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And that is actually what happened. The Pan-German representatives might have talked themselves hoarse, but to no effect whatsoever.
The Press either ignored them totally or so mutilated their speeches that the logical consistency was destroyed or the meaning twisted round in such a way that the public got only a very wrong impression regarding the aims of the new movement. What the individual members said was not of importance. The important matter was what people read as coming from them. This consisted of mere extracts which had been torn out of the context of the speeches and gave an impression of incoherent nonsense, which indeed was purposely meant. Thus the only public before which they really spoke consisted merely of five hundred parliamentarians; and that says enough.
The worst was the following:The Pan-German Movement could hope for success only if the leaders realized from the very first moment that here there was no question so much of a new Party as of a new Weltanschauung. This alone could arouse the inner moral forces that were necessary for such a gigantic struggle. And for this struggle the leaders must be men of first-class brains and indomitable courage. If the struggle on behalf of a Weltanschauung is not conducted by men of heroic spirit who are ready to sacrifice, everything, within a short while it will become impossible to find real fighting followers who are ready to lay down their lives for the cause. A man who fights only for his own existence has not much left over for the service of the community.
In order to secure the conditions that are necessary for success, everybody concerned must be made to understand that the new movement looks to posterity for its honour and glory but that it has no recompense to offer to the present-day members. If a movement should offer a large number of positions and offices that are easily accessible the number of unworthy candidates admitted to membership will be constantly on the increase and eventually a day will come when there will be such a preponderance of political profiteers among the membership of a successful Party that the combatants who bore the brunt of the battle in the earlier stages of the movement can now scarcely recognize their own Party and may be ejected by the later arrivals as unwanted ballast. Therewith the movement will no longer have a mission to fulfil.
Once the Pan-Germanists decided to collaborate with Parliament they were no longer leaders and combatants in a popular movement, but merely parliamentarians. Thus the Movement sank to the common political party level of the day and no longer had the strength to face a hostile fate and defy the risk of martyrdom. Instead of fighting, the Pan-German leaders fell into the habit of talking and negotiating. The new parliamentarians soon found that it was a more satisfactory, because less risky, way of fulfilling their task if they would defend the new Weltanschauung with the spiritual weapon of parliamentary rhetoric rather than take up a fight in which they placed their lives in danger, the outcome of which also was uncertain and even at the best could offer no prospect of personal gain for themselves.
When they had taken their seats in Parliament their adherents outside hoped and waited for miracles to happen. Naturally no such miracles happened or could happen. Whereupon the adherents of the movement soon grew impatient, because reports they read about their own deputies did not in the least come up to what had been expected when they voted for these deputies at the elections. The reason for this was not far to seek. It was due to the fact that an unfriendly Press refrained from giving a true account of what the Pan-German representatives of the people were actually doing.
According as the new deputies got to like this mild form of 'revolutionary' struggle in Parliament and in the provincial diets they gradually became reluctant to resume the more hazardous work of expounding the principles of the movement before the broad masses of the people.
Mass meetings in public became more and more rare, though these are the only
