I am a conservative, but I declare that the coming revolution will give Germany its very last chance to put its house in order. If it lets this chance go by too, it will remain forever what it now is and what its bourgeois has been for a long time—a cesspool. And I include in this designation all of the Prussian nobility, with a few notable exceptions.
Our German Pericles has also been involved in another little matter, the suicide of his niece in 1930.[51] It has never been explained why the girl should have taken her own life in his quarters on Prinzregentenstrasse shortly before Christmas of that year. There are people who claim that the girl had been having an affair with a Jew, and shot herself out of guilt and fear. . . . But there are hints of other things. It appears that even at that time a great deal was covered up, that even under the Weimar Republic there were officials in the police department and the prosecuting attorney’s office who were ready to help the ‘coming man’ with little services of this kind.
October 1940
Now, I am at Villach for the cure, and daily go to the springs at Lake Faaker, the Alps rising just beyond. The landscape here, with its Slavic je ne sais quoi and its autumnal melancholy, reminds me of a border region in Masuria: a southern, mountain-walled version of that other land’s sad desolation: the chemical-bright hues of the girls’ kerchiefs burning like eyes into the landscape; the filthy little restaurants where salads are made with machine oil because of the war; and the pathetic poverty and insufficiency of a border area covering everything and everybody like a film. This, despite the fact that prosperous East Tyrol is quite close by.
The hotel room where I sleep and have to stay in bad weather has the smell of the Balkans about it. A man in a well-cut suit is almost enough to stop the traffic.
The spa area is full of men taking the cure. Many of them have the lock of hair falling over the forehead that is characteristic of the Viennese house superintendent . . . the same hair style affected by our Gypsy Baron. And their speech, as one hears it from the dressing-room adjoining, has the ring of the Balkans about it too: the price of pork, transactions in corn, women. Sometimes a joke about Hitler. But that is exceptional. People do not pay too much attention to him here, in this border region.
And now all the memories of this apocalyptic summer flood back. I recall now those days in early summer when bearded old grandfathers crowded about as the bulletins of victories were posted, their eyes glittering with greed and joy. It never entered their heads that a victory by Hitler would change unrecognisably their world of the moderate rental and payment-when-due morality. I see it all again, a whole people drunk on the success of a series of political robberies, thundering approval in the movies when the newsreels pictured burning men: a bloodthirsty mob roaring rapturously at the sight of human torches plummeting out of exploding tanks. There they all are before my eyes: beer-soaked old pinochle players dividing up continents over their steins: the post office clerks rolling their eyes at each other when the greeting is not ‘Heil Hitler’; the stenographers promenading in silk stockings stolen in France by their boyfriends; the heroes on leave filling the air with stories about how they made their shaving cream from the froth of champagne. . . .
The enthusiasm of 1914 was nothing compared to this—those pastors’ wives distributing thin sandwiches on the steps of troop trains during the First World War were really giving expression to a most understandable fear. People saw disaster coming at them through every door and window. They tried to drown their fears in shouting exhilaration over rolling troop trains and the smooth perfection of the mobilisation machinery.
What is happening this time is something else. It is malevolent, crafty, bandit-like. Bourgeois Germany of 1914 had no idea of the game of roulette that was then beginning, in which the generals and industrial speculators would frivolously stake human lives. People then still had something of the old reliable uprightness of their middle-class past . . . something of a soul. Today, that is buried beneath muck and sewage and blood, but I still believe in it, and pray daily to see it reappear.
What is happening here is something else, of which the grimmest manifestation is certainly the total absence of identification with the fighting. All people care about is the booty from these gigantic raids. In 1870, at least, legends arose about the cavalry battles around Metz. Sedan must have affected people as a powerful drama, despite the war-poster paintings of the time.
But no sparkling squadrons of cavalry gallop forth today. To a large extent, battles are now matters of movements back and forth of standardised machines. It may well be that this complete mechanisation of war has a great deal to do with the complete idiocy of those who look on at it. You turn the knob of your radio, and are served up gigantic wheelings of armies. You forget entirely about the daring and alertness required of the strategists, you hear only the boom from the loudspeakers. What you know about is, perhaps, the death of somebody on your side in a particular episode, and for the rest, about the silk stockings which Hiesl sent Theresa from Tourcoing, or about the cognac which some Army paymaster ‘liberated’ from France and which is now drunk in all the bars from coffee cups.
Wellington’s words at Waterloo were part of Prussian legend for a hundred years thereafter, and of Sedan there remained the image of an unfortunate Emperor who tried unsuccessfully to find death on the battlefield, and then presented his dagger à son cher cousin. But this time—what really will remain in people’s minds of the breakthrough at this latest Battle of Sedan, which ushered in the French tragedy? Or the taking of the Somme line?
Nothing . . . I am certain that three weeks from now not one of the eight hundred people who were in that movie house with me will be able to associate the names of the places with the battles they saw. It is an old theory of mine that gasoline has done far more harm to mankind than alcohol, and I am sure that the masses in the United States or England react just as little to what happens to them as the Germans. But it is shattering when this Hottentot condition happens to one’s own people. The average German now registers developments as he would the scores of the Sunday football games, shouts happily over the results and has forgotten all about them by next morning. He has got into the habit of victory, and takes each successive triumph more and more for granted, which is charmingly simple of him—except that he is becoming more and more brutalised, and the level of his greed is constantly going up. I can hear the rumbling of a terrible storm in the distance.
Truly, with the Germans it is as I have said: every nation normally puts its demons, its delusions, its impossible desires away into the cellars and vaults and underground prisons of its unconscious; the Germans have reversed the process, and have let them loose. The contents have escaped like the winds out of Pandora’s box. A storm is raging across this long-suffering old earth. Germany, drunk with victory, is sick. The language one hears, the speech of the war commentators, the talk in the coffee-houses, together with the German of the military, has degenerated into a kind of street jargon that makes the blood run cold. The newspapers heap coals of fire on the banished Kaiser because he supposedly blocked a plan to have London erased from the map by a gigantic fleet of zeppelins in 1916. Little receptionists cry for blood, and old ladies who still have the aura of a better time now use slang to describe enemy statesmen that would make a Hamburg bartender stare.
And behind it all are the ‘deals’. People sell stolen paintings and sculptures and wine cellars, which may or may not exist . . . they ‘deal’ in securities, silk stockings, ownerless French factories—with stolen machines, with soup spoons, toilet soap, and rubber goods. In Berlin, absolutely everybody ‘deals’—I was there recently, and saw it. The ladies of noble Prussian families are busy transacting business, and so are waitresses, drugstore clerks, high-school students. . . . I was laughed at, and it was considered quite unconscionable that I should sit on my haunches in the valleys of Chiemgau with the present and future well-being of a family to think of, and neglect my ‘opportunities’.
This
is Germany today. True, southern Germany has remained sceptical about all the Prussian noise in victory, and thus has kept cleaner. The great majority of the workers and practically all the intellectuals are bitter opponents of the regime. And the farmers remain wedded to their old, unchangeable patterns of thinking and living, shrug their shoulders over the triumphs, and cannot be brought to ‘participate’.
But what good does it do? Industry pulls the strings; it has controlled the General Staff since the days of Ludendorff. The instrument of power is terror, and the industrialists hold tight to it. They control every means of influencing public opinion, and have thereby stupefied the great unproductive mass—salaried people, office workers, most of the lower ranking government employees—to the point of idiocy. The rest is a mixture of business people and nobility come down in the world, melted into a middle-class lump with the newly created officers and quick-turnover fellows. These people are more materialistic than the Bolshevik Russians, live from day to day, and haven’t the slightest conception of the grim little game that has been begun here.
A certain quotation has remained in my mind since the end of the First World War. . . . It is a quotation which provides me with a certain bitter hope, albeit for motives that are not in the least proletarian. It is a quotation from Balzac’s César Birotteau: ‘Et c’est la bourgeoisie elle-même, qui écoutera chanter sa Noce du Figaro.’
And it should be observed that Balzac’s viewpoint was that of a conservative, as is my own, and further observed that between this viewpoint and that of the nationalists is a chasm as wide as a canyon. To be a conservative means to believe in the immutable laws of this old earth: this earth that will begin to shake and quake when the day comes to cleanse itself of all this filth.
And this is where the crack begins which runs through my heart—which runs through the heart of every man for whom Germany is not identical with the Deutsche Bank or the German Steel Association. The poor little remnant of the German intelligentsia is also supposed to become part of the amorphous and comfortable docile mass of vegetable pedlars. For the ‘good of the nation’, I am expected to become ‘adjusted’. Specifically, I am required to deify this Reich, and the gentleman from the furnished room who has made himself its leader. I am supposed to sing in praise of deceit, of murder, of treaty-breaking. And I am supposed to join in the shrieks, the jubilant shouts as the enemy falls like a torch from his exploding aeroplane.
Yes, and this is truly effrontery enough to take the breath away, they are now demanding that a man forget everything he has learned in the course of travel and conversation abroad, and adopt comments about other countries of the Propaganda Ministry—a ministry of salesmen turned diplomats, informed by teachers turned foreign correspondents! To resolve my differences with God, I am supposed to adopt the thoroughly base and godless contention that right is what is useful for Germany! I, who believe I know something about the laws of history and geopolitics, am expected to lower myself to the level of the canaille and scum of this nation, and believe in the permanence of a regime whose Magna Carta was a broken treaty and whose foundations are largely propaganda!
In a Berlin movie theatre recently, I saw the newsreel in which Hitler, standing in front of the historic railway car in the Forest of Compiègne, receives the news of the capitulation of France; and then begins to dance on one foot like an Indian; a dirty old pig playing at being a boy, less worthy of respect than the banned Kaiser, who is still paying for his sins.
Among these sins I count such actions as conducting the orchestra of the Potsdam Life Guards, and with old Franz Josef present, slapping King Ferdinand of Bulgaria on his blue-uniformed backside as the latter was bending over a map.
Nevertheless, I still remember the cold March morning when one of our farmhands came back from town with the news that the old Kaiser had died. Monarchs have an importance in the scheme of things. They carry the dignity of the people they rule like a cloak around their shoulders. The life of that simple farmhand was ennobled by being the true servant to a true master, and I have been brought up in the same tradition of duty and obedience. But I have never been so ashamed of my countrymen as I was there in that movie house, surrounded by the clamour of a mob in ecstasy over the sight of its hopping Führer. I stood up and left. The gesture was understood, and nasty remarks came from left and right; I was supposed to do that hopping filth the honour of applauding it. If I had given any clearer expression to what I was really thinking, I would very likely have been lynched.
Oh, and the day in July when out of the loudspeaker in the square of Rosenheim, into the burning hot afternoon came Hitler’s triumphal speech about his ‘last peace proposal to England’—this, too, I shall never forget. The atmosphere was suffocatingly close, filled as it was with the greed and inordinate desires of people gone berserk with success. Old fogies, threatening that, ‘We’ll take up England with a vacuum cleaner.’ And the big-talking rear-echelon warrior, home from the wars for the moment with the inevitable office chippy on his arm, and in line with his role here of strategic expert, announcing that ‘England will take fourteen days, at most.’
Hemmed in as I was by spiritually sick people, I knew that a terrible presence was already beginning to move about in that stifling night. Knowing as I did that England’s answer must inevitably be ‘No’, I felt more alone among these thousands of people than if I had been at the North Pole.
