VIII
AN IMPRESSION OF GERMANY
A traveler who is trying to form an idea of the trend of thought in a strange country has several methods open to him. He may attend meetings and read newspapers and pamphlets with diligence. He may seek out the abler men and women in politics and probe them with questions. He may listen, silently if possible, to the voices of the street. I used all these methods during a three weeks' stay in Germany. In the end, after many interviews and much reading, I left off where I began. Entering Germany from Austria, and wandering with many stoppages for three days and nights over the inconceivably disorganized railways of Bavaria and Saxony, I had the chance of listening to the talk of dozens of fellow-travelers, who came and went in the crowded carriages. Two conversations stand out in my memory as typical. A group of Bavarian ladies from a little country town had been telling of the civil war, and the lack of food, and of their efforts to clothe themselves and feed their children. "It is far worse than the war," said one of them. "During the war we had hope. We knew it must end one day. Now there is no hope." The other conversation began at Leipzig, in a carriage full of obviously well-to-do people, including a major and a colonel's wife. They discussed the forecasts of the coming peace from Paris, and for a long time what they said was conventional. No people could accept these terms and live: it was ruin, moral, political, and financial. It meant the end of Germany. Suddenly a handsome elderly man in the corner, a manufacturer as it turned out, intervened with something like this speech: "Well, you know, we set a very bad example. Don't forget what we did at Brest. The Entente is doing to us as we did to Russia. The real authors of this tragedy are Ludendorff and the Kaiser." I expected an angry protest. There was none. "That's true," came from two or three of the passengers. The soldier sat silent. The colonel's wife began to abuse the Crown Prince.
Up to the publication of the draft treaty these two conversations in the train would serve as a clue to German thinking. Two strands ran through it, a black abysmal hopelessness, and an almost morbid self-blame. Omitting the impenitent pan-German newspapers, whose influence is negligible, Vorwarts and the liberal Berliner Tageblatt had dropped the old attempts to minimize the responsibility of Germany's rulers for the war, and references to the contributory guilt of others were confined to qualifying phrases in parentheses. The condemnation of the violation of Belgium, the devastation of the Somme, and the U-boat excesses was general, and manifestly sincere. There was a real effort to understand the attitude of the Entente in these matters. The official offer to raise a corps of volunteer laborers to repair the havoc in France and Belgium was more than a tactical move designed to facilitate the return of the prisoners of war. German opinion is ashamed of Ludendorff's performances, and wishes not only to separate itself from them, but even to do penance for them.
My last impression of Berlin was of a city visibly hesitating between the old world and the new. The Majority Socialists had summoned a meeting of protest against a Peace of Violence. In the vast Konigsplatz and on the steps of the Reichstag a crowd had assembled which would fill Trafalgar Square three times over. The outer scene recalled the past. The ugly gilded figure of Victory was still poised on her pillar, and she glittered in the sun, as she has glittered on every day of spring since the "crowning mercy" of Sedan. Moltke turned his stone back to the crowd. The hideous wooden idol of Hindenburg lowered like some sullen African fetish above the more civilized vulgarities of Hohenzollern architecture. But there were red flags on the pedestal of Moltke's statue. On the platform of the colossal Hindenburg a frail little woman, one of the Socialist deputies, was making a glowing if somewhat sentimental speech, in which she predicted the early triumph of the principle of love over the principles of violence and hate. On the steps of the Reichstag, an oldish man, with a marvelously clear voice, Herr Fischer, Socialist Deputy in the Reichstag, held the attention of at least 5,000 men and women. I could hardly believe my ears as he passed from the more conventional denunciations of this peace, which cuts deep into the living body of the German people, and condemns it to slavery for a generation, to a frank handling of the iniquities of the war. He told his audience that they must be prepared to pay, innocent though they might be, for Ludendorff's crimes. He denounced the violation of Belgium, without a syllable of excuse or reservation. When he came to speak of the devastation of the Somme area he spared no detail. He bade his hearers imagine the sensations of the French peasant as he returns to this desert, and dwelt on the deliberate malice which had ruined not only the houses but the fruit trees. He insisted that all this must be made good to the last pfennig, and told the crowd that if they did not like the prospect, they must blame Ludendorff and not the Allies. Fischer is no exceptional man, a trusted follower of Scheidemann. The resolution contained this remarkable sentence:
The German people is ready to do penance (bilssen) for the sins of its former rulers, and to repair all the wrong that has been done.
That cannot have been an easy sentence to write at a moment when the whole people is smarting under the sense that in this peace the Allies have surpassed in cold-blooded brutality the worst precedents of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest.
English opinion is puzzled by the survival of certain compromised personalities in politics, but Herr Erzberger, for example, has to his credit a long and determined struggle against the U-boat campaign. The newspaper kiosques in Unter den Linden, in railway stations and even in hotels, displayed an infinite variety of pacifist pamphlets, which had a ready sale, while in the street hawkers were shouting every evening the title of a big pamphlet which explained "how our rulers lied us into the war." To this overwhelming current of opinion there was virtually no resistance. Among the Independent Socialists and the pacifists of long standing this tendency to put the whole blame for the war on the former rulers of Germany was so uncritical and so simple-minded, that few of them realized even faintly the menace of the Entente's imperialism. A fortnight ago Mr. Wilson's name was mentioned everywhere with veneration, and, stranger still, I met Germans who were startled and almost shocked because I did not share their admiration for Mr. Lloyd George. This mood visibly passed with the publication of the treaty. What Germans saw in it was above all a cold-blooded project for the destruction of a commercial competitor. The curious thing, however, about the comments on this cruel document was that few of them (I except the Vossische Zeitung) were definitely anti-English. The moral drawn, even in clerical newspapers, and by the popular Center leader Giesberts, was that "capitalism" had in this treaty unmasked itself.
For the extinction of all hope and energy in the German people, the continuation of the blockade during the last seven months is chiefly to blame. At the moment when the hope, I will not say of victory, but even of a balanced, negotiated peace, vanished suddenly, there was just one chance for the sanity of an unhappy people. That chance was work. We denied it, not merely by withholding food (which began to arrive, but only in small quantities, in April), but even more by denying raw materials. The chief industries were at a standstill. Swedish ores were for the first time cut off by the blockade, and with them the iron of Lorraine. I saw the textile towns of Saxony, with their forests of mill chimneys that smoked no longer. If it was true of millions of workmen that they could not work, it was true of others that they would not.1 1Urgent official posters in all towns exhorted the urban unemployed to betake themselves to the plenty of the country. They did not go; as some said, because they would not; as others said, because the Junker landowners would take no workmen from the towns, infected as these were supposed to be with Communism. The motive to work was absent. Wages were useless, for there was little to buy. Clothing was prohibitive in price. The stimulus of innocent pleasure was withdrawn. One cannot buy coffee or tea or tobacco (the best shops advertise a mixture containing 30 per cent.). There is practically no sugar or butter, and the jam is a nasty concoction of turnips. Why work, if wages will buy nothing? The unemployed allowance would just suffice to buy the inadequate rations of bread, meat, and potatoes. Since work was denied, the mind of the worker sought other interests. Some gambled—one sees them engaged in it at every street corner. More turned to politics. Restless, disillusioned, yet grasping at any new hope, they first expected that a government with a majority of Socialist Ministers would at least make a beginning in socializing industry. The Scheidemann Cabinet did nothing of the kind, nor has it, I believe, any intention of doing anything. It pleads financial difficulties, says this is a bad time to begin, deploys the obstructive prudence so natural to the "moderate." It has gone so far in resisting proposals to "socialize" suitable industries, that even the liberal Berliner Tageblatt and Frankfurter Zeitung have begun to blame its inaction. As the workmen saw Parliament withdraw itself to Weimar, there to lose itself in interminable committee-work over the Constitution, they lost faith in the old parliamentary forms. The demand for some form of "Soviet" as a recognized part of the Constitution became irresistible. With some a mere fashion, with others a mode of expressing discontent, with others again a real constructive idea, the Soviet had become a symbol of revolt. The crushing of Spartacus in no way weakened the movement. The only result of the demonstration that armed revolt is destined to defeat, has been to promote the strike. All the strikers, from the miners of the Ruhr to the bank clerks of Berlin, put forward political demands, and all of them based themselves on the Soviet idea. The strikes were in fact a far more deadly form of social disintegration than the fighting. They end only to begin again after an interval for recuperation. The Ruhr miners, for example, have worked for barely half the period from November to May, and the last week of April the output of coal had fallen in Germany generally to 1 per cent, of the normal quantity. The effect on the railways and on industry can be imagined. Capital values are being ruined steadily. At every big station one sees queues of dilapidated locomotives which cannot be repaired. Some of the coal-mines are hopelessly flooded. Machinery is everywhere being ruined for want of lubricating oil. For years the science and energy of this race fought the consequences of the blockade. I found myself continually marveling at the ingenuity which could make dress materials, bath towels, and string from woven paper, and replace the pneumatic tires of bicycles and cars with noisy but comfortable substitutes of steel springs. To-day one feels that the struggle has been abandoned; the tough will has been broken. The motive power of hope has failed.
The problem of to-day, with or without help and understanding from the West, is to re-create hope. It is partly a physical problem. A doctor would prescribe a rest-cure, with abundant and stimulating food, for the whole nation. It is not merely half-starved: it is in a state of nervous ill-health, that varies according to temperament from dull apathy to neurotic over-excitement. No one is surprised to hear of the physical consequences of nearly five years' progressive under-feeding. The children are sickly and stunted: tuberculosis rages: the old die off at the first touch of disease: the birth-rate falls in some towns and in some classes to near vanishing point: the death-rate rises: the average man and woman in the streets is visibly listless and anemic: the sturdiest workman is incapable of his former efforts and his habitual endurance. These things can be measured and proved by statistics. The more elusive nervous consequences of malnutrition are no less obvious, when one has seen these defeated peoples in the mass at public meetings or in street demonstrations. The discipline of North Germany, the geniality of South Germany are no longer characteristic. Thinking is active, feverish, and destructive. Berlin seems as deeply interested in a novel political theory as London is in a painted "flapper" or the Atlantic flight. The whole current of political thought is "to the Left," and the party leader dreads only that his followers should desert him for a less moderate competitor. I found myself at first inclined to treat the recklessness of this political speculation as a verbal extravagance. I changed my mind after I had seen unarmed crowds in Vienna facing rifle-fire with a barely sane contempt of death, and risking their lives to pick up a little coal or to cut a fallen horse into butcher-meat. I changed it even more after I had watched the ascendancy over the Berlin Workers' "Soviet" of Communist speakers, whose tones and gestures at once betrayed a neurotic condition. Years of poverty and semi-starvation have sapped the morals of the blockaded peoples. An elaborate social structure has fallen into decay, like a farm which returns to the wilderness when cultivation ceases. The once incorruptible civil service of Germany, with its tremendous pride in the ethics of the official caste, is no longer proof against bribes. Theft and even robbery have become frequent, as they were not in the old days, and one heard of girls who would sell themselves for a cake of soap. We are pleased to talk of Huns, but when history tells the whole story of the working of this blockade from the Urals to the Rhine, in the hospitals that lack drugs, linen, and anesthetics, in the garrets where dying children call to unemployed fathers, in the streets where desperate mobs pillage under the fire of brutalized troops, the next generation will ask with probing curiosity what devastation it was that Attila wrought to compare with this achievement of ours. Even if the blockade were lifted to-morrow, if food were poured in, and credits granted to restart industry, I doubt whether German politics would then, begin to enter a normal path. The sounder a people is, and the more its health recovers, the more will it seek to open some door of hope. The crime of this treaty is that it kills hope. Every one in Germany had hope for an end of wars: but there will be no rest, if these annexations to Poland are maintained. Every one had built on the League of Nations: it is at best a disappointing structure, and from it Germany is excluded. To unite with Austria would have been some compensation for the loss of Alsace and Posen, which every one knew to be just: that also is excluded. All this, however, is trifling, compared with the economic ruin that faces Germany. To lose every trading center, and footing, and facility in China, Africa, Turkey, Russia; to lose the entire mercantile fleet, to be denied reciprocal rights in tariffs, transport, foreign residence; to see no prospects of obtaining raw materials on equal terms—all this means, to say nothing of the humiliation, a return to the economic conditions of the middle of last century. With no means of restoring her foreign trade, Germany must somehow maintain a population which can live only by foreign trade. Apart altogether from the indemnity, that prospect means ruin in the most literal sense. It means that for some fifteen millions of the population it will be impossible by exchange to purchase the necessary food from abroad.1 1Mr. Hoover has predicted that ten or twelve million Germans will be forced to emigrate. Whither? North America is closed. The Argentine is legally open, and Russia one day will be open. But shall we tolerate a German "penetration" of Russia? Will the ghost of President Monroe allow Latin-America to be Germanized.
Of the indemnity I will say nothing: it cannot under these conditions be paid. One may ruin Germany, if one so pleases. One might exact, after a couple of years for recuperation, a reasonable contribution for reparation. One cannot do both. How will the future shape under this treaty? Will it, in the first place, be signed? The odds are that, sooner or later (probably sooner), it will be signed. There lives no single German who would sign it, save under the dread of literal starvation. I believe that the Democratic Party, roused by Theodor Wolff of the Tageblatt, is sincere in its refusal to sign, and, unless there are large modifications, its members will leave the Cabinet rather than sign. This party has no working-class electors: the middle class can always buy some food. The Majority Socialists and the Catholic Center are both divided, but both on the whole incline to sign in the last resort under protest, for their working-class followers (including the Center's Catholic women voters) would not pardon leaders who condemned them to starvation. The Independents are almost alone in saying openly that there is no alternative to signature; but they are too shrewd to relieve the present Ministry of the responsibility. Some change of persons is probable, both in the Cabinet and in the delegation at Versailles, before the treaty is signed.1 1These forecasts proved correct. The Democrats (Liberals) dropped out of the Ministry, and so did Scheidemann, with two or three others. The leading personalities are now Erzberger, Noske (who will probably ruin his colleagues), and the Foreign Minister, Hermann Miller, a moderate Majority Socialist, who retained his popularity with all sections during these years of bitter feud, and is a man of transparent honesty and much good sense. In any event the moral value of this signature will be less than nothing, for it will mean only that in the present condition of anemia half the nation lacks the heroism to starve. The act, whether of signing or not signing, will be fatal to the present Coalition. Their prestige at present is very low. If they sign, it will be lower still. If they should refuse to sign, the starving masses would wholly desert them.
I doubt whether as yet any single tendency is strong enough to dominate Germany after the hour of humiliation, and to hew out a road of hope. Parliament is flat, dull, and remote, and its ranks poor in notable personalities. There may be an attempt to form an all-Socialist Cabinet, but it could not secure unity. It must on the one hand omit the most compromised "Right" Socialists, especially the detested Noske. On the other hand, neither the Communist leaders nor even such "Left" Independents as Däumig are likely to join it, because they believe in a pure Soviet administration. Even if the more moderate Independents (Haase, Oscar Cohn, Kautsky, Breitscheid) and the "Left" Majority (Wiesel, Kaliski, Cohen-Reuss) were to form a government without a majority, but with the tacit consent of the Assembly, it would be wrecked before long by the revolutionary tactics of the Extreme Left. The Left leaders have learned by recent events that armed insurrection is doomed to failure, but they intend to continue the policy of strikes. The Communist leaders whom I saw impressed me as nervous wrecks. Behind them is an army of desperate men, the war-cripples, the unemployed, the unemployable. In the general mood of despair the future belongs to the most reckless group. No one has much to lose, and even for the propertied class property has lost its value if trade is out of the question and the workers will not work. The Versailles plan of exploiting Germany for a generation omits all reckoning with human nature. As the Nation put it, men are not bees who will go on working if all the honey is taken periodically from the hive.
Sane men were absorbed in one problem only—how to induce the workers to work again. Without some hope in the future it cannot be solved. Expedients for creating hope are many and contradictory. The old military party dreams, of course, of a revanche in the old style, and Leagues of Officers discuss the possibility of an air war, and play with schemes of a more or less secret militia. Their public as yet is small, and the general sense condemns this reversion to the past. The next war will not be a shock of Powers, dynasties, and diplomatic coalitions: it will be an economic struggle with the class war raging beneath it. There is much talk of an alliance with Soviet Russia, and some Pan-Germans, notably Professor Elzbacher, advised the adoption of Bolshevism en Hoc. That seemed a trifle sudden, for all Berlin was still covered with ugly official posters depicting Bolshevism as a vampire. The real Communists refused to croquet with this faction. A curious "Continental" movement, with Bloch, Kaliski, and Cohen-Seuss as its leaders, has some footing among the Left Socialist majority. It believes in an understanding with France and Russia to break the Anglo-American economic ascendancy. The idea of any understanding with France seems fantastic. The "Continentalists" justify their expectation on the ground that France and Germany are both crippled by the war: there must be a fraternity in suffering: the lame man must help the paralytic. They seem to forget that these two nations crippled each other: moreover, France has this compensation, that her Allies seem content to allow her a revival of her ancient military ascendancy in Europe. Though there are many difficulties in arranging an economic understanding with Russia across the barrier of Poland (whose railways may not welcome German through traffic), this half of the policy is clearly sound. None the less, though there are brilliant men (notably Julius Kaliski) in this circle, I doubt if it is more as yet than a group of literary frondeurs. The orthodox Socialist position, to which the Independents give the most confident expression, is, of course, that this treaty, as cruel as the Peace of Brest, will last no longer. They foresee an early change of opinion, perhaps a revolutionary change, in France and Britain, and predict that the International will insist on the revision of the treaty. That may be the one sane hope, but no one who has watched English opinion this week will be disposed to expect much in the way of action at a very early date. There m?y be a disposition to admit Germany to the League of Nations after two years. The disturbing question is what will happen during the period of waiting. In any event, could a League of Nations, tied by its present Constitution, ever force Poland to disgorge her unjustifiable acquisitions?
I cannot believe myself that this faint hope, fed with a few perfunctory resolutions from London and Paris, will have life enough in it to induce the German worker to desert the leadership of the Extremists. The two real forces in Germany to-day are the new volunteer army on the one hand and the revolutionary workers on the other—the machine gun and the strike. This new Pretorian Guard, raised by Noske to crush Spartacus, numbers about 450,000 men. A large proportion even in the ranks are ex-officers or university students, and the inducement to join it is chiefly abundant food, good clothes, and high pay. The signature of the treaty will require the disbandment of three-fourths of this new force, and the relics of the old army (about 300,000 men). The immediate future might depend on the accident whether a civilian Ministry chooses the Corps which are to survive, or whether an enterprising Corps chooses the Ministry. A powerful caste is about to be ruined, and the disbanded men and officers will be potentially revolutionary material. That Germany in its present condition can be policed by an army, however efficient, which numbers only 100,000 men, seems to me improbable. If Noske or a successor attempts to do with 100,000 men what he has done, none too easily, with 700,000, he will assuredly fail. On the other hand, the adoption of a conciliatory social policy would probably come too late. The popular expedient is to attempt a compromise with the Soviet system, on something like English Guild Socialist lines—a two-chamber Parliament, one House on the present territorial plan, and the other on a basis of industrial representation. That would be at the best an unstable compromise, and the Left Socialist Wing would go on fighting for "the real thing," the dictatorship of the proletariat. The treaty is triple nonsense. It expects Germany to earn vast sums, and to earn them without the right and facility to trade abroad. It expects some government to impose this servitude on the German workers, yet denies to that government the army which alone might hold them down in outward obedience. It robs fifteen million Germans of subsistence, and omits to provide them with a field for emigration.
I am inclined to risk a prediction of the consequences of enforcing this treaty. They will not be interesting or eventful. For months to come Germany may be forgotten. She lacks the energy or the unity to act, though spasmodic essays, at positive action in opposite directions, may be attempted. The chief consequences will be negative. The workers will not work, or in so far as they work, it will be fitfully, half-heartedly, like angry, weary, and helpless men. So far from resenting this attitude, the middle-class employees will largely share it. Already the lines of class cleavage between the hand-worker and miserably sweated brain-worker have almost disappeared. This "ca' canny" mood will affect the employers no less than the men. The natural tendency to repair machinery and restart trade will be checked at every turn by the knowledge that between the burden of internal taxation1 1The whole burden of internal taxation in Germany for the coming financial year (1919-20), excluding the indemnities altogether, is according to the new Finance Minister, Herr Erzberger, 25 milliard marks. Herr Wassermann, a director of the Deutsche Bank, kindly showed me his calculations undertaken to estimate the total income of the nation for the past year. Including all taxable income, allowing for incomes below the level of taxation and adding a margin for concealment and evasion, he reached a total national income of 48 milliard marks. amounting to more than half the national income, and the load of the foreign tribute, all chance of appreciable profits has disappeared. Banks will refuse credit, for until the first two years are over no one will know what Germany's liabilities really are, nor until she is admitted to the League will her chance of trade be worth estimating. The ruin will go on unchecked, and the irresistible conviction will grow that the only chance of restarting life lies in repudiating debts, or in socializing without compensation. The Entente, in short, by this treaty, is reducing Germany to a despair as deep as Russia's. In the long run, the only possible field for German energy is Russia, and whether Lenin rules or Kolchak, no force can ultimately keep the German population from carrying its skill and science to the mental desert of the East. In the end, the two peoples whom the West has wronged, will seek their revanche together. But for a vivid, angry, resourceful, positive movement of protest and resistance, one need not look to-morrow. That in the end would be better for the world, for courage may do much to glorify ruin. Lethargy, despair, decay, the decline of an elaborate civilization, the slow lapse into disrepair of a good machine, that will be the immediate consequence of this treaty that murders hope. The German nation will wear itself out in abortive motions of unrest. It will flounder: it will sulk: it will decay. Injure us it cannot, save by its sickness, but this corpse is big enough to poison Europe.
London, May 20th.