by Victor Serge
In the second Clarté article Serge examines the state of German culture in 1923. He gives a broad definition of “culture”; as well as the arts and sciences, he considers the role of the press and many facets of everyday life. Serge can be accused of being too pessimistic about cultural decline in post-war Germany; doubtless he was too busy to notice the Bauhaus and the early Brecht. However, he did recognize the outstanding qualities of Käthe Kollwitz and Georg Gross.
The Rich against Culture
Writers and Artists Clarté, December 1, 1923
Berlin, November 14, 1923
I shall never forget the painful impression that Germany made on me at the end of 1921, at a time when it had reached—in comparison with present times—the peak of its post-war prosperity: the mark was worth 20 centimes.193 In Berlin I felt a confused sense of oppression and almost of despair. On analyzing it, I soon discovered the causes. Already, you could see everywhere in this starving metropolis the indications of a profound cultural decline. A shamefaced poverty still rubbed shoulders in the streets with the blatant bad taste of the newly enriched. From the poster to the comic song, from the shop window to the hairstyle of passing ladies, from the illustrated magazine to the art exhibition, everything bore the indelible mark of a defeat of civilization, of a diminution of culture. I noticed some young writers and poets. They had just published a remarkable anthology, under the significant title: Dämmerung der Menschen (Twilight of Humanity).194 I noticed thinkers; some coteries of dreamers or snobs were discussing the Buddhist wisdom of Count Keyserling, other, the anthroposophical mysticism of Rudolf Steiner—the philosophy of all decadences, recalling the intellectual corruption of the last centuries of Alexandria.—Above all they were discussing a great pessimistic book, steeped on every page with reactionary assertions, by Oswald Spengler, called The Decline of the West.195 The decomposition of the capitalist regime meant a heavy fate was already hanging over the whole people. Those for whom culture is the most precious result of societies’ efforts were living under the influence of a heartbreaking obsession with decadence…
What do they think today? It is difficult to find out amid the general demoralization. There are hardly any new books appearing. Today you couldn’t begin to publish Spengler or the despondent poets. The book trade is one of the industries worst hit by the crisis. Thinkers and artists are silent. Nothing is heard but the voices of demagogues. On the stage of Munich, a Hitler, a long-winded NCO, proclaims himself dictator of the Reich after shooting six rounds into the ceiling of a beer hall. In the main thoroughfares of Berlin you hear shouts of “Kill the Jews!” just as they used to be heard, in the days of the Russian hangman, in the small towns of Bessarabia, three centuries behind western culture. People are gnawed by hunger. A lawyer, famous thirty years ago, has starved to death. An old scholar has committed suicide… Those who want to live or just to survive face constant hard work. I know an old engineer in his seventies who has become a cobbler. Clever people speculate, buy, sell and resell dollars, banknotes from the gold loan, rare books and postage stamps. Think, write, read? We have to eat tomorrow. This evening we must spend the paper money which we were paid this morning, for fear it will be worth nothing tomorrow. On Sunday evenings near the approaches to the railways stations you can see elderly intellectuals coming back from the suburbs bent under the weight of sacks of potatoes.
I know people lived through a similar famine in Russia: but there it was in order to proclaim a new truth to the whole world, in order to lay, amid toil and blood, amid snow and anguish, no doubt, the first stone of a new Society. And everything that was really alive in the vast territory of Russia knew it: otherwise, the Revolution would have died long ago, and we should not be observing the admirable rebirth of Russian literature which is perhaps the only victory for the future amid the stagnation and general decomposition of European culture.
