(Change of scene.)
Scene 12
At a dance in Hasenpoth in Latvia. Baltic gentleman and Baltic lady in conversation.
GENTLEMAN My dear.
LADY What d’ya mean?
GENTLEMAN You’re not dancing.
LADY Naa.
GENTLEMAN Why?
LADY If I dance, I sweat. If I sweat, I stink. So: don’t dance, don’t sweat, don’t stink.
(Change of scene.)
Scene 13
Appeal hearing in the district court of Heilbronn
PUBLIC PROSECUTOR —In June of this year the accused gave birth to a child whose father is a French prisoner of war. The Frenchman, who is a waiter, has been in custody since 1914. From the end of 1914 until 1917 he was on the castle estate. Here he was employed in many different tasks, especially work in the fields and gardens. The accused Baroness was herself a regular participant in these activities. In the case before the court, the accused attempted to charge the French father of her child with rape. However, the court lent no credence to the charge. It was conspicuous that this was the first time the accused had put forward this defence. The fact that, for a full six months after the inception of the pregnancy, the French prisoner remained in employment on the estate itself rendered the submission invalid. Consequently, the court found the accused Baroness guilty. She was sentenced to five months’ imprisonment. Her incarceration took place immediately as there was reason to suspect she might abscond. The grounds for the judgment emphasized as aggravating circumstances the defence commonly advanced, also in this case, of charging the prisoner with having committed a crime, as well as the social position and upbringing of the accused, while her previous, totally unblemished, reputation and inexperience in sexual matters were adduced as mitigating factors. — My lords, if it please the court, in view of the outrageous leniency of this sentence, I need not waste words. The facts of the case, namely unnatural intercourse with a prisoner of war, have been adequately clarified in material terms. There is no need to spell out the immoral effect of such a shocking example. I have no doubt but that the court will share my feeling that we are on the brink of an abyss from which offended morality can only be saved if we bear one thing in mind: what would become of the Fatherland were every German housewife to sink so low! (General agitation.) With this in mind, I respectfully ask the court to reject the defence’s action for annulment, and instead to increase the sentence to two years.
(The court adjourns for deliberation.)
SOMEONE IN THE COURTROOM (hands a newspaper to his neighbour) Tremendous successes of our bombers north-west of Arras and behind the Champagne front. Over the last three days and nights some 50,000 pounds of bombs were dropped.
NEIGHBOUR The moral effect was certainly no less than the material effect.
(Change of scene.)
Scene 14
Optimist and Grumbler in conversation.
OPTIMIST The development of weapons thus far, with poison gas, the tank, the submarine, and the cannon with a range of 75 miles, has brought about a situation—
GRUMBLER —in which the army should be dishonourably discharged from the Combined Services for cowardice in the face of the enemy. According to the military conception of honour, the world would then finally attain eternal peace. For the one thing that remains inconceivable is what possible connection exists between some chemist’s inspiration, in itself a disgrace to science, and heroism. How fame in battle can be attributed to a “chlorious” offensive without choking in shame on its own poison gas?
OPTIMIST But surely it’s immaterial what weapon does the killing? How far do you go along with technical arms development?
GRUMBLER Not an inch, but if you forced me, I’d say as far as the crossbow. Naturally, since men cannot live without killing each other, it’s immaterial how they do so, and mass murder is the more practical way. But technical developments thwart man’s romantic impulse. As we know, this is satisfied only by personal confrontation, man to man. The courage of the man with a weapon may match up to a growing mass of enemies; but courage degenerates into cowardice when the mass obscures the soldier behind it. And it becomes quite pitiful when the soldier himself has no overview of mass warfare. We’ve reached that stage now. But worse is to come, hatched in laboratories according to the Devil’s all too scrutable ways. Tanks and poison gases, developed to the point of perfection by the competing nations, eventually quit the field in favour of bacteria. There will be no resistance to the redemptive idea that epidemics, once merely the consequences of war, should now become the primary weapons. But since man will be unable to dispense with a romantic pretext for his evil-doing, the commander whose plans the bacteriologist will implement will still be wearing military uniform, just as the chemist does today. Should the Germans be credited with the glory of inventing, the others with the villainy of perfecting these weapons, or else the other way round? — You decide which is the more hopeful scenario.
OPTIMIST All the same, with their highly developed military technology, the Germans have surely proved—
GRUMBLER —that Hindenburg’s conquests and triumphs surpass those of Joshua. Modern methods are better adapted to the objective of destroying and exterminating the enemy, and a breakthrough after gassing three Italian brigades trumps any coup produced by Jehovah’s miracle weapons.
OPTIMIST So you see a similarity between the modern German thirst for conquest and that of the ancient Hebrews?
GRUMBLER Up to and including the similarity of their gods! Among the peoples who have played a world-historical role, they are the only two who think themselves worthy of the honour of possessing a national God. While all the other peoples confronting each other on this crazy planet merely share the delusion of aspiring to victory in the name of the same God, the Germans follow the ancient Hebrews by adopting a separate God of their own, one to whom the most horrific sacrifices are offered up in battle. The privilege of being the chosen people seems to have passed straight down to them, and of all the nations whose minds have been turned by the idea of nationality, they are the one which has most frequently identified itself as such, incessantly addressing itself as the German nation, and even seeing the word “German” as an adjective capable of comparative and superlative inflection. But the connection between the pan-German and the Hebraic life-form and their expansionary drive at the expense of others deserves a broader and deeper analysis. Except that the ancient Hebrews always paid lip service to the commandment “Thou shalt not kill”, thereby finding themselves again and again — to the greater glory of God — in dreadful, though always genuinely felt and conscience-stricken, divergence from the laws of Moses, while the modern Germans make no bones about claiming Kant’s categorical imperative as a philosophical justification for “Give ’em a good kicking!” It is also true, of course, that in Prussian ideology, by virtue of the country’s familiar confusion of concepts, even the Lord of Hosts has degenerated into the commander in chief and the Kaiser’s superior officer.
OPTIMIST Only his ally, surely. Who but you would have come up with the bizarre notion that there existed some spiritual link between Hindenburg and Joshua?
GRUMBLER Schopenhauer: who thought the institution of a separate God, one who makes a “covenant” pledging to His people the lands of their neighbours which must then be won through plunder and murder, went hand in hand with that of a national God to whom everything that sustains the life of other peoples must be sacrificed. Kant: who deplored the victor’s invocation of the Lord of Hosts as a typically Israelite custom, and whose warnings anticipated the Kaiser’s fondness for invoking the philosopher and the Lord of Hosts in the same breath. What an antithesis: on the one hand the royal Prussian Kantian, with his bulletproof faith in his ally in Königsberg; and on the other the warning by Kant himself to respect the moral laws decreed by the Father of mankind and beg the heavens to forgive the grievous sins committed through the barbarity of war. When I next appear on the public platform in Berlin, I shall test out this devastating and all but annihilating contrast under the title “A Kantian and Kant.”