3 Political Essays 1919
Döblin’s eye-witness accounts of the end of the World War and the stumbling first steps of the Weimar Republic present a vivid picture of those confused tumultuous times. He is appalled not just by the inability of politicians nurtured under Prussian militarism to respond with imagination and humanity to the new situation, but perhaps even more by the reluctance of the German population to embrace their sudden freedom. His hopes that the authoritarian class-divided technology-driven system might be transformed into something better were soon dashed.
2018 saw many centenary commemorations of the end of the First World War I. We may not see so many commemorations of its disastrous aftermath in 1919 and beyond: the failed German Revolution, the Versailles Treaty, Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace, the persistence of anti-democratic Freikorps actions in Germany and eastern Europe…
The first two pieces linked below were published under Döblin’s own name. The third piece was his second foray using his pseudonym ‘Linke Poot’ (Left Paw), under which he published two dozen pieces between 1919 and 1923. (My translation of the first Linke Poot essay, Cannibalistic, appears in the March 2019 issue of The Brooklyn Rail – the first, I believe, of Döblin’s non-fiction works ever to appear in English.)
REVOLUTIONARY DAYS IN ALSACE (Feb 1919)
EXORCISING THE GHOSTS (Feb 1919)
THE BEAR, RELUCTANT (Aug 1919)
Translations © C D Godwin 2019
REVOLUTIONARY DAYS IN ALSACE
Die Neue Rundschau I (February 1919)
The Strassburger Neue Zeitung early on Saturday: ‘Our news by telephone from Berlin is unavailable today, the line is blocked; we hope to provide our readers with a clarification soon.’ That morning I stood in the Senior Inspector’s office, he reported with no particular excitement, old army boots: a Commissariat official’s here from Saarbrücken, someone just phoned from there, told me to change into civvies, sailors have come, there’s a revolution, like in Kiel.
Just then there’s a call from the garrison commander in the nearby spa town of N: can a guard detail be despatched urgently, there’s a mutiny. The Senior Inspector’s enjoying this: ‘The world’s gone mad, everyone in a tizzy, keep calm, always keep calm.’ Last night it seems there was unrest here too, in the barracks of our little garrison town, also choreographed by sailors. In the morning soldiers leave the barracks and occupy the garrison HQ encountering no resistance; the old man, General S., is livid, they threaten to break his sabre, then it all calms down.
Towards four in the afternoon, rumours already swirling, suddenly there’s music in the enormous street of barracks: a massive horde of soldiers seething along out of formation, hands in pockets, unarmed, behind a wildly waving red flag, a corporal in the lead. They throng tumultuously about the barracks gates, the sentries grin and let them through, they surge from one barracks to the next, the procession grows ever longer, howling, shouting, a press of civilians, they fetch prisoners out of the local holding stations. Soon half the town is behind them. I run down, chat with some soldiers: they won’t listen to officers any more, that’s finished, and if anyone gets arrested just for overstaying his leave, that’s finished too. That was all. Other soldiers when questioned said the same, they were all very merry about it; and anyway the war’s over and we’re going home; curfew at eleven tonight, no need to salute officers.
A strange uneasy excitement in the town. Crowds in the few streets, everywhere crammed with soldiers wearing red ribbons; I’m in civvies. The barracks squares have yielded up their masses of humanity, young puppies, cripples from the convalescent companies, elderly reservists.
The faces of these Alsacers, as if it’s a carnival parade and they’re the onlookers. Now it’s out in the open: checkmate, we can do nothing more with these.
Rumours fly that the French have broken through at Saarburg, they’ll be here in a day or two; drat, now how will we get out. Extra editions in the evening twilight, local fishwrap, people crowd around, read aloud in groups. And it’s the second blow; the first was the horribly revealing speech by Prince Max seeking an armistice, now: the Kaiser’s abdicated, the Kaiser and King, the government’s been handed over to Ebert without explanation, to the Social Democrat Ebert. It’s a mere formality, this ‘handing over’ of the government; lying behind it: we have a revolution, it’s the same in Berlin as here, they’re not giving the government to Ebert, he has it already. Here I sit in this damnable hole, the French on our heels, how will we get away, I want to go to Berlin.
Sunday morning at the hospital my people greet me with smiles and big red ribbons; empty corridors, empty offices, patients alone in the wards, in their beds; a sister wanders about: everyone went off very early into town, a soldier’s council is being formed, the hospital’s choosing its delegate. There’s a dead body, flu, right among the living, she has no one to take it away. I run through the building, an inspector takes pity. Not long ago the big beasts came through this empty building, dripping with titles and medals, Inspector General, Chief Medical Officer, we trembled, they shone lights in every corner, the corporal trotted behind with a little book, every trivial thing noted down, every negligence in matters of dress, bedmaking, painting of headboards. Even now the doors all display a list of every chair, every curtain-rod, every spittoon in the ward. Now, at one stroke –. Downstairs the old morgue attendant greets me gloomily, he’s worked here thirty years, who’ll pay his pension.
In the afternoon a big assembly at the market square. Sunny autumnal weather. On the way little D. bumps into me, our radiographer, carrying a photographic case. After a few words he slips past, doesn’t want to be seen with Germans. In the lovely wide old square, shingle roofs, ringed by excited civilians is a disorderly mass of soldiers wearing red cockades. The light is dazzling; confusion of voices.
And look, in among them are officers, pale, no shoulder flashes, in timid groups like lambs amid a pack of wolves; and look, they too wear red cockades, these men marked for sacrifice.
Windows and balconies of the houses around the market are packed with civilians. A jamboree, everything radiant, malicious glee, contempt, an entertainment for a cocky audience. In the window of the Café G. the whole smug upper bourgeoisie of the little town, smiling – no, grinning – animated, boisterously observing the spectacle. There’s stout little M. with his hands in his pockets, he’s head of the food supplies office, millionaire, complained all through the war with a big cigar drooping from his mouth, he nods: ‘A fine business for those Prussian gentlemen.’ Lawyer W. clearly can’t come up with enough witticisms, he tells them to his left, his right, points out this or that group of soldiers. His worship Mayor M. is here, he’s here, how could he not be. Up till now he’s mimed being a Prussian government assessor, now the capable young man groups himself in a Franco-painterly way at the window frame; he’s reflective, mulling over a speech he’ll deliver in French two weeks from now. (A couple of days ago, during an audit visit to Pechelbronn, that evening at the station there was a fellow making a jocular mocking speech to a bleating public: ‘Let’s sing it again, that lovely song: Deutschland Deutschland über alles.’)
