The crash of bombs had not served as a wide-resounding signal, had not even carried the message of liberation to the far-spread masses of the people—who were being suffocated under the same oppression—the message that they were not standing alone, that it was time for them to rise and to join forces. Its only echo was in the excited headlines of the papers, and in terror-striking police reports.
‘What repeatedly causes us astonishment,’ Ive rattled out on the typewriter,’ is the complete failure to take action, the inactivity of the police, which can only be explained by the absolute lack of initiative. . . One might have imagined,’ he wrote, ‘that the attack on the Reichstag, on the noble house of the elected and honourable representatives—we cannot say of the people, but of the System—would at last have sufficiently provoked the authorities to put a stop to the bombing attacks on governmental window-panes. . .’
He heard steps on the stairs. He suspected it was Grafenstolz and put on a severe expression. But it was not Grafenstolz, it was Hinnerk—Hinnerk with his arm in a sling, Hinnerk whom Ive had thought was still in the Neumünster hospital under police supervision.
‘The ways of God are miraculous,’ said Hinnerk, ‘and so are mine. No, no, not from Neumünster,’ he said, ‘from Berlin. No, no, not what you are thinking; that was only three windows of the Reichstag. I guarantee you better work than that.’
‘What’s up?’ asked Ive, and Hinnerk replied:
‘Tomorrow morning at six o’clock you are all to be arrested.’
Ive sat down slowly. He considered for a moment, then took up the telephone.
‘The others?’ he asked.
Hinnerk put his hand on the receiver.
‘That will be attended to,’ he said, and Ive flushed. ‘I am just going to tell the others; afterwards I am going to see Heim. Are you coming?’
‘I shall stay here,’ said Ive. ‘Send up the first young farmer you see, to help me clear away the stuff.’
‘Extremely silly,’ said Hinnerk, ‘but as you like.’
And then—‘Good luck!’ and he clattered down the stairs.
Ive remained seated for a while. I must get the article about our arrest written tonight, he thought. Then he began to collect the important papers. There was not much. Ive had had the place searched a number of times before. According to the Explosives Act the minimum sentence was five years’ imprisonment. He wondered whether Heim would stand his ground. He would. Heim would at once realise how important it was not to run away, to let himself be taken. Ive tied the papers into a bundle. The young farmer arrived. Hinnerk had fetched him out of a bar—a young fellow with a broad, smiling face. He took the packet with an eagerness which proved that he knew what was up. Ive gave him a few lines to take to old Reimann, who was to see that a successor was found to take on the work as soon as the editorial rooms were vacated by the police. The door banged; Ive was alone. He walked up and down for a while. What next? he thought. He wouldn’t have much trouble with the President of the Enquiry. Presidents of Enquiries always know much less than the accused imagines. Ive was almost enjoying the thought of the sharp intellectual battle in front of him. The prospect of an incalculable period in prison did not alarm him; wherever he went, or wherever he had to be, he had always discovered secret interests and excitements that were the heart-beats of fate for him. Imprisonment, with its greater hardships, only meant for him richer results. But the others, the Movement, the farmers and Claus Heim? Claus Heim, to whom he felt most strongly attached? Ive was not a farmer, but Claus Heim was so much a farmer that he could give up being a farmer—just as a man who truly loves life has no desire to avoid the thought of death. The tall, dark, reticent man had sacrificed security, had found the way to that militant readiness which had always been Ive’s attitude, which enabled him to regard reality as a mad whirlpool of dangers, a deliberate, inexorable chain of trials. But what for Ive was the natural course, the only conceivable state of events, had become for Claus Heim a fanatical passion. The more the Movement threatened to become encrusted, the more he allowed himself to indulge in wild dreams, which, fed by his indomitable will and transformed by his short, slow phrases into glowing images, could carry Ive away and give an impetus to his activities as though they had been ignited by a sudden flame. Ive would then see the clumsy farmer beside him enlarging his field of action until it burst all bounds, and the art of the possible transformed into an art to which everything must be possible. Hamkens Cunctator seemed to urge the necessity of carefully preserving what had been achieved, keeping the Movement straightforward and pure and always comprehensible to his simple mind; but Heim had cut the cords which bound him to the farm; he had set out to sea, like a pirate, knowing that this was demanded of him for the sake of the farm. Between the two stood Ive, who had once and for all anchored himself to the farmers’ cause, more because the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’ of the farmers’ struggle appeared to him significant. At heart Ive was a barbarian; he knew this and made no bones about it. It did not occur to him to pretend that necessity was a virtue, but he regarded it as unvirtuous to try to avoid it. The unconcern with which he began every enterprise, with which he tried to adapt himself to everything which presented itself as a manifestation of the period or of life, may have had some sort of an explanation, but it never occurred to him to search for reasons. As a son of the war he found himself placed among circumstances and events with which his natural gifts enabled him to deal perfectly adequately. Since he had no troubles and no memories to burden him, he never regarded himself or his position as a problem in any society. He belonged neither to the townspeople nor to the farmers, nor to the workers, and