The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  `Whenever it conveniences you, Herr Doktor.'

  There was a bewildered silence in the receiver, then a faint cough. `Well, hm,' the Olympian voice said at last, `I shall be pleased if you will join me on my little morning walk tomorrow at eleven o'clock.'

  As it was six o'clock in the afternoon, and our rooms only separated by a few yards across the corridor, and as I had come all the way to Switzerland to pay homage to the Master, I found this reception slightly chilling. But what else could one expect if one said `conveniences you' like the semi-illiterate Frau Stoehr? Mann must have thought that I was trying to be dreadfully facetious. I would have liked to bite my tongue off, chew it, and spit it into the cuspidor.

  The walk next day did not yield much comfort. We talked mostly of the Joseph trilogy, of which the second volume had, I believe, just been published. Mann had read a huge amount of ancient history and mythology, and been influenced by the theories of certain German anthropologists. I asked him whether he had read Levy-Bruhl, and when he answered in the negative, I said impulsively: 'Ach, but you must.' Mann shook his head: `I feel that I have read enough in that direction. If you know too much about a subject, it cramps you.' It was the only remark Mann made during the day that impressed me. The remainder of the talk was desultory; I could not help feeling that Thomas Mann was talking for the record. It was not a dialogue, but a series of ponderous statements such as: `I do not hold with dictators; however, if choose one must, I am inclined, as a humanist, to prefer Herr Stalin to Herr Hitler, as the lesser evil.' There was never a moment of personal contact. This was no doubt partly due to my paralysing timidity and gaucherie in the master's presence; on the other hand, Mann did nothing to put me at ease. He asked no questions regarding my prison experiences, nor any other question betraying any interest in my person; I was treated half as a visiting journalist, half as a casual Eckerman who would, it was to be hoped, note down every word of the conversation in his diary and preserve it for posterity. The air was full of echoes of Weimar; I had an uncanny premonition that as I was now made to play Eckerman, that name would be explicitly mentioned within the next hour.

  On our return to the hotel, we met in the garden Mrs. Mann who asked me to join their table for lunch. There was also present a friend of the Manns whose name I have forgotten: a pleasant and exquisitely courteous man of about forty who made a visible effort to put me a little more at my case. The moment that I had been expecting with a mixture of dread and curiosity came between the first and second course. I hardly knew what I was eating, nor what the conversation was about, when I heard Thomas Mann's voice: come booming across the table, at the end of a sentence to which I had not listened:

  `(boum-boum-boum)-as Goethe had occasion to remark to Eckerman. And a few minutes later, turning to me:

  `(boum-boum-boum)-as I had occasion to remark during our little walk.'

  It was so depressing that I almost quoted Frau Stoehr again. I left the same evening.

  Since that unhappy meeting, I have re-read a substantial part of Thomas Mann's early work. Much of it has lost its original impact on me, but it has retained its grandeur and subtlety, its poetic irony, its universal sweep and range. Most of his later work I find mannered to the point where it becomes unreadable. But Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, the stories and essays (excluding the political essays), and indeed the major part of his work up to and including the first volume of Joseph, remain as a monument of the early twentieth century, and Germany's most important single contribution to its culture. Thus personal disappointment did not diminish my admiration and gratitude for Mann's work. It did seem to provide, however, an explanation for a certain aspect of Mann's art which had always puzzled me: I mean the absence of human kindness. There has perhaps never been a great novelist so completely lacking the Dostoievskian touch of sympathy for the poor and humble. In Mann's universe, charity is replaced by irony which is sometimes charitable, sometimes not; his attitude to his characters, even at its most sympathetic, has a mark of Olympian condescension. It makes the reader feel that he is really just another Frau Stoehr.

  The only exception to this is Mann's treatment of children and dogs; perhaps because here condescension, the gesture of bending dowh, is implicit in the situation. The title of his only story about dogs is, revealingly: Herr und Hund. Which does not prevent it, however, from being a masterpiece.