Just recently I visited the Autumn Exhibition of painting and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts. None of the feasts of color normally offered to our gaze by French or Russian painters. An overall impression in greyish black tones. No harmonious sculpture, no pure lines, no light. Torment, suffering, weary effronteries, above all ugliness, sadness, a psychology of neurotics. The artists I believe to be the best—Kokoschka, Barlach, Albert Birkle, Max Klewer—share with their more mediocre contemporaries the fact that they know nothing of joy. On the other hand, there are some who, it seems, cannot and will not see anything but darkness. Barlach makes wood carvings of heavy, thick-set, obstinate, contorted, ill-natured peasants whom one would guess to be sorcerers, spell-casters, arsonists, insurrectionists, Vendeans,196 straight out of the hallucinated landscapes of a Verhaeren.197 In thirty drawings Käthe Kollwitz198 reveals a different obsession. The haggard working-class girl, her belly swollen with pregnancy, seems to embody for her all the suffering of our time. The Mother, the Child, Hunger, Death: Käthe Kollwitz’s art combines these four characters into a never-ending danse macabre. And I can understand this artist. Does she not live in the north of Berlin, in the middle of a poor working-class suburb? Her studio is next to her husband’s surgery; he’s a doctor in a poor district. Looking at other works, by the most varied artists, a question forced itself on my mind: “Is this man, this misshapen freak, that we find on all the canvasses, in all the sketches; is this grimacing, contorted mask the human face?” And I was forced to conclude: Yes, Behold the man! That’s exactly how the decadent199 art of a dying civilization represents man. Defeated. Mutilated. Degenerated.
Two general features: the absence of joy, the absence of force. A double result: ugliness and despair. The only one of the German artists today in whom one finds constantly a tone of vigor is Georg Gross—a revolutionary.200 But for him, man, the man of the ruling classes—has strength only because he is essentially a brute who kills, stuffs himself and fornicates…
Way of life
The culture of a people is embodied in its way of life rather than in the works of its intellectuals. From this point of view, the spectacle of Germany today is even more painful to observe. A whole series of major social facts, which have been continuously accelerating for some years now, characterize its decadence. They are:
The pauperization of the middle classes, who have often fallen lower than the proletariat, because they are less equipped for the daily struggle. The development of fascism is merely a consequence of this. If we take account of the fact that the middle classes in Germany, numerous, educated and respected—before the war—were the true guardians of “respectable bourgeois behavior,” we then see what are the serious results of their proletarianization.
The development of corruption and speculation at every level of the social scale.
The development of begging, prostitution and crime.
The decline in the intensity and quality of labor which results, in the long run, from the decline in physical and nervous energy, as well as the demoralization of productive workers: the slackening of work discipline.
There is a corollary common to all these four facts: the deterioration of public health. About half the schoolchildren in most working-class centers are undernourished and tubercular. The diseases of poverty are making progress; the birth rate is falling and infant mortality increasing.
But to give the reader a more precise sense of these things, I want to refer to how they affect some of the details of daily life. In Berlin taking a bath has become a luxury which only the rich can indulge in. The public baths have all closed down. The bathrooms in petty bourgeois homes serve as lumber rooms; people are happy to be able to fill the bath with potatoes. For fuel is prohibitively expensive. In boarding houses you have to pay for a glass of hot water! Another luxury item is the newspaper. This morning I paid 50 billion for mine with the official exchange rate of the dollar at 620 billion. That puts a single issue at a price of 1.50 francs. In recent days the average price was 70 centimes. Manual and office workers can now only read newspapers when they are displayed in shop windows. The
re you get crowds of people hanging about all day. The end of the circulation of newspapers has had the effect of considerably livening up life in working class districts; people come to get the news. Whatever the weather, large groups hang around, from dusk till the dead of night. The lack of reliable information gives currency to the most bizarre rumors. Not an evening goes by but you hear of some coup being announced for the following day.
