An insight into Germany's financial situation was given by the report of Finance Minister Schiffer, who disclosed that the prodigious sum of nineteen billion marks would be required in the coming year to pay interest charges alone. The war, he declared, had cost Germany one hundred and sixty-one billion marks, which exceeded by nearly fourteen billions the credits that had been granted.
The incubus of the terrible armistice terms rested upon the assembly. Enemy newspapers, especially those of Paris, were daily publishing estimates of indemnities to be demanded from Germany, and the most modest of these far exceeded Germany's total wealth of all descriptions. Naïve German editors faithfully republished these articles, failing to realize that they were part of the enemy propaganda and designed further to weaken the Germans' morale and increase their feeling of helplessness and despondency. Not even the fiercest German patriots and loyalists of the old school could entirely shake off the feeling of helplessness that overshadowed and influenced every act of the National Assembly.
The Majority Socialists had come to realize more fully the difference between theory and practice. The official organ of the German Federation of Labor had discovered a week earlier that "the socialistic conquests of the revolution can be maintained only if countries competing with German industry adopt similar institutions." There were already concrete proofs available that socialization, even without regard to foreign competition, was not practical under the conditions prevailing in the country. At least two large factory owners in Northern Germany had handed their plants over to their workmen and asked them to take full charge of manufacture and sale. In both instances the workmen had, after a trial, requested the owners to resume charge of the factories.
How shall we socialize when there is nothing to socialize? asked thoughtful men. The answer was obvious. _Gegen den Tod ist kein Kraut gewachsen_ (there is no remedy against death) says an old German proverb, and industry was practically dead. The government party now discovered what Marx and Engels had discovered nearly fifty years before.