ABSTRACT
In his memoirs the historian Felix Gilbert tells the story of a friend, a Reichswehr cadet during the late Weimar years, who was chastised by a senior officer because of the newspapers he was reading. The cadet was a regular follower of the liberal German paper Die Frankfurter Zeitung and the French Le Temps. When he told Gilbert about his dressing-down, Gilbert immediately thought the problem was the French newspaper; following the French political opinion so closely would have to be problematic for a future German officer. However, it turned out that the senior officer was not at all perturbed about Le Temps. The real problem was the liberal German newspaper. In the chaotic political atmosphere of the Weimar era, such liberalism was more of a threat to the political-ideological makeup of a member of the German officer corps.1