  Thus Mann's 'humanism'--his favourite word for describing his philosophy--is something rather abstract, a Weltanschauung in rarefied air. In our age, the term has lost its once well-defined meaning, but its very ambiguity makes it eminently suitable for the elusive style of Mann's philosophical essays. The result is a humanism without the cement of affection for the individual human brick, a grandiose, but unsound edifice which was never proof against the nasty gales and currents of the times. This may explain a series of episodes in Mann's public career which were exploited by his opponents and embarrassed his admirers--such as his support of Prussian imperialism in the first World War; his hesitant and belated break with the Nazis; his silent endorsement of the new despotism in Eastern Germany, and his acceptance of the Goethe Prize from a regime which banned and burned the books of his compatriots and fellow-authors. They were not so much political mistakes, to which every mortal is liable, but symptoms of a bluntness of moral perception, of a defect in ethical sensitivity caused by the absence of charitas. They do not affect Mann's greatness as an artist, but they have defeated his claim to the cultural leadership of the German nation. It is impossible to be angry with Picasso for believing that Stalin was the greatest benefactor of mankind, for one feels that his error is the result of a naive and warmhearted passion. But it is not so easy to forgive the moral faux pas of the ironically dispassionate Olympian.

  XXXV. An S. O. S

  MY next stop was Belgrade, where I had arranged to meet my parents. It had by now become too risky for me to visit them in Budapest. Closing time was approaching for Europe, one by one the doors of the countries of one's youth were being shut in one's face. They are still closed today, though for other reasons, and guarded by other dictators. There ought to be a new word coined for the benefit of twentieth­century Europeans: Stepmotherland.

  It was the last time I saw my father. Since our previous meeting, only two years back, he had suddenly become an old man. On that earlier occasion he had been sixty-six, but so full of zest and vigour that people generally took him to be in his early fifties--a fact of which he was very proud. Men who look and feel much younger than their age often seem to break down suddenly and without transition, as the night falls in the tropics. He still talked of his `colossal' and `grandiose' projects, but now his voice had a pathetic ring, and his eyes often shone with the sad tortoise-wisdom of our race. He was on a milk diet for what he called a`slight acidity', and which was in fact a cancer of the stomach. But to celebrate the occasion he insisted on having his favourite dish, Hungarian goulash with sour cream and paprika and dumplings and a glass of wine; and for once my mother let him have his way.

  My mother was unchanged--resolute, temperamental, caustic and irritable, as I had always known her. I discovered to my amazement that my father had managed to keep her in ignorance of the fact that I was in prison until the very day when I was released. He had read the news of my arrest and presumed execution in Malaga in the evening paper, while sitting with friends in a cafe. He had fallen off his chair in a faint, and had spent the next two hours in a telephone booth, warning all my mother's relatives and friends to keep the news hidden from her. My mother only read one paper, the Pester Lloyd, and mostly only the headlines; during the month that followed, whenever there was a reference to me in the Lloyd, my father tore out the page before my mother had seen the paper, or pretended that it had not been delivered. It was an extraordinary tour de force, in the imaguiative tradition of the envelope-cutting machine and the radio-active soap. To the end, my mother had noticed nothing--except that her bridge-partners sometimes looked at her in a funny way
and showed her more consideration than before, which she took as a sign of her superior skill at the game.

  Apart from this, the subject of my imprisonment was not mentioned between us. To my father, who had carried the burden of knowledge and anguish alone, the topic was still too painful, to my mother too embarrassing. For her generation, prison signified eternal dishonour to a family, and the politics of remote Spain provided no excuse; thus no reference to that scandalous episode was ever made between my mother and me.

  The last time I saw my father he was waving farewell through the window of the night train from Belgrade to Budapest. He died in 1940, while I was making my escape from France, when communications with Hungary were interrupted. I only learnt of his death several years later. When my mother rejoined me in London after the war, I gathered that they had both thought I had fallen into the hands of the Nazis, though they never admitted their fears to each other. On the day before he died, my father had asked her to take my photograph away from his bedside table. `I can bear it no longer,' he said quietly, and those were his last words referring to me.

  The Middle Eastern trip had been discreetly intended by the News Chronicle as a sinecure for me, but it became, in fact, an assignment to another region of terror and guerilla warfare. The first country to be covered on the tour was Greece, where I had meant to spend a quiet fortnight; but after a few days in Athens a cable from London instructed me to proceed at once to Palestine where the A.rab rebellion had suddenly flared up again.

  Even the few days in Athens had been far from peaceful. Greece, too, lived under a quasi-Fascist dictatorship, the regime of General Metaxas who had seized power by a coup d'etat in 1936. It was one of the nastier, and probably tlle silliest, dictatorship in Europe, illustrated by the fact that it had put Plato's Republic on the list of banned subversive books. The elite of the progressive intellectuals had been put into prison or deported to an island­camp in the AEgean. It was a monotonously famihar story. Before I left Paris I had got in touch, through the Party, with Greek refugee circles who had given me an address in Athens and a password. I was thus able to establish contact with some members of the underground opposition, both Communists and Liberals. I don't remember who they were, and hardly anything of what they told me, except that it had the same, familiar ring: arrests at night, beatings, frame-ups, summary judgments. One story stuck in my memory: the torturing by the police of a young Communist girl, with details too sickening to relate. In the Balkans, police brutality was an old tradition, but Fascism had given it a new zest; and since Malaga I had become physically allergic to that kind of thing. Wherever one travelled in Europe, one could not escape it. Mussolini, Hitler, Dollfuss, Metaxas, Franco: the Continent was lousy with dictators. I remembered a disgustiug boy at school who had suffered from furuncles and accepted bets as to where on his body the next one would break out. Would it be the turn of the Rexists in Belgium, or of the Croix de Feu in France? I wrote two pieces on the Metaxas regime so savage that even the News Chronicle would not print them.

  There was no direct line from Greece to Palestine, so I travelled via Alexandria where, to remain true to style, I ran into some riots--it was either the Greenshirts or the Blueshirts demonstrating either against the Government or against the British. I had just time to watch an autobus being turned over by the rioters and set on fire, before I had to catch the train for Kantara.

  In Kantara, which is on the Suez Canal, one changes trains for Palestine. The station was crammed with British troops, reinforcements for Jerusalem. On the previous day, the British had arrested the entire Arab High Committee in Palestine and deprived its leader, the Grand Mufti, of his functions; nobody knew what would happen next. The Arab shoeshine boy in the station bar warned me gleefully not to take the troop train: `There is at least a ton of dynamite under the tracks, hawadja.' But as it turned out, the Arabs of Palestine, deprived of their leaders, were for the moment paralysed; the dynamiting of trains and ambushing of motor cars only started a fortnight later.

  I stayed in Palestine for a month and a half. During the first, relatively quiet fortnight, I saw a number of friends and colleagues from Berlin who had managed to escape from the Nazis. They had all been compelled to take up new professions: a former editor of an Ullstein paper was a cloakroom attendant in the King David Hotel; a woman lawyer had become a cook in a boardinghouse; my former chief, Dr. Magnus, head of the Ullsteiu's international news service, was now space-salesman for an obscure little British gazette. It was another chapter in the story of the liquidation of Europe's intellectual elite. These men had survived, but they were rooted in German culture, knew no Hebrew, had never been Zionists, and were thus condemned to a pointless and sterile existence in a country to which they had been driven by force and not by inner choice.

  My Zionist friends of the old days belonged to an altogether different category. In a convulsed world, they were doggedly hanging on to their tiny strip of promised land. They had transformed the desert into a bitter oasis drenched with their sweat, throbbing with their anguish and passion. In the streets of Haifa and Tel Aviv, in the settlements of Sharon and Galilee, they went about their business with the calm, slow motions imposed by the heat, but underneath they were all fanatics and maniacs. Each of them had a brother, parent, cousin, bride, or in-law in the part of Europe ruled by the assassins. It was no longer a question whether Zionism was a good or bad idea. They knew that the gas-chambers were coming. They were past arguing. When provoked, they bared their teeth.

