STRESEMANN DEAD

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 8, 4 October 1929, Page 7

STRESEMANN DEAD

GERMANY’S FOREIGN MINISTER

ONE OF THE WORLD’S BIG FIGURES

SERVICES TO POST-WAR GERMANY

(United Press Association.—By Electric Telegraph.—Copyright.)

Australian Press Assn.—United Service.

(Rec. October 3, 8.25 p.m.)

London, October 3.

The German Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Gustav Stresemann, is dead.

(Rec. October 4, 12.30 a.m.)

London, Ocober 3. Dr. Stresemann died as the result of two paralytic strokes. The first paralysed his right side and occurred at about ten in the evening. The doctors then believed they would be able to save him. However, a second stroke after five in the morning caused his death. His wife was present when the end came.

STRESEMANN—THE MAN AND THE STATESMAN

ONE OF THE MAKERS OF THE GERMAN REPUBLIC

“What was Stresemann before he became Foreign Minister?” asked Henry Albert Phillips, an American writer, of a German friend in Berlin recently. “I suddenly realised,” Mr. Phillips continues, in an article in the March number of “The Living Age,” “that I had never heard of him previous to five years ago, when he sprang into the world’s headlines overnight. “‘You foreigners are under the mistaken impression,’ said my well-informed friend reprovingly, ‘that Stresemann began his career yesterday or a few years ago. As a matter of fact, he has been in the political field continuously for twenty-six years, that is, since he was twenty-four years old.’ Rapidly he told me that the year young Stresemann emer-

ged from Leipzig University he became a municipal magistrate in Dresden. He climbed slowly from magistrate to aiderman of the city, then to the Reichstag. From 1907 to 1919, with the exception of two years, he was a militant member of the national legislature. After this laborious apprenticeship he stepped for the first time, during the critical years of 1917-18, into political leadership as Chairman of the National Liberal Party. He has since retained that leadership. It has made necessary some changes and modifications in his political views, so that his enemies, seeing him to-day at the head of the People’s Party, hasten to dub him an opportunist. The simple truth is that he has observed and studied and grown in political stature. The Post-war Chaos. “ ‘When the war was over and lost for us, who was among the first of the German statesmen to control the toppling Reich, and fight for the founding of a German Republic on the crumbling ruins of the Empire? You will find Stresemann’s name among those of the first members of the German Constitutional Government at Weimar! Through the terrible years—l92o-23—of famine and civil war, of inflation and deflation—there were never worse in the history of any nation that survived—Stresemann was one of the stalwarts to be counted on and reckoned with!’

“My friend paused a moment at the curb. ‘God only knows where our unfortunate country would be to-day had not its leaders shown the sagacity to appoint Dr. Stresemann Minister for Foreign Affairs just five years ago last November. If you remember, he had been made Chancellor to succeed Cuno and had held that post only two months when the demand came for a superman to solve the most delicate and sore problem following in the wake of defeat. Our lack of conciliatory diplomacy thus far had led to nothing but reprisals and recriminations. The Ruhr had been invaded. Now an opportunity was at hand for liquidation, and an effective plea for withdrawal. At that time the country had but a single statesman and diplomat who had neither a mailed first nor a too dynamic superseusitiveness. It was Gustav Stresemann, who was then in his prime. Nobel Peace Prize-winner. “During this curious procedure, my mind kept reverting to Stresemann, about whom I recalled many things. He had achieved a .record among European Foreign Ministers by holding his post for five successive years, during which period he had seen no less than nine differ, ent Governments ruling the Reich. A remarkable achievement of internal diplomacy! To a land that had suffered from the stigma of war, Stresemann had brought guarantees of a constructive peace. As proof thnf this service bad received the seal of universal belief in its sincerity, Gustav Stresemann—a German and a Prussian—had been awarded the Nobel Prize as the world’s outstanding figure in the promotion of peace. I recalled vividly the rotogravure photograph that had startled the nations into an emotional realisation of Germany's return to world consciousness. It showed the President of France and Reichminlster Stresemann locked together in warm embrace in the presence of thousands of French witnesses.

“ ‘How did he do it?’ I asked my friend.

' “ ‘Ah, that is Stresemann’s open secret, the diplomacy by means of which he has consistently achieved success—conciliation and reconciliation, with honour, of course.’

“To Gustav Stresemann, it seemed to me, more than to any other man, to his wisdom and restraint, his diplomacy and statesmanship, does Europe owe its tolerable peace of mind nnd internal security in the early weeks of 1929. “ ‘Did you not know,’ asked my friend, in surprise, that Dr. Stresemann is a world authority on Goethe?’ “This was said with an emphasis that made secondary all other eminent facts about Stresemann—that he had been

Chancellor, had just finished his fifth triumphant year as Minister for Foreign Affairs, had put his signature to the Locarno Treaty, to the Dawes Plan, to the League of Nations Covenant and, finally, to the Kellogg Pact, and that he had received the Nobel Peace Prize.

