The outbreak of the war put an end once and for all to the large but undistinguished body of anti-Nazi literature that flourished in the 30’s. This literature was in its greater part directly influenced by the anti-Nazi bluster of Stalinism and the Stalinist popular front, and relied on the solidarity of the proletariat, both German and international, to bring about the downfall of Hitler. But the deployment of vast armies made it plain at last that the issue was to be settled otherwise.
Despite the fact that writers of considerable talent at one time or another contributed to it, this literature was a failure in every respect. And not the least of all its shortcomings was its curious inability to reckon seriously with its antagonist.
In André Malraux’s Days of Wrath, in Ernst Toller’s Pastor Hall, in The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers, as well as in a host of lesser works, there is evident a strange unwillingness to permit the Nazi to enter the foreground of the story’s consideration. (In Watch on the Rhine, by Lillian Hellman—which takes place on the Potomac, not the Rhine-there is not a single Nazi in the cast of the characters.) Usually the Nazi is only a slightly more precise detail in a generally vague and hostile background. The locus of the action is in the heroic agony of the protagonist—his suffering and his martyrdom, seen almost as predestined. A strange veil of indifference hangs between him and the world of the enemy’s personality. His purpose is to suffer and endure in a kind of deliberate isolation, at least insofar as the Nazis are concerned, fortified by his faith in ultimate proletarian redemption.
The Nazi is ignored. Or if he is not entirely ignored, the most commonplace and venal motives are attributed to him. Occasionally—but not often—an obsessive, violent, and distraught inner world is hinted at, a world new and forbidding, but this rarely goes beyond having the Nazi character repeat by rote—but with the fervid accents of personal belief—the official ideological nonsense of Nazism.
This disdain of the Nazi, this lack of interest in him, wears the appearance of lofty moral superiority. Actually, it is not so. It is fear and ignorance, and a deliberate turning away from the incomprehensible and fearful.
The effect of such disdain, paradoxically, was not to detract from the conception of the strength of Nazism that prevails in these books. The world of Nazi power is their context, and although the Nazi man is ignored, Nazism, omnipresent and omnipotent, dominates the scene with a massive fatality.
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The comparatively recent publication of two anti-Nazi works in German is the immediate occasion for this analysis. Bertolt Brecht’s Furcht und Elend des III. Reiches (New York, Aurora Verlag, 1945), staged in this country as The Private Life of the Master Race, was written in 1938 and is an archetype of the literature of anti-Nazism. It is a dramatic spectacle in twenty-four scenes, and the whole is intended to provide a panorama of the “fear and misery” of life in every section of the Third Reich. Friedrich Torberg’s Mein Ist Die Rache (Los Angeles, Pazifische Presse, 1943), not properly a part of this genre, but belonging to a later period, is a novelette about Jews in a German concentration camp, their gradual realization that the Nazi commandant intends their extermination as a group, and the—rather unreal—question as to whether vengeance is in their hands or in those of God.
Both Brecht and Torberg have experienced Nazism at first hand, and yet, as is invariably the case in the literary treatment of this subject, they fail to understand it imaginatively. There almost seems to be a law at work here. The more direct a writer’s experience of Nazism, the less his imagination is able to comprehend it. Odets in Till the Day I Die, or Hollywood in a number of movies, although far removed in space from Nazi Germany, seemed better able to cope aesthetically with the Nazis, perhaps because, protected by an ocean, they were in a position to be more curious about the Nazis and less disdainful of them—that is, less afraid of them—as human beings.
This lack of imaginative understanding is, of course, a reflection of our general bafflement in the face of the phenomenon of Nazism. Nevertheless, one always hopes that playwrights and novelists will be able to by-pass the historical problem by a direct and intuitive grasp of the living reality. Brecht’s play and Torberg’s novelette, like the works of the others before them, disappoint such a hope. Nazism looms up monolithic and impenetrable in their pages, an impersonal, unassailable, and absolute force. There is no hint of its inner desperation and uncertainty; there is no hint of its violent contradictions, its frustrations, and its ambiguities.
Brecht consoles himself for this secret defeatism with a kind of grim, theoretical, surface cheerfulness: he assumes a catastrophic decline of the German standard of living under the Nazis, he assumes a sullen and intransigent proletariat, and he assumes certain laws of capitalist development, all of them together spelling the ultimate doom of the Third Reich.
