Neuropa

Hitler's New World Order

Bibliographic Data

ID4048110
AuthorsW E B Du Bois (corresponding author)
Year1941
Volume10
Issue3
Pages380
Publication date1941-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Negro Education (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-2984 • E-ISSN: 2167-6437
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2292742
OpenAlexW2333047729
LanguageEN
Citations received10

Neuropa is a perfect pun and New Europe, a meaningful name. The Nazis are using it to indicate the new order in Europe which Hitler proposes to establish, while in the United States experts seem certain that no such new order is going to be established and that if it is it will only be characterized by war, oppression and race hate. I do not believe this. I believe that the revolution sweeping over Europe in 1917 and temporarily halted by the Treaty of Versailles is today entering its second phase and is destined to reorganize modern, civilization. I do not believe that Hitler is indispensable to this revolution or that its triumph means the triumph of all his beliefs and vagaries. What is happening in Europe is something far greater than the Nazis. I first came to realize this by my trips to Russia and Germany im 1928 and 1936; and the five months which I spent in Germany as a fellow of the Oberlaender Trust in 1936. I had previously been a student in Germany for two years, 1892 to 1894, and travelled in all parts of the empire. The first thing I was aware of in Germany in 1936, was the broader basis of democracy. In the Germany I knew before the World War, the people who counted, the people for whom Germany was primarily administered and arranged were the nobility, high and low, and the rising capitalists in finance and large industry. The large civil service, including professors and teachers were in the near background, but they depended for advance and favor on monarchy, nobility and capital. Defeat in war permanently changed this. The monarchy and ruling nobility seem gone forever. The Weimar Republic was based on a more democratic foundation: the upper classes of workers, the shopkeepers, and civil servants, with the still powerful influence of the junkers and captains of industry on one side, and the threat of the proletariat on the other. In Big Industry, the power of the engineers and technicians increased, and they and the salaried clerks rose in comparision, with the hand laborers. Then came a series of startling economic changes; vast inflation destroyed fixed incomes, investments, savings, property values, pensions and the like. At the same time it enabled large industry to pay off its debts, scrap its old equipment and rebuild in preparation for a planned economy in a Germany industrial world mastery. Prosperity based on borrowing followed, raising speculative values and the hopes of middleclass citizens. In 1929, came sudden deflation. The middle class of civil servants and clerks suffered more than industrial leaders or laborers, and were even more wracked by fear of being leveled down to workers. The communism thus threatened, found no united support even among the workers, who were distracted by contradictory advice from poor leadership. The revolution that ensued was extraordinary. A class struggle began, but there was no unity on either side

Economics · Order (exchange) · Political science · Politics · World order · Law · Leadership, Courage, and Heroism Studies · Nuclear Issues and Defense

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub