B I L A N Z
Als
ich ein Kind noch war,
war
das Leben wunderbar:
Der
Garten blühte hinterm Haus,
nichts zog mich in die Welt hinaus.
Doch
schon als Knabe ward mir vieles Schein
das
soll nun meine Heimat sei?
Der
Krieg geht weiter und die Lüge
bestimmt das menschliche Gefüge.
So
ging ich fort und suchte nur
das
Glück noch in der Subkultur.
Durch
Freudenzwang, der Mode Trend
wurde mir auch diese fremd.
Die
Fassadenwelt mit ihrem Glanz
ist
Hülle nur!
Die
Seele fehlt ihr, die Substanz –
das
ist die innere Kultur.
Da
wandte ich dann meinen Blick
in
die Geschichte und zurück:
Wovon
lebten unsre Alten?
Welche Kraft hat sie erhalten?
Und
ich fand die Weltanschauung
für
die eigene Erbauung:
Neu
entdeckt’ ich die Natur,
fand
die innere Kultur.
Dort
ist meine Heimat nun
und
die Quelle für mein Tun. –
Neues
Leben kann man weben
aus
dem inneren Erleben!
From the Weight of Nothing
"Tell me, what does a snow-flake weigh?", asked the
pine tit the wild dove.
"Not more than nothing", answered the the dove.
"Then I have to tell you a wondrous story", said the
tit. "I was sitting on the branch of a spruce, close to
the trunk, when it began to snow; not strongly with
stormy gusts of wind, no, like in a dream, noiseless and
without any heaviness. As I didn't have to do anything
else I counted the snowflakes falling down and resting
on the twigs and needles of my branch. It were exactly
three million seven hundred forty-one thousand nine
hundred and fifty-two. When the three million seven
hundred forty-one thousand nine hundred and fifty-third
snowflake landed - not more than nothing, like you say
-, the branch broke."
So the tit flew away.
The dove, a specialist in that question since Noah's
times, said to herself after a short time of thinking,
"Maybe only one person's voice is missing to the peace
of the world."
written by Kurt Kauter
Your Horses - my Horses
Three farm-hands began to work at an old land-owner's
estate at the same time. Some weeks later, a neighbour
asked him whether he was content with his new
farm-hands. The old man thought a moment, then he said,
"They are all very different, the three of them. First,
there is Franz - he is no good, I will have to send him
away soon. He always says, 'Your horses'. Then there is
Joseph - he is already better and is maybe going to be
quite a useful fellow. He always says, 'Our horses'. But
Frederic, that is a splendid guy. He shall stay on my
farm as long as I can keep him. He always says, 'My
horses'."
after a newspaper note
Adolf
Damaschke:
The Life
and Work of a Land Reformer and Popular Educator
A Social Legacy
and its Meaning
by Klaus Hugler
1.
A man who was contradicted
At the beginning of the first volume
of his memoirs, completed in 1924, Adolf Damaschke
reflected on an experience which he had recently had.
A settler friend from Hanover had
invited him to deliver a lecture in the morning. Awaking
early in the bedroom of his host’s son, his eyes fell on
a pamphlet in the bookshelf. It was an anti-Semitic
diatribe from an Austrian publisher. Various public
figures were cited. He discovered this entry: “Damaschke,
Adolf… (from Damascus, now baptized), the great land
reformer.” He laid the pamphlet aside and asked
himself: “How sick must our people be, how febrile the
air of our time, when something of this kind is
possible. A man is sitting in Tyrol who – I assume –
earnestly desires to serve the German people in his own
way. In the course of this service he encounters a
movement like land reform. He does not consider it his
duty to check his facts.”
A year later, the citizens of Potsdam
opened the Adolf Damaschke Bank. It was his sixtieth
birthday. Let us try to discover what drove Damaschke’s
contemporaries to honor this man in such a way during
his lifetime!
But this much is already clear: he
was a contentious and controversial personality.
Already at the turn of the century,
conservative forces warned about him in the forefront of
the Reichstag elections: “You citizens in the cities,
you peasants on the land: if you want your homes and
fields to be taken away and handed over to the state,
…if you want to lose your autonomy, then vote for Herr
Damaschke!” This sort of thing was being repeated
everywhere.
Is that why he is nearly forgotten
today?
