Dragon's Teeth

by Sinclair, Upton;

  Each member of the visiting party had his or her own idea of happiness. Miss Severne inquired concerning the English church in Berlin, and there she met persons near enough to her social station so that she could be happy in their company. Mr. Dingle discovered a New Thought group with a lecturer from America, and thus was able to supply himself with the magazines he had been missing. It is a fortunate circumstance about Christian Science and New Thought publications, that dealing with eternal truths they never get out of date. The only trouble is that, saying the same things, they are apt to become monotonous. Undeterred by this, Mr. Dingle began escorting Madame to a spiritualist church; they knew only a few words of the German language, but the spirits were international, and there were always living persons willing to help two foreigners.

  III

  The great city of Berlin, capital of the shattered Prussian dream. Triumphal arches, huge marble statues of Hohenzollern heroes, palaces of old-time princes and new-time money-lords; sumptuous hotels, banks that were temples of Mammon, department stores filled with every sort of luxury goods—and wandering about the streets, hiding in stone caves and cellars, or camping out in tents in vacant spaces, uncounted hordes of hungry, ill-clothed, fear-driven, and hate-crazed human beings. Out of a population of four million it might be doubted if there were half a million really contented. There was no street where you could escape the sight of pinched and haggard faces; none without beggars, in spite of the law; none where a well-dressed man could avoid the importunities of women and half-grown children, male or female, seeking to sell their bodies for the price of a meal.

  Shut your eyes to these sights and your mind to these thoughts. The city was proud and splendid, lighted at night like the Great White Way in New York. The shop windows were filled with displays of elegance, and there were swarms of people gazing, and some buying. Tell yourself that the stories of distress were exaggerated; that the flesh of boys and girls had been for sale in Nineveh and Baghdad, and was now for sale in London and New York, though perhaps they used a bit more Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy. Prostitution has been the curse of great cities ever since they began; swarms of people come piling into them, lured by the hope of easy wealth, or driven from the land by economic forces which men have never learned to control.

  This was something about which Freddi Robin should have been able to speak, he being now a duly certified Herr Doktor in the science of economics. He reported that the great university had left it still a mystery to students. The proper academic procedure was to accumulate masses of facts, but to consider explanations only historically. You learned that the three-stage pattern of primitive economic progress as taught by Friedrich List had been abandoned after the criticisms of anthropologists, and that Roscher’s theory of national economics as a historical category had been replaced by the new historical school of Schmoller. It was all right for you to know that in ancient Rome the great estates, the latifundia, had been worked with slave labor, thus driving independent farmers to the city and herding them into ramshackle five-story tenements which often burned down. But if in the class you pointed out that similar tendencies were apparent in Berlin, you would be looked at askance by a professor whose future depended upon his avoidance of political controversy.

  To be sure, they were supposed to enjoy academic freedom in Germany, and you might listen to a Catholic professor in one lecture hall and to a Socialist in the next; but when it came to promotions, somebody had to decide, and you could hardly expect the authorities to give preference to men whose teachings fostered that proletarian discontent which was threatening to rend the country apart. At any rate, that is the way Freddi Robin reported the situation in the great University of Berlin.

  IV

  The Budds arrived a week or so before the national elections in September 1930. The city was in an uproar, with posters and placards everywhere, hundreds of meetings each night, parades with bands and banners, crowds shouting and often fighting. The tension was beyond anything that Lanny had ever witnessed; under the pressure of the economic collapse events in Germany were coming to a crisis, and everybody was being compelled to take sides.

  The young people wanted to see these sights. Hansi and Bess must attend a big Communist gathering the very night of their arrival, and the others went along out of curiosity. The great hall in the Moabit district was draped with red streamers and banners having the hammer and sickle in black. Also there were red carnations or rosettes in people’s buttonholes. The crowd was almost entirely proletarian: pitiful pinched faces of women, haggard grim faces of men; clothing dingy, generally clean but so patched that the original cloth was a matter of uncertainty; many a man had had no new suit since the war.

