The Passing of the German Middle Class

In this period of readjustement after the Great War the German masses have gone through untold privations and deprivations. It is a grim battle that the laborer fights, and daily does the number increase of those who lose their grip upon the pinacle of wealth and fall back. It is the large middle class that feels most the clutching hand of poverty. The sources of the higher life are drying up. In a country struggling for bare survival, the luxuries of learning and tradition are dispensed with, and the services of intellectual workers are not in demand. The emphasis is upon production. Science and invention are moribund, and under the terrific pressure the intellectuals are scattering into better paid but less cultural pursuits, and this is hastened by the state of mind of the intellectual himself. Bitterness fills him, and the suffering of the children breaks his nerve. The body of the middle class is honeycombed with disease. Hospitals are always filled. A physically ill class is no more productive than a mentally ill one. The future will likely know a new dark age in Germany. The applied sciences are sinking beneath the ooze, but they will be the first to see the light again. The Germany of tomorrow will be an industrial nation and cannot endure without its engineers and chemists. Music lies upon the hearts of the people and so must rise again, and yet it will need a new Germany trained in music before Germany's art is at its height once more. Literature and the drama have lost much that can never be regained. The fate of the pure sciences, however will be that of the other cultural subjects. The philosophers who work in the mines and the botanists who harvest grain take with them treasurers of tradition and learning and with their disappearance will go the habit of culture. One great lamp in the cluster which lights mankind will have gone dead

Ancient history · Battle · German · Media studies · Middle class · Political science · Sociology · World War II · Economic and Social Issues · History · Law

• Inflation, Revaluation, and the Crisis of Middle-Class Politics

  Open Access•Larry Eugene Jones•Central European History•1979

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