Why should we remember him then?
Who was he?
What was his message?
And: what can his legacy teach us
today?
2.
Life and work
Adolf Damaschke was born on November
24, 1865 in Berlin. His father was a furniture maker,
who had a workshop in the backyard of a house on
Rosentaler Strasse. He lived with his wife and children
in the main house facing the street. The master
furniture maker first met his later wife in the
“Bethanien” hospital while he was visiting an ill
friend. She was about to become a deaconess and came
from Lehnin, where her parents lived and where Adolf
later spent his holidays. These holiday stays awakened
his great love for the Havelland region west of Berlin.
When Adolf was ten years old his
father had to give up his workshop. The parents moved to
the north side of the city. Nearby was the Mission House
where he would soon begin attending Sunday school. He
found both the school and the material easy. He quickly
became a model pupil without letting it go to his head.
He would later say about this time: “My best friends
were books, and they have remained so to this day.”
At that time he also encountered the
social distress which tenement life entailed. Early on
it became clear to him that land speculation, which ran
rampant in the Berlin of those days, was forcing more
and more poor people into smaller and more decrepit
tenements. In the years to come, he would come to see
land reform – a “third path” between capitalism (or
“mammonism,” as he called it) and communism – as the
solution to the problems of industrial society. Under
Damaschke’s leadership, this simple idea would develop
into a holistic social reform movement that inspired a
generation.
He attended primary school until
1880. Thanks to his great academic skill, he went on to
a preparatory school and from there to the “Berlin
Seminar for City Teachers” from 1883 to 1886. Since
there was still no public transit system in Berlin in
1880, he had to walk to his school on Friedrichstrasse
every morning, and then back every evening.
In these years he wrote his first
poems and theater plays. These early works expressed
both his living faith and his social ideals for the
first time.
After an excellent final grade and a
period of student teaching, he passed the second State
Exam in 1888. As a result of conflicts arising from his
convictions, the young teacher was given a job in one of
the tenement districts. At this time he also began his
lecture activity. Over the next fifteen years alone he
would speak at over 1,200 meetings before a total of
some 150,000 people.
In 1890, the year when Bismarck was
forced from power and the anti-socialist law was lifted,
many things changed for Damaschke as well. He took a
public stand against alcohol abuse and worked for the
democratic “Volkszeitung” (People’s Newspaper). In the
course of his work he made contact with the reformers
Friedrich Naumann, Moritz von Egidy and Franz Mehring.
But a lecture by Eugen Richter became decisive for his
work. On this occasion he first heard of the land reform
movement and soon became an outstanding proponent of
this social renewal movement in his own right. Some of
the topics he would speak about within this context in
the coming years were: “Images from the German Peasant
War,” “The French Revolution,” “The History of Social
Struggles,” “Cultural Historical Images from the Roman
Empire,” “In the Year 2000,” “Social Currents of the
Present,” “Foundations of National Economy,” “Modern
Answers to the Social Question,” “Controversial
Questions of Economics.”
In October 1891 he assumed the
editorship of the journal “Frei-Land.” Starting in 1892
he published “Volksgesundheit” (Popular Health), the
“Gesundheitskalender” (Health Calendar) and the
“Naturkalender.” Starting in these years he also
maintained contact with the practical “projects” (as we
would call them today) of land reform. These included
the vegetarian colony “Eden” near Oranienburg, whose
founder Bruno Wilhelmi also cooperated on his journal
“Der Naturarzt” (The Nature Doctor), and also the
building cooperatives, to name just a few.
The year 1896 also brought a
significant change: Prof. Lehmann-Hohenberg invited him
to Kiel as chief editor of the regional newspaper
“Kieler Neueste Nachrichten.” In this capacity he
continued his life’s work.
Damaschke couldn’t “only” raise his
voice. He also had to intervene in public life in a
practical way. Thus, thanks to his intervention, the
city opened a public reading hall, and the daily work
hours of the streetcar drivers was reduced from fourteen
to nine hours.
Through his critical and at the same
time partisan reports on the appearance of the anarchist
Gustav Landauer in Kiel and his influential reports on
the Hamburg dock worker strike, he also placed “the
margins of society into the center.” This policy could
not help but arouse massive opposition. The newspaper
went bankrupt the following year.
Adolf Damaschke returned to Berlin.
