The New Wine in Germany

I

IT is not difficult, after three thousand miles of travel in Germany, to recognize in one’s mind a certain general impression; but it is almost impossible to convey that impression in speech or writing. One has the sense of a tremendous spiritual or psychological fact — overwhelming in its magnitude, urgent in its significance. But since the ingredients of this fact are primarily neither personal nor political, it eludes the scope of both the ordinary news story and the ordinary article. Perhaps the film could do it justice.

A sound film, of course, it would have to be. Drums — no, not the drums first. Silence — the silence that surrounds a great ship coming into harbor; and, somewhere up above, a band playing the new national anthem, the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ (never mind who Horst Wessel was, or precisely why he was killed) — a fine music, reserved, steady, powerful in its measure, swinging out in the sunshine over the massed decks, over the narrowing water, over the crowded dock, over thousands of arms held motionless in the splendid gesture of the Fascist salute. Swing the camera along those lines of hands, held tense, not flaccid; close up to the faces; look at the lips, look at the eyes, shining, shining. . . .

Fade-out, all but the music: thousands of voices, men’s voices, singing:

Hess has just finished his July speech at Königsberg: the appeal to the ‘front-line fighters’ of every land, but especially of France, to get together and fight for peace. No use hoping anything, he says, from the old politicians; sweep them out of the way, as we have done in Germany. The younger generations alone can talk to each other and understand each other. They have no cause for quarrel; they will not let the old men any more intrigue them into killing. At the end comes suddenly the sharp ‘Sieg-HEIL, — sieg-HEIL, — sieg-HEIL! ’ And then, when you expect the ragged American cheering, instantly the massed voices in that steady song. It sounds now more like a hymn, much less militaristic and a good deal stronger than ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers.’

The tune goes on: boys’ voices singing, boys in their clumpy boots tramping late at night through the Roman arches of the Porta Nigra, putting on a final spurt as they pass under the street lamps; young faces, hot and dusty from the country roads; singing their way home, clipping the end of each line so that you hear the tramp of the feet in the song. The packs are getting a bit heavy, the sweat gleams here and there on a young forehead; but look at the eyes — such clear, straight eyes. . . .

Hold one face: a fair-haired, freckled little fifteen-year-old, brown-shirted, heavily booted, pack on back, standing in the hot sun in the gardens of Sans Souci at Potsdam. He has a retinue of two or three still smaller Brown Shirts, and we all drift along together toward the big fountain. Amerikaner? Yes; and he is from Berlin? No, these boys are from Berlin; he is from Breslau. Breslau in Silesia? Yes; he has walked all the way, stopping at the Jugend-Herbergen. We are going back to America? Yes. ‘And you will tell them about — Hitler?‘ Look at the eyes.

Here is another pair of eyes, wide open in more senses than one; their owner understands our political lingo, has studied in one of the most liberal American institutions. And how she hated the Nazis! ‘The more letters my people sent me, the more I hated it all.’ She went off to California instead of back to Germany; and then at last came home to see for herself what was happening. ‘I saw the necessity of it. Nobody had ever explained to me the fundamentals.’

Cut to the Platzl in Munich. The night is hot, the air is thick, and we are packed round the tables with hardly enough elbow room to lift a stein of beer. The terrific energy of those big Bavarian bandsmen, yodelers, dancers, makes one sweat the more in sympathy. Weisz Ferdl comes on, and the house goes up in a roar at his rollicking satire (he has more than once been suppressed for his impudence). A girl leans over to translate a bit of the dialect. Surely there is hardly a lovelier face in Germany; it is like a gardenia in a mass of marigolds. The talk drifts to places, to people. ‘You have been in Weimar?’ Yes. ‘And you saw Hitler? You saw him?’ A long pause, as she looks far away over the tables. Then suddenly, ‘Ah! He is so clean, so strong, so pure!‘ Look at the eyes — transparent, alight, incandescent. No lover ever lit up those eyes like that.