meanwhile he felt no urge to range himself with any particular class or profession. He knew that an infinite number of people in the country were in the same boat and, if here and there they went under, this could only be for the time being. Ive did not need to go under, for he could find subsistence wherever he was. Certainly he had a longing for attachments—the only one which he was firmly and inalienably aware of arose from the fact that he was a German. This attachment was his only reservation; it amazed him that the uncompromising character which resulted from this was regarded in all the circles into which his activities brought him, apparently not only as exceptional, but even as dangerous and intolerable. He did not stand for the opposition on principle, but everything he thought or said or did declared him an oppositionist; he found from the very beginning that he was shut out from every established system and he did not mind this; what hurt him was the discovery that actually the standards of every system were not fully respected or administered by those who upheld them; the anonymity of the systems and the timid subservience of those who had dug themselves into them, seemed to him insupportable. Thus he was anti-bourgeois, not from the sociological point of view, but because of his attitude of mind. He examined this attitude and, using it as a basis, he sought for attachments and comradeship; and its uncompromisingness was for him the sine qua non of every kind of politics. This caused him to regard all political theories with fierce mistrust; the masses collected round their dry bones and clothed them with the flesh of their most intimate hopes, and when it was established that every theory, or, if it took an imaginative form, every ideal only ended in corruption, he was unable to see why so much spirit, blood, and devotion need be expended on it. He was often told that this kind of thought was anarchistic, and he would have had nothing against this if Anarchism had not delighted in hair-splitting theories. His fellow workers in the woolcombing factory had quickly found an epithet for him: they called him ‘declassed,’ and that in a tone which plainly betrayed mistrust. He sought for the reason of this mistrust, and found it in the supposition that he had had an academic education. As this did not happen to be the case, and as he thought to himself that Marx and Lenin must without doubt have been under the same suspicion, he contented himself with admitting that he possessed no class-consciousness, and he could the more easily dissociate himself from the solidarity of
the workers, as this, in fact, did not exist. Ive was not quite clear whether class-solidarity was regarded as an essential factor or merely as an expedient. In any case solidarity remained the chief slogan for seventy years. It seemed to him that the study of this phenomenon, investigation into its causes, and the possibilities of modifying it would prove a more fruitful revolutionary task than to acquire and continually propagate the economic doctrine, a doctrine in which everything worked out too pat to be true. So he occupied himself with the living body of the proletariat, which had more to tell him than the learned theses over which professors and bureaucrats disputed, a dispute the jangling echo of which in the various trades was far more likely to confuse and divide the proletariat than to consolidate it. In fact, independent solidarity, in an illuminating and fruitful form, was to be found only in that section of the proletariat where they were concerned with militant action, that is where the importance of what they had staked in common was felt so strongly that they were no longer united merely by interest but where, on the contrary, the network of hidden interests was being forced into the light of day. When Ive threw in his lot with Claus Heim and the farmers, the chief attraction for him had been the existence of a militant partnership, the first and most natural form of solidarity, which from the very first displayed a fundamentally different character from that which the workers announced as their aim. After the failure of the unions as an expression of solidarity, and their increasing absorption into the capitalist system, it was clear that class-organisation could only be possible when individual interests had been disentangled and when the whole body had been disintegrated with the object of educating it and subjecting it to the discipline of realising some theory—or of refuting some theory—whatever it might be. But the militant partnership of the farmers had stood from the outset under the discipline of the farm. The farm was the law-giver—set the boundaries and enlarged them. It presented itself as the superior will which the proletariat had to seek in a leader, had so far not found, and would only with difficulty ever find; for the task of a leader of the proletariat could only be one of instruction. Claus Heim and Hamkens knew why they were so unwilling to be called leaders, why they perpetually drew attention to the spontaneity of the farmers’ campaign; it was the farm which regulated and gave form to their emotional reactions—the farm, which no longer belonged to the farmer if he reckoned up his accumulation of debts. True, the events which had taken place in the province could only be regarded as raw material, but they already contained the germ of a complete development as well as the laws of a new order. Thus no single action of the Movement could be lost; it crystallised immediately into a new motive-force, and, if the growth of the Movement was strictly limited as regards numbers, this was not the case as regards the far-reaching influence of its impetus. The resistance to the encroachments of the System, the battle of Neumünster, united to build up the preliminary structure of self-government; showed the difficulties and, through them, the prospect, and through the prospect, the plan of the complete revolution.