He lived at Asconaplatz 8 and soon travelled to Erfurt.
There, in 1896, the National Social – not National
Socialist! – Party had been formed, uniting Friedrich
Neumann, Max Weber and Max Lorenz around a new reformist
social vision. Back in Berlin he assumed the direction
of their party newspapers, the “Volk” (People) and “Die
Zeit” (Time), also becoming the editor of the popular
paper “Welt am Montag.” Reichstag elections were set for
1898 and Damaschke ran on the National Social ticket for
the state of Schleswig. During his campaign he made
contact with the rural population and became acquainted
with their problems. Even if the new party did not
succeed in entering the Reichstag, its appearance
changed the political landscape.
During this period, two great canals
were dug across the German Empire: the Mittelland Canal
and the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal. It was Damaschke’s
achievement that the land along their banks did not
become an object of speculation.
Damaschke ensured that rental law was
applied, which the new civil code made possible, and
that the future Botanical Garden would become a people’s
park.
In the same year – on April 3, 1898 –
the League of German Land Reformers was founded. The
League’s work was aimed at abolishing land speculation
(which it saw as the root of social inequality),
preserving municipally-held lands from private
acquisition and promoting domestic settlement projects
or “homesteads.” Damaschke himself formulated “the only
profound sentence in his program, for which the League
of German Land Reformers should stand up for: ‘that the
soil, the foundation of all national existence, should
be subordinated to a law promoting its use for
working and living use, which should prohibit
all misuse, and which should place every growth in value
which it receives without the work of the individual, at
the disposal of the people as a whole.”
The membership rolls show the general
recognition and significance which this association
received. 54,000 individuals joined by 1919.
Damaschke’s books appeared one after another: “The
History of National Economy,” “The Art of Public
Speaking,” and a collection of essays on “The Social
Question of the Times.”
He encountered innumerable public
figures of his day. The chairman of the Prussian General
Synod, Count Albert Julius von Ziethen-Schwerin, invited
Damaschke to his castle in Wustrau in order to learn
more about his land reform scheme. The Austrian writer
Peter Rosegger was one of his followers. When Damaschke
visited him in 1916, two years before Rosegger’s death,
the latter declared that people could forget all of his
books except for his novel “Jacob the Last.” He called
it his “land reform book.” All these public figures
helped popularize Damaschke’s ideas on various levels.
In 1903 he ran for the Reichstag a
second time, this time in Jena. He lived in the house of
Prof. D. Gelzer, which, as we will see, would soon have
a decisive effect upon his personal life. This time,
too, he failed in his attempt to win a Reichstag seat.
The party was dissolved. The proponents of the National
Social idea now went their separate ways. Ten years
later, Max Maurenbrecher, who turned to the Social
Democratic movement and later worked as a pastor in
Thuringia, wrote about this time: “I can summarize the
results of our previous experience in two sentences
which, if you will, also point to a personal program for
the future.
“First: It is not true that it is the
duty of every citizen to belong to a party. However, it
is true that the parties as a whole are often more of a
hindrance than a help for the promotion of honest,
hands-on and down-to-earth thinking. …The creative
people of the past seventy years, people like
Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche, Marx, Bismarck etc.,
were not party politicians.
“Second: A central office for the
cultural problems of socialism without a link to a
political party, also without establishing a blind
dogma, an office which continually forces the public to
look at these problems without peering through the
rose-colored glasses of a party… such a congress and
association could be the correct, direct and profound
continuation of both our National Social movement and
also our recent past.”
By now, Adolf Damaschke had achieved
a degree of popularity which led to public honors and
streets named after him. When, following the collapse of
the German Empire, he was nominated for the office of
Reich President in 1919, he responded: “If German men
and women of all camps arrive at the conviction that my
strivings and work give them confidence that I can serve
our people in this decisive time in the position of
Reich President, then I would see it as my duty to
follow this call. … I demand… an organic
reconciliation of the great contradictions of socialism
and individualism as the task of our time, as the only
possible foundation for the propitious reconstruction of
our Fatherland. My book, in which I show the path to
this reconciliation, and which is the program of the
land reform movement in the German speaking countries
and beyond, is based upon the guiding concept:
Neither mammonism nor communism, but rather an
economic order which organically combines social justice
and personal freedom!” And in the local press one could
read: “Our fellow citizen, the renowned land reformer
Adolf Damaschke, has been lifted onto the shields in
Hamburg as a candidate for the office of Reich
President. The acclamation above all acknowledges his
contributions to the homestead law and welcomes the fact
that Damaschke is not a party big shot who has sold his
soul to a clique. Damaschke’s program, neither mammonism
nor communism, but rather Fatherland, freedom and social
reform is likely to win him thousands of votes.”
