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- A World Conference of Liberalism
- Improvement in the Coal Miners' Strike Situation
- Let Us Remember...
This Vienna front page of 30 October 1926 carried signed columns by David Lloyd George and Heinrich Mann alongside a British labour report. Lloyd George wrote that the manifesto of international finance and industry leaders had caused a sensation, recalled an 1820 London bankers' manifesto that took a quarter of a century to bear fruit, and argued that inherited trade conditions looked outdated in the war-ravaged world. A news report quoted Thomas as calling the coal strike situation promising after union talks with Churchill, with the miners ready to consider provisional district agreements built on national principles. Mann began an essay on French and German postwar literature by noting that the young French author Henri Poulaille had dedicated a novel to him, an act he called courageous.
Translation
A World Conference of Liberalism
By David Lloyd George.
The manifesto of the international leaders of finance and industry has caused a sensation among businessmen and politicians. It has moved many to talk and some to think, and it is on these thoughtful ones that the hope rests that the manifesto will have an effect. But thinking takes time. A similar manifesto, issued by London bankers in 1820, bore fruit only after a quarter of a century. In the new, devastated world that the war has left behind, the inherited conditions of trade appear more and more outdated.
Improvement in the Coal Miners' Strike Situation
Thomas told the press this evening that, after the latest meeting between the union leaders and Churchill, the situation in the miners' strike had to be described as promising. The government and the miners' unions, he said, had made concessions that would make a rapprochement possible. The miners were now prepared to consider a resumption of work on the basis of provisional district agreements, to be concluded according to national principles. The provisional agreements were to remain in force until, through detailed negotiations, a permanent wage agreement with graduated rates for the individual districts was reached.
Let Us Remember...
By Heinrich Mann.
A young French author has dedicated a book to me. I say this at once, because it is the reason why I am writing here about certain connections between French and German postwar literature. *) I am aware that Henri Poulaille is showing courage. He is surely the first to set a German name at the front of his novel, and German authors, too, have probably not yet written a French one there.
Context
The bankers' manifesto Lloyd George was writing about
Lloyd George's column responds to a manifesto that, according to Time magazine's issue dated 1 November 1926, was signed by one hundred international bankers and urged European nations to let down their tariff barriers. In the excerpt printed in Vienna, Lloyd George treats the document as a sensation that has set many talking and a few thinking, and he places his hope in that thoughtful minority. His comparison with an 1820 manifesto of London bankers, which he says bore fruit only after a quarter of a century, is the columnist's own historical comparison. His closing point in the excerpt, that inherited trade conditions look increasingly outdated in a world devastated by the war, presents the manifesto as an answer to conditions the war had created and explains why he expects its effect to come slowly.
How the US Treasury answered the call to lower tariffs
US Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon answered the bankers' manifesto with a defence of protection. Time's issue dated 1 November 1926 reported that, on hearing of the manifesto, Mellon explained the previous week how the American protective tariff was making both the United States and other nations prosperous. He took as his example the Aluminum Company of America, one of his own corporations, arguing that if the existing aluminium tariff were maintained, the expansion of domestic business would take place in the United States. The free-trade appeal whose effect Lloyd George expected to unfold slowly thus met open opposition from the American Treasury within days of its publication.
The British coal dispute of 1926 and its outcome
Thomas's optimism came late in a long dispute. The University of Warwick Modern Records Centre timeline shows that the miners' conflict went on for months after the General Strike of May 1926: on 5 July the coalowners posted new terms of employment based on an eight-hour working day, on 17 August the Miners' Federation delegate conference empowered its executive to reopen negotiations without prior conditions, and on 26 August miners' representatives met members of the government, including Winston Churchill, and were told there would be no further subsidy for the coal industry. The concessions and provisional district agreements reported in Vienna belong to this late phase of talks with Churchill. The rapprochement Thomas called promising did not bring the miners the terms they had held out for: between 27 and 30 November 1926 they returned to work on lower pay and longer hours, an outcome the timeline calls a total defeat.
Why a French veteran's dedication to Heinrich Mann was a bold gesture
Mann's remark that Poulaille 'is showing courage' makes sense against the two writers' wartime records. Henry Poulaille, whom the paper calls Henri, served at the front and was wounded at the Chemin des Dames on 23 October 1917; he became known for a humanitarian, pacifist and anti-militarist commitment, was hired in 1923 by the publisher Grasset as director of its press service, and devoted himself to promoting proletarian literature. Heinrich Mann had earned respect on the left in the Weimar Republic because his Zola essay and his novel Der Untertan demonstrated an antiwar and defeatist stance during the First World War, while his brother Thomas Mann condemned him as one of the 'Civilisation's Literary Men', the writers who served the West in its struggle against German culture. A French veteran placing the name of such a German writer at the head of a novel in 1926 was a public gesture across the wartime divide, and Mann in the article judges it surely the first of its kind on the French side and probably without precedent on the German side. Mann's later life kept the Franco-German theme in view: he went into exile in France in 1933, and his Henri Quatre novels of the 1930s are described as anticipating the end of French–German enmity.
Original
Eine Weltkonferenz des Liberalismus.
Das Manifest der internationalen Finanz - und Industrieführer hat bei Männern der Wirtschaft und bei Politikern Sensation hervorgerufen. Viele hat es zum Reden, einige zum Nachdenken veranlaßt, und auf diese Nachdenklichen stützt sich die Hoffnung, daß das Manifest Wirkungen ausüben werde. Doch Nachdenken erfordert Zeit. Ein ähnliches Manifest, im Jahre 1820 von Londoner Bankiers erlassen, trug erst nach einem Vierteljahrhundert seine Früchte. In der neuen verwüsteten Welt, die der Krieg zurückgelassen hat, erscheinen die überkommenen Handelsbedingungen in zunehmendem Maße als veraltet.
Besserung der Lage im Kohlenarbeiterstreik.
Thomas erklärte heute abend der Presse, daß die Lage im Bergarbeiterstreik nach der letzten Unterredung der Gewerkschaftsführer mit Churchill als aussichtsreich bezeichnet werden müsse. Die Regierung und die Bergarbeitergewerkschaften hätten Konzessionen gemacht, die eine Annäherung ermöglichen würden. Die Bergarbeiter seien jetzt bereit, die Wiederaufnahme der Arbeit auf Grund von provisorischen Distriktsabkommen, die nach nationalen Grundsätzen abzuschließen seien, in Erwägung zu ziehen. Die provisorischen Abkommen sollen Geltung haben, bis in eingehenden Verhandlungen ein dauerndes Lohnabkommen mit abgestuften Sätzen für die einzelnen Distrikte zustande komme.
Erinnern wir uns...
Ein junger französischer Autor hat mir ein Buch gewidmet. Ich sage dies gleich, denn es ist der Grund, weshalb ich über gewisse Zusammenhänge der französischen und der deutschen Nachkriegsliteratur hier schreibe. *) Ich mache mir klar, daß Henri Poulaille Mut beweist. Er ist gewiß der erste, der einen deutschen Namen vor seinen Roman setzt, und auch deutsche Autoren haben wohl noch keinen französischen darauf geschrieben.