The streets in Germany—in the working-class districts—have completely changed their appearance in a few months. Until the great hunger, they had preserved their respectable, impassive, petty-bourgeois appearance. In Germany, you pass along the streets; you don’t live in them as they do in Latin countries. Now it seems as though the greyness of the desolate houses has got darker. The windows are dirty, and so are the pavements (they’re saving money on cleaning). Outside bakeries, grocers’ shops, dairies, there are queues of sometimes a hundred or more persons, standing there for an indefinite period of time, however bad the November drizzle. There are queues outside the kitchens run by the Salvation Army or the local council; queues at the milk carts; crowds, thousands of people, outside the squalid offices where they pay unemployment benefits; crowds wandering in the evenings, along badly lit thoroughfares, at a loose end, bitter and anxious. Berlin has no less than 200,000 unemployed, and if you add to this figure the wives and children of the unemployed, that is some 500,000 people almost completely without resources. What happens to them in the evening? The cold, unlit house with no bread is uninhabitable. They go out onto the street, gather in groups, wander aimlessly, listen to the nationalist agitator, read the anti-Semitic leaflet that is being given out… In a Baltic port, as freezing drizzle was falling, I saw the quaysides in the evening covered with a crowd of motionless men, almost silent, waiting like this, with faces of cold anger, for the pointless evening to pass…
The frequent looting of bakeries seems to me to demonstrate the vigor of the hungry rather than their brutality. I’ve been told of cases of orderly, calm, “decent” looting, during which, taking only what was necessary, the poor didn’t dream of touching money or expensive articles! It’s among other elements of the population that we can see a new outbreak of brutal and indeed depraved behavior. In one year, the Berlin police know of 2,000 cases of children who have been ill treated. In France, the mainstream press have reported details of the anti-Semitic pogroms in Berlin. We know less about what the Bavarian fascists are capable of; during the wretched coup of Hitler and Ludendorff on November 7, they wrecked every item of furniture belonging to the social democrat Auer and terrorized his family for hours on end. I’ve just read that in the surroundings of Chemnitz, uniformed Nazis thrashed Communist workers who had been arrested till the blood ran… Twice, in recent days, at Altenhausen, near Coburg, and at Munich, they set up sham court-martials, in one case to condemn Jews to be hanged, and in the other case to tell SPD and Communist municipal councillors they would be shot…
Civilized behavior has, in short, been rapidly disintegrated by generalized poverty; the reactionaries, in a conscious effort to take the nation backwards, have added to the demoralization of the masses with elements of brutality, cruelty, obscurantism and sadism.
The arts and sciences...
European culture is a whole and you can’t remove any part of it without impoverishing thereby all the peoples and all the minds of Europe. Can we imagine French thought today without Kant, Nietzsche, Wagner, Haeckel, Marx, Einstein? There is no sphere of European intellectual life where German intelligence has not contributed its achievements: Avenarius, Mach,201 Ostwald, Helmholtz, Einstein in physics; Wundt and Freud in psychology; Max Müller, Max Weber, Cunow, Sombart, Eduard Fuchs202 in sociology; Bebel, Hilferding, Franz Mehring, Rosa Luxemburg in socialism; Hauptmann, Wedekind, Dehmel, Stefan George, Stefan Zweig in literature; Richard Strauss and Mahler in music; Böcklin, Sleevogt, Liebermann, Corinth, Max Klinger in painting…203 Here are European names, contemporary but already classic, which no “good European” can now ignore. I could mention many more, but I’m not making a catalog of great men. I haven’t mentioned any of the representatives of the young Germany of today, because, incarcerated in their “defeated” country, they belong only to the Europe of tomorrow.
…In the country of these laborers of civilization it is no longer possible to print new books; no longer possible to publish sheet music; it is no longer possible to maintain the old laboratories or to buy or make precision instruments. Museums are no longer heated in winter; many are closed; in any case it is impossible to add to their stock.—Dr. Georg Schreiber, from Münster, has just published a short book on the Poverty of Science and Brain Workers in Germany. I’ve taken the following data from him:
Institutes of scientific research that for years have been pursuing studies of specialized problems, such as the Institute of Epidemiology and the Institute for the Study of Cancer (Berlin), the Institute for the Study of Tropical Diseases (Hamburg), the Institute of Occupational Medicine and Hygiene (Frankfurt-am-Main), are having to reduce their expenses to a ridiculous minimum—or close down altogether. Taken all together, the scientific libraries of Prussia had, in 1922, a budget of 17 million marks (the exchange rate of the dollar was 4,000), while a single Scandinavian University, Upsala, had 135 million marks for the year. The Berlin Public Library, which before the war received copies of 2,300 foreign journals, now gets no more than 200. The gaps made in its collections by the blockade have not been filled. German scientific journals, like all the others, are disappearing. The Museum of Printing in Leipzig, in a desperate situation, has decided to sell abroad a valuable Gutenberg204 Bible; only spontaneous donations from German artists enabled it to avoid resorting to this extreme measure.
What is happening to intellectuals amid this collapse of culture? Some, who are worse paid than workers, become workers. The majority vegetate, embittered. A composer said the following to me, which I quote more or less word for word:
“In a few years, nothing but the memory of the rich musical ave to write scores for operettas in order not to die of hunger…
On the revolving stage of the great theater built by Reinhardt,205 a boxing ring has been set up. The Volksbühne, the people’s theater, in Berlin, is on the road to bankruptcy…
If Pasteur were working in Germany today, he would not be able to do anything for humanity. If Wagner were alive, he would have to write scores for operettas in order not to die of hunger…
So that Herr Raffke,206 newly rich and one of those who has profited from the collapse of German culture, should have music with his supper…
The Stinnesation of intellectual life
Stinnesierung: “Stinnesation.” The term is in current use. It is derived from the name of Herr Hugo Stinnes, a plutocrat, richer than Vanderbilt and Carnegie, who owns five or six world shipping lines, a large number of mines, factories and banks, who is one of the kings of coal, one of the kings of electricity, one of the kings of gold in Europe, who is considering putting at the head of a dictatorial government of the German Republic the general manager of his companies, Herr Minoux. Now he wants to make a monopoly of intelligence as well. His press trust, whose influence extends to a good fifty daily papers, uses in various capacities all those well-known intellectuals who don’t want to resign themselves to poverty; and he is using them to implant in Germany a fascist ideology that is much more coherent, more elaborated, than that of a Hitler or even of a Mussolini. In the course of the last few months the scholars and journalists on Herr Hugo Stinnes’ payroll have published hundreds of articles, demonstrating the historical necessity of a reactionary dictatorship and (to quote the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung word for word) that “the belief in the advantages of the eight-hour day is based on crude scientific errors.” The press trust, a powerful enterprise devoted to winning over public opinion in favor of the owners of heavy industry, is not the only element or even the most important one in the “Stinnesation” of intellectual life. In the universities, in the mana
gement of large factories, in intellectual circles closely connected to industrial circles, the reactionary thought of present-day Germany is being elaborated, the philosophy of action of a possessing class, determined to make a final effort to survive the national and cultural catastrophe of Germany—that is, to survive its own crime.
At the turning point
Thus German capitalism, which first reached full maturity, then a decline hastened by military defeat, has become, after having been a factor of national organization, a factor of national disintegration, and it is fulfilling a comparable function in relation to European culture which it first developed—directly by means of the development of industrial technology—and which it is now murdering…
In the battle that has been joined between the upper German bourgeoisie and the revolutionary proletariat, between a class which is the cause of the current bankruptcy of culture and a class which, as is proved by the amazing cultural renaissance of Russia, is capable of giving a new impulse to culture, what could be the consequences of even a very temporary victory of the former?
The decadence of which we are witnesses is already the fruit of a temporary victory of counterrevolution. Joy, as I have said, is dead in this Germany of mourning and poverty: its best sons are dead too. Fifteen thousand proletarians—it is the accepted figure—died defeated in the social battles of 1918-19. Fifteen thousand members of an elite, the builders and soldiers of a new order, who had reached a sufficiently high level of class consciousness to try to move, at the cost of their lives, from verbal socialism to socialism in practice. What was their cultural value in a country already impoverished by war? Did they not represent one of its last reserves of civilizing energy? Moreover, the intellectual elite has been struck in the head by the counterrevolution. Liebknecht was not just a popular orator but above all a scholar; Rosa Luxemburg was one of the richest and most powerful Marxist minds of our time. Gustav Landauer, whose skull was crushed with hobnailed boots207 (in Munich, in 1919, after the fall of the soviets), was an artist and a philosopher, one of those anarchists who belonged to the dying lineage of the likes of Reclus and Kropotkin.208 They have also killed the socialist idealist, Kurt Eisner,209 Ernst Toller is still in prison, Erich Mühsam, a poet and thinker, is also still in prison, but he, by a singular injustice, is almost forgotten…