished, by harsh prison terms.)
More fundamentally, however, their doctrine entailed an explanation for the German “disease.” It offered an explanation as to what was wrong about the German character structure and what to do to fix it. And in due time, this very doctrine was to become “common wisdom,” accepted by a huge and growing number of people.- The doctrine was based on empirical research, begun already in the 1930s, regarding family structures and personality types. The German character-flaw, it was supposed, lay in the prevalence of a certain personality type brought about by the prevalence of a certain family structure. Several volumes of “Studies in Prejudice” had been devoted to the study of this question, with two volumes by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford on “The Authoritarian Personality,” first published in 1950, as the crowning achievement. Therein, with the development of the so-called F-Scale, they claimed to have designed a “measuring instrument” that could serve as the basis for the identification and early detection and diagnosis of an interrelated cluster of (potential) social pathologies: of authoritarianism, of prejudice (most notably Anti-Semitism), and fascist predisposition.
Supposedly, the authoritarian (prejudiced, antisemitic, fascist) personality was the result of an authoritarian family structure which was described, almost caricature-like, as such: a highly rigid hierarchical social order, with the father as unquestioned authority figure on top; the father’s blind obedience in turn vis-à-vis the earthly powers that be, i.e., especially the state and state-rulers; on the other hand, the father’s own oppressive conduct vis-à-vis wife and children and everyone else viewed as inferior and weak; a wife rigidly tied to the role of house-keeper and bearer of children; and the children repressed and drilled to routinely and uncritically conform to ‘given’ norms and standards of social conduct and expression such as diligence, duty, efficiency, punctuality, cleanliness, etc..
Far less clear in turn – indeed: rather vague – was their description of the non- or anti-authoritarian personality and family structure, and still less agreement existed regarding the proper technique of bringing this new personality type about. In effect, then, the anti-authoritarian education set in motion by the Frankfurt school amounted to a multi-pronged assault on all forms of social hierarchy and traditional family. Children were encouraged to rebel against their parents, students against their teachers and professors, workers and employees against bosses and employers, wives against husbands, and women against men. Alternative lifestyles were promoted, and the standard father-mother-children family model deprecated. Sexual liberation, promiscuity, and permissiveness were hailed and sexual restraint and control criticized as oppressive. Multi-culturalism and egalitarianism were celebrated and the ideas of a national-character and exclusivity ridiculed and smeared.[17]
XI
More than a century after the institute’s founding, and more than a lifetime after its re-migration from the US to Germany, then, what about its effects on the German character? Was the re-education of Germany and the Germans a success, as judged from the viewpoint of its leading protagonists? And in any case, what does the new anti-authoritarian German and Germany look like that the Frankfurt School systematically helped bring about?
Most fundamentally, the teachings of the Frankfurt School moved Germany successively more leftward. All German parties, not just the official Social-Democrats, the SPD, but also the so-called Conservatives, Liberals, Greens (environmentalists) and Lefts are today committed to social-democratic principles: to interventionist economic policies, the increasing restriction, regulation and erosion of private property rights and of free market trade and exchange, and the steady, complementary growth of the redistributive Welfare State instead. And this steady growth of the Welfare State, viewed and interpreted as gradual approach to the ideal of a socialist state, received a further boost from the anti-authoritarian measures. Because, predictably, these measures promoted a variety of social dysfunctions: of family breakup and divorce, of single and one-parent households, of child-neglect and ‘illegitimacy,’ of old- and young-age dependency, of financial destitution, degeneration, alienation and perversion – and for all of these “social problems,” then, including a fertility rate falling well below replacement level as the result of a diminishing value attached to family and family-life, a solution or “cure” had to be found, requiring ever more social workers, teachers, therapists, mediators, shrinks and social “engineers.” Thus, all the while the anti-authoritarian education successively diminished the economic strength and competitive standing of Germany, as far as they were concerned: the size of the public sector and the job openings for them and other correctly “left-thinking” Germans continuously grew and increased.
