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The Prime Minister's anxiety was acute because he had not yet been able to obtain from the small "centre" parties and the Socialist party (largest) any assurance that these would stand together in a coalition, supporting either Herr Briining's or some other moderate cabinet against the Fascist Right and Communist Left—two extremes quite capable of voting together to oust a government which pleased neither.
If he cannot obtain such support for himself or arrange it for some other "moderate," Prime Minister Brüning, according to his closest friends last week, was agreed with Old Paul that they must "save the nation from itself" by adjourning the new Reichstag (only just elected) and embarking on a high-handed program of rule by "executive decree"—in other words Dictatorship, a procedure made quasi-legal by article 48 of the German Constitution conferring on the President "extraordinary powers."
Unterbermsgrün. Just one actual clash occurred in the excited but lawabiding Reich last week. A number of angry Communist sidewalkers with brickbats pitched upon 150 parading Fascists at Unterbermsgrun in Bavaria, broke up the parade, injured 29 Fascists, four "critically," then went on about their business.
*The German Socialists and Social Democrats who in 1918 proclaimed the Republic, brought about Kaiser Wilhelm's abdication.