- Yg. 1930, No. 35 -

The ID card came into the house. Number so and so. Polling station here and there. What are you doing?

Stay at home? But they will come then in the afternoon, the tugs, and radiate mellow fury. Actually, really. After all, you're a citizen, are not you? It can arrive at a voice; on yours!

Travel? Lying in the forest with your backpack? It looks like escape, cowardice. Does not work either. Would make a very bad impression.

So go there. After all, the election is secret. You can put two pieces of paper in the envelope instead of one. You can tick two parties, or none at all. Then the vote is invalid. But the conscience says: this is something like deception if you do it on purpose; you ought to be ashamed of yourself.

But for God's sake, what can one choose with a clear conscience? Which party is the right one? Did not you scold the damn bonzes all the time?

Aha, there are the so-called splinter parties. Is the USP of the brave old Ledebour still there? Or how about Vitus Heller's Christian Social Reich Party? The people are socialist and pacifist to the bone. Would it be worth supporting them?

Only: they will definitely not get through. 60.000 votes in one constituency, otherwise there won't be enough seats! And that is impossible. All votes that fall on splinter parties are lost, given in vain. Even if it were two or three seats for such a group - what would it be worth? No, we think too politically for that. If I cast my vote, it should at least have some weight, albeit a small one.

So stay: SPD or KPD Which of the two? The battleship party? The self-mincers?

The Social Democrats proved to be so unreliable and incompetent in the last Reichstag and in the Cabinet Hermann Müller that I swore I would not vote for list 1 the next time. Should I expose myself to new disappointments? Can one choose a party from which nothing, but nothing at all is to be expected?

But isn't a strong social democracy the only way to save us from the looming bourgeois bloc, whose shadow is becoming more and more evident on the horizon? In front of a civic block including the swastika activists, who a few weeks ago were not considered "fit for government", which can hardly be signed today? Wouldn't a “Hindenburg Cabinet”, a reactionary government from the National Socialists to the state party, be a great misfortune for Germany? Even greater if a strong and aggressive radical left gave it the desired occasion to "take action"? Can we encourage such a dangerous turn?

The communists are not eligible for any form of government or any “positive” political work. To their happiness and ours, because the way they are, they have just as little what it takes as the Hitlerites. But aren't they the only reliable opposition party we have? Wouldn't I have almost always voted like the communists in the last Reichstag? Won't the next Reichstag come up with things - criminal law reform, school law, church laws, social policy, tax issues, community law, relationship with Russia - which I can reasonably assume that the communist party will take my point? So won't it be best to vote communist?

I want to think again. What is the name of Herr von Gerlach's old, good choice recipe? "Better a meter too far to the left than a centimeter too far to the right!"

1930, 35 · Erich Schairer