Moreover, this very tendency was still further stimulated by the so-called civil-rights movement, originating in the US in the 1960s and eagerly promoted there by the various proponents of the remaining US-branch of “critical theory,” and its anti-discrimination and “affirmative action” policies. Beginning in earnest around the 1990s and continuing to this day, then, this movement had swept across the Atlantic, affecting all of Western Europe and especially Germany, as the US’s most obedient European vassal province. According to “critical theory,” social hierarchies were not natural phenomena but the result of violence, oppression and prejudice and required, in order to bring about a genuinely anti-authoritarian, social-democratic society, some rectification and compensation: the oppressors should be systematically disadvantaged, and the oppressed given preferential treatment. Originally, in the US, this simply meant that blacks qua blacks should be given preferential treatment – or be entitled to “affirmative action” – vis-à-vis whites. Yet step by step it came to mean that everyone except white heterosexual men, and especially married such men with children, was defined as underprivileged and deserving of affirmative action: blacks, browns, women, single mothers, divorcees, widows, homosexuals, lesbians, transgenders, etc. etc.. To rectify this discrimination, every institution: every business firm, every club or association and every school or university, was required to employ a so-called Human Resource Officer – or more correctly: a Political Correctness Commissar – who was to oversee and adjust all hiring, firing, promotion and demotion. And given the complexity or rather arbitrariness of such task – is a black homosexual deserving of more or less support than a white lesbian or a Latino transgender, for instance, and countless other such complex pre-judicial constellations? – an entire intellectual industry had to be invented around this re-educational project. A hodgepodge of new fields of study was brought into existence to help solve such (actually insoluble) questions: Black studies, Latino studies, Gender studies, Women’s studies, Queer studies, etc., each one backed up and “legitimized” by corresponding university departments, institutes, degrees, professorships and chairs. – From an economic point of view, the entire project was and is nothing but waste, of course. In essence, it means preferring lower over higher quality and productivity: a sure recipe for economic decline and ultimately ruin! In the short run and from the viewpoint of “critical theorists,” however, it amounts to a huge employment program for them and all sorts of – of course: “critical” – “grievance studies.”
There were some bumps on the road to this success, of course, – apart from the economic decline that they either did not even recognize or, in any case, did not recognize as the consequence of their own actions. There were external critics of the Frankfurt School, and there were in particular also internal critics, deviationists and renegades, that had to be brought under control, tamed or silenced. Both Horkheimer and Adorno were cultural conservatives and, qua re-migrants, exhibited an unwavering allegiance to the US. Directly and personally confronted with the outgrowth of their anti-authoritarian re-education program, however, beginning in the 1960s, they were taken aback. Their Institute had been occupied by students in the name of democracy and in protest to institutional hierarchy. In the name of female and sexual liberation, bare-breasted women had occupied the lecturing podium to disrupt Adorno’s lectures and to personally embarrass him. There were voices within the Institute’s intellectual orbit, that called for violent revolution rather than piecemeal reform. And, often connected with them and in the name of anti-imperialism, there were also anti-American (or anti-US) voices articulated and to be heard. Horkheimer and Adorno wanted none of this. Indeed, for a few years, Jürgen Habermas, later-on and until today the intellectual front-man or “High Priest” of the Frankfurt School, was on the way out. Horkheimer thought of him as insufficiently reformist and Western (or as too revolutionary), and derailed and delayed Habermas’ habilitation process. Habermas only returned back to the fold and be appointed as Horkheimer’s successor in Frankfurt after a few years in the diaspora, in which to prove his correct(ed), reformist credentials: his unequivocal commitment to the “revisionist” model (or ideal) of the Western Welfare State.
As far as the general public was concerned, matters took somewhat longer, of course, but today the “critical” re-educational mission appears almost complete. The political elites, the mainstream media and the great majority of public intellectuals have fallen in line. The Welfare State is a given. There is no alternative. Germany is “friends,” above all else, with the US and with Israel. Germany owes them both special consideration and support. This also holds if these special “friends” go rogue (that’s how “special” they are!). If the US provokes a war in the Ukraine to get at Russia, Germany, as a matter-of-course, is supposed to help out big time paying for this war and the killing to keep on going. As well, all the while Russia had withdrawn its troops from East Germany in the early 1990s and the Warsaw Pact had been dissolved, all things Russian now are to be condemned, sanctioned and banned. Indeed, Russia is to be considered the “Enemy.” And as for Israel, Israel can do no wrong. Regardless of what Israel does, in Gaza and the Near East, Germany must keep on paying and subsidizing. Today, in full view of the events in the Ukraine and in Gaza, there are no mass-protests or anti-war rallies in Germany, as they still existed in the 1960s and 70s (regarding the US and its war in Vietnam). Rather: all is quiet on the domestic front. Even the Greens, which had started out as the party of peaceniks, sexual liberators, anti-authoritarians and anti-imperialists, have come around. They did not only rid themselves of their faction of sexual “perverts,” more importantly, they actually turned into the most belligerent of all German parties (proving along the way that women can be even bigger war-mongers than men). And they too, along with all other mainstream parties and forces, reject any form of German nationalism as beyond the pale. Instead, as all other mainstream parties, or even more so, they hail inter-nationalism and support of supra-national institutions such as the EU, NATO, the UNO, the WTO, the WHO and the ICJ, etc.