Music, the infantry’s coming, the red flag bobs up and down in the hands of the childishly smiling leader, everyone parading their freedom with hands in pockets, smoking a pipe; they swagger along arm in arm. The civilians draw aside to let them through the ring. A table is carried from the café over the heads of the crowd, someone climbs on, it’s starting, everyone on tiptoe, a soldier speaks, then another, he roars hoarsely: ‘must not happen again, is not permitted, shameful for a soldier.’ The barracks at the training ground O. have been broken into, the contents plundered, horses sold to civilians. I ask in bewilderment, what does this have to do with the essence of revolution, why are they doing this; soon I realise this is all a part of it.
Walking slowly behind us through the mocking jostling throng comes the old man of the garrison in his gaudy general’s uniform, on stiff knees, the same dandy as always when he came here. He struts about for a bit this way and that, speaks to no one, no one greets him, disappears. What fear and terror he used to blow about him.
A soldier, an Alsatian, waves his hands about up there: he didn’t join this movement just to see something like robbery take place. ‘You all know me!’ (The other soldiers in the Soldiers’ Council are not stupid, they won’t let any militia in until the garrison has pulled out, won’t include a single Alsatian in the Council, no one wants to hand out muskets to this lot to use against us. And anyway, last night all the soldiers had their weapons taken away, none of the officers has buckled on his gun belt.) Someone else on the table, a North German by his accent, addresses himself to the locals: they should rejoice with us, we too are now free of an alien domination; mark it well: even we, actually in the market square at H., addressed by a German in front of Alsatians and recorded here for posterity. The bourgeois crowd accepts it all graciously, stately on its throne, lets itself be flattered, some slip away, the balconies empty, it’s becoming tedious, time for coffee.
The dogs, they rock securely on their heels, just wait, gentlemen, you’ll laugh on the other side of your face. Conclusion, music, march off.
The revolution makes itself felt at home. My young man ran off with twenty Mark early this morning, that’s how revolutions are celebrated. The farmers deliver no milk for the infants, for ages it hasn’t agreed with them. Monday morning annual fair, many civilians running about with red ribbons, and some tricolours can be seen. The paper advises us to keep emotions down, don’t antagonise the soldiers unnecessarily. My colleague St. from Kreuznach has returned, we speak a little of our worries, he says accusingly: ‘Now you have your revolution, you and your Frankfurter Zeitung.’
On the way someone brings the rumour that the Belgians and French are fraternising with our red soldiers at the front, English ships are flying red flags. I almost fall for it, anyway it pleases me to hear it, and I think how to pour some cold water on our worthies here. On the way I meet our splendid senior pharmacist W., he listens quite distraught to my cry of jubilation. ‘Yes,’ I laugh, ‘there’s no more blue-white-red, black-white-red, now there’s only red and red again and for a third time red.’ A few days ago we thought up a witty accolade for him, a blue-white-red frame with his name, but the last letter ‘e’ graced with a huge acute accent. I go into the other pharmacy, the chemist receives the same shock. Only Professor E., whom I encounter on the way to the station – he’s off to Strasburg, shaking the dust of H. from his heels, was stationed here on duty, but what is duty now, he’s an Alsatian – he smiles and lifts a warning hand: ‘A victorious army does not make revolution.’
The stipulations of the Armistice in the extra editions lying around everywhere are hardly remarked; internal politics have swallowed the external, the war has been swallowed by the revolution. But the Alsatians stand around in groups stunned by the number of locomotives and wagons we must deliver; lucky them. The Sunday edition of the Strassburger Neue Zeitung headlines its lead article ‘Shreds’, speaks dismissively of Wilhelm, who wanted to tear the Alsatian constitution to shreds, who through his undignified clinging to the throne drove everything to the limit, now the entire German constitution is in shreds, etc., etc.
‘From this perspective all so-called solutions to the question of Alsace-Lorraine are to be considered, from an autonomous federal state through neutrality to a plebiscite; and as democrats we do not shy from asserting that today we decline even a plebiscite: its only purpose would be to cheat France, a purpose which in any case we are convinced can no longer be achieved even with the strongest measures of persuasion. We know what we want! Our forefathers protested not just in Bordeaux, but also in the elections of 1873 and in Berlin, and it is therefore quite wrong to suggest that the opinion of the people of Alsace-Lorraine regarding the annexation was never sought. It is clear and unambiguous, and has been known to the world for almost 50 years. When, therefore, the question arises of a popular referendum, the only meaning this can have is that the French should ask us if we wish to remain with them. We are burning to give the French our answer!’ Such a prompt response to Germany’s liberation; for them it’s a liberation from Germany. No surprise there.
In our little town this afternoon a session of the local council; his honour the mayor, erstwhile government assessor, reports on the changes in the Empire that have been accomplished, the hour has come when – see the ‘Shreds’ article for the gist. Next day in the sewing room where the Patriotic Women’s Union for Charitable Giving and the Wounded works away, twenty needlewomen quite silent and furtive, the town has commissioned them to sew flags, you know the colours.
On Wednesday night gunfire, towards one o’clock (two nights earlier I’d been woken at the same hour by gunfire, there’d been an air raid alarm at ten, but they just threw leaflets down saying they’ll be here by the 15th); when I enquired next morning what the shooting was about they said it was a Bavarian transport, the men refused to go on, they’d rioted at the station, unhitched carriages, shot at signals. Tonight the shooting is in regard to a fight with a speeding car that came into Strasburg and was seized by the sentry post there. The car had been driving through the town in the dark full of armed soldiers; what they intended was not apparent, people talked of an attack on a barracks, clearly it’s simply a bunch of Alsatians heading home in their car.
On Thursday a crazy scene of plunder in the barracks street. The barracks form a huge long block of housing, at the gates at three or four places along the street a throng of civilians mixed with soldiers, many country people in flat caps, short jackets, with wheelbarrows, horse carts, ox carts, many more lurking in the background, they come up out of the side streets. Outside one of the yellow barracks, right by the door, is a crowd of maybe a hundred people shouting, jostling, flowing this way and that. As I approach I see several windows on the second floor are open as far as they’ll go, suddenly soldiers appear, hatless, laughing and shouting down to the street. All at once several soldiers side by side bend back, throw down armfuls of boots and stuff; keep bending back, throw boots out high, scatter them in every direction. Everyone makes a grab, kids run off with a single boot, now there’s a knot of people hitting out, yelling, scolding. The barrows and carts come closer. Crowds of soldiers at the vehicle entrances, they’re closed today. Sentries with raised rifles (incidentally the sentries, like soldiers generally, are suddenly no longer carrying their rifles at the shoulder, or on the back barrel up, but in the Russian manner with the butt upwards; headgear too has given in and acquired a certain tendency to a Russian shape); the soldiers are wearing new clothes: it is said, credibly, that the huge stocks inside can’t be moved out, no one wants the French to have them, but these newly-clothed soldiers are actually delivering to the greedily waiting peasants and the townspeople in the background; the soldiers keep going in, no one’s checking how often the same one returns, in the corridors on the carts they change back into old clothes.