How is it done? The German puts his money down on the counter of the little shop, takes his package from the old lady, and turns to go. ‘Danke sehr.‘ ‘ Bitte schön.’ ‘Heil Hitler.’ It is almost a formula, casually and quietly said ten million times a day, but it means a little more than ‘Thank you — not at all — good-bye’; it means, ‘We belong together, you and I, don’t we?’ The boys crowd round to shake hands, wish you a good trip home again, draw back a step. Up go the hands: ‘Heil Hitler!’ It means, ‘We’re your pals really, are n’t we?’ The business men finish their bargain in the hotel lobby, make a note of the terms, and separate. ‘Heil Hitler!’ It means, ‘This is on the level.’ The long argument in the beer cellar comes to an end because the management is anxious to get rid of us all at two in the morning; we separate in the empty street, saying good-bye to these young men we shall never see again. ‘Heil Hitler!’ It means, ‘We trust you to give us a square deal.’ The crowd rushes wildly down to the street corner where Hitler is coming by — children, old women, everybody pouring out of the doorways. The Mercedes purrs past — no hullabaloo of motor-cycle police, no soldiers, no warning. He sits in the front seat by the driver, wearing the familiar raincoat, with that half smile on his anxious face, raising his forearm gently up and down as if in blessing on those beseeching hands. ‘HEIL HITLER! ’ It means, in the words of one of the youth songs, ‘Germany, you will still stand radiant even if we go under.’

II

Where is it heading, everybody asks? Toward war? Take another look at it, en masse.

Patient, elderly faces line the streets, packing closer as the hours go by, glancing up at the sky, hoping it won’t rain, staring at an occasional big car full of uniforms, waiting for the procession to the stadium. At last it begins, headed by a mounted band and a dozen middle-aged men in white flannels who form a sort of review point at the crossroads. Then come the athletes, walking eight abreast, with bands at frequent intervals, — local bands, with more enthusiasm than training, — and masses and masses of banners elaborately decorated. There are all ages and both sexes, all in white, and all in the highest spirits, waving to friends, singing, saluting their organizers, stepping along in their soft shoes despite a good many sore feet, or waiting good-humoredly while some tangle up ahead gets straightened out and the camera gets a close look at them. Peasant types, for the most part, and all rather undersized; this section of the country does not run to height, and, moreover, this is largely the generation of the food blockade. But what simple, happy folk! The whole business has the air of a huge Sunday-school picnic. By the time they have gone through their exercises it is late afternoon, and many of them are drenched to the skin; but they are required to stand and listen to no less than four typical campaign speeches bellowed at them through loud speakers from the grandstand. The fourth speech is by a really high official who is putting all he has into it — and they arc drifting away by the score, tired, anxious to get changed and spend the evening in the beer halls singing about Gemütlichkeit.

Here is another procession, in Northern Germany — an S. A. procession, headed by a band and a mass of about thirty identical swastika flags, marching round the town to some sort of meeting. Despite the ‘holiday,’these people are in uniform, because they are all leaders. Possibly that is why they don’t know how to march — they look more like the Elks on parade. And here is another speech at a banquet in a far-away town where tourists never come. The soup is over, and a big man in a brown shirt rises to the occasion with the sort of speech he has been making, mostly out of doors, for years of campaigning. It is all about German unity and German greatness and the German love of peace, and it begins fortissimo and proceeds in an unbroken crescendo until one wonders just how strong is that belt around his middle. Near him, in uniform, sits an officer of the Reichswehr. The face is like that of many a British staff officer: high-bred, finely chiseled, reticent, firm, and sensitive. The eyes never lift from the table. The fingers are twirling the stem of a wineglass — round and round and round. Presently they rest on a crust of bread, idly crack it in two, crumble the pieces slowly, slowly, smaller and smaller — flick them aside at last in a single gesture as the hands are raised in polite applause.

It may suit the French to pretend that the Storm Troops are an embryo military organization. The Reichswehr does not think so. The Reichswehr does not regard them even as good raw material. One does not begin the training of a recruit by telling him he is one of the élite and encouraging him to regard himself as a little leader. One begins by telling him he is a pack of rubbish and hammering him for months into the sort of tough homogeneous material out of which real soldiers are painfully fashioned. Watch a Reichswehr officer gravely return the military salute to the enthusiastic Fascist greeting of some brown-shirted Gauleiter, and you have the whole story.

But it is not a new story. Hitler himself, seven years ago, describing the Storm Troop system, insisted that it ‘must not have anything to do with military organization’ — not because he was anxious to avoid giving offense to anyone, but because the function to be performed was a totally different function. Further, said he, ‘it is utterly out of the question to form organizations with any military value for a definite purpose with so-called voluntary discipline.’ Then, as always, Hitler knew what he wanted — and insisted on having it, even against the ambitions of some of his closest colleagues.