There remains only one major road block on the way to total success (and the further economic decline that would come with such success). This is largely the outgrowth of the mass-migration movements from the African continent and the Near- and South-East to Western Europe, and in particular to Germany as the most advanced and generous Welfare State, which had been set in motion by various prior or ongoing US interventions (wars, coups, etc.) in these regions. Reaching its high point in 2015 and continuing near-unabated to this day (ten years later), the so-called immigration problem has become the most contentious political issue all across Europe and in particular in Germany.
Confronted with the arrival or better: the invasion of millions of alien immigrants in Germany, the ruling elites, in accordance with their “critical,” egalitarian, social-democratic and inter-nationalist outlook, decided to not only let the invasion happen, but to even reward the invaders with privileges: they would be classified as a discriminated minority – as refugees – deserving of subsidies and affirmative action. Ignorant of even the most elementary economic laws, such that you will get increasingly more of whatever it is that you subsidize, and blinded by an egalitarianism according to which one Somali, Iraqi, Afghani, Pakistani, etc., etc., is just as productive and on “good” behavior as any one German, the public was fed the story of the future miracles of such a policy: in no time the refugees would be culturally assimilated and integrated in the German labor market, and it would be they, then, that were to ultimately pay the pensions and retirement benefits of the increasingly ageing indigenous German population.
There were some skeptical voices regarding this policy. A hunch, by some, that free immigration cannot go together with a Welfare State. But it was to take years until these voices had grown to mass-opposition. For quite a while the powers that be tried their very best to deny, hide or explain away the consequences of their own actions. In fact, contrary to their high sounding promises, their immigration policy had brought about a steadily increasing number of people on the dole, a sharply rising crime rate, and the successive dispossession and replacement of Germans by other, alien people. (And all that along with downward spiraling economic powers.) Over time it became increasingly more difficult, however, to ignore or close one’s eyes to these facts and not recognize them as the consequences of the official immigration policy.
Interestingly, it would be East-Germans, i.e. the inhabitants of the formerly (until 1990) Communist-ruled and Soviet-occupied eastern German provinces, who learned this lesson first and gave the most vocal expression to their opposition to the ruling (mostly West-German) elite. The re-education of East Germans by their Soviet occupiers had been strikingly different from that of West Germans by the US. Instead of the seemingly gentle, slow, lengthy, deep and profound re-education in the West (as described above), East Germans experienced a re-education that was openly repressive, brutal, crude and swift, but at the same time shallow and superficial. They had to learn and repeat some standard Marxist slogans and otherwise obey the orders of the ruling communist party (the SED). But they did not have to believe in such slogans or consider such orders wise or justified. They only had to pretend that they did. And over time, faced with the economic disaster that was Marxist-socialist East Germany, ever more people did just that. Meanwhile however, under the surface much of the old German character structure, the traditional family model, manners and mores remained intact and survived the end of the East German regime, the DDR, in 1990/91. When East Germans, then, economically still lagging well behind their Western compatriots and having grown accustomed to continuous Western subsidies, were confronted with the phenomenon of some foreign mass-immigration, they reacted like most “normal” people would. Of course, during their Marxist education they had learned to sing along the “Internationale,” etc., yet practically no one was an internationalist and actually believed in the world-wide solidarity of the working class. They were socialists, to be sure. They merely rejected its Marxist form of a centrally planned economy and preferred instead its Western model of a redistributive Welfare State. But they were not inter-national socialists as the dominating West-German elites but national socialists. Subsidies given to foreign immigrant-invaders diminished the subsidies available for them. In their view, as far as Welfare State subsidies, help, assistance, etc. were concerned, preference should always be given to the indigenous population, i.e. to Germans, rather than some un-invited foreigners. Hence, the national borders should be controlled and the inflow of un-invited immigrants stopped. – As well, as another sign of surviving “normality:” Among East Germans, the “critical” ideological US-imports of affirmative action, anti-discrimination, anti-racism, feminism, queer-ism, etc., had never taken deep roots. Instead, they were largely considered ideological aberrations.
It was in this special, East German environment, then, where the AFD, the Alternative für Deutschland, Germany’s only explicitly nationalist party, could first take hold and establish its strongholds. Nation-wide, the AFD presently gathers about 20-25% of the popular vote (making it the second-most popular party, slightly behind only the so-called conservative party, the CDU/CSU). But in the provinces of the former East Germany the voter turnout for the AFD actually runs between 30-40%. And yet, despite a plurality of the vote in almost all Eastern provinces, the AFD is everywhere excluded from the exercise of any governmental functions by a grand coalition – a “people’s front” – of all other, internationalist parties and their respective leadership in the name of “democracy” and so-called “anti-fascism.”