Damaschke’s candidacy had scarcely
become known when the decision was announced to extend
Ebert’s term for another five years. In the same year,
Damaschke was awarded an honorary doctorate of law by
the University of Münster, an honorary doctorate of
theology by the University of Giessen and, soon after,
an honorary doctorate of medicine by the University of
Berlin.
Damaschke’s voice was also heard
internationally. His book on land reform was already
available in French, Hungarian and Spanish, and his
ideas were discussed in New York. He spoke at the
Peasant’s Congress in Sofia in 1922, and the new Chinese
Republic send some of its leaders to visit him and learn
how to develop a new land policy. And in the summer of
1927 he took part in the founding of the first
international adult education center in Helsingör,
Denmark.
As his life approached its end, he
said that “after a tough struggle… in the field of law…
[I reaped] great success; I will mention only the most
important of these:
·
The land tax according
to common value in place of the previous profits tax
·
The Reich Capital Gains
Tax of 1914
·
The Rental Right
Ordinance of 1919
·
The Reich Settlement
Law of 1919
·
The Small Garden and
Smallholding Leasing Ordinance of 1919
·
The Reich Lease
Protection Ordinance of 1920
·
The Reich Homestead Act
of 1920
·
The Public Official
Settlement Ordinance of 1924
·
The Public Official
Homestead Act of 1927
·
The Homestead Act Draft
Law of 1928
·
Law on the Opening of
Settlement Areas of 1933.”
In the
last years of his life, Damaschke suffered from cancer.
He finally succumbed to the illness on July 30, 1935 in
Berlin. On August 3 he was buried in the town of Werder
in the Havelland region he loved so much. The minister
cited a verse from the first Epistle of John, which has
remained programmatic for Damaschke’s life’s work and
which can still be read on his tombstone: “We know that
we have passed from death unto life, because we love the
brethren.” (I. John 3:14).
The Work of the Land Reformer and
Teacher
Is it possible to separate the two?
Damaschke the land reformer here, Damaschke the teacher
there? Even the briefest perusal of his memoirs shows
that such a division is a hopeless endeavor.
The
roots of his political activity lay in his own personal
experiences. The world presented itself to the young man
as a new one: with the founding of the German Empire in
1871, German unity had finally been achieved. This
represented the fulfilment of a long-standing dream for
millions of people. The idea of the German nation had
now taken on a political form. The national
consciousness was aroused. But then the social
consciousness was also aroused. How many families
suffered from hunger! The misery of working families was
a scandal. In 1895 there were some 17,000 houses in
Berlin. In the preceding thirty years, each house had
changed owners three times. Mortgages and the housing
shortage had unspeakable consequences. Damaschke
experienced all this himself. After all, his own father
had had to give up his beloved workshop. These
experiences gave rise to the national-social idea within
him, making him believe that a party based upon this
notion could provide solutions.
He also had a key experience as a
young teacher. A primary school class in a workers’
district, which had been placed into his hands,
transformed itself under his direction. The children’s
performance improved and so did the discipline. With one
exception. One boy, whom Damaschke considered to be
intelligent, continued to get poor grades, so that he
could not enter the next higher grade. The successful
teacher didn’t know what to do and took him aside after
the class. When he spoke seriously to the student, the
latter broke into tears and confessed that he did not
want to be promoted because his father was not able to
buy him a new school book. The scales fell from the
young teacher’s eyes. How soon we forget! Now he
recalled the poverty of his own childhood. From now on
he carried the fight for social equality into the
schools.
And Paul von Gizycki, the school
inspector responsible for Damaschke, approved of his
struggle, calling it an imperative of “practical
idealism.” Even more, the school inspector brought the
young teacher into contact with American reformers who
came and went in Gizycki’s house.
Let us now take a look at Damaschke’s
works and limit ourselves to two writings which give us
an overview of his activities as a land reformer and
teacher.
