- Yg. 1925, No. 24 -

We are currently celebrating a bit of festivities again, although we are “thoroughly impoverished”. A very lively, lively club life can be noted.

The whole people sometimes seem to have broken up into clubs. These clubs live from the clutter of the periodic festivals with their public parades, long speeches and banquets ("medals and decorations are to be put on"), the surges and concentrations of artificially bred emotions, the cash reports, reviews and views. The cause of this event frenzy is always the childish or childish endeavor to apply to something, to seem something. One wants to overcome some depressing situation through the fanfare of big words. One tries to get attention: through brass music and presentation. The spirit of Wilhelm II hovers over this republic.

Whether a general is doing well at a regimental appraisal, or whether a reserve officer in a corporation has created a framework for his modest ambition - it is basically the same as when German men engage in high tourism in a volkisch manner, or workers proletarianly play mandolins , Patriotism and local patriotism come together in noble competition. Each nest has its historic festival and celebrates it in the same cliché as the Millennium on the Rhine. Board members of beautification associations speak like ministers, and ministers sometimes like association boards. Landscapes are noisily reminiscent of their peculiarity; Kulickes are very interested in their complicated family tree and invoke Family Days. Apparently there is nothing left which does not give rise to club foundations, celebrations and parades, to parades and speeches.

Today appearances are more interesting than being. Acting as if you were not a secretary but an accountant, not a clerk but a department head: that is the urge of every German. Everyone wants to be “classified” higher in their area than actually corresponds to their position. Just for God's sake don't show what you are.


Applied to the whole people, this then results in this new German slapstick, which makes the foreign study committees crazy. Because nobody thinks that a supposedly poor and exhausted people is expressing their poverty in this way, in truth: their poverty.

1925, 24 Hermann Mauthe