  The speakers raved and shouted, and worked the crowd into a frenzy; the singing made you think of an army marching into battle. A quartet sang chants with hammering rhythms, the repetition of simple words, like lessons repeated by children in school. Lanny translated for his wife: “Be ready to take over! Be ready to take over!”

  Irma had learned a lot about this subject during her sojourn in these two strange families; she had listened to Uncle Jesse, and to Hansi and Bess arguing with Lanny, and now and then with Hansi’s father. They didn’t want to kill anybody—not unless somebody resisted. All they wanted was to reproduce in Germany what they had done in Russia; to confiscate the property of the rich and reduce them to their own slum level. Johannes had smiled and said they would make a museum out of his palace, and that would be all right with him, he would buy another in London, and then one in New York, and then one in Tahiti—by which time Russia would have restored capitalism, and he would return to that region and make his fortune all over again.

  The financier made a joke of it, but it was no joke at this Versammlung. Not one single laugh in a whole evening; the nearest to it was mocking jeers, hardly to be distinguished from cries of rage. This was what they called the “proletariat,” the creatures of the slums, threatening to burst out, overcome the police, and raid the homes of those whom they called “exploiters.” The speakers were seeking election to the Reichstag, where they would pour out the same kind of tirades. Irma looked about her uneasily, and was glad she had had the sense not to wear any of her jewels to this place. It wasn’t safe anyhow, for the National Socialists often raided the crowds coming out from Red meetings, and there were fights and sometimes shootings.

  V

  The Social-Democrats also were holding great meetings. They were by far the largest party in the Republic, but had never had an outright majority, either of votes or of representation; therefore they had not been able to have their way. If they had, would they have known what to do? Would they have dared trying to bring Socialism to the Fatherland? Hansi and Bess declared that they were paralyzed by their notions of legality; it was a party of officeholders, of bureaucrats warming swivel-chairs and thinking how to keep their jobs and salaries. They continued to call themselves Socialist and to repeat the party shibboleths, but that was simply bait for the voters. How to get Socialism they had no idea, and they didn’t consider it necessary to find out.

  Lanny, yearning after the orderly methods of democracy, considered that it was up to him to help this party. In days past he had brought letters of introduction from Longuet, and now he went to renew old acquaintanceships, and to prove his sincerity by making a contribution to the party’s campaign chest. He took his family to one of the mass meetings, and certainly, if there was any tiredness or deadness, it didn’t show on this public occasion. The hall was packed to the doors, banners and streamers were everywhere, and when the party’s favorite orators made their appearance volumes of cheering rolled to the roof and back. These men didn’t rave and threaten as the Communists did; they discussed the practical problems confronting the German workers, and denounced both groups of extremists for leading the people astray with false promises. It was a dignified meeting, and Irma felt more comfortable; there didn’t seem to be anything to start a fight about.

  On the
ir way home the young people discussed what they had heard. Bess, who used the same phonograph records as Uncle Jesse, said that the party was old—a grandfather party—so it had the machinery for getting out the crowds. “But,” she added, “those municipal councilors repeating their formulas make one think of stout, well-fed parrots dressed up in frock-coats.”

  “The Communists don’t have any formulas, of course!” countered Lanny, not without a touch of malice. These two loved each other, but couldn’t discuss politics without fighting.

  Bess was referring to officials who had reported on their efforts to increase the city’s milk supply and reduce its price. Lanny had found the Socialists discussing the same subject in New York; it was no unimportant matter to the women of the poor. “Of course it’s dull and prosy,” he admitted; “not so exciting as calling for the revolution next week—”

  “I know,” broke in the sister; “but while you’re discussing milk prices, the Nazis are getting arms caches and making their plans to bring about the counter-revolution next week.”

  “And the reactionary princes conspiring with them, and the great capitalists putting up money to pay for the arms!” Thus Hansi, stepping onto dangerous ground, since his father was one of those capitalists. How much longer was that secret going to be kept in the Robin family?