A century ago, his book on “Municipal
Socialism” appeared. Its origins can be traced to a
lecture which he held in Dresden on November 9, 1895.
This book contains a crystal-clear
analysis showing the ways and means for a municipal
policy characterized by “self-government” – he uses the
English term – and which acts in a socially responsible
way. This was the idea of municipal socialism, which has
nothing in common with the “state socialism” of the
later communist regimes besides the ideals, but which,
in its implementation, attempts to do justice to the
citizens as a whole. Since Damaschke was a practician
rather than a theorist, this writing is particularly
interesting.
Let us take a look at two examples
from this book.
First: “The education question.”
Damaschke begins this chapter by
saying: “Show me a community’s school and I’ll tell you
what that community is worth.” He cited Friedrich
Schleiermacher (“The external differences in the living
conditions should not become conscious in the childhood
years.”) and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (“The son of a
beggar and the son of a prince have the same nature. The
same soul ebbs and flows in all who are born of woman;
the same developmental laws reign in all.”).
From these models, Damaschke
formulated the demand for primary schools in which the
children of the rich and poor would sit side by side.
They should be expense-free and finally the teaching
materials should be placed at the students’ disposal
without charge so that in practice all children could
receive the same educational opportunities. This last
point provoked massive resistance on the part of
conservative politicians.
Further demands included: the further
cost-free promotion of especially gifted children (which
in Berlin at that time was already possible but not yet
customary) and the hiring of school physicians who
“become a blessing for the whole of popular hygiene.”
The necessity of this had already been recognized by the
city conference of the province of Brandenburg. He
further demanded the establishment of popular libraries
by the municipalities. And he concluded this chapter
with the words: “When a genuinely social spirit is alive
in the municipal administrations, then the right
procedures and the right form will find themselves.”
Second: “Concerning municipal land
ownership.”
He begins this chapter with the words
of a city councilman: “Not only perhaps, but without a
doubt the most difficult task of a municipal
administration today is the treatment of the land
question.” Damaschke then stated: “We are today dealing
with an entirely practical procedure of a reasonable
municipal socialism, and in no way with the question of
socialising or not socialising the entire soil. It can
only be a matter of whether we want to sell the usually
insignificant remainder of municipal property, or
whether we should increase it on a planned basis or not.
“The decision is clear. With every
piece of land which a municipality sells today, it also
gives away its increased value. Examples are legion in
which… communities… have yielded broad areas to private
speculation, only… to have to by them back again after a
relatively short time at an extremely inflated price.
…In Germany, one of the greatest hurdles faced by land
reform is the almost general notion that the land and
buildings form an indivisible unity.”
Damaschke saw a way out in rental
rights, for which the Civil Code of January 1900 cleared
the way.
In this connection, I ask myself
whether the municipalities and parishes who, after the
reunification of Germany in 1989, often sold land as
quickly as possible to fill the holes in their budgets
or in order to pay for prestigious items, are aware of
this.
When a year ago, after a long time, I
arrived on the beautiful Baltic island of Hiddensee and
came to Vitte, my companion said regarding the new
buildings: “That looks like Stralsund!” We only found
peace and quiet when we arrived in the southern town of
Neuendorf. When we asked them why land wasn’t being
bought and sold here the way it was in Vitte, the
Neuendorfers said matter-of-factly: “Well, it belongs to
the church!”
At a large pedagogical conference in
Berlin in 1928, Damaschke spoke about the education of
good citizens. In his typical style, he spoke on many
practical issues, such as the significance of housing,
the importance of schools (playgrounds and gymnasiums,
school gardens), but also on the value of teaching
children about the Reich Constitution. He finished the
lecture with a personal analysis in which he said:
“However we think about the levels of world historical
development… our century is the century of popular rule.
Among the civilized peoples nothing lasting can be
created anymore without or even against the will of the
people.” He saw this as the basis of the responsibility
of the individual for popular education: “If these
political rights are not accompanied by the same amount
of political education and the resulting sense of duty,
then our political legal foundation will become an
inward falsehood, and every falsehood – whether in the
life of the individual, in one’s profession or in the
national community as a whole – means a source of decay
and ruin! … Pity the national community for whose common
tasks only ‘interested parties’ show an interest. Then
all talk of popular freedom and popular sovereignty will
become a popular swindle. … In exchange for bread and
circuses, potatoes and movies, along with ‘great
speeches’, clever interest groups can easily… persuade
an immature people to yield their freedom to anyone who
is willing to pay the price.” This all came true in
Germany just a few years later. And today? When I see
how many people abandon their interest in political
life, then I sometimes wonder if we’re going down the
same path right now!