Where Brecht draws his comfort from the commonplaces of the routine Marxian anti-fascism of the 30’s, Torberg draws a colder and more uncertain comfort from the God of Israel.
The depersonalization of the Nazi man is the literary consequence of the impersonalization of Nazism. One thinks of no literary work that successfully portrays a Nazi person. In almost every case he is reduced to some absolute of inhumanity and functions in the story as a mechanical and abstract figure of speech. Or if some human weaknesses are conceded him—to indicate somehow that he is human after all—they are conceived in the most banal and cliché fashion, and no serious understanding of the Nazi is accomplished.
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There prevailed in the 30’s, to be sure, a general tendency to treat character impersonally as a consequence of the schematization of imaginative literature that the influence of Marxism had brought about. Literature was made to conform to the materialist interpretation of history; life was “reduced” to a bleak and arid class struggle, and humanity was “reduced” to a bleak—but sentimentalized—proletariat. The intelligentsia unburdened itself of its selfhatred by creating the proletarian hero-that rigid and lifeless figure whose every attribute implied a contemptuous dismissal of the “classless” and “disinterested” concerns of the intellectuals. It is amazing even to this day how negative and abstract was the literary conception of the worker, and how completely false. (Is this evidence of the restricted and doctrinal character of Marxism, and its inability to create a really universal attitude, heralding a new humanity and a new period in history? Does not socialism here have the suspicious appearance of a radical theory of the propertyless late middle class rather than of a tremendous social force destined to change the world?)
With the triumph of Hitler and the approach of the war, proletarian literature looked towards the international scene and transformed itself into “anti-fascist” literature. It was still the old morality literature, but one in which the Nazi conveniently played the role of the Devil, a role hitherto imperfectly fulfilled by “capitalist society.”
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The conversion of the Nazi into an abstraction is more surprising in Brecht’s case. The Brecht who in the Dreigroschenoper was able to penetrate the essence of the big-city, industrial Common Man of capitalism with so exact an irony is here able to create only blank horrors, and this despite the fact that the Nazi Common Man was equally a child of the megalopolitan jungle Brecht knows so well.
One reason, perhaps, that Brecht’s old irony failed to work against the Nazis is that it was an irony aimed at urban and capitalist society—and the Nazis professed to be anti-capitalist, too, outdoing the Marxists, moreover, in condemning the perversions and degradations of modem urban life. The ideal human being in whose name they opposed the city was not the same ideal that the Marxists asserted—it was not the clear-eyed, square-hewn workingman of the city. It was the stolid, “wholesome,” old-fashioned, rural petty-bourgeois. And here, precisely, was where pro-socialist propaganda fell into one of its subtlest, yet most damaging, ambiguities. Marx established as one of socialism’s prime tasks the obliteration of the differences between town and country; yet socialism’s whole quality has remained urban. The very word “socialism” summons up a vision of enormous vistas of shining concrete pavement and smoking factory-chimneys, of huge and smiling throngs of people passing by parks and cinemas—the décor of the rationalized megalopolis. Socialism came to be the world of large suburbs and long vacations. It came to represent a world new, mechanical, ingenious, full of “improvements.” Socialism became Europe’s version of an America purged of its imperfections.
The masses, however, have never been entirely urbanized. (The only entirely urbanized group in modern society is the Jews, whose metropolitan competence has always aroused the resentment of the Gentiles.) The memory of the countryside—from which they came originally—persists in the masses, together with a sentimental nostalgia for what now seems the stable, organic, and reasonably secure—if highly limited and somewhat boring—life they led there. This insipid nostalgia, this sentimentalization of rural life, has become one of the myths of urbanism. It is the plebeian version of the aristocratic Arcadia. The Nazis took advantage of this nostalgia in their attacks on modem industrial life, counterposing to the urban tradition of capitalism and socialism their rural ideal.
However, the human type the Nazis actually realized puzzled the anti-Nazis in a way that the merely reactionary Nazi rural ideal did not. Nazism succeeded in intimidating the world by more means than those of power politics and militarism. It reshaped the image of the masses into something inscrutable, threatening, and profoundly alien to traditional Western intelligence, so that it defied even the efforts of the artistic intelligence to assimilate it imaginatively.
