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No. 40. Vienna, 7 September 1898. Second Year.

The Prussian Elections. Berlin Letter from Redivivus.

For a long time past there has not been so much talk of the Prussian Landtag as there is now, when the ballot-boxes are to be opened for its second five-year legislative period. Compared with the Reichstag, the Landtag was the Cinderella about whom nobody troubled himself. Now all at once our newspapers are full of it, and wherever one listens the probable result of the election is being discussed. How is this transformation to be explained?

In general, but only very much in general, one may be content with the explanation that the Prussian Chamber of Deputies has fallen more and more a prey to political and economic reaction, notwithstanding that in the Empire a growing inclination “to the left” was not to be mistaken. The Prussian Chamber of Deputies was once a fortress of Liberalism, but with that it has long been over. Anti-Semitism and its Conservative patrons have decomposed the parties, so that to-day even the National Liberal party is hardly able to defend itself against its own right wing, which is agrarian and anti-Semitic. It is therefore possible that in numerous constituencies the political conscience is stirring, and that in the comparison between now and formerly the liberal sense of shame declares itself more vividly. Yet that is psychology; and to examine every electoral movement forthwith for psychological marks is, politically speaking, philosophising ostentation. In any case an impermissible humbug is nowadays carried on with the “soul of the people”.

One comes nearer at all events to the seeming riddle of the electoral storm that is preparing in Prussia by the plainer consideration that the nationally minded elements of the people are beginning to defend themselves against that rigid Borussianism whose citadel the Prussian Landtag has become. The battle-cry “against the Junkers east of the Elbe” means at bottom that the Prussians who are German are rising up against the Prussians who will be Prussian only and nothing but Prussian. And since Liberalism coincides roughly with the national sentiment, it is in turn comprehensible that the electoral movement takes more and more the form of a liberal self-defence against Prussian particularism. The election addresses of the liberal parties accordingly resemble passionate ejaculations for a common ordre de bataille, while the election manifestoes of the Conservatives and of the Centre are full of brutal confidence of victory. The Centre marches, like the Crusaders of old, with the watchword:

In God's name fare we forth, His grace do we desire, Kyrieleis,

while the Conservatives make no secret whatever of it that the denominational elementary school, together with a great corn duty, constitutes the be-all and end-all of their ideal of felicity.

Of the Jews alone — who are, after all, likewise in the act of reawakening to a timid national feeling — there is no word far or wide, although in truth the old saying finds application, in a corresponding variation, to the fate that is being prepared for them: Qui mange du pape en meurt. Anti-Semitism, which took the junkerish Borussianism so tenderly under its wing, has decomposed and poisoned political life; now, it is true, it is disavowed by the old Conservative patrons in their election address, in which the word “Jew” no longer occurs, but it has in return the satisfaction that the liberal parties too, in their sore straits, no longer summon up the courage to declare themselves openly and expressly for the struggle for Jewish equality of rights as well. And so there results the remarkable outcome that by foe and friend alike the Jews are — simply passed over in silence. There are no longer any Jewish candidates for election; there are only Jewish voters, with the active but no longer with the passive franchise. Among the Social Democrats alone does the like still exist, but under the three-class system in Prussia they too come into consideration once more only as electing, not as eligible.

If, then, as we believe, the real driving motive of the present Prussian electoral movement is nowhere to be sought but in the antithesis between the national and the specifically Prussian element, there emerges as an irrefutable fact that the Jews are shut out, in so far as they do not fit with their ballot-paper into the arithmetical exercises of the parties. They are Germans or Prussians so long as they are needed as voters; but if one of them wishes as a German to be elected too — why, peasant, that is quite another matter. The “fatherlandless” Social Democrats can at least, in the Reichs-