Brüning is a Bad Psychologist

I see how little the psychological effects of such measures are understood when I consider the time at which the new emergency decree was issued.

One chose the time before Christmas, since one could refer to the holy peace of Christmas and forbid opposition political activity for a long time. Today, naturally, when one bans all meetings, government parties are not affected. No independent person in Germany will even think of defending this decree! It would only be possible to speak against it. What a brilliant idea to use Christmas peace as an indirect shield for this infamous emergency decree! Despite it all, Mr. Reich Chancellor, you have given yourself over to yet another psychological illusion. If the constitutional guarantee of free assembly had been maintained, many a one would have been able to express his discontent. It displays dubious talents as a statesman to close off all means of releasing pressure so that the steam pressure builds up!

Just as it was psychologically wrong to announce the emergency decree at that time since it robbed millions of Germans of even the most modest Christmas joy, so, too, the psychological effects are unfortunate.

You are convinced, Mr. Reich Chancellor, that it will make a major contribution to calming people down if one, for example, bands ten thousand National Socialist Christmas parties, robbing hundreds of thousands of impoverished German children of their Christmas presents!

You are convinced, Mr. Reich Chancellor, that it will contribute to political peace and the calming down of public life if one carries this ban so far as, for example, to ban a symphony concert by a prominent Bavarian orchestra only because it is sponsored by the National Socialist movement! Or do symphonies by Brahms, Brückner, and Mozart endanger the republic?

History will demonstrate whether the hopes of strangling a movement with such methods are realistic, or whether they belong in the kingdom of illusions.