Towards evening the picture changes; the civilians with their raw red faces have been chased away, sentries have blocked off the whole street, no civilian can just wander in, word is the storerooms are locked, though some are already empty. In the town people move in a strangely lighthearted happy feverish colourful excitement, sacks being dragged along everywhere, there were never so many carts in the town as now, among them wretched Russians, released prisoners with bundles in their hands. Along the main street furniture van after furniture van heading for the station. Taverns chockablock with people, now provisions make an appearance, of course the French are bringing everything with them, they say that in Nancy trains are already standing by full of white bread and red wine for Alsace. The price of wine suddenly crashes, you can buy a fat goose for five Mark a pound, yesterday it was twelve Mark, or fifteen.
Someone calls to me in the street, I’m not wearing shoulder flashes now: ‘Comrade, the cockade must come off.’ Off, then. I encounter officers, mostly in civvies, who all explain how they propose to get away; you write yourself a leave chit, sign it yourself or have it signed by the Soldiers’ Council, the Council stamps anything. Most of the bigwigs are already up and gone, in civvies of course, even General S. who yesterday attended a session of our Soldiers’ Council in order to discuss essential matters regarding the withdrawal of the regiments; after speaking he dropped back into his chair and said for all to hear: ‘You can imagine how hard this is for me.’ Tonight the Dragoons will march out, over the Rhine into Baden. How comfortably the local colleagues stroll around. One of them, when I happen to express how little pleasure I feel in exchanging the meat stew of Alsace for the turnips of Berlin, says to me quite benevolently: ‘They’ll do all they can to prevent famine among you lot. They’ll find it, they’ll find it, you can be sure.’ I: ‘But this tawdry Armistice.’ ‘They’ll soften it down, they just want to humiliate the military, don’t worry.’ How far we’ve fallen. And it’s all stealing, hauling away, thinking only of possessions. Overnight we’ve been struck to the ground in the most grotesque way, to be trodden underfoot. Many carts and people heading down B. Street to the airfield; most are too late; our big new airfield, they say, has been deserted by man and mouse, people and soldiers are forcing their way in, or trying to, huge amounts of materiel, petrol, metal are stored there. At last doubled sentry details are posted there.
This evening little M., forename Aron, appeared at my house, the trader, namesake of the fat millionaire. How he came here from Rumania a year ago, still suffering the after-effects of dysentery, totally intimidated, ground down, wretched, shaking with fear. The cruellest Prussian NCO regime had exercised its power on him, on the defenceless Jew, who could do nothing about it but keep his head down, beg, bribe, hide underground. He knows how to keep going, now he’s finally been abandoned here in misery. How he crows now, in civvies: ‘What do they want? Are you a human being when you’re a soldier? Are you for such officers and gentlemen a human being? And if you’re ill, an Alsatian? They had their Staff Doctor Sch., now he’s Senior Staff Doctor, you should have seen, he never touched anyone, monocle in his eye, cigar in his mouth. Alsatians A1, fit for service.’ How happy he is: ‘It had to come, it should have come long ago. Let the bigheads feel it. Orders, orders, yes sir, hold the line, and we sit in the mud.’ And he tells endless stories of his sufferings, some funny, some accusing. How Prussian ladies at the start of the war acted so high and mighty when they came to work in the hospital, their little jealousies; how a pharmacist had noted one of these young ladies in his register as ‘the pig’; how this became a matter of state; how he had to play along when one of the ladies treated him as her orderly: ‘Go across to my regiment now.’ To my regiment.
An officer’s lady whose child lay ill had said to me a few days earlier when she visited: ‘So if they depose our Kaiser, I shall no longer wish to live.’ She wasn’t emotional, it was quite genuine, but now I bump into her and she’s still alive, just anxious for the whereabouts of her furniture. ‘And our Crown Prince, such a dashing gentleman.’ Well, what can you say, the woman had her beliefs, they worked splendidly for her, how should she understand other motives? When I argued with her a little, she said yes, property could be shared a bit more evenly and fairly, but it’s all the fault of the rich peasants and the bankers, that can be changed, but our Kaiser? ‘And really you can’t change everything. Take the head of a district, for example, he sits in his circle like a little king and everything goes like clockwork. And they cling to him and obey. When that too should all be over and done with.’ Sister Grete in the infants’ crèche, a resident of Alsace but German to her very bones, keeps pestering; she’s been travelling around southern Germany for days to find a place for her parents, to no avail, there’s nothing to be had. Her father’s at the Strasburg cathedral building office, a pensionable post, he’s an old man, will the French keep him on. ‘What’s become of our great rich Germany. Look at the railway carriages, seat covers all cut up, no curtains, even the fastenings for the luggage-rack nets have been cut away. No heating, the locomotives can hardly pull, there’s no coal, the engine’s defective, people begging in the streets for bread, it’s enough to make you howl.’ She will never and nohow become French, but there’s nothing else for it but to stay.
By Wednesday we are quite headless, meaning: chief, senior inspector, corporal all gone on some excuse or other. The army hospital is supposed to march off, we wait anxiously for our train, there’s a terrible shortage of carriages, three hundred are ordered from the railway, twenty arrive. We’ve sent all the serious cases to the town hospital. When I go to the army hospital on Wednesday, the ambulance is waiting below to take someone away, upstairs the man lies dead, died suddenly just now. This terrible flu never stops. Chests have been packed, straw lying in every corridor with hospital supplies, books, there’s hammering. I find the big rooms of crockery, porcelain still quite full, women standing about, it’s not clear who’s in charge, who’s going to check things off. We’re supposed to be leaving on Thursday evening. It’s clear there’s a huge amount of thieving in the hospital. An orderly from the town’s ambulance company was caught carrying away marble tops from the night-tables in his gurney. Every ward is empty, people go from room to room, prams moving everywhere without check, evidently loaded up with coal, out through the doors.
On Thursday evening, under the harsh glare of magnesium lighting piercing the darkness, the ponderous transport train departs. We travel all day. We’re freezing to death. Three pigs, two goats were supposed to be slaughtered for the transport, we could have feasted, but where was it all? A day in the goods yard at Würzburg. Stroll through the town. A red flag flying at the castle, a red flag in broad daylight! Posters on the pillars, signed ‘The Republican town commandant’. What sort of world are we entering. No newspapers for days, all we can buy is a local Würzburg paper, the masthead: ‘Free of Berlin’. The contents the same old story, clericals playing to Bavarian pride, they’re using the ploy of ‘Berlin Terror’.