Further, he may be credited with having foreseen the necessity of a liquidation of the purely campaigning spirit and a drastic purge of the personnel. The one open criticism made by informed opinion in Germany was that he had waited, if anything, too long. Such a purge had been necessary in both Italy and Russia; and there was ample evidence, long before June 30, that it would be necessary in Germany too. Certain elements that had been quite useful in the rough-and-tumble of party propaganda were obviously not capable of assimilation when the party became the government; and large blocks of the party membership of 1933 were too irresponsible, and too raw, to come up to the standard of disinterested idealism that was Hitler’s personal passion. Official tactics were crude and harsh enough; the vindictive hooliganism of these people added a number of awkward local situations to the troubles of the transition. Then there was too much money lying around in private pockets of the party; too much unofficial, but inescapable, collecting — until Hitler stopped it by a strict regulation. The overbearing disposition of uniformed nobodies was becoming a nuisance to respectable citizens — until Hitler, by a series of private instructions to the police, gradually removed the last vestiges of civil authority from his party officials, and capped the deflation by the official ’holiday’ in June. The ostentation and love of display on the part of many leaders were becoming a popular joke in Bavaria; Hitler administered a sharp official rebuke which intimated very plainly that that was no road to good standing in the party. When an American ‘yellow’ journalist, in July, reported in his characteristic style that the remaining Brown Shirts were ‘slinking about unobtrusively, almost shamefacedly,’ he either did not know, or did not care to add, that the changed demeanor was in direct response to orders.

Nor were the difficulties of the transition confined to the political or to the domestic sphere. Ill-judged local efforts to ‘coördinate’ — that is, to abolish — the student organizations of the universities led to impossible situations which had to be liquidated by a peremptory change of personnel dictated from Berlin. Anti-Semitism got altogether out of hand; until, when Streicher’s organ, Der Stürmer, attacked the President of Czechoslovakia, that too had to be temporarily suppressed. Most dangerous of all these ‘hangovers ’ from the wild campaigning days was the Austrian adventure of the Munich group. Habicht and the Austrian companies had been tolerated to a point at which outside opinion knew better than Hitler what a liability they might prove. Hitler, misled perhaps by his passion for the Anschluss and contempt for the Austrians, appears to have underestimated the strength of two factors in the situation: one, the determined imperialism of Mussolini; two, the sickening sentimentality of foreign opinion (backed by foreign money) toward the ‘little Chancellor,’ whose régime had been far bloodier, and more futile, than Hitler’s own. The sudden realization, on the evening of July 25, that Germany was within an inch of international war taught the government a lesson that was symbolized by the immediate concentration of all authority in Berlin. That marked, in all probability, the final stage of the transition period.

III

Confronted by this transition from party to government, British and American opinion exhibits a reluctance to face the facts that amounts to a positive refusal. Atrocity stories are played up, blunders magnified, oppression emphasized (heaven knows there is plenty of it), until a fair estimate of Hitler and his system is out of the question. There was the same display of stubborn short-sightedness in regard to the Italian and the Russian revolution, but in neither case was the myopia as acute as in this one. The roots of the disease must be exposed, since it renders a realistic attitude to modern Germany impossible.

These roots are psychological. An immediate—but not fundamental — cause of the trouble lies in the tendency of the Western democracies to think exclusively in political terms, whereas what Hitler stands for is much more than a merely political movement. The name ‘ National Socialist Party ’ is itself misleading, as the Germans now recognize. It tempts a Westerner to think in terms of politics as he understands politics, to start arguing about the ‘ programme.’ There is — or was — a ‘programme,’ but nobody in Germany is bothering very much about the little that is left of it. Hitler did not come into power on a programme; he came into power on a tidal wave. The right word is Bewegung—the Movement. Hitler did not create this Movement; he adopted it — and was in turn adopted by it. He is said to be number seven in the party’s seniority list. And where, in turn, did the Movement come from?

