The tenth birthday of the German Republic passed, last week, uncelebrated and ignored. No parades, no holiday. In the words of Minister of Justice Erich Koch-Weser "We look back ten years not to a birth but to a defeat. This is no holiday for Germany!"
Startling to many a German and others in Berlin last week, was a blazingly candid newspaper article How I Accidentally Proclaimed the German Republic, by Philipp Scheidemann, first Chancellor of the Republic (1919).
With meticulous exactitude Socialist Scheidemann writes that he was eating a bowl of "thin 1918 soup"...