On Wednesday in Berlin, I head for Potsdamer Platz for the ceremony to the Fallen. Along the way I encounter a group of Social Democratic voters, red flag up front, respectably clad calm men and women, they’re singing the tune of the Marseillaise. I have the impression of a little club outing. The lines of people at the Potsdamer Platz are not as thick as usual at such gatherings, it stretches across the city as far as Friedrichshain. In the endless procession wreaths with red ribbons, red banners, proletarian cries, otherwise nothing to remind me of revolution, a well-ordered petit-bourgeois event writ large.
First I must put myself to rights.
Alsace: a border region with a complex history. At the end of the Thirty Years War (1648) it was incorporated into France, and was annexed by Germany following the war of 1870-71. Many Alsatians were among the naval mutineers of 1918-19. The Treaty of Versailles ceded the province once again to France.
Kiel: In early November 1918, navy sailors rose up to liberate the thousand of their comrades arrested for mutiny on 28 October. They formed a Council of Workers and Soldiers. Their revolutionary example spread across Germany.
Prince Max of Baden 1867-1929, the last Imperial Chancellor, announced the Kaiser’s abdication on 8 November and handed his office to Ebert.
Friedrich Ebert 1871-1925: president of the Social Democratic Party. He would violently suppress several socialist insurgencies between 1919 and 1923.
H = Hagenau, 25 km north of Strasburg, where Döblin was stationed from August 1917.
Bordeaux: the French government retreated here when the Prussians invaded in 1870.
Friedrichshain: district adjacent to Alexanderplatz.
EXORCISING THE GHOSTS
Der Neue Merkur (Special Precursor Edition) February 1919
That Saturday, the memorable ninth, in my little Alsatian hideaway, when I heard the cry: ‘They’re coming with red flags’ and saw troops swarming out, I had a feeling: this is total collapse, now they’re losing discipline. Removing officers: what’s the point? Sending the Kaiser packing, the last government packing, good; but officers altogether? They simply don’t want any more of it, it’s heading for anarchy. All I saw was undisciplined soldiers. Only now and then a twitch of pleasure: the conservative feudal system, it’s smashed, no dog wants a single crumb of it any more; but I’m not with this horde either. A few days later I strolled through Würzburg like a foreigner, exiled, the red on the flags meant nothing, oppressive, numbing, perplexing. I even had a vivid sense that I was living under foreign rule.
Wandering the streets of Berlin, reading newspapers, listening to people, after a few days all became clear.
A few years earlier I had sought points of common interest with the so-called political parties, and found none. Conferences of the so-called Liberals: trivia, party building, educational ideals, bourgeois philistinism, make eyes at the Left, yearn passionately towards the Right, fatal compromises, basically comfort, avoiding any pain or urgency, they were conducting a defensive campaign, though sure they’d be pleased to gain a few positions, little advantages. I felt a strong sense of revulsion against this party. Then the ‘party’ of head teachers, professors, civil servants: I have nothing to do with nationalism, pension rights are for me no perspective; doing politics in accordance with the motto ‘If I eat his bread, I sing his song’ appeals to me not in the least. The conservative party: it incurs not my hatred, but my wrath: the shamelessness of the propertied, the people who monopolise the government, parasites by virtue of birth.
Innumerable conferences of the Social Democrats; I read Marx, Lassalle. But when I sat beside workers, it was clear that my love must remain Platonic. I didn’t want economic advantages, as they did, I wasn’t a factory worker. This was the only party that represented radically important and elemental things beyond class interest, yet was tied up with its class interest. But they viewed me as an outsider. I returned from conferences exhausted, at elections I rejoiced at the increased vote share of the Reds. It became clear to me I was floating in air, riding hopelessly on principles.
Now, strolling through Berlin, I recognised that the war had ended in a quite unforeseen way: perhaps won, perhaps lost, in any case had become irrelevant. It came into consideration only as a means, a heroic means, of – the socialist case.
A new king arose in Egypt; he knew nothing of Joseph. The lions of war had roared to no avail, no one now remembered them. It was evident that here we had a suffering body that in wild abandon had torn off a gangrenous limb. Seemingly unannounced, a disinterested idea had penetrated from an unremarked corner. The poor populace had rescued itself from defeat by turning to socialism.
Seemingly unannounced. Strolling among little people, riding with them, I saw: these banalities – officer arrogance, army chicanery, no leave, bad treatment – were the main point. They were here the only bare facts, untransfigured and unexplained by ideas, no comforts in life could prettify them. These ridiculous little facts were everything to them, the ‘ideas’ proved threadbare. They know nothing of German expansionism, English injustice, French revanchism, they have low wages, bad food, demeaning treatment. The populace has shrugged off the war as something of no relevance to it, merely draped on it like a disgusting ragged wig. It was no defeat for the populace, just as it was not their war. Socialism, democracy: no Freudian repressed idea, but an impregnable whipped-up inner momentum that grows ever stronger and eventually reveals itself. No more party programme. And on this ground it stands: this the victorious breakthrough of an accusatory truth. How good that it’s politics as well!
They shut Germany up in a sturdy building like a fat nag, and wanted it to die, burn up; and then a bird comes flying out of the chimney singing, and they stand there below and can’t catch it, and wonder where the nag has got to.
Astonished happy days in Germany. You could almost call it home. The first calm hours after the jubilant awakening of the Russian revolution.
If only things externally were not so gruesome.
None of the so-called victories during the war moved me. The dreadful English phrase ‘You will win battles, but we shall win the war’ was always in my mind. In the first weeks of the war I often went restlessly through the streets of Berlin, no more to rights with myself than during these first revolutionary days. Did not believe we’d been attacked, rather we’d seized an opportune moment to settle scores and put an end to quarrels now grown unbearable. The question, who started it? seemed puerile, and I was disgusted when in the midnight hours of 1 August the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung brought out an extra edition according to which the Tsar had ‘deceived’ the German Kaiser. A moral cloaking? It was clear that Germany is enormously powerful, and we’d been told for years that no way could be found for this latent power to develop appropriately, Germany was systematically – so they said – being denied the realisation of this power, and so the adversaries had risked the resort to violence. On the German side the war is undoubtedly about expanding its power, a modern war of conquest. Injustice lies with the other side; they should never have let it go so far. When the names Courland, Livonia, Flanders appeared, it seemed to me the war was showing its true face. The population was in accord with this power-politics, the eternal appeal for armaments; hordes of volunteers streamed in. And at last this power was surprised to find itself used up, consumed by the war, it had taken on too many adversaries, the war became ever more evidently senseless, aimless, self-awareness and cleverness failed to take their place in good time alongside power. The war could be lost, reality was once more cleansed of our excessive power, we can no longer prate about injustice, the enraged adversaries can fall on us and do with us as they will.