  VI

  Lanny wanted to hear all sides; he wanted to know what the Nazis were doing and saying, if only so as to send Rick an account of it. Among his acquaintances in Berlin was Heinrich Jung, blue-eyed “Aryan” enthusiast from Upper Silesia. Heinrich had spent three years training himself to succeed his father as head forester of Graf Stubendorf’s domain; but now all that had been set aside, and Heinrich was an official of the National Socialist German Workingmen’s Party, high up in what they called the Hitler Youth. For seven or eight years he had been mailing propaganda to Lanny Budd in Bienvenu, having never given up hope that a pure-blooded “Aryan” would feel the pull of his racial ties.

  Lanny called him on the telephone, and Heinrich was delighted and begged him to come to party headquarters. The visitor didn’t consider it necessary to mention the fact that he was staying in the home of one of the most notorious of Jewish Schieber. It wouldn’t really have mattered, for such eccentricities in an American didn’t mean what they would have meant in a German. A German traveler had described America as “the land of unlimited possibilities,” and rich, successful persons from that fabulous region walked the common earth of Europe as demigods. Even the Führer himself was in awe of them, having heard the report that they had not run away from the mighty German army. A bright feather in the cap of a young party official if he should bring in such a convert to the new religion of blood and soil.

  The blue-eyed and fair-haired young Prussian had matured greatly in the three or four years since Lanny had seen him. He had his private office in the great Nazi building, and was surrounded by the appurtenances of power: files and charts, a telephone on his desk, and a buzzer to summon his subordinates. He wore the uniform of the Sturmabteilung, those party soldiers whose marching and drum-beating were by now among the familiar sights in German cities: brown shirt and trousers with black stripes, shiny black boots, red armband with the swastika in black. Handsome, smart, snappy—and keep out of their way, for they mean business. Die Strasse frei den braunen Bataillonen!

  Heinrich stopped only long enough to ask after Lanny’s wife and baby, about whom he had heard from Kurt. Then he began pouring out the story of the miracles which had been achieved by the N.S.D.A.P.—the initials of the party’s German name—since those old days when a student of forestry had revealed it as a tiny shoot just pushing its head through the wintry soil. “Tall oaks from little acorns grow!” said Heinrich; having written it as an English copybook exercise in school.

  A ladder was provided and Lanny was taken up to the topmost branches of that ever-spreading oak tree. The Hitler Youth constituted the branches where the abundant new growth was burgeoning; for this part of the tree all the rest existed. The future Germany must be taught to march and to fight, to sing songs of glory, hymns to the new Fatherland it was going to build. It must be well fed and trained, sound of wind and limb; it must know the Nazi creed, and swear its oath of loyalty to what was called the Führerprinzip, the faith that the individual exists for the state, and that the state is guided by one inspired leader. No matter from what sort of homes the young people came, the Nazis would make them all the same: perfect party members, obedient because it is a joy to obey, because the future belongs to those who are strong, confident, and united.

  Lanny had seen this principle working in the soul of one sturdy young “Aryan,” and now he discovered him as a machine engaged in turning out thousands of other specimens exactly like himself. A machine for making machines! On the wall was a map showing where the branch offices of this youth-machine were situated—and they weren’t only in Germany, but in every city on earth where Germans lived. There were charts and diagrams, for in this land things are done scientifically, including Hitler propaganda. “Deutschland Erwache!” said a placard on Heinrich’s wall. The Führer was a great deviser of slogans; he would retire to a secret place and there ponder and weigh many hundreds which came to his mind, and when he chose one, it would appear on posters and be shouted at meetings in every hamlet of the land. “Germany, Awake!”