The Foundation: his Christian
faith
Adolf Damaschke had found a solid
foundation for his upright path. Again and again, he
encountered people who, he said, led him “upward.”
In the Sunday school of the St.
Bartholomew parish it was his group leader. His name was
Fritz Reuter. Later on, when Damaschke himself conducted
a Sunday school group, his guide was Paulus Classen, the
preacher of Christ Church. And then he met Moritz Egidy
and people who had been touched by this extraordinary
personality. Damschke called them “noble people.” They
all oriented themselves on the life and work of Jesus of
Nazareth. As did Damschke himself.
Three figures from this circle
emphasize what Christian faith meant to him and how he
understood the Christian idea.
Friedrich Naumann
The liberal politician Friedrich
Naumann was Damaschke’s friend and collaborator for over
thirty years. Naumann himself had been inspired by the
reformers Johann Hinrich Wicher and Moritz von Egidy.
During the 1898 election campaign in
Schleswig, Damaschke and Naumann shared lodgings in an
inn. In the evening hours they occasionally fell to
talking about issues that moved them. One evening they
came to the subject of “modern man and Christianity.”
Damaschke recalled: “Naumann did not care to go into
details: ‘I want to tell you something which for me does
not necessarily represent an ultimate insight, but which
is a bridge to such an insight. Isn’t it true that the
fundamental law of all science is that of cause and
effect? No effect without a corresponding cause. The
larger the effect, the greater the cause.’
“I agreed.
“’Now, using this natural law,
anybody can test the significance Jesus Christ has for
humanity, or at least for European humanity, of which we
are members. Walk through the houses of Europe, go into
the castles, the huts. When times come when life in all
its immensity stands before the individual soul – birth,
illness, death – then the names from which frightened,
suffering, searching, dying souls draw strength, joy and
consolation are not the names which are otherwise spoken
so grandly, not Frederick the Great or Bismarck, not
Schiller or Goethe, not Kant or Schopenhauer, nor Karl
Marx or Henry George, but rather the name Jesus Christ.
That is an effect which cannot be compared with any
other effect which has ever proceeded from a human
being. And if this effect is incomparable, then it must
also have a cause. And the obvious answer … is the
unique position of Jesus Christ. … Show me a person who
has perceived the figure of Jesus and who has not then
become better, purer, braver and more self-sacrificing.
Compared to such proof… what is the value of scholarly
disputes on some old pottery fragments, stone tablets,
scraps of parchment? That sort of thing doesn’t even
touch the shell, let alone the core of our Christian
faith.’”
Theodor Zollmann
Pastor Zollmann had worked for
several years abroad and expanded his horizons before he
took over a parish near Magdeburg. Damaschke recalled:
“He was well regarded in church circles. His favorite
slogan was: More ‘Jacobinism’ for Christianity! That
meant: alongside the importance of personal
spirituality, which the Protestant Church particularly
emphasizes in regard to the Epistles of Paul, the social
teachings, particularly those contained in the Epistle
of James, must be given more attention. He did not doubt
that every honest attempt in this direction would lead
the Church to a more organized land reform policy.”
Friedrich von Bodelschwingh
One day, the housing reformer
Bodelschwingh knocked at Damaschke’s door. “I stood up
and immediately recognized the man standing in front of
me: ‘Father Bodelschwingh, what a joy and an honor!’ He
said: ‘First I must confess something! Sometimes I have
thought to myself: There sits Damaschke, writing books
and demanding land reform laws; well, why does he do it?
I am a much better land reformer; I’ll start doing it!
I’ll build houses for little people!’
“’And now?’
“’And now everything you warned about
has happened. With every house that we build the price
of the neighboring lots has risen. Now speculators are
watching where we go with our settlements. It’s hopeless
– land speculation is twisting our necks!’
