‘O’er sea and land Graf Zeppelin chooses.
To fly and only Veedol uses.’
This sum of money, which was the largest he had ever possessed in his life, had cost him only five seconds’ work, and he decided to expend it prudently. He provided himself with a smoking-jacket and a cello—which he played deplorably badly—and became a member of a restaurant band which spent the summer months making music in the seaside resorts of the Baltic coast. During the winter he subsisted by means of a variety of odd jobs. But before the second season was over the conductor of the band had decided that he would have to replace his cellist by a nimble Negro who was an expert on his instrument. When they parted, the conductor tried to box Ive’s ears, and the latter, scorning the intervention of the civil authorities, wreaked his vengeance on the manly beauty of his director, sold his smoking-jacket to the second violin and decided, in order to complete the exchange, to set sail for Africa.
At the docks he could find no employment either as a stoker or a sailor, nor could he find the money for his passage. So he took on a job in the Hamburg wool-combing factory, a thing, as he told himself, that he should have done long ago. He remained there for a year. He lodged with and shared the bed of a buxom widow, and morning after morning he went off with his tin-can to the factory. On Sundays he went dancing. His fellow-workers called him simply ‘the lieutenant,’ and tried to induce him to join their party and the trades union. But he had an insurmountable horror of co-operative societies and trades union secretaries, and his attitude was much more akin to that of the communists and syndicalists than he was himself aware. He was attracted to them temperamentally; but he differed from them in his absolute belief in other than economic values. He wanted to get on himself. For him Germany at that time consisted of six million people who had a feeling that they were in the wrong place, and of the balance who actually were in the wrong place. He wanted to be in the right place. He wanted to get on, in order to take up his rightful position.
At the moment his prospects seemed very meagre. He wrote articles. In his dinner hour he wrote ‘The Dinner Hour,’ and after work he wrote ‘After Work. Provincial papers with a strong social conscience were glad to accept his little contributions, and, in view of his circumstances, paid him at the rate of four pfennigs a line. On one of his visits to an editorial office, he heard that a small national weekly had gone bankrupt and was now the property of a book-printer. He immediately sought this man out and offered his services to carry on the paper. The publisher, although he had made up his mind on the spot, kept him on tenterhooks for a month; he then appointed him as editor at a salary of two hundred marks and fifty marks editorial expenses. Ive was enthusiastic. He was enchanted with his work. The Iron Front, as the paper was called, had no front, nor could there be said to be any iron about it. The list of subscribers was lamentable. The Letters to the Editor were mostly in connection with the Puzzle Corner and the supplement ‘The German Woodland,’ which provided a regular stereotyped correspondence. Ive made a general clearance. He abolished the Puzzle-Corner and ‘The German Woodland.’ The supplement ‘Arms and Defence’ he transformed into the ‘School of Politics.’ The heading ‘Our Colonies’ experienced a change which drew from an old subscriber, a retired major, a postcard headed ‘The National Traitors.’ The previous editorial staff were offended and resigned. It was difficult to find a new staff who were ready to submit to Ive’s dictatorial direction. At times he wrote the whole number from the first to the last line. He could write what he liked. Sometimes his publisher grumbled, but the number of subscribers grew. Ive made contacts all over the country, hunted out small and directionless groups of young people, as well as individuals, who seemed to be of his opinions. There were plenty of them who were anxious to express themselves but against whom all editorial doors were closed. He organised little lecture evenings, which ended in serious discussions, and he continued the discussions in the paper. Frequently what he printed was nonsense, but it was always nonsense which had an attraction of its own. The Iron Front became a paper which had something individual to say and this it said, Ive saw to it, in unequivocal language.
Ive was happy. Even at the most dismal moments he had always found life pleasant, but now he found it quite indescribably pleasant. He knew he would always land on his feet, and the word ‘adventure’ could have no meaning for him that was not attractive. He could take a firm stand about everything in his life, because he always had the courage to take a plunge into the unknown. He had taken the plunge and he stood firmly on his two feet in front of his editorial table. When he surveyed the field of his opportunities from this spot, however much work the short day might pile on him, he could confidently believe that he had found his métier. Until one day Farmer Claus Heim called on him.
‘We need a man who can write,’ said Claus Heim, ‘Will you come to us?’
Ive looked round his editorial office for a few moments.
Then, flushing, he said: ‘Yes.’