As for me, as I walked about and pondered it all, I was not much concerned with this test of strength among nation-states, it was somehow all the same to me, even odious. I wondered hopelessly: how long will this war last, in the end it was just a newspaper affair that had become unpalatable. The war a private matter of the army, happening in Flanders, France and Russia! It was happening out there, it was an abomination, an irreparable dam-breach, why had everything to go into this devil’s cauldron, we all had to go in, no sense, no salvation.
And as once I walked along the boulevards mulling doubts about the rotten state of Denmark, I was surprised by the sight of an officer emerging with his lady from Rhinegold in the Potsdamer Strasse. The man was in his peacetime uniform, young, slim, coldly arrogant, monocle, lifting his sabre he leapt into the car as it pulled up.
Then it flashed through me.
So there he is – the enemy! Standing there right in our own country!
A damnable feeling! Him there! And then all that came later as I approached closer to the war. The active doctor-general who heard about his starving patients, and tried to punish the messenger for failing to follow procedures. Staff doctors who strode through the wards with their riding crops, pastors who rode and loved holding services armed, celebrating the Kaiser’s birthday, ‘our heartily beloved Kaiser’, this service of mysteries, this ossification of forms, alienation from life, alienation from humanity, from the people, this whole forsaken bad-tempered mess. No, this unreality!
For it is not the military that is real and powerful, but industries, technologists, scientists.
And then the second event, the ghastly spectacle flashed like lightning: the German Kaiser with his court and his generals entering the cathedral as the war began. Invocations of God in victory telegrams. At the war’s end: the English Parliament with creepy Lloyd George marching into the cathedral, thanking God not for the end of war, but for victory.
Religion: for this we have the shocking unforgettable example in Syria. The utter brutality of this time and place, this mechanical pseudo-culture. Religions good enough only for building churches, creating a cadre of officials, so-called men of God, and handing them to the tolerant populace for their upkeep. Systematic suppression of higher thoughts of humanity through bourgeoisification, governments bearing witness, going into churches with warlike aims and not being thrown out by the priests, but rather blessed.
My sojourn in Alsace was a terrible lesson on the core of the war and the spirit of the times in general, on the nation’s spiritual dilapidation. Across from me a school building, a Catholic educational institute. Children from five years old, maybe even younger, girls and boys, sit on benches in low rooms. Nuns and men of God are at work. What kind of work? Hour by hour I hear a shrill buzz, it’s a dressage facility, an assault on brain and soul. What goes on there, I cannot feel it any other way and must say it out: it is a crime, and I shudder for the state that does not protect its inhabitants against such assaults. What are robbery and theft against this? But to have all mental, moral and spiritual freedom stolen away under the rubric of education, to have wretched helpless people and whole classes spiritually enslaved, immiserated and atrophied. This is what the German Empire does, tolerates, supports. A parson, confronted with this, will say something like: ‘You can do nothing else with these people. Of course they pay only lip service to the rosary. But now and then they think of Mary, and that’s something. Of course they have to be pressured to attend church, the Protestant churches are admittedly always empty, but it’s better to have them forced to sit an hour in church than get up to mischief outside in the drinking dens.’ The man of God as corporal; he speaks with ineffable disdain of the people, its needs, its spiritual rights.
German Empire. This: the feudal lords and the clergy reached an understanding, and it’s called the German government. They can’t abide each other, but each side commits its robberies.
The feudal lords built themselves the military. Who could oppose a regiment; every lieutenant is in command; mass suggestion rules, it’s called Obedience. And for those who’ve undergone systematic spiritual immiseration and enslavement, the clergy have Heaven and Hell. I’ve heard lively sermons in a church about the devil, in broad daylight. I heard a pious nun in Berlin say, when I quipped that the oven was hellishly hot: Oh no, with the greatest respect, Hell is even hotter. I looked at her, it was shockingly clear she wasn’t teasing me. These crimes occur. Every week I saw on the high road small and larger troops of peasants coming to our town, men and women chatting, telling rosaries, in between gabbling their litany. And it’s no blasphemy; how good that there’s no God, but perhaps nothing shows it so well as this, the only remnants of a belief in God. What can be expected of such an enslaved people?
We’re fighting England, France, America? Nothing else to worry about. This the people harried by dreadful food speculators, and in another sphere piling up war profits. Here the root of barbarism, this sour neglected soil. Religiosity lives within us, but those religious have no life, only history, machinery! Unsubstantial unreality!
These priests, one class alongside others, have brought it to the point where the holy thoughts of religion float like a veil over life, life goes on beneath untouched from within, holy thoughts are Raphaels without arms, they can’t grip us, find no way to us.
On one side the ruling caste, on the other side the teachers of the godly; running behind both are all teachers, all education, intellectuality.
The Kaiser of the ruling caste has gone. If God were alive, he would have to abdicate. Cry ‘atheism’, cry ‘patriotism’.
What is the fatherland of the Germans? South America.
Third unreality as Moloch looking for a sacrifice: the entrepreneur, lording over his workers. What a master-class long since powerless, existing almost only as a historical relic, was to the nation-state, an idol, a false god, so the entrepreneur vis à vis the mighty workers. Ideas, even when they’re dead, exercise omnipotence over people. The most dangerous organ in the human is the head. Idolising the entrepreneur’s capital, the workers render themselves impotent. Where they don’t willingly idolise, threats are added, with guns wielded by the same workers in different clothing – a token of their subjection. The insanity of the situation came fully to light, in war. It came to war, it was able to come to war. The workers acknowledged the deadly but non-existent force of the entrepreneur, the roaring deafening moment of war tore them away, victims not only of the constant deception they could hardly see through, but also of atavistic instincts. Allowed themselves be harnessed to possessions they did not possess, the object of their struggle, let themselves be told that everyone must unite. The head: the most dangerous organ of a human, especially when it’s missing. Knew not what was up with them, half lifted the head, half let it droop, and suddenly they were at war. Graspable by the hand: the power not of reality, but of unreality. The corpse for which they were fighting had clothed itself in the most terrible attributes in order to conceal the appearance of death; it was the ally of feudalism. People hated both, but succumbed to both of those claiming moral values for themselves: nation, patriotism, German Empire. Idea upon idea, unreality on unreality.
It was not necessary for the entrepreneur, for Capital, to ally itself with feudalism, but even Capital succumbed to the Crown. And so the worker went with the entrepreneur, with the feudal class: threefold remarkable ghost-step. The corpse tied a gout-ridden dog to its body, it was supposed to pull it along, the dog got hold of a horse, it bit the halter, pulled bravely, though it left a stink behind.