It came straight out of the criminal folly of 1919. As a British observer said recently, ‘Between Hitler, as the ruler of Germany, and the Versailles Treaty there is a line of cause and effect as straight as any line in human affairs can be.’ And there lies the root of the difficulty Anglo-American opinion has in facing the tremendous fact of the Third Reich. It is a case of bad conscience. One may know one has done a grievous wrong. One may readily admit the fact — so long as it commits one to nothing. But to see the victim struggle to his feet again, to be required to look him straight in the eye — that is an experience the average person will find endless excuses for evading. Intelligent opinion has recognized for over ten years the wickedness of the treaty. The liberals have talked and talked — and accomplished nothing of any moment. ‘I maintain,’ said Clemenceau, ‘that this treaty, like all treaties, is and can only be a prolongation of war activities until complete fulfillment.’ Intelligent opinion everywhere realized that unless that old tiger were muzzled he would ruin Europe; but the treaty stood. Everyone knew that in a world in which one must live with one’s neighbors there could be no such thing as ‘security’ in the French sense; but France continued to dominate diplomacy and,the League of Nations. Tardieu’s policy of ‘reserving to the [French] victims the future benefit that would accrue from the possible revival of the aggressor’ was privately denounced as immoral and impracticable; but it was nowhere officially discarded. Tardieu’s policy of ‘imposing upon Germany the obligation to export ’ was by no one save Wilson recognized as imposing upon other nations the obligation to import; and Wilson was rejected. The overthrow of liberalism in Germany is the direct result of the failure of liberalism elsewhere; and that is the basic reason why liberals will not and cannot look the facts in the face.

They can, of course, find endless cause for skepticism and hostility in the candid enmity of the régime to all their ideals; but they cannot see the positive side of the picture. Neither the British nor the Americans have lived under such a disjointed political system as that of pre-Nazi Germany; so they can hardly appreciate the enormous prestige attaching to Hitler’s unification of the Reich. Nor have they known the minorities problem as the treaty has bequeathed it to Germany; they cannot therefore understand the passion for totalitarianism and like-mindedness that underlies the crude fallacies of the racial theory.

Least of all can they understand it when official Germany denies that any serious loss is involved in the enforced nationalization of art and culture; yet the denial is deliberate. The passion for like-mindedness demands that persons in positions of authority, in every walk of life, shall be not only well disposed to, but positively active in support of, the new régime. Consider what that means to education, to the schools and universities. The universities used, generally speaking, to elect their presidents annually from their own faculties. Now they have new ‘leaders’ appointed from outside, whose claims to distinction (if any) are of quite a different sort from those which their colleagues would have looked for. The results in many cases appear almost comic — until one considers the inevitable effect on academic life and German scholarship. Official Germany, however, does not admit that anything is being lost here. In the past—so runs the argument — far too many people were given higher education. The idea that society is best served by giving the maximum number of individuals the maximum amount of training is entirely mistaken. In the future the state will select those most valuable to society (already there are five of the new state boarding schools, with this as their main objective) and such individuals alone will qualify for complete development. Overemphasis on brain was the grand mistake of the individualist era: ‘Mental acrobatics are a sure sign of decay.’ The individual — the ‘well-rounded personality’— will be developed for the good of the state, not the state for the individual. The school system therefore has three main objectives — body, character, mind (with mind a bad third). The curriculum is being curtailed and concentrated: less mathematics and foreign language study, more German history and biology. There are to be more trade schools and more contact with the soil; all the new institutions will be in the country. Higher education will not involve a greater variety of subjects, but a deepening and broadening of the selected few.

Add to all this the sort of civics and history that is taught to the Hitler Jugend and the Storm Troops, and you have a strong and water-tight system embodying what liberals would call the basic fallacies of the old Germany of Treitschke and Bernhardi. Many of the most gifted men have left the country, not because they had to (in certain cases great efforts were made to restrain them), but because they could not work in such an atmosphere. Yet the new Germany persuades itself that nothing of importance is being sacrificed. Doubtless there is, in certain cases, a temporary loss — so one is told; but a new culture will arise out of this tremendous sense of strength and togetherness (Hitler himself is very keen and confident about it) which will reveal the true genius of the German people without the disintegrating tendencies of internationalism. That such tendencies do exist it is at any rate difficult to deny; as in all such arguments, there is the half truth that is more dangerous than falsehood.

IV

And now remains the paramount question of our attitude to Hitler’s Germany. One thing can be said with entire confidence: to attempt any further kind or degree of external coercion is the one way to make war certain. Germany is completely united in the determination to assert her equality of status with other powers; she has the means to do so, and there exists neither the right nor the possibility of preventing her. Hitler has restored to the German people, after the years in which they were the whipping boy of half Europe, their self-respect, their belief in themselves and in their future. It is a tremendous achievement. Henceforth they must be treated as equals and trusted as equals. The Clemenceau-Tardieu policy of projecting war disabilities over the succeeding generations is at an end.

