Two thousand years after the demise of Virgil and the Greco-Roman pantheon, and more than a century after Nietzsche declared in The Gay Science that “God is dead,” and that, moreover, “we have killed him;” the mystery of the role that God plays—or does not play—in human affairs continues to compel authors, theologians, readers, and indeed, most thinking people. It’s safe to say that the rumor of God’s death that Nietzsche started 130 years ago has been exaggerated. And yet, in the 21st century, the questions that the philosopher raised on the heels of his inflammatory proclamation remain unanswered: “How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?” and “What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?”
These questions of solace, guilt and atonement stung even more sharply in the last century during Hitler’s murderous dictatorship, which acquired its full strength after von Horváth was dead, and expired, ignominiously, less than a decade afterwards. If God exists, the atheist taunts, and the boulevardier asks with regretful politesse: how could he permit infernal states like the Third Reich to arise? In Youth Without God, von Horváth puts one possible answer in the words of a disgraced priest, [this page] who explains to the demoralized narrator that the state “is a necessity of nature, and it is willed by God.” But what if the state is a bad state; what if its structure collapses? the teacher presses. “Very often such a collapse is the will of God,” the priest responds. He adds, “God is the most terrible thing in the world.” [this page]
In Youth Without God, with unique sincerity and unique power, von Horváth suggests that men who play God are more terrible still.
YOUTH WITHOUT GOD
1. NIGGERS
25th March.
THERE WERE FLOWERS ON MY TABLE. BEAUTIFUL. A present from my landlady, kindly old soul: a birthday present.
But I needed to use the table, and I pushed the flowers aside, together with the letter from my people. “For your thirty-fourth birthday,” my mother wrote, “I send you the very best wishes, my dear child. May Almighty God bring you health, luck, and happiness.” And my father: “For your thirty-fourth birthday, my dear boy, I wish you the very best. Almighty God give you luck, health, and happiness.”
Well, luck will always come in useful, I thought—and thank your stars you’ve got your health into the bargain. Touch wood. But happiness? No, happiness I’ve missed. No one, really, is happy.
I sat down at my table and uncorked my bottle of red ink: it got onto my fingers and I was annoyed. Somebody ought to invent an ink which would put an end to stained fingers …
No, I can’t call myself a happy man.
Don’t be so silly, I said to myself. You’ve got a safe job with a pension at the end of it. Isn’t that something in these days, when nobody knows what to-morrow holds? How many fellows would almost give an arm to be in your shoes? For what a tiny percentage of candidates for the teaching profession succeed in getting good posts in the end! Be thankful that your post is in a county high school, where you can grow old and senile without a moment of real worry. Why, you might live to be a hundred—the oldest inhabitant of the Fatherland! Then, on your birthday, you’d have your photo in the illustrated newspapers. “He is still in possession of all his faculties,” you would read beneath it. That’s where the pension would come in! Think it over, and count your blessings.
I did: and I began working.
Twenty-six blue copy-books lay before me—I’ve twenty-six boys in my charge, fourteen-year-olds; for yesterday’s geography lesson they wrote me an essay. Geography and history are my subjects.
Outside, the sun was brilliant. It must have been fine in the park! Well, work’s work. Must get on correcting the essays and put down the marks in my register even though I know how meaningless these marks are.
The subject set for the essay was this: “Why do we need colonies?” … Yes, why do we need colonies? Let’s hear what they’ve got to say.
The first pupil whose book I opened had a name beginning with B. Bauer. Franz Bauer. There are no A’s in my class, but to balance that there are five B’s. Curious, that—so many B’s in a class of only twenty-six. But two of them are twins. Automatically I ran down the list of names in my register, to discover again that the B’s are no distance from the S’s. There are four S’s, three M’s, two each beginning with E, G, L, and R, but only one to represent F, H, N, T, W, and Z. Names beginning with A, C, D, I, O, P, Q, U, V, X, Y do not figure on my list.
Now, Franz Bauer, why do we need colonies?
“We need colonies,” he had written, “because we need numerous raw materials; without raw materials we cannot keep our home industries working at high pressure. This would have disastrous consequences: our workmen, here at home, would once more be without work.” Quite true, my dear Bauer. “The workers are not the only party concerned: the whole of the nation is involved. The workers are ultimately a part of that whole.”
Well, ultimately, that’s a great discovery, isn’t it, I thought. And it occurred to me at that moment how often to-day the most ancient platitudes are disguised as up-to-the-minute slogans! Or have they always been?
I don’t know.
But I knew I’d got to get on with my task of correcting twenty-six essays—essays packed with false theories and distorted conclusions. Wouldn’t it be nice for us if the very meaning of words like “false” and “distorted” were unknown to us—but there, they are only too familiar, and they go strolling arm in arm and singing their vain lays.
I must be careful: I’m a State employé. It wouldn’t do for me to venture the tiniest criticism. Even if silence irks me—what good could one man do? He must keep his anger to himself. I mustn’t lose my temper.
Get on with your correcting. You want to go to the cinema to-night.
Well, what’s this that N’s written? I found myself reading: “All niggers are dirty, cunning, and contemptible.” What rubbish! Cross it out.
I was on the point of writing in the margin, “An unsound generalization,” when I pulled myself up. Hadn’t I recently heard this very opinion of niggers? Where was it? Yes—it came out of the loud-speaker in a restaurant where I was having dinner—and quite took my appetite away.
So I let N’s sentence stand. For it is not for a schoolmaster to question the opinions stated on the radio.
And while I read on, there was the radio still droning and cackling and vibrating through my mind: the newspapers re-echoed it and the children wrote it down like a dictation.
Soon I’d got as far as T: beneath his book lay Z’s. Where was W? Had I mislaid his work? No, he was poorly yesterday—caught a bad cold at the Stadium on Sunday—inflammation of the lungs. I remember now, his father wrote me a note. All in order. Poor W! What were you doing at the Stadium, with that icy rain storming down?
Well, you might as well ask yourself what you were doing there! You were at the Stadium too on Sunday, you stuck it out till the whistle went, although neither of the teams was at all in the first class. Why?—play was slow, tedious even—why did you stay? You, along with thirty thousand other spectators?
Why?
When the outside right outplays the left half and centres, when the centre-forward breaks away and shoots, when the goalkeeper throws himself on the ball, when the back’s attempt to clear brings a free kick and a spectacular save, whether the play’s fair or foul, the referee good or weak-willed, impartial or the reverse—then for all those onlookers nothing exists in the world outside the game. The sun may shine or it may be pouring or snowing. It makes no difference to them. They’ve forgotten everything.
What is “everything” for them?…
I had to smile: the niggers, perhaps—
2. RAIN
NEXT MORNING, AS I WENT INTO THE HIGH school, on going upstairs to the masters’ common-room I heard quite an uproar coming from above me. I raced up and saw five of my youngsters—E, G, R, H, and T—laying into one opponent, F.
“What’s going on here?” I shouted. “If you really want to brawl like board-school boys, then have it out one with another and not five against one—that’s a rotten thing to do.”
They all looked up dumbly at me—even F, the victim of the attack. His collar was torn.
“What’s he done to you?” I inquired; my heroes weren’t very ready with an explanation. Nor was the bullied one. At last, I learned that F had done nothing to the other five. Quite the reverse—they had taken his bread roll—not to eat it themselves, but just to see him without one. They’d thrown it through the window into the yard.
I looked down. There it lay, bright on the dark asphalt in the falling rain.
Perhaps the other five had no rolls, I thought, and they were mad when they saw F’s. But no, they all had them. G had two. Once more I asked:
“Why did you do it?”
They didn’t know themselves. There they stood, in front of me, grinning awkwardly. Man must be evil: so we read in the Bible. When the rain ceased, and the waters of the flood began to recede, God said: “I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”
Has God kept His promise? I cannot tell.
But I did not ask them again why they threw the bread out into the yard. I only asked them if they had never heard of that unwritten law, which for measureless thousands of years has grown stronger and stronger, to become a beautiful human precept: “If you must fight, then fight one against one. Be just.” I turned to the five again.
“Aren’t you rather ashamed of yourselves?” I asked.
They weren’t. I seemed to be talking another language to them. They stared at me, and even the victim, F, smiled. There was derision in his smile.
“Shut the window,” I said. “Or the rain will come in.”
They obeyed me.
What sort of a generation will theirs be?
Hard? Or only brutal?
I said no more, and went on to the common-room. On the stairs I stopped. Had they begun again? No, all was quiet. Perhaps they were pondering my words.
3. THE RICH PLEBEIANS
FROM TEN O’CLOCK TILL ELEVEN WAS ONE OF my geography periods. I must give out the essays on the colonial question which I had marked the day before. I have mentioned already that in accordance with instructions one could say little against the contents of these compositions.
So while distributing them, I confined my observations to a few remarks on style, spelling, and sentence formation. For instance, I told B—one of the B’s—that he mustn’t keep going over the left margin. R should have spaced his work better. Z should know that the plural of colony isn’t spelt with a “y.” Only when I came to N, I couldn’t pass it over.
“You’ve said in your essay,” I told him, “that we white peoples are far in advance of the negroes in civilization and culture, and you’re quite right. But you shouldn’t have said that it doesn’t matter whether the negroes live or die. They’re human too, you know.”
He looked up at me very steadily for a moment, and a hostile expression ran like a shadow over his face. Or was I mistaken? He took his note-book, nodded very correctly, and sat down again in his place.
I was soon to discover that I had not been mistaken.
For only next day, N’s father showed up during my “parents’ hour”—the hour I set aside once a week to keep in touch with my boys’ people. They come to me to inquire about their children’s progress and ask a lot of questions, most of which are very unimportant. Tradesmen, officials, officers, business men—such are my boys’ fathers. Not a working-class man among them.
With many of them, I have the impression that the thoughts which their sons’ essays inspire in them are very similar to mine. But we just meet and smile and talk about the weather. Most of these fathers are older than I. One of them is hoary with age! The youngest was only twenty-eight two weeks ago. He married at seventeen—a manufacturer’s daughter. He’s a very smart fellow. When he turns up, it is always in his open sports car. His wife stays in the car and I can see her from up here. At least, I can see her hat, her arms, and her legs.
You could have a son too, I have thought to myself: but I can easily control any wish I have to bring a son into the world. To be shot down in some war …
N’s father confronted me. He had a very self-assured manner and looked squarely into my eyes.
“I’m Otto N’s father,” he began.
“I’m delighted to meet you, Mr. N,” I responded with a bow; of course, I invited him to sit down, but he would not.
“My presence here,” he went on, “is due to a somewhat serious occurrence. An occurrence which might well have grave consequences. My son Otto told me yesterday afternoon—and he was highly indignant about it—that you, his teacher, had made an outrageous remark—”
“I?”
“You, sir!”
“When?”
“During your geography lesson yesterday. Your pupils wrote an essay on the colonial question, and you remarked to my Otto: ‘Negroes are human too.’ You understand me?”
“No.”
I was speaking the truth: I didn’t. He looked at me, summing me up. God, what a stupid fool he looked.
“My presence here,” he continued, pompously emphatic, “arises from the fact that from my earliest years I have struggled for what is just. And now I put you this question—did you voice that odious sentiment of yours on the negro question, in that class and at that time—or did you not?”
“I did,” I answered with a smile I could not restrain. “Your presence here, otherwise—”
“Please,” he interrupted me sharply. “I am not in a mood for joking. You don’t know yet what the expression of such a sentiment about negroes implies. It’s sabotage—sabotage of the Fatherland! Oh, don’t pretend you are not aware of it! I know only too well the secret ways in which you try to undermine the souls of these innocent children, and how you spread the poisonous slime of your humanitarianism among them.”
This was a bit too much.
“Forgive me,” I broke in, “you can find that in the Bible—that all of us, all men, are human.”
“When the Bible was written, there were no colonies as we understand them,” continued N’s baker-father, impervious as a block of stone. “You can’t take the Bible in an exact sense—you’ve got to take it figuratively, or not at all. Do you believe, sir, for instance, that Adam and Eve actually lived—or do you admit there’s a mythological element in the story? You see? I’ll take good care that we’ll have no more expatiations on the love of God from you.”
“You needn’t,” I muttered, showing him out. I was almost throwing him out.
“We’ll meet again at Philippi!” he shouted to me as he disappeared.
Two days later, I stood at Philippi.
The Head had sent for me.
“I wanted to tell you,” he began, “that yesterday I had a letter from the authorities. A baker, named N, it seems, has lodged a complaint about you. Apparently you have expressed certain opinions. Now, I’m quite au fait, and I know how such complaints come to be made—there’s no need for you to do any explaining. But, my dear colleague, it’s my duty to warn you that nothing like this must occur again. You’re forgetting the private memorandum that went round—number 5679, paragraph 33! We are supposed to keep youth at a distance from everything which doesn’t in some way or another train their minds for war—which means, morally, we must prepare them to be warriors. Just that.”
I glanced at the Head. He was smiling. As if he guessed my thoughts. Then he rose, and walked up and down. A fine old figure.
“It may set you wondering,” he said suddenly, “to hear me blowing the bugles of war! And you wouldn’t be wrong. You’re thinking, What sort of a fellow is this? Only a few years ago he used to subscribe to ardent peace propaganda—and to-day? To-day he’s all for the slaughter.”
“I’m aware that it’s only because you
’re forced to be,” I murmured, to reassure him.
He pricked up his ears, came to a stop in front of me, and searched me with keen eyes.
“Young man,” he said, gravely enough, “one thing you must be sure of—there is no compulsion. I could—yes, I could—struggle against the spirit of the times, and have myself put in jail through the agency of our worthy baker. I could resign this position, but I don’t intend to—I won’t. I want to reach the age-limit and draw my full pension.”
Excellent, I thought.
“You’ll think I’m a cynic,” he continued, and his manner was now quite fatherly. “All of us, striving and aspiring towards better things for mankind, have forgotten one thing: the times we live in. My dear colleague, a man who’s seen as much as I have gradually acquires a sense of reality.”
It’s all right for you, went my thoughts, you lived in time to see that hey-day before the war. But what about me? It was in the last year of the war that I loved for the first time—what, I am not sure.
The Head nodded sadly.
“We live in a plebeian world. Think of the Rome of old, the Rome of 287 B.C. The struggle between patricians and plebs still hadn’t been settled, but the plebeians were already in possession of the highest State offices.”
“Forgive me, sir,” I ventured, “so far as my knowledge goes, no poor plebeians hold the reins of power with us. The great, the one and only power, is gold.”
His eyes came to rest on mine again, and he smiled slyly.
“Yes, but I can’t give you a satisfactory mark in history, though you may be an historian! You’ve forgotten that there were the rich plebeians too. Remember now?”
I remembered. Of course! The rich plebeians, who deserted the people and who, together with the already decadent patricians, built up the new nobility of office—the so-called Optimates.
Youth Without God Page 2