GERMANY: Staatspartei

With the Reichstag disbanded and Germany under the “veiled dictatorship” of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning (TIME, July 28, Aug. 4), with every German politician touring his bailiwick in preparation for the general election Sept. 14, a new political party was organized in Germany last week.

In view of Germany’s economic depression, political tipsters have shaken their heads over the future of constitutional democracy in Germany, wagered that no matter who forms a ministry, the extremist parties—extreme Nationalists on the right, Communists on the left— will make tremendous gains.

It is to counteract this tendency, to preserve the Republic from a dictatorship, that the new party has been formed. In its first proclamation it called itself the Staatspartei (Constitutional Party). Claiming the late great Gustav Stresemann as its patron saint, and two of Stresemann’s biographers on the list of its organizers,* the Staatspartei “stands on the ground of the Federal Constitution and honors the national flag;” i.e. it is opposed to the restoration of the black, white, red, tricolor of Imperial Germany. All this is understandable and praiseworthy. What is surprising is the man who was chosen leader of the new party, champion of constitutional democracy.

Flush and fiery Arthur Mahraun, 39, a Prussian infantry captain in the War, formed an organization in 1919 known as the Young German Order. Its purpose: to fight Bolshevism in Germany. The failure of the Kapp putsch (revolution) of 1920 put Prussian militarists in temporary bad odor. The Young German Order expanded as a great war veteran’s organization, forgot the Bolshevists, concentrated on Germany’s ancient enemies: France and Poland. In 1921 red-cheeked Capt. Mahraun was busy shooting Poles in upper Silesia. Few years ago, like St. Francis of Assisi he saw a great light, reformed, put away his gun and, working for reconciliation with France, announced that the YoungGerman Order could only save Germany through parliamentary means, that it had “set its face unalterably against putsch power.”

Last week the reformed Young German Order appeared to be the backbone of the Staatspartei. Also in the fold was the old Democratic Party, which has been losing deputies at every election since 1919 until its formal dissolution last week. Friedrich Baltrusch and Ernst Lemeer, Protestant Trade Unions leaders, were listed among the new party’s leaders. Observers saw in this an attempt to bring into the Staatspartei the Protestant workers of Germany as the German Centrist party absorbed German Catholic workmen.

*Rochus von Rheinbaben, Walter Bauer.