Repression in Germany.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 13, 27 March 1902, Page 1

Repression in Germany.

The following cable, which appeared in last week's messages in the daily papers, furnishes a striking illustration of the measures of repression constantly adopted against the Press in Germany : —' The editor of the Potsdamer Zeitung has been sentenced to two months' imprisonment and the publisher heavily fined for incorrectly stating that the Kaiser had reprimanded two lieutenants for threatening to fight duels.' Absuid and outrageous as this appears to us, it is only a typical instance of the irritating and tyrannical prosecutions to which the members of the Fourth Estate in Germany are continually subjected. It is only a few years ago that a still more severe sentence for a similarly trivial offence was passed on Dr. Forster on the same ridiculous charge of lese-majeste. The Emperor had delivered a speech on the occasion of the anniversary of Sedan, in which he had stigmatised the Social Democrats as a rabble, and Dr. Forster, as editor of an ethical magazine, had in most temperate language and without any personal allusion to his Majesty, condemned the speech as calculated to impede the reunion of classes which will one day • bring peace into the exalted regions where princes are throned in solitude.' For this article Dr. Forster was sentenced to three months' imprisonment in a fortress, the Judge who condemned him declaring that he made the sentence light on account of 'Dr. Forster's youth, unblemished character, high aspirations, and independence of all political ties ! ' To such a length has the Royal sensitiveness been carried that the Emperor on one occasion expressed his annoyance at the ' disloyalty ' of a critic who had written ' his Majesty' instead of ' His Majesty. 1 It would seem as if kings and emperors are so accustomed to being addressed with deference, and even flattery, that criticism, even when respectful in form, tends to create in them at once a suspicion of the loyalty of the critic. • He cannot be loyal,' the Emperor reasons with himself,' 'or he would never criticise me '; and so he gets excited and permits these odious prosecutions for even respectable criticism on the pretext that the writers are guilty of lese-majeste or high treason. It does not seem to occur to the Emperor or his statesmen that if there is a Press at all it must be critical, and that the critics who set an example by being respectful deserve official approval rather than condemnation.

Precisely the same policy of repression is pursued in Germany with regard to the freedom of political speech and political agitation. Some time ago a decree was issued dissolving all the Central Committees and organisations of the Social Democratic Party in Berlin and forbidding their reestablishment under any name and for any apparent purpose. Is is very much as if, in this country, the various Labor Unions or Workmen's Political Societies were ordered to disperse under pain of imprisonment and were forbidden to recombine under any name or for any purpose. Even the beershops and restaurants are dogged by detectives, and conversation — at least so far as any reference to the Kaiser is concerned — has to be carried on in a very guarded way. When we ourselves were in Berlin a couple of years ago we

found that the habitues of the restaurants had hit upon a device for dodging the police by referring to the Kaiser under a fictitious name. Thus a conversation beginning with * Have you heard about Smith's latest bit of buffoonery? ' would be allowed to pass as perfectly harmless, the police being quite unconscious that the ' Smith ' referred to was no other than the Kaiser himself. We had often wondered how an intellectual people like the Germans could put up with such tyranny, and on one occasion we put the question plainly to a university man in Berlin. His answer was that the Germans hated that sort of thing as heartily as the British could do, but that they had no remedy. They could protest in Parliament, but beyond that they could not go If they attempted to give practical effect to their desires, the aid of the military would be invoked, and as the army is completely under the Kaiser's personal control, his will is, in the last resort, absolutely supreme. The policy of repression is manifestly foolish and demoralising, and is altogether unworthy of an enlightened nation. So long as lese majeste plays such an important part in the government of the country, it is little wonder that Germany should prove a fertile breeding ground for the wildest anarchism.