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It is the ordinary Nazi man, the mass man of the Nazi organizations, that constitutes the core of horror in the enigma of Nazism. The modem world expected the masses either to continue to suffer in traditional fashion, that is, to continue to exist at the sub-human level of life that generations of poverty impose, without ideas, without spirit, and without independence; or to become socialist, that is, to revolt against themselves, to revolt against the conditions of their existence and the limited type of humanity that such an existence thrusts upon them, in the interests of a superior and universal conception of humanity. Nazism, however, linked the spiritual poverty of the one role with the revolutionary dynamism of the other.
Hitler armed the German masses with a theory. Whereas socialism—and, indeed, all genuinely revolutionary mass movements—gave the masses a theory with which to transcend themselves, Nazism gave them a theory—racism—to confirm them in their mass nature. Their present spiritual status was given the primordial sanction of blood, and elevated to an eternal ideal. Within Germany, the racial class struggle replaced the economic class struggle, and the German masses, rather than striving to overcome their purely mass nature, strove to be purely German, i.e., they strove to realize more absolutely their present, mass self. In propagating the racial class struggle, Nazism made use of the revolutionary rhetoric of socialism so that it could masquerade as a revolution of the masses, and it further developed the masquerade by thrusting the economic class struggle outside the borders of the Reich into the realm of international power politics (“proletarian” vs. “capitalist” nations).
Once the power of the Nazi party was firmly established, it turned outside the borders of its country in classic German fashion to solve in an imperfect and debased fashion the problems that it could not solve at home. The national unification that Germany was never able to achieve by itself, it achieved belatedly in 1870 in a war against the French. It needed the First World War to accomplish—imperfectly—the democratic revolution it was unable to accomplish in 1848. And, finally, Germany needed the Nazi party and the Second World War to realize a corrupt and barbarous version of the socialist revolution that it had failed to achieve after 1918.
Nazism, from this point of view, is “kitsch” politics, and fully in the German political tradition. It wanted the emotional effect of a mass revolution without being able to summon up the inner historical strength that a mass revolution demands. The Nazis wanted the sensation of history without the risk and inner effort demanded by history.
For surely it is the case that Germany, the home of that Faustian spirit which worships most ardently at the altar of History, felt most grievously the lack of a history of its own. Germany never experienced an authentic Bastille Day, and the absence of such a historical experience condemned it to psychological and political immaturity, and to a political role in Europe incommensurate with its real strength. Nazism represents Germany’s last desperate effort to dominate Europe without itself first submitting to the necessity of a democratic revolution.
In this last effort, Germany placed its fortunes in the hands of the plebs. The plebs, in the person of the Nazi party, was given political power in the hope that the masses might accomplish the conquest of Europe that the German ruling class was never able to accomplish on its own initiative.
Nazism is therefore political plebeianism—the attempt of the mob, armed with political power and a philosophy, to play a significant role in history. Incapable of accomplishing that other revolution which remains its country’s only means of creating a real history, the German plebs poured all the frustrated passion of Germany’s historical disappointment into an ersatz revolution against the Jews and the outside world. Who better than Hitler represents the passionate nothingness that is the political plebeian? Vulgar, ignorant, shrewd, brutal, and empty—that is the nature of the mass man, and he brings all these qualities with him into history on the rare occasion when his envious fanaticism is permitted to discover a purpose for itself, to patch together a theory out of its void, and to organize in its own image and its own right.
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In no age have the “masses” made history. The mass, as mass, in an historical sense is literally nothing—the historical empty space in which events occur. In pre-history they did not exist—there were only families and tribes. In ancient civilizations they were almost completely ignored; the masses were simply a part of nature. When Roman society began to disintegrate, the threat that lay in the dead weight of the Roman masses finally won them a particular consideration—bread and circuses, the appropriate symbol of their spiritual and historical insufficiency. Under Christianity they were admitted into the human community, but their special nature was dissolved in the grandiose category of Christian humanity.
The various peasant revolts that have taken place in the history of Europe illustrate best of all the historical impotence of the masses. Many of these revolts achieved considerable initial success and conquered large reaches of territory but, unable to maintain themselves, were eventually put down, and events resumed their interrupted course almost as if nothing had happened. The peasants were unable to create or acquire an idea with which to challenge the idea of feudalism. They were unable, that is, to make history.