The horse is no longer pulling where we are, the corpse has been buried, the dog will have to undergo a cure, but out there in Abroad the horses still believe they must pull. The deception continues. Reality counts for nothing, ghosts walk in broad daylight. The calendar numbers are written on the wall, not in heads and hearts.
If it is carried through, what is happening now, Socialism, if the evil is grasped at the root, then for the first time in history we can speak of real progress. The path from slavery through pittances to justice, freedom and moral consciousness. People coming together in true communities. Against the conqueror of a state we are powerless; as for the conqueror within the state, the monarchist entrepreneur, society can clap a hand on his shoulder. Society up till now has been no society, but the compromising cohabitation of several hundred million people, a few of whom are clever enough to put everyone else to particular kinds of work, to let them live and in return take from them a large commission. If society, after an act of self-realisation, takes the lead, it can point out to the clever people that their profits arise by the grace of society. The whole body has the right to find the hypertrophy of particular organ parts awkward and unhealthy. The totality has the right to play the role of judge, for the clever man, the master, is not solitary, and even with his company of slaves earns nothing by himself. The slaves need clothing, coal, heating, a place to live, a postal service, railways, food, schools, doctors, and these can be brought into existence only by the planned deployment of large numbers of people; the totality first provides itself, and thereby him the clever man, with railways that take away his products and deliver his raw materials; the totality lights the places of work, provides bricklayers for buildings, includes mines within itself. The apportionment of proceeds must be organised according to differentiated norms, and this is one of the most important considerations where morality and ideas of biological breeding can talk to one another. Society must systematically set aside the unsocial, and hence senseless, immoral and boneheaded concept of private property; ownership will become something relative, mine and thine must be lifted out of their personal fixity onto the warm breast of society. The slavery practised by ownership must be set aside, I mean the slavery practised on owners and non-owners alike; perhaps we shall learn to understand better why St Francis said his bride was called Poverty.
National sentiment, national culture could now really emerge, as long as it is not driven away by the much more significant and extensive Un-nationals.
No mocking laughter, please, from your high horse at those whose motto is: where I feel at home, there is my fatherland. There are children and grandchildren too, even if you care nothing for yourself. One does not live in memories, one is not a Chinese, with his cult of ancestors. Patriotism was up till now a cosy matter for the propertied, a cheap spiritual comfort for which it was unnecessary to trouble poets, you could get by in it without poems. The rest were denied this joy, this spiritual joy in one’s native region that binds most deeply and entices one to activity. Why do we treasure our native region? Because here we find our life-assets – the spiritual, after we have won enough of the material – that lifts man above the animals. But if you can’t find these assets? Now people should demand, should be allowed to call for, a general right to patriotism: I am a German.
During the war and before there were debates about why Germans have so little national sentiment. It wasn’t hard to answer. The nation had been pulled away beneath their feet, they were deceived with schoolhouse dogmas; a bad cadre of teachers – such intellectuality – offered itself as the instrument.
Mine and thine must learn to swim. Every piece of property must be answered for in the forum of society. A minority have understood up till now how to obstruct, cleverly and brutally, any test of the legitimacy of their property and the extent of that property. Enfeoffment, wresting away, new enfeoffment according to common use.
Even heaped-up spiritual property must answer, must be rousted out of its placid seats. Spiritual capital must stream over the masses, multiplying in a lively way over the living. The sources of true surging spirit are at present constricted. What can we expect of the few spiritual literati and scientists, who being rootless are easily crippled, and if they set down roots, the soil soon becomes barren.
You must know that the main struggle in the life of groups is over slogans, and that the ruling class always grabs for itself every flowery word. It strives to make itself the advocate for the whole of society, wants to represent the nation. In the past few decades it reached the point where national capability was flowing in a very broad bed. Complete backwardness and unconsciousness reigned over Germany. It did not come about that the one who reigned also wore the crown. The most heated efforts of young spirituality were to pierce through from the abstract to the real, the concrete. It sought to penetrate undepleted senses, acute perceptions, uninterrupted productivity. Its enemy: educational ballast, classicism, the world of words gradually reduced to platitudes. These words hung only like corpses about the shells of words. National capability spread out, work was going on in every corner, for every purpose. A disaster: this reality could not find its meaning. We made our revolution a spiritual one, we did not allow ourselves to be enslaved by Geibel and Goethe and whoever. But they came into the war. Wealth in Germany developed in the stormiest way, our capitalism conducted itself most strenuously, and it was tied to the feudal corpse. Most obvious is the total picture, the biggest is backwardness, the most absurd is mendacity.
The tarted-up spectres standing there as the bearers of imperial power grabbed to themselves the strengths of the wider nation. Ghosts trying to hold on to existence. Ghosts centred the life-forces of the national empire on themselves, led the nation into a whirlwind. People were lured by a ghost that led them madly into war, untold wealth thrown away, until the bedazzlement faded and the blindest could see that we had allowed shadows to make use of our blooming life, that the past had triumphed horribly over the present and future. For what was left lying on the fields of battlewas blood spilled not for the German Empire, but for old chestnuts, for Frederick the Great, for the castellans of Nuremberg, for the Victory Avenue. For these corpses of history the blood was spilled, and the next generations will have to work for it.
Threefold dreadful ghostly footsteps.
Away from the ghosts of the Church, whispering millennia-old phrases into our ears not to bring us clarity about ourselves, our fidelity, but to make our cultural soil, the masses, wither, suppress their freedom and responsibility.
Away from mediaeval and contemporary platitudes in economy and politics. Revolution must never rest. When it rests, ghosts emerge. Life conceived and reality are the solution. The fundamentals of existence ever and again put to the test. We live but once, so it seems. So existence must prey on our minds. The stale word, the breath from history, the arid abstraction, the dream want to be swallowed by our brains as Kronos swallowed his children. This or that ghost have still hardly faded away. The time for new building has hardly come. Whole pyramids, the Moloch of yesterday require all our resources.
This piece was rejected by Die Neue Rundschau.
Courland: a region of what was in 1914 the Russian Empire, and is now in Latvia. The Germans invaded in 1915; the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk separated it from Russia.
Livonia: Baltic region now shared between Estonia and Latvia.
Syria: refers to the murderous actions of Ottoman Turks against Armenians in 1915.
Emanuel Geibel 1815-74: popular lyricist whose verses inspired Schumann, Mendelssohn and Brahms. His lines ‘Und es mag am deutschen Wesen / einmal noch die Welt genesen‘ (May Germany’s existence one day cure the world) were used as a slogan by Kaiser Wilhelm.
THE BEAR, RELUCTANT by ‘Linke Poot’
Die Neue Rundschau, 1919/2 (August)
The leg was gangrenous, it was removed. They cursed the doctor because they’d lost a leg.
They shuffled along in chains, a smith cut them free. They yelled, scolded: we can’t walk straight, our hands and feet are raw, they hurt.
Their smith was an unusual fellow. The prisoners were none of his business. This they know: now they have something.
These predators, complaining. Released from the cage, unable to run. Sand trickles between the toes, over the soles, the ground is soft, they slide and lurch, wind ruffles their fur. They want to return to the cage, huddle, stand clutching the bars.
You see this horrible situation when an animal is being tamed. The beast is led to a confined space, and at once everything it’s used to is no longer valid. Yet instincts continue to present themselves. Every organ now superfluous, but still there, importuning. How they chafe and scrape themselves raw. The clang of the prison house: the human being, isolated, suddenly nothing to look at, nothing to activate the auditory nerves straining for a sound – but the nerves are intact, and waiting. The whole human being, attuned to an enormous number of stimuli, now suddenly deprived in every organ, and on top of that it’s as if they deliberately stimulate and torment him, he’s fed, charged up; they pour stress into him, inspiriting anew the organs, eyes, ears, bones, feelings. If he were a boiler he’d explode. So the whole thing is askew, runs idle, hallucinations, phantasms, excitation-states.
Germany tipped from its cage. The problem: how to make a tamed animal wild again. It should and must return to the wild. It should and must make revolution.
So it’s not wrong and it’s no laughing matter when the instincts of hundreds of thousands or millions come surging up. Not even the apparent misery of those who weep for the defunct regime and who are pained by one of the peace conditions above all: the surrender of the dungeon-symbol. Posters on the wall, German women proclaiming: the sailors should redeem their shame by scuttling the fleet, the land army should not hesitate. How glad they are to hide behind instincts now bereft of purpose. How they refuse to see that they’ve lost all purpose, and wave their sweet little flags. A roar from the National Assembly: revenge. They’re unhappy; people goad them still. They don’t know if they’re coming or going. What should they do but cry revenge on those who made them unhappy.
A secret: they’re lying when they make a big to-do about this peace. They’re glad of it, expected nothing else, maybe a bit more lenient here and there. How outraged they would have been, how ashamed and broken, if a just peace had appeared in front of them. This fact, this true revolution: justice, in which they do not believe, and will never ever believe.
What more do they want? It symbolised what they’ve lost, what ‘s been taken from them, for centuries the optimum of their conditions of life. From which they had become inseparable. They themselves were half-destroyed when those conditions were destroyed.
The great revolution of 1789 was preceded by decades of the most serious disturbances. The populace was loosened and freed from the soil and the constraining fetters. There was Montesquieu in the Persian Letters, mocking spirituality and all the institutions of state, he, president of the Parliament. In his youth Voltaire wrote satirical verses about Louis XIV, for which he took a trip to the Bastille; this was early in the 18th century, the revolution came at the end, and in between the man had not sat quietly, had not sat alone, the Encyclopaedists and Materialists toiled away, a war of liberation was fought in America. Slowly the apparatus of government began to malfunction, to the point where the wheels began to squeak and fail. Taxes were the last straw.
In Germany on 4 August , even some workers rejoiced, to say nothing of the middle and upper classes. The Radical Member of Parliament Frank went off to war, to set an example.
In the end the Entente’s foot stomped on the antheap. The disarray of the shaken tumbled little creatures. And these are meant to make a revolution!
There is no intention and has never been any intention to set you free. They could have done it already, maybe for the sake of your blue eyes, there’s something about the Germans, there’s enough raw material in them. But even the sun does not intend to draw forth plants and trees, yet here they come. The sun is an awesome ball of fire, a dreadful glowing mass of gases, and tender flowers live from it, can’t live without it, they wait for it.
In Nature there’s a thing called Adaptation. It’s no imposition, no weakness, rather the capacity to become the master of chance, to attain power over circumstances. It’s entirely up to any being to be a slave or not. As long as you keep baying at foreigners and their peace, you’ll be their slave.
Like flowers shrinking from the sun so they won’t be burned. But still they grow towards it.
I repeat: grow.
Gratitude towards the Entente: where is this sentence? When will it be written?
See there: as they sit quietly after the foot has stomped, and set themselves to rights, something has come among them, guests, several guests, in amongst us. No one knows them, they look bad, grey earthy pallor, you want to usher them politely out. They don’t understand German, or any language, are themselves dumb, have horrible big white eyes, heavy fists, iron jaws. They are Rancour, Mistrust, Want. The same foot-stomping brought them out. They’re inescapable.
Meanwhile others are yapping. Who to blame for the War. Germany’s to blame, the others are to blame, also to blame, both are to blame. The war’s not over yet, they’re still fighting, with words. Even in the Trojan War the legendary heroes swore at one another. What’s new is how the heroes swear using the words of priests. You can see Christians swearing.
They’re ashamed of having wanted war and glorified war. One of them, almost as wise as if he were Wilson, has collected the essays he wrote during the war into a book, but he left out the embarrassing ones. My son Brutus. Just publish them. The war was a moment of happiness for a thousand souls. The world of a vanished time, senile from mercantilism: everything revolves around cotton; no one need feel shame at not wanting it. That was something, that wild lightning-storm, that greedy gulping down of crazy ideas, and many, many people, young and old, were drawn into the war and died with the feeling: this is better than how we were living. A biological resistance came to the fore; the world of neuroses, hysteria; jobbers and frauds trembled in the face of meaningless lives led along the wrong path. War was torment, peace the prison-house.
Don’t misjudge yourself. Don’t gabble slogans. Find yourself.
Should one laugh, should one shrug the shoulders? They’ll still be playing with dolls in their old age. All through Germany, from town to town they march, the old dear dear soldiers. They’ve lost their self confidence. Don’t cry: there are still the old party-puppets. Millions upon millions gave their lives to the fires of war, a foot stomped, the survivors have rescued almost nothing, just bird-cages, junk, sofa-covers, absurdities. The centre holds and so on. And they cling to it; it’s their world-view; don’t cry. Even though nothing makes sense any more, the hour has its own specific targeted necessity, but the necessity stopped acting on their nerves long ago, long ago. They’re not living this real life, they are hostage to tatty sofa-covers, to dead unreal ideas. Hence their incomprehension, their unfairness, their mutual hatred. They don’t actually see one another. That’s how parties are made, don’t cry, Ministries are formed, as far as possible with equal representation, in order – to reflect popular opinion!
That’s how helpless, how stupefied they are. Ants in a ruined nest. And at their backs the grunting and groaning of those guests with the earthy pallor. Inescapable. And one would have to ponder the decisions to be made.
Drastic intermezzo.
A certain man addressed a great gathering: “The dignity of Man is in your hands.” Whereupon they swore to wage an avenging war. A few weeks later the same man felt the need to pull them back. But the Dignity of Man still lay in the hands of the Assembly.
4th of August, in perpetuity. But alongside this 4th of August – with its words: ‘I no longer recognise parties, I recognise only war credits’ – were other words, namely those of 1789. In the night between ten and four, representatives of the privileged appeared before the legislative commission, foregoing their prerogatives. Until four o’clock. In the morning some of them regretted it. Our privileged class have taken note of the latter part: they will not be the first to act.
Everything comes around. We are living in Byzantium. Whoever has the army has the power of the State. Since no one knows what to do, they play tag, rearrange the parties, today thus, tomorrow thus, count heads. In the absence of higher modes of calculation they make use of the Rule of Three; as a democracy, this method is everywhere praised. You could make it simpler: count the buttons on the jackets, or, like Gretel in the open air, the petals on a pretty flower. The pleasant choice is ours: games with guns, or counting buttons.
I mention Herr Erzberger. There’s nothing much for him here. But he’ll make a place for himself.
Bread these days causes gastric fermentation. And the gastric fermentation leads to phenomena like these newspapers and periodicals (omitted for lack of space and consideration of the reader).
The talented, those gifted with ideas, occupy themselves with such matters. What else.
It’s a feeding frenzy for the pacifists. They like a nice stately congress. They pour forth speeches bearing witness to great thoughts. They took their seats in the Herrenhaus and began to debate before the whole world. As expected they placed the guilt on Germany, the war-guilt. Germany alone. Their first item. The crowd shuddered in awe. One of the gentlemen was able to point to a magnificent deed: he had flown an aeroplane to Denmark, and then back again. He brought a fine tone to suffering humanity. He gave pacifism a foundation in the natural sciences. Erotic love takes precedence over humanitarian love, takes it for granted. They lapped it up, praised the doctrine. But some reminded themselves that love can turn to hate, really, crimes can be committed even among people of the same race and the same tribe, and educated people thought of Strindberg, but all it does probably is reveal the pettiness of people and doesn’t refute the doctrine. He pointed out that war nowadays isn’t selective as it was earlier, and so cannot be justified in Darwinian terms; as is well known, whenever we do something important, good deeds and evil deeds, we do so on the basis of Darwinian theory, for the furtherance of selection and the delight of biology professors. The human being, then, is the implementer of biological theories. He crowned his remarks by noting the ridiculousness of German policy that had increased the population by half since 1870 and now all it demands is a few square kilometres. What can a people do but grow and multiply? There’s a thought to grasp in all its fullness. He said nothing of the quantity of gentlemen’s hats, woollen goods and trashy literature produced in Germany during that period, and that might have seen an even more colossal growth, so that the firm of Hirsch & Cie could have supplied the whole world, which would have been very good and a joy for humanity, for Germany and the firm itself. Thus far the personally very courageous and today pacispiffing aviator and biologist. Ah God! Pacifism is a nice little idea to stick in your buttonhole, and now it’s supposed to be the Big Idea.
A lady spoke after him, very nicely, about young people and ideas of peace, she snorted at the bestialities of war, the atrocities in Belgium, you could feel your pacifism stirring, and I found it quite comforting. A professor from Munich was advertised, but didn’t turn up. Perhaps he didn’t fancy his chances in the race.
The Social Democrats will become the masters of misery. They do what they do: put Democracy up front and let things grow until they’re ripe for Socialism. They are the true Marxists. As Marx said, at a certain point the time comes for Socialism, it’s in Das Kapital. Of course it’s hard waiting for Socialism until that point comes, but we shouldn’t be led astray by chance events of the age. Jews have already waited two thousand years for the Messiah, thereby becoming a Chosen People. They survived persecutions, burnings, they gradually reached the stage where they can hawk second-hand trousers. The Socialists too, if they wait two thousand years, could become a Chosen People, they wouldn’t be disturbed in that effort by any other nation, whether by persecutions or burnings. On the contrary, they’d be accorded love and attention the whole time, would be observed with sympathy as they approach the stage of old-trouser-hawking, and informed promptly when it reaches that point.
Lovely flowers grow in Weimar, and there’s a park where the rustling is iambic and sweet nothings fall as golden offerings from the trees. There the gentlemen have gathered, classically thrilled, for their party conference. . Nurturing Socialism, i.e. a sense of economic community, is today a party affair; that’s where we’ve come to; it will come to the point where we must form a party to nurture parental love, or care about justice in the State. At this conference they’re going to settle the principles, confirm the fundamental truths according to which they will act.
A man, a leader, was accused of having made himself guilty of breaching convention in all sorts of ways. He had restored the hated militarism. But once they’d shouted enough and made their points, he stood up and said coldly: My opponents wanted to enlist even him, they wanted to tear him away from me. At that they all fell silent, the matter was dropped and the fundamental truth confirmed and strengthened.
Another speaker left a lot out. He started speaking. He sang of love and loyalty, of times new and old, he recited Uhland; the trees, the trees of Weimar acquired voices. And after he had twittered and recited proper German to the delight of those present, he demanded a vote of confidence. They were horrified how far they had pushed things in their presumption. What sort of man was this. He spoke like a charm. His vote of confidence would not be denied. They stood fraternally together. The classically oriented trees rustled, down below they sang the Internationale; up above, banalities fluttered.
It comes from heaven, rises to heaven, and must come again down to Earth, turn and turn about forever.
Lice crawl over the bear’s pelt and make their music. The bear is supposed to dance.
Oh, how weary the scene of paradox and confusion makes you. Who wouldn’t rather be in Turkestan or further east, lie under a felt tent, let, o world, o let me be.
And just one happy thought: the lice can pipe whatever tune they want, the cage, the cage is broken open, there’s no denying. And if the bear wants to go back into the cage, the iron bars of the whole world stand ready to greet him. He must turn round, must come out into the open. The bear groans and grunts lamentably.
When shall we hear you, at last, grunting sincerity and gratitude?
The Versailles Peace Conference opened on 18 Jan 1919; the German delegation was handed peace terms on 7 May; a peace treaty was signed on 28 June, and ratified in the National Assembly on 9 July.
Variation on words of Kaiser Wilhelm on 4/8/1914.
Matthias Erzberger (1875-1921): Centrist politician. As State Secretary took part in Nov 1918 armistice negotiations in Compiegne. 1919-20 Finance Minister, organised a unitary tax authority. Murdered by former officers on 26 August 1921.
SPD Weimar conference June 1919, attacked the ‘bloodhound’ Noske who suppressed the revolution as the SocDem Defence Minister.
