Foreign News: Partitioning Prussia

If ever there was a Socialist Garden of Eden it was the Free State of Prussia from 1920 until this year. Its “fall” was dramatic (TIME, Aug. 1). Socialist Dr. Otto Braun who had been Premier of Prussia for eleven years was driven from power together with Socialist Minister of Interior Dr. Karl Severing. Cartooning them as Adam & Eve, Kladderadatsch (“Slapbang”), famed German comic weekly, pictured Chancellor Franz von Papen (who did the ousting by presidential decree) as a Biblical angel with a flaming sword. Last week Angel von Papen drew his sword again in earnest, swished it ominously, announced that his “Cabinet of Monocles” will carve up and partition the Free State of Prussia—which is approximately two-thirds of all Germany.

Purpose of this angelic carving was seemingly to give first Prussia and later the whole Reich a highly centralized rule with all reins held tightly at Berlin—just as Paris holds the reins of France. In the French Republic there are no “States,” free or otherwise, but only “departments.”‘ Germany teems with “free states” such as Prussia and “free cities” such as Hamburg. Angel von Papen has been whittling, little by little, into German states’ rights almost from the moment he became Chancellor (TIME, June 13).

In Berlin the Prussian Diet met in strange session last week while the German Reichstag was assembling New Reichstag. The session was strange because nobody sat on the Prussian Government benches. Irate orators of all parties in the Diet demanded that their Government or at least some member of it must appear! In vain.

Under the decree which ousted Prussia’s Adam & Eve, her Government is vested in a Federal Commissioner, blunt Dr. Franz Bracht. He took the line last week that he and all his ministers are not responsible to the Prussian Diet, but solely to President von Hindenburg. Therefore Dr. Bracht let Prussian Deputies elected by three-fifths of the German people rave, rant and grow purple in the face.

Four days later Chancellor von Papen, acting for President von Hindenburg, issued decrees partitioning Prussia into approximately the same “provinces” which existed in 1807—when Prussia was conquered by Napoleon, Emperor of the French.

Each province, Chancellor von Papen indicated, will be governed by a federal sub-commissioner under Federal Commissioner Dr. Bracht. Since the people of Prussia and even the German people have had no chance to examine or approve this ultra-arbitrary change, Paul von Hindenburg took his place last week in a class with Josef Stalin and Benito Mussolini. Vital fact: The 84-year-old President and his angelic Chancellor are well known to be guided in their dictatorial steps by sly but patriotic Defense Minister Kurt von Schleicher, tireless in his intrigues to restore the goose-step unity and military might of Imperial Germany.