THE GERMAN QUESTION

“The German question is the most sombre, the most complicated, the most comprehensive problem of all recent history.”

Constantin Frantz (1866)

THE GERMAN QUESTION

by

WILHELM RÖPKE

Professor at the
Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales
Geneva

TRANSLATED BY

E. W. DICKES

INTRODUCTION BY

PROFESSOR F. A. HAYEK

LONDON

GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD

First published in Great Britain in 1946

All rights reserved

Published in Switzerland in 1945

under the title

Die Deutsche Frage

(Eugen Rentsch Verlag, Erlenbach-Zürich).

Translated from
the Second Edition

This book is produced in complete

uniformity with the authorised

economy standards.

Printed in Great Britain

in 12 point Bembo type

A YEAR has now passed since the overthrow and the complete occupation of Germany. What progress has been made in this critical year in the solution of the German problem? A dispassionate answer with justice to all sides can only be that the progress made has been utterly disappointing. A year ago Germany was a molten mass ready for pouring into the right moulds. The moment for this was missed; the metal has cooled and toughened.

BY PROFESSOR F. A. HAYEK

IT is only too understandable that the seed of hatred the Germans have sown under their National Socialist leadership should now shoot up, though it must be clear to anyone who thinks of the future that the world cannot indefinitely continue in the present state of passionate feeling. Once our initial anger has abated we shall be driven, if ever the fatal process is to be ended, to ask ourselves quietly however it could happen that in a great civilized nation all the forces of evil should be let loose, and what now is the just and sensible way of treating the Germans.

THE dictum placed as a motto in front of this book came in 1866 from the pen of a far-seeing and unbending opponent of Bismarck. In that same fateful year of German and European history, Ludwig Bamberger, the eminent German Liberal and economist, wrote to his friend von Stauffenberg, after a fresh meeting with his old comrade of the revolution of 1848, Carl Schurz, who later became a Senator and Home Secretary of the United States: “I have greatly enjoyed meeting Schurz.