- Written in 1924 CHAPTER IV MUNICH IN the spring of 1912 I went to Munich.
A German town ! How different from Vienna ! I felt bad when I thought of that Babylon of races. Also the dialect, which was nearly the same as my own and reminded me of my own youth with its con¬ nections with Lower Bavaria. In a thousand ways it was or became dear to me. I belong to that town more than to any spot in the world, and this is due to the fact that it is inseparably bound up with my own development.
In Austria the only adherents of the alliance idea were the Habsburgs and the Germans. In the first it was due to compulsion and calculation, and in the second to easy credulity and political stupidity. Easy credulity, because they imagined they would do a great service to the German Empire by means of the Triple Alliance, which would strengthen it and bring it security ; political stupidity, because their imagina¬ tions did not fit the facts, for they were really helping to chain the Empire to the dead carcase of a State, which was bound to drag them down into the abyss ; more particularly, however, because that alliance was contributing more and more to de-Germanize Austria herself. For since the Habsburgs believed an Alliance with the Empire would insure them against any inter¬ ference on the part of the latter—and unfortunately they were right in this—they were enabled to continue their policy of gradually getting rid of German influence inside the country with more ease and less risk. They had no need to fear any protest from the German Government, which was known for the “objectivity” of its point of view, and moreover, in dealing with the Austrian Germans they could always silence any insistent voice which might be raised against some particularly disgraceful instance of favouritism shown to the Slavs, by a reference to the Triple Alliance.