The West discovered the masses out of the same impulse that discovered America, and was amazed and repelled by their strangeness. Shakespeare’s rude plebeians and ignorant mechanics are above all curiosities in their author’s eyes. Shakespeare observes them with some of the same wonder with which Columbus observed the West Indian savages.
In our own day, the masses were observed minutely, and the horror of their lives was understood. They were understood, however, in their passive and suffering aspect, and they acquired real humanity and influenced history only insofar as they transcended the limitations of their mass nature in the revolutionary struggles for justice carried on by the egalitarian movements.
Under Nazism, the German masses abandoned this struggle for justice—and thus their humanity—without abandoning their resentful aggressiveness. In the place of the ideal of Socialist Man they substituted the Fanatic Plebeian. The plebeian with an idea—this is the creature that Brecht, Torberg, and the rest cannot understand. This is that “rough beast,” that “shape with lion body and the head of a man” who, conceived in a time when “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of a passionate intensity . . . slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.”
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In Brecht, Malraux, Seghers, Toller, and Odets, the proletarian masses are counted on to destroy the power of the Nazis. When the course of events proved this expectation vain, this type of literature ceased to be written. In Watch on the Rhine (1941) already, there is no longer any talk of proletarian action. The hero is unpolitical—neither a Communist, Socialist, nor radical intellectual; he is simply an “anti-fascist” who was once an engineer. He returns to Germany at the end of the play to carry on the fight, but the fight is no longer the fight to rally the dispossessed (the Nazis had already done that), it is the guerilla foray of an isolated individual. (Miss Hellman’s sentimentalities are more hard-headed than her predecessors’—one has the right to expect that her hero later made contact with the O.S.S., served it well, and is now at least a technical adviser to the Allied Military Government.) In the case of Torberg, God replaces the proletariat. The genre of anti-Nazi literature is pretty well used up. The literature of “anti-fascism” had never been a literature of real struggle; now more than ever it becomes merely a literature of passivity.
Even while abandoning their faith in the masses, few of these writers suspected to what extent the envious and illiterate Lumpenintellektuellen had succeeded in creating a new type of mass man. The popular masses that had provided the great revolutions of the West with their social force had at last been halted in their progress towards universal democracy and a classless society. Whereas in France, England, and to a certain extent in America, where democratic revolutions had successfully taken place, this represented the exhaustion of a historical role, at least for a certain period, in Germany it represented the frustration of that role. The German masses, desperate in their necessity to act, and yet inwardly crippled by the long history of German political failure, squandered their energies on the gutter socialism of Hitler.
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The sentimental plebeianism of the anti-Nazi writers blinded them to the aggressive plebeianism of the Nazis. Only the idea of socialism had united them with the masses, from whom they were otherwise entirely alienated. The failure of this idea severed the connection, and these writers have since then relapsed into an unenlightened disenchantment.
They, together with the entire anti-Nazi world, made the mistake of considering the Nazis merely reactionary. They failed to perceive—and did not wish to perceive—the significance of the fact that the Nazis had become the first to challenge traditional socialism’s hold upon the masses. In the end the Nazi armies were defeated, not however by the embattled working class fighting in the name of humanity, not by the enemies of the Nazis, but by the mechanical and unenthusiastic mass armies of their opponents.
In the disintegration of Europe, in the utter collapse of all historical purpose, the void rose up in a frustrated and perverted effort to realize itself. The vision of doom that had secretly haunted the 19th century at last became reality. This reality the anti-Nazi writers persisted in ignoring. It is not so much their wrong politics that one finds most offensive—we can all be convicted of the same thing—it is not even their bad writing and false heroics. What is most appalling is their betrayal of the private vision of the artist. We do not demand of the artist that he be wiser than we are; we demand a simple kind of honesty that keeps him close and loyal to his intuitions. What is amazing in this literature is the complete absence of any intuitive sense of the quality of our age. One line of the poetry of Yeats, whom most of the anti-Nazi writers would consider “unenlightened”—although a good “private” poet—is weighted down with more reality than the whole body of anti-Nazi literature. An ultimate kind of corruption took place, and more talent than one generation can afford to waste was wasted.
