Divide and Concur: A Radical Plan for Peace in Europe (1920)

In a kind of wonderful inversion of concerns, P.A.M. spends more time on the details — outlining, for instance, the design, denominations, and iconography of the Union’s currency — than he does explaining how, exactly, this might all work. Since most of Europe’s problems can be solved by cutting it up like an overshared pie, he turns instead toward future threats to the Union: the East. To prevent “cultural upheaval” and incursions by “Asian peoples”, soldiers would occupy a fifty-kilometer no man’s land, where, when not fending off invasion, they could freely farm and marry. The pamphlet’s politics run the gamut. “Gypsy” children will be placed under state protection, and if parents complain, they are to be “expelled from the Union forever”. Schools are to be placed in forests due to the aromatic air (würzigen Waldesluft); factories that emit heavy smoke or pollutive noise must be relocated away from the capital; and imperial colonies should be consolidated, for this is the only way the Union can obtain, at a good price, “the raw materials that it absolutely needs for processing and producing cultural products”.