  VII

  Lanny was touched by the pride with which the young official revealed and explained the complex organization he had helped to build; its various departments and subdivisions, each having an official endowed with one of those elaborate titles which Germans so dearly love. The head of the great machine was, of course, the one and only Adolf, Partei- und oberster S.A. Führer, Vorsitzender der N.S.D.A.P. Under him were adjutants and Secretariat and Chief of Staff, the Reichsjugendführer (who was Heinrich’s superior) and his Staff Director, the Subdirectors of half a dozen different staffs, the Business Manager, the Secretary, the Presidium, the Reich Directorate.

  Also there was a Political Organization, or rather two, P.O. 1 and P.O. 2—they had two of everything, except of the Führer. It made you dizzy merely to hear about all these obligations and responsibilities: the Foreign Division, Economic Policy Division, Race and Culture Division, Internal Political Division, Legal Division, Engineering-Technical Division, Labor Service Division; the Reich Propaganda Leaders Number 1 and Number 2, the Leaders of the Reich Inspection 1 and 2; the Investigation and Adjustment Committee—what a whopper of a title had been assigned to them: Untersuchungs- und Schlichtungsausschuss, or USCHLA! But don’t smile over it, for Heinrich Jung explains that the party is preparing to take over the destinies of the Fatherland, to say nothing of many decadent nations of Europe and elsewhere, and all this machinery and even more will be needed; the Gymnastics and Sports Committee, the Bureau Leader for the Press, the Zentralparteiverlag, the Personalamt, and much more.

  Heinrich was responsible for the affairs of one department of the Hitler Youth, with twenty-one geographic sections throughout Germany. They maintained a school for future Nazi leaders, and published three monthlies and a semi-monthly. There were divisions dealing with press, culture, propaganda, defense-sport—they were learning not merely to fight the Young Communists, but to make a sport of it! Also there were the junior organizations, the Deutsches Jungvolk and the Bund Deutscher Mädel, and a Studentenbund, and a Women’s League, and so on apparently without end. The polite Lanny Budd was glad in his heart that it was election time and that so many subordinates were waiting to receive orders from this overzealous expounder.

  VIII

  One thing a young party official would not fail to do for an old friend: to take him to the mighty Versammlung in the Sportpalast which was to climax the Nazi campaign. Here the Führer himself would make his final appeal to the German voters; and it would be like nothing ever seen in the world before. For several months this marvelous man had been rushing all over the land making speeches, many hundreds of them; traveling by airp
lane, or in his fast Mercédès car, wearing the tan raincoat in which Lanny had seen him in the old days; possibly not the same coat, but the same simple, devoted, inspired, and inspiring leader whose mission it was to revive Germany and then the whole world. Heute gehört uns Deutschland und morgen die ganze Welt!

  Heinrich explained that seats would be difficult to obtain; there would be a line of people waiting at the doors of the Sportpalast from early morning to be sure of getting good places. There would of course be reserved seats for important persons, and Lanny accepted four tickets. He knew that none of the Robins would attend a Nazi meeting—it really wouldn’t be safe, for someone might spit in their faces, or beat them if they failed to give the Nazi salute and shout “Heil Hitler!” Bess loathed the movement and its creed, and her curiosity had been fully satisfied by watching the Stormtroopers on the march and by occasional glances at their newspapers.

  Well in advance of eight o’clock Lanny and his wife and Beauty and her husband were in their seats. Bands playing, literature-sellers busy, and armed squads keeping watch all over the enormous arena—Communists keep out! A display of banners and streamers with all the familiar slogans: “Down with Versailles!” “Freedom and Bread!” “Germany, Awake!” “An End to Reparations!” “Common Wealth before Private Wealth!” “Break the Bonds of Interest Slavery!” These last were the “radical” slogans, carried down from the old days; Robbie had said they were practically the same as those of the “money cranks” in the United States, the old-time Populists and Greenbackers; they appealed to the debtor classes, the small farmers, the little business men who felt themselves being squeezed by the big trusts. This Hitler movement was a revolt of the lower middle classes, whose savings had been wiped out by the inflation and who saw themselves being reduced to the status of proletarians.