There are increasing signs, however, that the firewall (die Brandmauer) erected against the AFD by the ruling internationalist “people’s front” is crumbling, spoiling the re-education efforts and achievements of the “critical” theorists and the Frankfurt School. All German parties, except the AFD, are in decline. The once mighty SPD is down to some 15% of the vote and likely to shrink even further, and the conservatives (CDU/CSU), for the longest time post-war Germany’s dominating political party, by now only barely surpasses the AFD at the polls. The strict exclusion of the AFD from any and all cooperation is increasingly solely and alone the work of the various party leaderships, while the rank and file members demonstrate an increasing willingness to include and cooperate also with the AFD, based in particular on its anti-immigration stand. That is, its demand to immediately stop the further inflow of foreign “welfare seekers” and, akin to Donald Trump’s policy in the US, begin to deport the un-invited invaders and above all the worst, criminal offenders among them.
Apart from this, the AFD, too, is firmly committed to the idea of a Welfare State. In comparison to other parties, its Welfare State is slightly less bloated. Its foreign policy is somewhat less belligerent and interventionist. It is less Russophobe, and less enthusiastic about the coups, military interventions and imperialist adventures and ambitions of the US and of Israel. It is more critical of NATO, of the EU, of political centralization, of supra-national organizations and of “foreign aid.” But in all of this, the differences are generally little more than a matter of degree.
Predictions are difficult, especially predictions concerning the future, as is well-known. The present firewall may break down and the AFD may enter and become part of the German government, demonstrating that today, just as a hundred years ago, as far as the general public is concerned, national socialism is still more popular than internationalist socialism (and not just in Germany but all across Europe and the entire so-called Western world). In any case, however, what can be said with considerable confidence about Germany (and most of Western Europe) is that, barring any “miracle,” its future is doomed. The coming to power by the AFD may help eliminate some of the absurdities of the “woke” culture promoted by the hard left (the “Green” and the “Left” party) and restore a bit of normality and common sense to Germany, but at best it may only delay the inevitable breakdown of the Welfare State and slow down Germany’s economic and moral decline. The dispossession and replacement of the indigenous German population by alien foreigners has already proceeded far too long and far-reaching to expect anything more.
Yet it also cannot be ruled out that the above mentioned internationalist “people’s front,” notwithstanding its increasing unpopularity, will prevail over its nationalist opposition. Up until now, the ruling elites have done their very best to smear and vilify their nationalist opposition as “fascists,” “racists” and “right-wing extremists” and to hamper their activities through all sorts of legal and illegal tricks and chicanery. But to no avail. The rise of the AFD threatens their seemingly secure sinecures: their jobs, their incomes, their benefits and privileges. Hence, in reaction to their failure to “peacefully” silence the nationalist opposition, more drastic, autocratic or even dictatorial means appear necessary. And indeed, there are now serious efforts under way to simply outlaw the AFD, and to enlist one’s “anti-fascist” shock troops to spread fear and engage in terrorist activities against the “right” and anyone suspected as a “rightists.” And in order to distract the public attention from the ever more apparent economic decline of Germany (and thus actually accelerating it!), the ruling elites are now stirring the war drums. Germany must be made ready for war, no matter the costs. Germany must be rearmed, big time, compulsory military service must be reintroduced, and the infamously corrupt Ukraine must be supplied with money and weapons “as long as it takes,” because otherwise: the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming.
Re-education completed: a Germany, visibly run-down and in steady economic and moral decline – and yet rearming for war in the name and in defense of “Western Liberal Democracy” and against “The Enemy” or the “Hitler of the Day,” as defined by the US as head of NATO.
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___. 1992. The Conduct of War 1789-1961. New York, N.Y.: Da Capo Press
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___. 2003. Ed. The Myth of National Defense. Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute
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___. 2024. The World at War. Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute
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Endnotes
[1] See Rothbard (1963); Hoppe (2003)
[2] See Hoppe (2001, chap. 1)
[3] Howard (1976, p. 73)
[4] Howard (1976, pp. 75-76)
[5] Fuller (1969, pp. 26-27); see also Fuller (1992); Ferrero (1969); Kuehnelt-Leddihn (2003)
[6] Schrenck-Notzing (1996, p. 150 ff)
[7] Fuller (1992, p. 220)
[8] Raico (2024, p. 67)
[9] Stone (2009, p.185); Fuller (1992, pp. 218ff); also Raico (2010)
[10] Fuller (1992, p. 224)
[11] See Veale (1953)
[12] Fuller (1882, p.296)
[13] Raico (2010) (2024)
[14] See on the following Schrenck-Notzing (1995).
[15] See on the following Lenhard (2024).
[16] Kandil (2017, p. 24/26)
[17] See Schrenck-Notzing (1996, pp. 118ff); Kandil (2017, pp. 24ff)
