And this leads to the most absurd, incredible and unfair consequences. A common judgement in the denazification trials is that the accused, if he has been active as a Nazi, is deprived of his apartment, which is then allocated to someone who has suffered political oppression. The gesture is fine, but alas often meaningless, because economically anyone who has suffered political persecution finds himself somewhere between the middling poor and the most poor and simply cannot pay the rent for a large ex-Nazi apartment, which is now taken over instead by people with money, and that means people who earned money under the aegis of Nazism.
The liberal lawyer and his friend the writer of picaresque novels have never been Nazis. Before 1933 the lawyer belonged to the old Liberal Party and the writer is one of the very few best-selling authors who during the Hitler years preferred to live off their money rather than write. As we drink tea without sugar and eat a cake which beneath its layer of carefully counterfeited cream turns out to be the usual bad German ersatz bread, the lawyer reveals, under his silver-haired surface of resignation, a passionate sense of disillusion which is quite rare among the bitter indifference so common in Germany and which in normal countries would be attributed to youthful hysteria. It seems to be a part of good German post-war breeding in certain middle-class circles that not-so-young gentlemen relate how they have spent the last twelve years with one foot in the concentration camp, a habit to be found also in the worst circles, those of the still-to-be-denazified. What is even rarer is to hear those words expressed with genuine rather than false pathos, but this master of fragile resignation who leans over the equally fragile Meissen porcelain has developed the art to a nicety.
‘We greeted the Englishmen as liberators, but they can’t have realized that. We were willing to do everything, to get not the old Germany but a new democracy on to its feet. But we weren’t allowed to. And now we are disappointed in the English because we have a definite impression that they are sabotaging the process of renewal, and indifferent to what is happening because they are stronger than we are.’
‘We’ — that can mean the Liberal Party, which in North Germany is rather small but has a good reputation on account of its anti-Nazi attitude, but which in South Germany is large and suspect for there we can hear it said ‘Think Liberal, act Socialist and feel German.’ But ‘We’ can mean much else. ‘We’ can be those middle-class German intellectuals who were at heart anti-Nazi but never had to suffer for this and perhaps never wanted to suffer for it, who never voluntarily went against the grain and are now bearing a kind of anti-Nazi jalousie de metier against the legitimated anti-Nazis, those who were politically persecuted. Having two consciences in one’s breast, one good and one bad, promotes neither ideological nor psychological clarity. Disappointement and conscious disillusionment are without doubt the simplest way out for such a dilemma of the soul.
The author is more flexible by constitution and laughingly tells us that the programmes of the different parties are still so obscurely couched that people will turn up at the wrong election meeting and only at the exit, even if then, notice that they have visited the Social Democrats instead of the Christian Democrats or the Liberal Democrats instead of the Conservatives. He himself illustrates the ideological confusion in an apt and amusing way. He claims to have been born an anti-Nazi but yet he has voted for the CDU, the party which calls itself Christian and is said to have gathered pretty well all of the former Nazis under its cross in the hope of avoiding a planned economy and the loss of their money. But in order to salve his conscience he has persuaded his sister, who is Conservative but lacks money, to stand in for him and vote for the Social Democrats.
The habit of writing optimistic novels persists, although it is fifteen years since the last one. He assures us on his honour that at the most a mere one per cent of the German ‘quality’ were Nazis, where-upon the lawyer drily laments the lack of ‘quality’ in Germany. The latter goes on to accuse the English: he says that through a deliberate policy of starvation they have demoralized the population to just as great an extent as the Nazis did, they have ‘made bad people worse and good people uncertain’, with the consequence that they are driven into the arms of whatever suspect movement you can name, so long as it undertakes to solve their immediate material problems.
It is, of course, a bitter truth that hunger is unamenable to any form of idealism. The work of ideological reconstruction in Germany today meets the strongest opposition not in those who are consciously reactionary but in the indifferent masses who are letting questions of political persuasion wait until they have been fed. Allowing for this, the most polished election propaganda is content to promise, after victory at the polls, not peace and freedom, but a proper larder, proof against rats and thieves, and Germany’s best-known loaf is the one that appeared, with a sharp bread-knife, on the Communist posters in the autumn of 1946. One rainy day in October when General Koenig, the liberator of Paris, stepped out under the bullet-riddled canopy of Hamburg’s Central Station, both he and the nervous British guards, officers with white sleeve-covers up to their elbows and plenty of red both on their cheeks and on their parade uniforms — all were observed by dense rows of the unemployed of Hamburg. When the long cortege of cars drew away with angry tootings the young German police lads were surrounded by people scornfully shouting ‘What did he bring? Chocolate? Or bread?’ And the representatives of the powers of law and order blushed beneath their leather helmets.
To blush — that, until further notice, is all that the parties can do when the masses demand some end to their material difficulties. But there are more becoming and less becoming ways of blushing. One of the less becoming is the middle-class insistence on the dissolution of the class society, though at heart one knows perfectly well that they don’t mean it. The cake of bad German bread offered by the lawyer and the author is in fact a symbolic cake, a liberal cake whose imitation cream is intended to camouflage all too bitter facts. It is without doubt a cake for the least poor. The most poor do not eat bread that way.
This symbolic cake implies one of the reasons why the labour parties are evolving their strategies along the lines of class struggle and why certain groups in the trade union movement have the foresight to expect hitherto unseen social conflicts when the occupying powers eventually give Germany a free rein. To find more concrete evidence you can take a ride on one of Hamburg’s underground trains, where you can travel second class along with relatively well-dressed and relatively well-maintained citizens, and third class along with ragged citizens whose faces are white as chalk or paper, faces which look as if they could never blush, faces which, you might think, would not even bleed if they were cut. These, the whitest faces in Germany, most definitely do not belong to the class of the least poor.
The Art of Sinking
Sink a little! Try to sink a little! When it comes to the art of sinking then there are worse and better artists. In Germany there are bad practitioners who keep themselves alive only by the thought that since they have so little to live for they have even less to die for. But there are surprisingly many who are willing to accept anything merely to survive.