With the warmest protestations of faith and friendship for you and yours, I am ever your faithful
MAX
Deutsch-Völkische Bank und Handelsgesellschaft.
München
JULY 9, 1933
Mr. Max Eisenstein Schulse-Eisenstem Galleries San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
DEAR MAX:
You will see that I write upon the stationery of my bank. This is necessary because I have a request to make of you and I wish to avoid the new censorship which is most strict. We must for the present discontinue writing each other. It is impossible for me to be in correspondence with a Jew even if it were not that I have an official position to maintain. If a communication becomes necessary you most enclose it with the bank draft and not write to me at my house again.
As for the stern measures that so distress you, I myself did not like them at first, but I have come to see their painful necessity. The Jewish race is a sore spot to any nation that harbors it. I have never hated the individual Jew — yourself I have always cherished as a friend, but you will know that I speak in all honesty when I say I have loved you, not because of your race but in spite of it.
The Jew is the universal scapegoat. This does not happen without reason, and it is not the old superstition about “Christ-killers” that makes them distrusted. But this Jew trouble is only an incident. Something bigger is happening.
If I could show you, if I could make you see — the rebirth of this new Germany under our Gentle Leader! Not for always can the world grind a great people down in subjugation. In defeat for fourteen years we bowed our heads. We ate the bitter bread of shame and drank the thin gruel of poverty. But now we are free men. We rise in our might and hold our heads up before the nations. We purge our bloodstream of its baser elements. We go singing through our valleys with strong muscles tingling for a new work — and from the mountains ring the voices of Wodan and Thor, the old, strong gods of the German race.
But no. I am sure as I write, as with the new vision my own enthusiasm burns, that you will not see how necessary is all this for Germany. You will see only that your own people are troubled. You will not see that a few must suffer for the millions to be saved. You will be a Jew first and wail for your people. This I understand. It is the Semitic character. You lament but you are never brave enough to fight back. That is why there are pogroms.
Alas, Max, this will pain you, I know, but you must realize the truth. There are movements far bigger than the men who make them up. As for me, I am a part of the movement. Heinrich is an officer in the boys’ corps which is headed by Baron von Freische whose rank is now shedding a luster upon our house, for he comes often to visit with Heinrich and Elsa, whom he much admires. Myself, I am up to the ears in work. Elsa concerns herself little with politics except to adore our Gentle Leader. She gets tired too easily this last month. Perhaps the babies come too fast. It will be better for her when this one is born.
I regret our correspondence must close this way, Max. Perhaps we can someday meet again on a field of better understanding.
As ever your, MARTIN SCHULSE
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A.
AUGUST 1, 1933
Herrn Martin Schulse (kindness of J. Lederer) Schloss Rantzenburg Munich, Germany
MARTIN, MY OLD FRIEND :
I am sending this by the hand of Jimmy Lederer, who will shortly pass through Munich on a European vacation. I cannot rest after the letter you last sent me. It is so unlike you I can only attribute its contents to your fear of the censorship. The man I have loved as a brother, whose heart has ever been brimming with sympathy and friendship, cannot possibly partake of even a passive partnership in the butchery of innocent people. I trust and pray that it may be so, that you will write me no exposition, which might be dangerous for you, — only a simple “yes.” That will tell me that you play the part of expediency but that your heart has not changed, and that I was not deluded in believing you to be always, a man of fine and liberal spirit to whom wrongs are: wrongs in whosoever’s name they may be committed. This censorship, this persecution of all men of liberal thought, the burning of libraries and corruption of the Universities would arouse your antagonism if there had been no finger laid on one of my race in Germany. You are a liberal, Martin. You have always taken the long view. I know that you cannot be swept away from sanity by a popular movement which has so much that is bad about it, no matter how strong it may be.
I can see why the Germans acclaim Hitler. They react against the very real wrongs which have been laid on them since the disaster of the war. But you, Martin, have been almost an American since the war. I know that it is not my friend who has written to me, that it will prove to have been only the voice of caution and expediency.
Eagerly I await the one word that will set my heart at peace. Write your “Yes” quickly.
My love to you all,
MAX
Deutsch-Völkische Bank und Handelsgesellschaft.
München
AUGUST 18, 1933
Mr. Max Eisenstein Schulse-Eisenstein Galleries San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
DEAR MAX:
I have your letter. The word is “no.” You are a sentimentalist. You do not know that all men are not cut to your pattern. You put nice little tags on them, like “liberal” and expect them to act so-and-so. But you are wrong. So, I am an American liberal? No! I am a German patriot.
A liberal is a man who does not believe in doing anything. He is a talker about the rights of man, but just a talker. He likes to make a big noise about freedom of speech, and what is freedom of speech? Just the chance to sit firmly on the backside and say that whatever is being done by the active men is wrong. What is so futile as the liberal? I know him well because I have been one. He condemns the passive government because it makes no change. But let a powerful man arise, let an active man start to make a change, then where is your liberal? He is against it. To the liberal any change is the wrong one.
He calls this the “long view,” but it is merely a bad scare that he will have to do something himself. He loves words and high-sounding precepts but he is useless to the men who make the world what it is. These are the only important men, the doers. And here in Germany a doer has risen. A vital man is changing things. The whole tide of a people’s life changes in a minute because the man of action has come. And I join him. I am not just swept along by a current. The useless life that was all talk and no accomplishment I drop. I put my back and shoulders behind the great new movement. I am a man because I act. Before that I am just a voice. I do not question the ends of our action. It is not necessary. I know it is good because it is so vital. Men are not drawn into bad things with so much joy and eagerness.