‘What we have to do,’ said Claus Heim, ‘is, starting as it were with the farmers, to enrol the whole country. And why should that not be possible? The town is against us,’ said Claus Heim. ‘It must not be, but today it is, because it has not got as far as we have. Our task was easier; we must attack the town in order to help it. It must find itself, as we have found ourselves. Then we can see a step further.’
Claus Heim said: ‘All the misery comes from the town. It was not always so, but it is so now. The town is sick and its breath is foul. Are we too to be destroyed by its pestilential vapours? How does one protect oneself against a plague-stricken man? By isolating him. Let us isolate the town. How does one cure a fever-ridden man? By bringing him to a crisis. Let us bring the town to a crisis. Neumünster,’ said Claus Heim, ‘is a beginning. What is possible in Neumünster is also possible in Berlin. Let us declare a boycott against Berlin. Once the whole of the country-people are united, Berlin will be in our power. The town needs us, because we feed it. The town thought that our troubles were not its troubles; we must show it that our troubles are its troubles. What is the world coming to when corn is rotting in the barns, and the people in the towns are starving? They will change things when they have starved a bit longer. They will learn to divide equally, so that the farm which feeds them may live, and that they who are starving may also live. They will not be able to import food, either by sea or by land, for farmers live near all the railways and near all the canals.’
‘As soon as the whole of the country-people are united. . .’ said Ive, and indeed that was his concern.
‘Forty-five percent of the farmers’ children in Schleswig are under-nourished,’ said the Schleswig farmers to Hamkens. ‘We live on potatoes with dripping.’
‘What are you going to do?’ asked Hamkens.
The farmers said, ‘We shall have to eat potatoes with linseed oil now.’
‘And the farm?’ asked Hamkens. The farmers shrugged their shoulders sheepishly and said, ‘Well, a railway porter is all right—he has everything he needs and a regular salary as well.’
‘Very well, become railway porters,’ said Hamkens, ‘but don’t complain, if you are not prepared to fight.’
‘We want to, but we can’t,’ said the Schleswig farmers, and they hoisted the black flag; but that didn’t help them and next to nothing was changed.
‘How are we to exist?’ said the landowners in East Prussia to Hamkens. ‘We have forests and fields and machines and labourers, and we have nothing. How are we to get rid of our timber when the Polish rafts are coming down the Vistula; how are we to sell our corn at prices which will not even bring in enough for wages and rates and taxes?’
‘How is it,’ said Hamkens, ‘that at one time it used to be said that it was a crime against the Fatherland to feed wheat to the cattle, and now you are being suffocated by it? What are you going to do?
The landowners said, ‘Corn duties.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Hamkens. ‘Are you going to hinder cultivation by putting up the prices of foodstuffs?’
The landowners shrugged their shoulders.
‘The System is to blame,’ they said, and hung the black flag out of their front windows, and sat behind them discussing the duties and the removal of the land-tax. And the position was the same everywhere. In the Rhineland the trouble took a different form from that in Thuringia; and in Hessen different from that in Württemberg. Everywhere the associations were worming their way in; if it was not the peasants’ party, it was the farmers’ party; if it was not the National Land Association, it was the District Land Association; solidarity was their one cry, and each one challenged the other to amalgamate; the whole farmer-class consisted of a tangle of groups, and the groups of a mad conglomeration of smaller groups, all fighting with each other and all with the proud watchword, ‘Unity.’ What was possible in Schleswig-Holstein and was still possible in North Hanover and could gradually be extended to the whole of North-west Germany, was difficult in Pomerania and in Mecklenburg and in East Prussia, and desperately difficult in Schleswig or the Gretizmark, and everywhere it meant a long, bitter, tough task.
‘The System,’ they repeated throughout the country with grim hatred.
But some were for the System, and some were against the System, but most of all were both for and against. Claus Heim never lost sight of the goal, nor Hamkens, nor Ive. But whereas Claus Heim urged and pressed for action, Hamkens was for waiting. While Claus Heim wanted to make use of every opportunity—and what numbers offered themselves daily!—while he wanted to form an alliance with anyone who came whirling to the forefront even for a moment—were it the devil himself—wanted to hurl the weapon of the boycott against every form of opposition (and when he uttered the word ‘System’ it sounded as though he was speaking of murder and arson and bombs and farmers armed with scythes), Hamkens’ idea was carefully to hoard the resources of the Movement, to use it prudently, to begin in a small way a
nd feel his way slowly step by step, to be prepared, not for the moment, but for the day on which he must be the victor who could act at once with solid support behind him. Now Heim was to be arrested and the Movement was left entirely in Hamkens’ hands.
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