  When the Arab terror campaign was resumed on October 15, one of the first victims was a young orthodox Jew who had recently escaped from Germany. He was stabbed in the back on the holy Sabbath while walking through a street in Jerusalem reading his Bible. Another victim was a twelve­year-old child in Ness Ziona, one of the oldest settlements, built on the so­called Hill of Dreams. He was shot in his sleep. It was typical of the pointless, senseless character of the terror. Though everything here was on a smaller scale, in a sense it was even worse than Spain. There at least one had known where the enemy's frontline was, but here both camps were mixed together, and no one knew when he was going to be knifed in the back, or where the next homemade bomb was going to explode.

  Mostly they exploded in crowded buses and train-compartments, or on the railway tracks. The oil pipeline from Mosul was set on fire, the airport in Lydda burnt down, British soldiers were ambushed, Jewish settlers sniped at in the fields, girls were raped, then stabbed to death. For a few days there was a curfew in Jerusalem. At five-thirty the streets were crowded with people hurrying home; a quarter of an hour later they were deserted, all doors and windows closed, and only the rattle of an armoured car on patrol or the whine of a sniper's bullet broke the ghostly silence--the silence of Malaga, the last night before its fall.

  After a week, things calmed down a little; another week later it started all over again. The Jews were still holding back, swallowing their bile. It took some years for the tailors from Warsaw and the lawyers from Prague and the Talmud-students from Jerusalem to acquire a taste for throwing gelignite bombs. A year later they had acquired it, with a vengeance.

  Eleven years had passed since I had set out for Palestine the first time, a romantic young fool, to work in a collective settlement at the foot of Mount Gilboa; eight years since I had left Palestine, disillusioned by the narrow chauvinism, the limited horizon of the Zionist settlers. During these eight years I had believed that the small and irksome Jewish question would eventually be solved, together with the Negro question, the Armenian question and all other questions, in the global context of the Socialist revolution. So I had left the old Promised Land for the new land of promise, and had found it an even more bitter disappointment. Now, on my way out of the Communist Party, I had come back.

  But it was not a coming full circle. It was a return on a different level of the spiral: a turn higher in maturity, but several turns lower in expectation. I no longer believed that this small and bitter country held out a mes
sianic promise, an inspiration for mankind at large. I no longer believed that the artificial revival of the archaic language of the Bible would produce a cultural renaissance, a return of the age of the Prophets. And I also knew that my roots were in Europe, that I belonged to Europe, and that if Europe went down, survival became pointless, and I would rather go down with her than take refuge in a country which no longer meant anything but a refuge. This resolution was actually put to the test when France fell, and when, instead of heading for Palestine or still neutral America, I made my escape to England--which led to another stretch of solitary confinement in a London prison during the blitz. Yet even that prison-cell in Pentonville meant Europe, my home.

  On the other hand, there were six million doomed people in Germany and Eastern Europe who had no such freedom of choice, and for whom Palestine meant their only chance of survival. Whether they were welcome or not, whether the climate and culture suited them or not, were irrelevant questions when the alternative was the concentration camp, the ghetto and finally, the crematorium. In this limited, resigned, and utilitarian sense, I was still a Zionist.

  In the early days, I had been a member of Jabotinsky's maximalist party which aimed at the transformation of the whole of Palestine into a Jewish State with an Arab minority. In the light of the intervening years, this programme had proved to be unworkable and utopian; Jews and Arabs were too profoundly divided by religion, culture and social pattern to live harmoniously together in the measurable future. I had thus become gradually convinced that partition of the country, as proposed by the Royal Commission under Lord Peel, was, though not an ideal solution, yet the only possible solution. The serial that I wrote for the News Chronicle on my return ended with an urgent plea for carrying out the partition scheme, and a warning of the horrors which further procrastination would entail: