Soul of the Age (42 page)

A dear friend of mine
341
is severely ill; the doctor thinks that he will not survive. He had a stroke a year ago. It is strange. This man, who was brought up along strictly Catholic, clerical lines by some priests, kept in monastic seclusion and inadequately fed, has retained the stigma that was inflicted on him in two rather infantile ways. First of all, he has remained hungry physically, and can never get enough; he used to get up at night occasionally and eat pounds of sugar or bread, etc. Second, throughout his life he retained the spiteful pose of the atheist and rebel, and as an old man wrote a very scholarly book directed against his personal enemy, Yahweh.
342
Now, close to death, he gratefully permits the Catholic prayers to be spoken, not by the priest, but by a woman who is helping care for him, and he says his
ora pro me
or
ora pro nobis
like a believer.

Spring is always very difficult for me, especially the gout in my hands and feet, and yet it can still be very beautiful. May it also bring you some warm, beautiful days!

TO OTTO BASLER

Easter 1945

Thanks for your last letter. I hope that this is really your last stint of military service.

Unfortunately, that Easter poem
343
does not merit your enthusiastic response. Of course, the sentiments are all fine and good, but the how lacks the true blossom or intangible quality that alone makes a poem worthwhile. It is well meant, but nothing more.

Since I have occasionally mentioned my poor friend and publisher Suhrkamp, I have copied the latest news about him for you.
344
It's doubtful he is still alive. Those apes in England have suddenly become furious at all of Germany, as if the German people had really perpetrated the abominations in the camps, but nobody is saying a word about the thousands of quiet stoics and heroes who, like Suhrkamp, repeatedly confronted a superior force, thereby risking life and liberty, and nobly represented the German people in its most difficult hour. The English have only just discovered the abominations in the camps, even though magazines in Prague were already describing them in 1934, sufficient grounds, one would think, for the English diplomats in Berlin to distance themselves from Hitler and stop genuflecting, such apes! Nobody says a word about that nowadays. And in Italy the Allies have to this day kept many people imprisoned who were persecuted by the Germans and fascists and are commonly regarded as courageous anti-fascists.

TO GÜNTHER FRIEDRICH

Montagnola, June 18, 1945

Thank you for your letter, which arrived the day before yesterday. I am sorry I cannot send you anything apart from these lines.
345
Until recently, I could at least send an occasional present of books to German émigré friends in England, but since the so-called end of the war that has also ceased; the post office will not accept anything apart from letters. And we have had no contact at all with Germany since the capitulation: I haven't heard anything about my sisters and friends or about my poor, faithful publisher, who was incarcerated for a long time in Gestapo prisons—I don't even know whether he is still alive. So I can't tell you anything about your people, but there is no cause for worry, although there will most likely be food shortages in Germany soon and they will probably be better off if they don't happen to live in one of the larger cities.

In your letter you say that it would have been better if Hitler had died in that assassination attempt. That is correct, since Germany would indeed be in a slightly better situation were that so. But Germany accepted Hitler, and invaded and plundered Bohemia, Austria, Poland, Norway, and, finally, half the world, slaughtering millions of people and plundering one country after another; those sad facts would still be true if Hitler had died earlier. Germany's misfortunes and disgrace are rooted not in its current suffering and defeat, but in the continual abominations that it perpetrated for years. Even prior to 1939, we used to grit our teeth in anger when we heard your recruits striking up the song: “Today Germany is ours, tomorrow the whole world,” and we are now saddened by the thought that your people has only a limited awareness of what it has wrought.

Enough of that. It's just that I didn't want to gloss over this issue in my first letter to you.

May your fate be tolerable and may you yet live to witness some of the reconstruction.

TO MARIANNE WEBER

[
ca. August 1945
]

Your letter and one from the Engels reached me at Rigi, where I have been trying to make sure my wife gets some rest. Today I can only acknowledge having received it. I shall soon be back home, but am not doing well, have no energy. My wife was ill and completely run-down; at least she is recuperating now.

You take C. G. Jung, etc., far too seriously. Since the end of the First World War, Germany has been behaving suspiciously and making itself hated in the eyes of the whole world, and has ended up destroying half the world in an almost diabolical manner; so the entire world naturally hates the Germans, and does not stop to ask each and every individual whether he might not have been an opponent of Hitler's. And, ultimately, there is a small kernel of truth underlying this comprehensive hatred and guilt. Why, for instance, in all those years since 1923, did a nation of eighty million people not produce a single individual with the courage to shoot the huge beast?

You ought not to expect a world that has been robbed, besmirched, and destroyed by the Germans to display much interest in the sufferings of the more decent Germans. There are gaping wounds everywhere, over here as well. I have some too.

I would add: While your anger at professors such as Jung is understandable, it's also rather pointless. You people need to learn how to stop taking those admonitory sermons personally; any other kind of response betrays a vestige of nationalism.

TO CARL GEMPERLE

August 22, 1945

Thanks for your letter. I do not have sufficient energy to respond adequately. I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiments expressed by H. Bischoff, and would just like to add that I have never complained about a dearth of readers in Germany, and never had any occasion to do so. Hitler (or rather Goebbels and Rosenberg) wiped me out over there, and even he needed some help from American bombs.

The average Swiss takes pride in his democratic virtue, even though almost half the governing National Council was still pro-fascist only yesterday. When he sees one of those horror films about German camps, he often forgets that it is not just the Satans and chief devils who are Germans, but also the majority of their victims. And these Germans, who have suffered for years, not just since 1939 but also for years beforehand under Hitler, lost everything, their positions, honor, freedom, and the chance to have any impact; they suffered and starved in prisons and camps, and today they are perhaps the wisest and most mature people in Europe. I have many friends among them.

TO HIS COUSIN FRITZ GUNDERT

October 23, 1945

You wrote some time ago saying that a poem of mine, “Toward Peace,” had been printed in a Stuttgart newspaper and that the final two lines, which were also the most important ones, had been omitted.
346
I protested to the press office of the American Army, more as a matter of principle than with any real hope of receiving an answer. I complained about the unauthorized use of the poem and also about its having been mangled. I have just received a less than beautiful reply. I'm enclosing a copy for your information.
347
I have not yet decided how (or whether) to respond. I don't feel I should have to answer in any way to a man capable of writing such a stupid and nasty letter; I am not a vanquished Germanic slave in the occupied area and am not inclined to explain my actions to some little officer. If there is no possibility of a diplomatic approach, our authorities could perhaps lodge a complaint at the American Embasssy, but it's not clear that they will actually do so, and I may have to respond publicly. In any case, you now know why you will never again come across anything of mine in those newspapers. This affair hasn't done me any harm; I don't believe that I shall ever get another penny from Germany. But we heard some good news yesterday, not firsthand, but from a reliable source: Suhrkamp is still alive, and people are trying to get him into Switzerland (I have also tried to be of some help).

There was a nice letter from Wilhelm Schussen
348
in Tübingen. Mergenthalerstrasse, where he used live, is now proudly called Ebertstrasse. That would be fine if the entire German “Republic” had not voted so unanimously for old Hindenburg!

How often I think of you!

TO BISHOP THEOPHIL WURM

Montagnola, November 3, 1945

Thank you for your letter, which I received the day before yesterday.
349
I was extremely sorry to hear that they have not yet given you permission to travel. My experience corroborates what you say about the disinclination of powerful people to think in differentiated terms, etc. As a result of Hitler and Goebbels, I was deprived of the proceeds and resonance of my life's work, and now the person entrusted by the occupying forces with the task of reconstituting the German press informs me that I belong to a group of people who will never again be allowed to speak out in Germany. The man may be malicious, but it is more probable that he is just not well enough informed and too complacent to remedy that deficiency. This whole thing is certainly disgusting, yet we are glad that Germany has been defeated and that the daily killing and torturing of thousands of people has finally come to an end. My wife is Jewish and comes from Bukovina; she hasn't had any news of her only sister for a year, and has lost almost all her relatives and close friends in the gas ovens at Auschwitz, etc. It is certainly true that we are still very much shaken by these events.

I had no difficulty adopting Swiss citizenship after seeing virtually all of Germany sabotaging its own republic in the early years after the first war and thus showing clearly that the country hadn't learned anything at all from the war. I hadn't managed to take that step during the war, in spite of my denunciations of the aggressive tactics of the Germans. As a kind of warning, in one of my books I anxiously sketched the specter of the coming second war, but people just laughed that off politely. So I bade farewell to political Germany. Nowadays I receive many letters from Germans who were still young in 1918; they say that the tone of my essays from those years still rings in their ears, and they wished they, and everybody else, had taken those warnings more seriously at the time.

Well, it was easier for me than for others not to be a nationalist. Our family was very international, which, of course, accorded well with the mission to the pagans, and I came under the influence early on not just of Luther and Bengel but also of the Indian world. People like my grandfather Gundert and my father had no reason to be nationalists, but another generation needed to emerge before that position was completely clarified. And now we are confronted with such terrifying new situations and tasks! I agree with you that penal measures and the principle of revenge will be of no great use, and that those who are suffering the most at present are precisely the ones who must free themselves from that way of thinking. I often feel glad that I am so old and rickety. But I cannot abandon hope when I think of all that thoughtfulness, goodwill, and insight acquired by dint of suffering; I find traces of that in some of the letters from German friends and readers, especially those in POW camps in England, America, Italy, France, Egypt, etc.

TO FRANZ GHISLER

January
[
ca. 15
]
1946

My wife has just been reading me some selected letters from the heap of still unread mail; she read out a long, moving letter from Dr. Hans Huber in Heidelberg, and I immediately began thinking about my reply. Your letter, which was next because of the postmark, brought very painful tidings of the termination of our forwarding arrangement.
350
That will really impede many of my efforts, and it is also happening at a sad moment, since my elder sister
351
is hopelessly ill in Korntal.

The other question, about the street name in Constance,
352
fits in with everything else one hears about the concerns and actions of the victors. Let them go ahead and name that little street after Eisenhower, Truman, or somebody else! I really couldn't care less.

I'm reluctantly enclosing the Rigi Journal for that officer of yours. If you had not recommended this course, I would never even have made a token gesture indicating any degree of compliance with the victors. But let's go ahead now.

I found it odd that one of my crimes, according to America (or rather Herr Bekessy), is that I wasn't delighted when the German cities were destroyed. The people who come up with ideas like that! Actually, it's a great exaggeration to call them “ideas.” I have never criticized the way the Americans conducted the war, either in private or in public, but have always fully supported it, even though I was not sufficiently blind to miss the fact that American's entry into the war was, to some extent, a good economic move. No, I welcomed every Allied victory. But this is the first time anybody has ever demanded that I should be delighted by the by-products of these victories: the destruction of so many cities and cathedrals, libraries and publishing houses (including my entire life's work).

No, I shall not get involved, and if America insists, it can go ahead and ban me for the next fifty or a hundred years. The intellect cannot prevail against force, just as quality cannot compete with quantity. We want to die without ever having made even the slightest concession to those surface currents in world history.