ABSTRACT
The discord among the Germans in modern times was due to the diversity of the country’s peoples, religions, and unequal distribution of national wealth, but also to the conflict between the military and the civil population and between bureaucracy and the recipients of State care and maintenance. A glimpse at German history from Frederick the Great up to the laying down of the Republican Constitution at Weimar shows as its most prominent feature the inner disruption of the German people into opposing groups. But the discord which manifested itself in class strife was by no means the only and certainly also not the most important issue which disrupted the German community. It is true, the issue between the several German peoples was losing its urgency. Economic life, in an amalgamation difficult to analyse, of capitalist with socialist principles, became an autarchic state economy facilitating war.