II
Grafenstolz owned a printing works in Itzehoe. Despite all his efforts he had never been successful. He panted after orders like a terrier after rabbits; wherever he scented a customer he was on the spot. The little grey man was well known in the town, trotting industriously along the streets, or sitting on the edge of his chair, over a glass of beer, gesticulating vehemently in his endeavour to persuade his unwilling partner to close the deal. But the printing business went from bad to worse. Whatever Grafenstolz might do everything went awry, and he became more and more convinced that his failure was due solely to the machinations of the Jews, Jesuits and Freemasons. He felt that the evil must be attacked at the roots and henceforward devoted himself entirely to his crusade against these super-national powers. He left off buying his underwear at Salomon Steinbach’s, the leading house for that commodity in the Square, and he was never again seen in consultation with Lawyer Haffich, who wore a strange amulet on his watch-chain; he did not know any Jesuits: there were none in Itzehoe. But this he took for a further proof of the uncanny power of his opponents. He knew that his shots could not misfire, for the invisible enemy was on every side. Even the smiles of his friends sometimes betrayed the cloven hoof, for were they not the smiles of the initiated, or at least of those in the pay of the enemy? Sometimes too, when he was lying curled up in his bed, his thin body broke out in a sweat at the thought of the omnipotent forces against which he, Grafenstolz, was engaged. But nothing could deter him from throwing himself into the breach for his convictions. Heedless of danger, he published a pamphlet which directed a merciless searchlight on the criminal activities of Germany’s destroyers. Thereupon the authorities withdrew their printing orders—particularly the publication of official announcements. Grafenstolz went bankrupt. He fell, but his very fall tore the veil from the secret understanding, between the super-national powers and the machinery of administration.
No one welcomed the farmers’ struggle as much as he did, and it was he who gave the farmers the opportunity to buy the printing business. He suggested that the new paper should be called Balmung, but the farmers were against that; one of them wanted The Alarm Bell, another Pidder Lyng, but Ive decided to call the paper simply The Peasant. So the name was settled, but it was the only thing that was settled. For when Ive followed Grafenstolz into the printing works for the first time, he found that the back premises consisted of a derelict courtyard and a large dirty room, of which the windows were either broken or boarded up, furnished with a miscellaneous collection of scrap iron. This was the composing room. The type was lying in muddled heaps in the cases, the rotary press—an antiquated model—-appeared to be completely in ruins, the two composing machines were as useless as the hand press. Silently Ive mounted the rickety stairs which led to the editorial office, still accompanied by Grafenstolz, who, without displaying the slightest interest in his former business premises, was pointing out eagerly the more than extraordinary circumstance that the minister of the Centre, Trimborn, was in the hab
it of dining frequently with the banker, Oppenheimer.
The editorial office consisted of four bare walls and a floor of cracked flagstones on which boxes, barrels and shelves were lying about. Ive took off his coat and began to knock together his editorial table from the boxes and shelves. Out of the planks and iron bars he erected a structure nor unlike a bedstead. He carefully put the Rotary machine in order and oiled and cleaned the handpress. He whitewashed the walls and put in new window panes. He installed the big wireless set which Claus Heim had sent him, he engaged compositors and a lay-out man, and negotiated with the post office and the paper merchant. Even Grafenstolz, whose activities were enlivened by all sorts of disclosures about the Zionist protocols, was allotted a task. Ive sent him into the town to look for any wall space that might be suitable for posters.
Ive slept in the editorial office; he lived on cigarettes and tea and the liberal gifts which Claus Heim sent him from his farm. After a fortnight’s uninterrupted work, he published the first number. The gentlemen of the Itzehoe Advertiser shrugged their shoulders. That rag wasn’t a newspaper. There wasn’t a scrap of local news. There was no mention of the collapse of the scaffolding at the cement works, nor the jubilee in celebration of the twenty-five years’ service of the Chief Secretary of the District Savings Bank of Lower Saxony—not even a line about the great Hilde Scheller murder trial; on the other hand the news from the Telegraphen Union and Wolff’s Bureau was given startling headlines and comments which, at any rate, showed an original point of view. The leading article was an outburst from Herr Hamkens, whose efforts had several times already provoked the authorities to drastic interference. There were observations on the nature and uses of the boycott; an obviously fabricated report of the Reichstag proceedings, which gibed at everyone in office and, instead of a feuilleton, an article entitled ‘My Reactions as Prisoner in the Dock,’ the point of which was to indicate in advance the attitude to be adopted towards the Beidenfleth oxen-case. The whole thing was written in the unbridled language of one who had little tolerance for law and order. Apart from this the issue was full of printer’s errors; for instance the name of the Minister of Public Safety, Gresczinsky, which occurred five times, was written differently each time until at last it was nothing but a string of consonants.
‘Pure demagogy,’ said the editor of the old-established Itzehoe Advertiser. ‘We must ignore them; simply ignore them, especially as they have no advertisements.’
Ive himself was not satisfied.
‘We’re not cutting any ice,’ he said to Heim. ‘What I want is the voice of the farmers.’
But the farmers still held back. The emergency committees brought in a number of useful reports, and a few of the young farmers tried their hands at the unaccustomed work—indeed they were Ive’s main support. His colleagues of the Iron Front were still hesitant, so Ive had to write nearly the whole paper himself. As a rule he dictated straight on to the composing machine, and if he got stuck, the compositor, who wore a Redfront Star in his button-hole, egged him on with obscene comments. After the first week the paper was banned. Ive changed the title and brought out The West Coast. The President of the Province, Kürbis, banned this too; and he banned The Farmers’ Front and The Country Herald, and any version of the paper that dealt with politics. Then Ive called the paper The Pumpkin,[1] A Technical Journal of Agriculture. The first article began with the words: ‘The pumpkin thrives best on a dung-heap. . .’