“ ‘Some day we shall go together to his private study,’ continued my friend. ‘There we shall find nothing less than a Goethe museum, I might say a GoetheNapoleonie museum—manuscripts and documents, relics and books. In studying the period of Goethe, especially the years 1789-1815, Dr. Stresemann became fascinated by the dominating personality of Napoleon Bonaparte, and began studying and collecting material on him. But his library on Goethe is famous. There is nothing written about the greatest German poet that is unfamiliar to Stresemann. and there are scores of littleknown facts in the life, of Goethe, not to be found in print anywhere, about which Stresemann could discourse, if he had the leisure.’ ”

An' Eloquent Speaker.

Mr. Phillips heard Stresemann speak on the melancholy aspects in the life of the great dramatic poet, Goethe. “One had to listen closely, because Stresemann’s voice—very much like the late President Roosevelt’s—came out as an astounding surprise. From such a big man one expected a big voice. It was astonishing to .hear a small, suppressed voice, almost sharp in its moments of greatest eloquence. When he showed deep emotion he had a habit of squeezing his voice back down his throat, after the manner of certain actors registering passion. Like Roosevelt’s, again, his voice was disappointing at first, but when one got used to it one felt strangely moved by its sincerity and swayed by the fire and eloquence behind it. It was not long before I realised why Stresemann was considered one of the Reich’s ablest orators, and why his addresses moulded public opinion and filled even his enemies with conviction.

“Dr. Stresemann seldom glanced down at the heavy sheaf of pages, fastened at one corner, except when he wanted to be sure of a quotation. He spoke with ease, even unction, and with no trace of nervousness, fixing his gaze for long periods upon a point near the ceiling, a halfsmile crossing his face as though he were reciting agreeable personal anecdotes about an intimate, and not propounding a ponderous theory concerning the baffling ego of a great mystic. The only possible sign of nervousness was a constant changing of hands in holding the manuscript. One could not help but note the smallness and whiteness of the hands as he gracefully gestured a fine phrase with the one that happened to be free. “Whether it was ingrained German respect for personage and position, or a genuine absorption in the abstruse subject, or a wrapt fascination at the sheer eloquence of his delivery, the audience sat spellbound for two hours, not even looking from one to another for corroboration, and fiercely hushing anybody who dared even creak in his seat. “We sat there silent for a half minute after it was over, as an audience often does at the end of a deeply moving play. Then there was a burst of applause and the usual ‘Hoch! Hoch! Hoch!,’ which Stresemann accepted standing and smiling like a schoolboy who has just delivered a prize oration. “The substance of the address? Well, that somehow seemed quite secondary. We all knew that it concerned the mysterious life of Goethe. It left us more deeply mystified than ever, if anything. The important point lay in the fact that Germany’s great statesman bad had the fun of giving the address and that we had listened to him with equal pleasure, enjoying his delight, “I overheard one old Thespian remark almost regretfully, ‘What an actor Germany has lost in Stresemann!’ “To which his companion somewhat cynically replied, ‘Yes, I could have listened to him all night, but I didn’t believe a word of it!’ “ ‘Ah, mein lieber Herr, that is just the point; none of us did —but what a talent!’ ” Work for Industrialists. Dr. Streseman was born on May 10, 1878, in Berlin. He studied history' and political economy at the Universities at Berlin and Leipzig, and devoted the next few years of his life to organising industry. He founded the Union of Saxon Industrialists, and was for many years its secretary. He became associated with the National Liberal Party and was first returned to the Reichstag in 1907. With a brief interval (1913-14) his Parliamentary career had been unbroken. On the death of Basserman in 1917 he became leader of the party. During the war Streseman pursued strong annextionist aims, and, when these hopes had fallen to the ground after the defeat and collapse of the German armies and the outbreak of the revolution he resisted the temptation to go over with his party to the Democrats, and so the German Peoples’ Party came into being. Under his leadership it has become perhaps the most serious force in German political life, largely by its association with the great industrialists. Dr. Stresemann’s activities in world affairs since his assumption of the portfolio of Foreign Affairs is too fresh in the public mind to need recapitulation here; suffice to say that he has been a prominent figure in the League of Nations Assembly since 1926, where he has played no small part in the general endeavour to secure the peace of the world. His last appearance on the international stage was at the famous Reparations , Conference at The Hague last month.