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Shades of the Future?: Daniel Frymann [Heinrich Claß] (1912)

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The vicious cycle of wage increases and price hikes carries uneasiness into every house.

For twenty years, the socialist press and party organizers have been granted unlimited opportunity to exercise their subversive, inflammatory activity, and to alienate the masses from their own people and state.

The Liberals of every stripe, with the exception of the right wing of the National Liberals, engage, under the leadership of the Hansa League, in the suicidal tax campaign and the struggle against the phantom of the blue-black bloc; their press, their agitators are working unscrupulously in support of the agenda of Social Democracy. [ . . . ]

Large capital, large industry, large commerce pose a most serious threat to the middle class, and it is understandable that people who, in spite of all their hard work, all their thrift, do not get ahead in this struggle or even go under, are aggrieved with the state, which has watched as the greater power of capital has smothered them. The “free play of forces,” once revered as the embodiment of economic wisdom, has two sides to it, and the bad side is partly to blame for the fact that the strata of the population that were once the most loyal and reliable are today discontented. [ . . . ]

Here one must now remember the fateful role that Jewry plays in the life of our nation, ever since the gift of emancipation was thrown into its lap, which was not earned by achievements of any kind, but was granted by the sentiment of humanity, lovely in itself, and from the idea of the equality of all people.

Now, Germans and Jews are by their innermost nature like fire and water; as long as the life of our nation was morally sound, there was nothing more different than the German and the Jewish attitude towards life. The German stands above all possessions, remains inwardly free with respect to them, and demonstrates his freedom by wishing to live life fully with no regard for economic success. Honor, independence, and autonomy of mind are the driving forces behind his action, which may often be impractical, but which nonetheless demonstrates an orientation of mind that is not merely “of this world.” The Jew, however, subordinates his life to practicality and utility; acquisition, possessions are everything to him; he is unfree with respect to them; to them he subordinates his entire personality. It is no surprise that people with such qualities, once they have been granted equal rights, are differently equipped for economic life than the Germans, seeing as they knew – even when the laws were unequal – how to exploit the Germans and amass riches. [ . . . ]

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