The farmers laughed, the farmers bought the paper, and subscriptions rolled in. A professor at the College of Agriculture contributed a supplement, ‘Harrow and Plough, ‘ and was summarily dismissed by the authorities of the college. This put the paper on its feet. It was able to appear once more as The Peasant, and at the farmers’ meetings resolutions were passed that they should buy no other paper than The Peasant. Advertisements came in and very soon there was hardly a farmhouse in the Schleswig-Holstein where the paper was not read.
The Itzehoe Advertiser said: ‘An evil spirit has now entered the portals of our peaceful town.’
Ive resolved that when the oxen case came up for trial the paper should appear twice daily, one edition when the court rose at twelve o’clock, and another in the evening.
Ive needed help. It came to him in the form of a young man who turned up in his editorial office one day out of the blue. No one knew where he came from. All that was known was that he now called himself Hinnerk, but that in Bavaria he had gone by the name of Seppl, and in the Rhineland he had been known as Jupp. If he was questioned closely he would say thoughtfully that he was the salt of the earth, and as old as the earth. Anyway, he knew everything and could do anything and during the trial he proved his worth. The very first time he came into the editorial office he said sorrowfully that, according to the inscrutable decree of God, there had to be organisation. And he organised! By the time the trial began he not only had a battalion of young farmers at his disposal, there were not merely fleets of cyclists, motor-cyclists and motorists, but actually an aeroplane landed in the fields outside the town, ready to drop the paper punctually in the remotest spots of the province.
Both farmers and authorities realised the significance of the trial, that it was a test case, the outcome of which must be of the greatest importance in determining the future course of the struggle. Over two thousand farmers assembled in the town; representatives from all the emergency committees and deputations from other provinces, from Hannover, East Prussia, Silesia and Oldenburg. The big papers sent their reporters and the Berliner Tageblatt, for the first time, devoted a leading article to the happenings in Schleswig-Holstein, written not by their Hamburg correspondent, but by a member of the editorial staff. The heads of the administration were present in the courtroom (Frau Bebacke, the wife of the President of the Government Board, in a simple afternoon frock of plain wool alpaca fitting close to the figure) and, of course, Police-Commissioner Müllschippe from Berlin, Division I. A. A force of two hundred police marched into the little town, and Ive had good reason to ask himself: ‘What is this costing the State?’
He sat in the court-room of the Town Hall, where the trial was held, at the foot of Charles the Great, the founder of the town. During the war the worthy townsmen had ingeniously studded this gigantic statue with black, silver and gold nails, possibly because Charles, in his day, had had twenty thousand Lower Saxons put to death. Ive by no means forgot to allude to this. He sat between Dr. Lütgebrune, the counsel for the defence, and the shorthand-writer, who was taking a verbatim report of the proceedings. While the gentlemen who were reporting for the big papers sat round looking bored—for the fifty-two defendants all had exactly the same story, all explained how it was that the farm was in debt, how it was that trouble had come to the rich marshland—Ive sat and wrote and wrote. Once he bent over to speak to counsel; once he looked at the shorthand note; Heim whispered to him; the President of the court looked up disapprovingly as the young farmers kept pushing their way through to Ive to collect his sheets of copy for the printer.
At the press Hinnerk was in command, sending his messengers tearing about the town, where the farmers were standing about in idle groups, telephoning and answering calls, and every now and again pouring himself out a stiff drink. Hardly had the President adjourned the sitting at twelve o’clock when the damp sheets were pouring into the court-room, the farmers in the streets and squares and in the public houses already had the paper in their hands, and the defendants could not only read an exact account of all they had said, but they could learn what they had yet to say. A descriptive story, a verbatim report, comments from the point of view of politics and criminal law—every sentence a dig at the Public Prosecutor—telegrams of sympathy from all the farming provinces of the country, a word of censure for the President of the court, reassuring comments for housewives—with reference, of course, to the milk money—anecdotes which the farmers were retailing to one another about the trial. The trial monopolised the paper and the paper monopolised the trial.<
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‘The inaccurate reports in a certain newspaper. . .’ wrote the Itzehoe Advertiser.
‘The determined faces of the farmers must be causing the authorities. . .’ Ive dictated to the compositor in the evening. Then the rotary machine gave a crack and stood stock still. For three hours they hammered away at it—but where was Hinnerk? The young farmers plunged into the night life of Itzehoe, into the ‘Blue Grotto,’ and there he was sitting completely drunk, embracing three police constables, whom he had forced to drink three ‘pumpkins,’ a decoction invented and named by himself, made up of the most potent spirits well flavoured with pepper. There he sat hobnobbing with the governmental bailiffs, and they were all singing ‘Sea-girt Schleswig-Holstein,’ an event which resulted in disgrace and transfer for the worthy officials, and for Hinnerk three days’ incapacity for work. So the young farmers took turns at the hand-press, but Ive had to be satisfied with a supplement instead of the evening edition.
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