Politics & Power Quote by Gustav Stresemann

Stresemann is selling a pivot without calling it surrender. “Active cooperation” is a phrase engineered to sound muscular and forward-leaning, a way to rebrand accommodation as agency. It’s not just that opposition has failed; it’s that opposition is being demoted to something passive, obsolete, even childish. The line performs a neat political judo move: he casts critics of the “new form of government” not as principled dissenters but as people stuck in two equally unproductive poses - reflexive resistance or “dreamy resignation” that romanticizes the past.

The target is clear in Weimar Germany’s early years, when the republic was attacked from both extremes and haunted by imperial nostalgia after defeat in World War I. Stresemann, a conservative nationalist turned pragmatic statesman, needed legitimacy for a republic many elites considered illegitimate. The sentence is a permission slip for former monarchists and wary conservatives to participate without admitting they’d been wrong. Cooperation becomes a patriotic duty, not a capitulation to humiliating realities like reparations and diplomatic constraints.

The subtext is also a warning: if you don’t engage, you’re either sabotaging the state or indulging in aestheticized mourning. “Entranced with the beauty of times past” drips with contempt for nostalgia as a kind of political opium - pretty, soothing, and useless. Stresemann’s intent is to drain romance from reaction and replace it with workmanlike governance: accept the new order, shape it from inside, and stop treating history like a refuge from responsibility.