One is tempted sometimes, when the Germans point to their badly drawn frontiers, to the Polish Corridor, to the lost colonies, to remark that any nation which takes the hazard of war must be prepared to abide the consequences, and that such consequences are hardly ever in line with an impartial justice. The argument may be logical, but it is totally irrelevant, especially to this new generation that had nothing to do with the war, the Hohenzollerns, or the signing of the treaty. If Germany wishes to rearm, she has just as much right — in her own eyes, at any rate — as any other power to do so. And in the conduct of other powers — in their failure to disarm, in their military alliances, in their determination to maintain Europe as an armed camp — she has excellent technical justification. Wilson’s policy of the good neighbor was deliberately scrapped in favor of the French policy of security by force. That policy has wrought irretrievable damage. It is now bankrupt. Whether we will or no, we must take the risk of believing in the German people. Any further attempt to hold them in a position of tutelage will strengthen the intransigence of the régime and render war ultimately inevitable. If the truth now appears menacing, it is solely because the truth was rejected when it first appeared in friendlier form. That is how history teaches.

Similar considerations compel one to disapprove the Jewish policy of an organized economic boycott. This, like other forms of external coercion, can only render the ultimate situation still more dangerous. The boycott has inflicted severe injury upon all parties — but most of all, of course, upon Germany, where it fell at the most effective time. Undoubtedly, it has been a severe retribution for the persecution of the Jews; but it has not convinced the Germans of their error, it has not helped the Jews, and its organized continuance will constitute an act of simple revenge. Such revenge would be pardonable under the circumstances if it were at the same time fruitful or constructive. It is in fact, however little one likes to admit it, neither. The world cannot afford it. The Christian communities do not recognize revenge as a principle of social action. And one cannot rebuild the community of good will — in which lies the world’s one slender hope — by measures of force.

But, it will be objected, are you not evading the point in all this? Does not Germany herself mean to resort to force the moment she feels able?

The answer, which must be briefly set forth, is threefold. First, it would be well to remember that Mussolini’s early official utterances were far more explicitly militaristic than Hitler’s (though they did not prevent his securing a large loan in Wall Street) and that his policy has continued to be so. So far there has been no war. The whole business was primarily a move to push Italy into the front rank of European powers; and, European powers being what they were, it was the only available means to that end. Whether eventually it will mean war depends on the way European policy as a whole is handled. The same is true of Germany.

But — secondly — Germany has no present desire to provoke a war; and she has given certain tangible evidences (as Mussolini did not) of this fact. Hitler said, a few weeks ago, that ‘no colony was worth a single German life.’ His lieutenants have repeatedly said that with the return of the Saar there will remain no further cause of quarrel with France. There is good ground for accepting these assurances. But more weighty evidence is supplied by the ten-year treaty with Poland and the agreement recently concluded by Danzig with that state. To anyone who knows at first hand what conditions are like on the eastern border, those two settlements are an impressive demonstration of the will to peace.

But, thirdly, there lurks in the background a genuine danger. The danger lies in Germany’s thoroughly unrealistic attitude to Russia. Communism is conceived to be the enemy primarily because it is not a nationalistic system (not because it is a socialistic system). And being such — so argue the Nazis — it is bound to fail. When one suggests that Germany’s economic future should naturally bring her into increasing and mutually profitable relations with Russia, one is told that Russia, being Communistic, has no economic future and is going to collapse. That is an a priori dogma of the sort that always suggests wishful thinking. Now Nazi idealism has all along looked for an extension of territory in Europe — not in Africa; and the coming collapse of Russia is expected to provide the occasion for it. This, the essential part of Nazi expansionism, has never been officially renounced; and in it lies the source of ultimate peril. It is possible to interpret the agreements with Poland in the light of this expectation. How should this situation be handled?

The only maxim that can be laid down with assurance is the one already stated: namely, that no good can come of further attempts, whether military or economic, to coerce Germany. The nation has enough to do, for years to come, in the reshaping of its domestic economy, particularly in East Prussia; this is freely admitted in responsible quarters. During those years every effort must be made to win Germany back, spiritually as well as politically, to the community of nations. Of that community the League is the sole existing instrument; and, once she is assured of genuine equality of status, Germany will be glad to return to it. Isolation is now, as before the war, the German nightmare.

Further, it must not be forgotten that the increased tension in the international situation has accurately paralleled the world-wide economic depression. A reopening of the channels of international trade will have immediately favorable effects in the political sphere; and the economic risks involved in that reopening will be less, on the whole, than the political risks involved in the present deadlock. This applies with particular force to Germany. Germany has learned about all the lessons there are in adversity; and granting — as her actions frequently remind us — that she still has a lot to learn, it is in the book of prosperity that our hope for her, as for ourselves, should lie.