OPTIMIST You surely don’t mean that story about a rape?
GRUMBLER Well, whether Hungarian territorials or an elite Viennese regiment have doffed their caps and asked the women of their own country, let alone those of the enemy, for a glass of water — I leave the decision, one way or the other, to your optimism, unshakeably grounded as it seems to be in the reporting of our War Press Bureau.
OPTIMIST Don’t you find that, after all, we too give the enemy his due?
GRUMBLER Yes, we are sometimes content with the humour of idiotic picture postcards.
OPTIMIST No, I mean we really sometimes do him justice.
GRUMBLER If it makes people laugh, then yes. As when they related the curious fact — for the central European intelligentsia won’t be caught telling the truth about the most maligned people in Europe — the curious fact, then, that the Russians stopped shooting over the Catholic Christmas, and instead left behind in their trenches a seasonal greeting to the enemy and hopes for peace.
OPTIMIST And the Austrians, I’m sure, responded in kind.
GRUMBLER Certainly, for instance a Doctor Fischl, an articled clerk until 1 August, then mobilized when the age of grandeur arrived, had a field postcard printed for the troops, inscribed: “Tomorrow the Russians celebrate their Christmas — time to tickle their fancy good and proper.”
OPTIMIST That was a joke.
GRUMBLER Quite right, it was a joke.
OPTIMIST One mustn’t generalize.
GRUMBLER I do. You can depend upon my unfairness. If militarism served to combat the despicable conditions at home, I would be a patriot. If it accepted those unfit for military service, if it waged war in order to deliver these human dregs to the enemy, I would be a militarist! But it sacrifices what is valuable and procures haloes for the dregs, even, when things go wrong in the field, crowning them victors over their own side. Only this way of looking at things can explain the patience with which the majority of mankind put up with an insult to nature such as universal conscription. Soldiers treated as trash know that the idea they are fighting for is their own survival, and in that sense they even fight for the Fatherland, which they know at heart to be an alien idea, though it is drummed into them day after day by an infantile ideology. Would they not otherwise come at last to resent this coercion to die for an alien idea, a form of serfdom a thousand times more oppressive than the worst excesses of despised reactionary tsarism? But the final outcome is that they make the idea of the Fatherland their own. Would people who have never enjoyed the privileges of a military career otherwise submit under duress to sharing its dangers? Allow themselves to be torn from their profession, their livelihood, their family, to be abused in barracks before dying to retain Bukovina? The fact that they would be shot beforehand if they refused to die for Bukovina is, of course, an immediate motive, and one which in itself provides a complete explanation. But conscription could not have been introduced if the great majority had not known that they themselves, though seeming victims of autocratic cravings, would finally vanquish their oppressors. You see, I too am an optimist. I cannot bring myself to think of mankind as a totally impotent rabble, willing to mire itself in mud and misery and mortal peril — just to please an alien elite.
OPTIMIST But surely the exaltation which the call of the Fatherland creates is a better explanation than coercion or personal advantage.
GRUMBLER The Fatherland? It’s true that, of all those who instigate such spectacles, the voice of the Fatherland still retains the greatest hypnotic power. But the intoxication which lulls all suspicion of how totally defenceless they are would fail to work on the intelligent ones who are more alert, were it not for their underlying feeling that a victory would make them masters of the realm.
OPTIMIST But the war hasn’t provided that yet.
GRUMBLER They merely avoid thinking about that, so they can relax for once. They don’t need to knock their brains out until the enemy does it for them, something they no longer have sufficient power to imagine. For war turns life into a nursery, where it is always the other side that started it, where the one always boasts of the crimes he accuses the other of, and where the scuffles turn into war games. When war comes, one learns to be less appreciative of children playing soldiers. It is much too early a preparation for the childishness of grown-ups.
OPTIMIST On the contrary, the children’s game of playing soldiers has received a new impetus. Do you know the game “Let’s Play World War”?
GRUMBLER It’s the other side of the coin, and every bit as squalid as the real-life “Let’s Play Potty Training.” Given this humanity, one might wish their infants to have their first successes starving each other or bombing each other to death, in any case, liquidating their nurses’ clientele.
OPTIMIST If you had your way, mankind would be in line for extermination even before a world war. But, thanks be to God, it is up-and-coming—
GRUMBLER Up in arms, you mean.
OPTIMIST Marching onward and upward from generation to generation. You mentioned five pages of Jean Paul that could not be written today, but I’d say the invention of Graf Zeppelin has by no means deprived Germany of the possibility of producing poets. There are poets today who are not to be despised.
GRUMBLER And yet I despise them.
OPTIMIST And now, above all, now that it’s wartime, German poetry has received an impulse which has revived it.
GRUMBLER A pity it didn’t receive a box on the ears.
OPTIMIST What you say is rude, but not true. Whatever you might think of the war, the work produced by our poets breathes fire in much the same way this age of grandeur has engulfed our daily life, setting it alight.
GRUMBLER The poet’s fiery mouth has one immediate point of contact with daily life: the hackneyed phraseology that our poets, adaptable as they are, adopted at once. They latched on promptly, before their bewildered clients could start to make demands. German poets! You are an inveterate optimist, but your optimism would soon turn to mockery if you tried to pass off those works as proof of the grandeur of the age. I can still differentiate between the poor philistines compelled to swap their office desks for the trenches, and — several levels lower on the moral scale — the miserable scribblers at home, their horrified scrawls worse than mockery, namely editorials or rhymes, who strike tenth-hand attitudes that were already false when first concocted, and who shamelessly turn the enthusiasm of those people breathing fire into a fabricated call for action. In all those works, I haven’t found a single line that I would not have turned away from in peacetime, with an expression more indicative of nausea than of participating in a revelation. The only worthy line I’ve set eyes on is in the Emperor’s Manifesto, which some sensitive stylist must have brought off after soaking up what it must feel like to have a lifetime’s experience. “I have weighed everything in the balance.” Times to come, even more than the times we have already endured, will show that weighing things even more carefully would have averted this unspeakable horror. But taken by itself, in isolation, the line has the power of a poem, above all perhaps if you sense the train of thought behind it. Look, over there — on that advertising pillar you can still feel its impact.
OPTIMIST Where?
GRUMBLER —Oh, what a shame, the very part of the manifesto containing that line is obscured by Wolf in Gersthof’s face. Behold, like Tyrtaios spurring the Spartans on with his martial elegies, the true face of this war. And only now a poem!
OPTIMIST I know your exaggerated way of looking at things. You don’t think there is such a thing as chance. But still, Wolf in Gersthof, someone I personally don’t particularly like—