In the hands of commentators such as von [Von Metzsch], the indignation aimed at post-Versailles Germany went hand in hand with the glorification of the Great War and its German participants. The sacrifice of the warriors begged comparison with the inadequacies of Weimar politicians in order to magnify the perceived failure of the democratic regime. In one such article, von Metzsch uses the memory of the war dead to launch a virulent rant against the treaty and the republican politicians and leftist intellectuals of Weimar Germany, spouting the clichés of the "nobility of war" and the "silent heroism of the fallen." It accuses anyone who did not reject this system as a "misleading, unappeasable enemy of the Fatherland" who "sin[ned] no less against the living than he did against the dead." Von Metzsch ignores the popular image of the war as a catastrophe where even the victors did not win and claims that "while the disrespectful defenders of the current situation make a lowly joke out of the sacrifice of the war dead, history would judge differently. It would write that the two million died so that the sixty million could live." But, von Metzsch muses, "as for the question whether the survivors were worthy of such a sacrifice, the page of German history that might answer [that] is still blank."15 One cannot help but wonder who would eventually write on the page that von Metzsch imagined. All too often, his contributions to the journal contained vestiges of violent nationalism, irredentism, the cult of the dead, and a romantic myth of regeneration. These sentiments were quasi- fascist and antirationalist trademarks of those on the right who were discontented with the republic. His verdict on the regime was a common one in an era when to be nationalistic was widely understood to require being, even when working within a democracy, "against democracy, against the party system, against the so-called Novem- ber Revolution, and . . . the Treaty of Versailles and the humiliation of Germany."