in I went to the replacement battalion of my regiment, which was in the hands of 'soldiers' councils.

'
Their whole activity was so repellent to me that I decided at once to leave again as soon as possible.
With Schmiedt Ernst, a faithful war comrade, I went to Traunstein and remained there till the camp was
broken up.
In March, 1919, we went back to Munich.
The situation was untenable and moved inevitably toward a further continuation of the revolution.
Eisner's death only hastened the development and finally led to a dictatorship of the Councils, or, better
expressed, to a passing rule of the Jews, as had been the original aim of the instigators of the whole
revolution.
At this time endless plans chased one another through my head. For days I wondered what could be
done, but the end of every meditation was the sober realization that I, nameless as I was, did not
possess the least basis for any useful action. I shall come back to speak of the reasons why then, as
before, I could not decide to join any of the existing parties.
In the course of the new revolution of the Councils I for the first time acted in such a way as to arouse
the disapproval of the Central Council. Early in the morning of April 27, 1919, I was to be arrested, but,
faced with my leveled carbine, the three scoundrels lacked the necessary courage and marched off as
they had come.
A few days after the liberation of Munich, I was ordered to report to the examining commission
concerned with revolutionary occurrences in the Second Infantry Regiment.
This was my first more or less purely political activity.
Only a few weeks afterward I received orders to attend a ' course ' that was held for members of the
armed forces. In it the soldier was supposed to learn certain fundamentals of civic thinking. For me the
value of the whole affair was that I now obtained an opportunity of fleeting a few like-minded comrades
with whom I could thoroughly discuss the situation of the moment. All of us were more or less firmly
convinced that Germany could no longer be saved from the impending collapse by the parties of the
November crime, the Center and the Social Democracy, and that the so-called 'bourgeois-national'
formations, even with the best of intentions, could never repair what had happened. A whole series of
preconditions were lacking, without which such a task simply could not succeed. The following period
confirmed the opinion we then held. Thus, in our own circle we discussed the foundation of a new party.
The basic ideas which we had in mind were the same as those later realized in the ' German Workers'
Party.' The name of the movement to be founded would from the very beginning have to offer the
possibility of approaching the broad masses; for without this quality the whole task seemed aimless and
superfluous. Thus we arrived at the name of ' Social Revolutionary Party'; this because the social views
of the new organization did indeed mean a revolution.
But the deeper ground for this lay in the following: however much I had concerned myself with
economic questions at an earlier day, my efforts had remained more or less within the limits resulting
from the contemplation of social questions as such. Only later did this framework broaden through
examination of the German alliance policy. This in very great part was the outcome of a false estimation
of economics as well as unclarity concerning the possible basis for sustaining the German people in the
future. But all these ideas were based on the opinion that capital in any case was solely the result of
labor and, therefore, like itself was subject to the correction of all those factors which can either
advance or thwart human activity; and the national importance of capital was that it depended so
completely on the greatness, freedom, and power of the state, hence of the nation, that this bond in
itself would inevitably cause capital to further the state and the nation owing to its simple instinct of
self-preservation or of reproduction. This dependence of capital on the independent free state would,
therefore, force capital in turn to champion this freedom, power, strength, etc., of the nation.
Thus, the task of the state toward capital was comparatively simple and clear: it only had to make
certain that capital remain the handmaiden of the state and not fancy itself the mistress of the nation.
This point of view could then be defined between two restrictive limits: preservation of a solvent,
national, and independent economy on the one hand, assurance of the social rights of the workers on
the other.
Previously I had been unable to recognize with the desired clarity the difference between this pure
capital as the end result of productive labor and a capital whose existence and essence rests exclusively
on speculation. For this I lacked the initial inspiration, which had simply not come my way.
But now this was provided most amply by one of the various gentlemen lecturing in the above-
mentioned course: Gottfried Feder.
For the first time in my life I heard a principled discussion of international stock exchange and loan
capital.
Right after listening to Feder's first lecture, the thought ran through my head that I had now found the
way to one of the most essential premises for the foundation of a new party.