Dernburg
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
BERNHARD, a German diplomat. By gradual promotions he reached the post of Colonial Minister in the Chancellorship of Bülow. The opening of the World War in 1914 found him in the United States where he entered upon a propaganda designed to arouse sympathy for Germany. In this sympathy he was fairly successful until the sink- in England, in Derbyshire, Yorkshire, ing of the Lusitania in May of 1915. He finally became so unpopular that he voluntarily left the United States and returned to Germany. There he exerted his influence to prevent war between the two nations, but the failure of his mission in the United States made his influence on the German Government of no importance. After the Revolution of 1919, Dernburg became a prominent leader of those voters in Germany who wished to prevent the complete capture of the German Government by the Socialists, and yet did not wish for a return of the former Imperial régime. Whether true or not, it was alleged that he and his party, the German People's party, were not hostile to a return to monarchy. DÉROULÉDE, PAUL (dā-rö-lād'), a French poet; born in Paris, Sept. 2, 1846. His "Soldier Songs" (1872) and "Military Refrains" (1888) were immensely popular, and won him the presidency of the Patriotic League, an association intensely hostile to Germans. In 1900 he was sentenced to 10 years banishment for conspiring against the Republic. The Amnesty Act of 1905 reduced the sentence to five years. He wrote a drama on patriotism, "The Hetman," and the semi-religious drama, "The Moabitess." He died 1914.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Collier's wrote this in 1921 Dernburg was still active in politics, and the entry hedges about whether he and his party leaned back toward monarchy; in fact he had joined the liberal, firmly republican German Democratic Party rather than the German People's Party, and had served as finance minister and vice-chancellor in the Scheidemann cabinet in 1919. He sat in the Reichstag through the 1920s and died in Berlin in 1937, by then pushed out of public life as a man of Jewish descent under the Nazi regime. Historians now treat his 1914-15 American propaganda work, which the entry describes as "fairly successful" until the Lusitania, as the standard case study in how badly Germany lost the battle for neutral opinion; he was asked to leave after publicly defending the sinking. His earlier record as colonial secretary from 1906 is judged more critically today, as reform of a colonial system whose brutality in South-West Africa and East Africa he administered rather than dismantled.
Written for this edition, 2026.