“We remained good comrades… Then
Bodelschwingh founded the Hoffnungsthal (Hope Valley)
colony near Bernau. When his second homestead was about
to be built, he came to me and said I had to come and
speak at the opening and proclaim the alliance between
land reform and Christianity in this project. I did it
and expressed the hope that the Hoffnungsthal colony
would become a bridge to home town colonies… Every
community which wants to conduct true welfare should
learn from Hoffnungsthal.”
It is hardly suprising that Damaschke
placed great value on religious instruction in a social
sense. “Who can give true religious instruction
and ignore the fact that Christ sharply and concisely
stated: ‘You cannot serve two masters!’ And that he
placed God on one end and the great antagonist of all
godly justice, Mammon, on the other! Who can honestly
recite in the Lord’s Prayer ‘Thy Kingdom come!’ and not
struggle for the coming of this kingdom, that is to say
for more air and light, for more justice and purity on
this earth?”
3.
Damaschke in private
In 1903, following the end of his
second election campaign and the collapse of his party,
the exhausted strategist withdrew from public life for a
while in order “to rediscover my balance with myself and
the world.” He sought refuge on the Swedish island of
Gotland and devoted much of his time to writing his
memoirs, and found time to note the following: “For
November I had once again agreed to go on a lecture tour
in Jena, and the Gelzer family once again invited me to
stay with them. I decided to take a closer interest in
my human surroundings than before – and soon the day
came when the Jena newspapers wrote:
“’Herr Damaschke, who in the last
election sought in vain to gain a Reichstag seat from
Jena, has now at least led a daughter of Jena home. He
has married Fräulein Julie Gelzer, the daughter of our
renowned historian.’
“A new life began.”
Thenceforth, his wife accompanied him
on all his major lecture tours.
In Werder-on-the-Havel
In the summer of 1907 the young
family moved to the Brandenburg town of Werder, just
west of Berlin, where they ordered a wooden house from
the workshop of the reformist architect Gustav
Lilienthal, brother of the famous aviation pioneer. Here
he found the peace and natural beauty which the big city
had never provided him. But Damaschke, who always had
plenty to say about public issues, uttered scarcely a
word about his private life. Only occasional peeks have
come down to us, such as this recollection by his friend
Naumann who often dropped in at his summer residence to
go rowing with the great land reformer. “Now let’s turn
things around for a change,” Naumann once told him.
“This time I’ll sit at the rudder and you’ll row.”
Adolf Damaschke was a consciously and
intentionally one-sided man. He remained dedicated to
the cause of land reform into old age. As he wrote in
his book on public speaking: “Whether a one-idea man is
an oddball and eccentric, a ‘saint’ or a great man, all
depends on whether this one idea stands for
something indifferent and petty to our people and our
time or else something great and necessary.”
In the last decade of his life,
Damaschke spoke and wrote often of an impending “turning
point in history” (Zeitenwende), and titled the
second volume of his memoirs with this word. His hope
for such a turning point motivated him all the way up to
the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. In 1925 – recalling
his own National Social Party – he briefly viewed the
Hitler movement with hope. After all, the Nazis made
liberal use of reformist ideas of all kinds in their
propaganda. But already in 1927, upon the dedication of
the Adolf Damaschke Bank in Potsdam, he publicly
rejected the Nazis’ accusation that the land reform
cause was of neither national nor social importance.
Finally, in 1933, the Nazis banned this popular
ideological rival from speaking. The racial biologist
and Reich Peasant Leader Walter R. Darré classified him
with the Marxists as an enemy of the people. Damaschke
had to admit that the turning point had already arrived
and saw evil times ahead for the German people. Well
before his death in 1935, Damaschke saw Hitler as a
seducer of the people who had to be resisted at all
costs.
Adolf Damaschke is well remembered in
Werder. On April 9, 1949 – before the founding of the
communist German Democratic Republic – the town council
voted to rename the “Mittelweg” street where Damaschke
lived to “Adolf-Damaschke-Strasse.” Today some 150
German towns have streets named after the great land
reformer.
Wherever we encounter his name we
recall a noble human being who was convinced that
everyone should do his or her best and that everyone
should do well. “Every organic reform must proceed
slowly, step by step. But even the smallest step forward
is not possible if one is not clear on where one is
headed… We must always keep the highest goal in sight if
we want to walk steadily towards that which we can
achieve today!”