As I write now, knowing full well what the end must be, I can well imagine the first day of a future occupation of Germany by English troops, when an English sergeant, simply because he has nothing better to do, puts a few bullets into me: I can well imagine that victory by the others will be followed by political blunders. I am far from making the mistake of thinking that nothing but devils live here, while nothing but angels live over there. Nevertheless, I cannot overlook the fact that a European psychosis is nearing its end in the dance of death that is going on in Germany, the psychosis of nationalism, and that Europe must now decide either to destroy it, or be itself destroyed.
Why must I honour as a force, foreseen at the time of the creation of the world, an idea—nationalism—which the builders of the cathedrals in Germany’s greatest period had never heard of, which, indeed, never existed before 1789 and which the Nazis, who otherwise pose as the great liquidators of the French Revolution, have ‘recreated’ out of dusty old scrolls?
Why must I equate with basic human feelings like love and hate a philosophy which puts an aura of heroism around mercantilism and the bourgeois drive for power, and which is today as rancid and flat as the whole of Rousseau. Nationalism is as tattered and dust-covered as the banner of Girondism itself, which great Carlyle called the worst of all time. It was possible only at a time of generalised atheism, and purposelessness, and brute force. Of course, I.G. Farben welcomed Hitler—he provided their poison factory with the aura of a philosophy!
The businessmen from the Ruhr were well aware of what they were doing when they hired this sombre bandit. But should I pretend that I feel myself closer to a German coachman than to the French historian with whom I have been corresponding for decades, to keep this mercantilist ideology from going entirely to shreds? Am I supposed to make no protest when this same nationalism, supposedly the specially ordained protector of all the chief treasures of our national heritage, then turns about and grossly, cynically toys with these as only a barbarian would do?
What price a forest if the ‘national’ interest calls for a cellulose factory? Or a German cathedral that stands in the way of an autobahn? What is the value of a tiny remnant of the German soul when aggression is in the works and an entire nation is being systematically turned into cavemen—when their spiritual centre is to be destroyed, and they are to be turned into an amorphous mass, whose only form is formlessness itself?
But we must be completely clear: Why, if nationalism really is one of the basic impelling forces of mankind, as its apologists contend, was it discovered in such comparatively recent times as th
e French Revolution? How is it that this ‘basic force’ did not exist in the days of the Song of the Nibelungs? And how does one explain the fact that in 1400 there was a German nation, but no nationalism—while today, when nationalism is in full bloom, even Goebbels gags a little at the statement that this conglomeration of wage earners, sergeants-gone-berserk, and virgin-typists is a nation? If nationalism is truly the hallmark of a people in the prime of its youth and energies, how does it happen that under its aegis morality decays, ancient customs die out—that men are uprooted, the steadfast derided, the thoughtful branded, the rivers poisoned, and the forests destroyed?
Why, if this is a high watermark in our national life, has our speech been vulgarised in this unprecedented way? Why is there such a worsening of all social forms? How have we come to this reneging on treaties and our given word? And how did we arrive at this pimp’s German, with all foreign words fearfully excised, which is today written and spoken by all of German officialdom, from the General Staff down to the ‘war commentators’?
Try, if you can, in these, our ‘great’ days, to build a cathedral; at the end, you will have a blasphemy in stone. Listen to a lady on the radio read a German fairy tale, and you will begin to feel you are in a bordello. Mouth the names of the men into whose hands the nation has been delivered: Dwinger, and Steguweit, and Thorak, and Speer, and Herms Niel; then just speak the word ‘Germany’, and the lie of the combination will make you choke. Place yourself amongst the crowd as it is roaring out one of Haydn’s songs, and you will think you are listening to a beer-garden concert, with all the usual noise, and behind, the usual smell from the men’s room. . . . And this is nationalism?—this thing that Frederick of Prussia knew nothing about when that chief Machiavellian of his time drew his dagger in an attempt to turn failure into success amidst the ruins of his life?
Diary of a Man in Despair Page 10