THE HAMMER AND THE ANVIL
SIR,—Your recent article Belgrade and Berlin brings to mind a quotation from Goethe used by Mr. Dimitrov in his concluding speech from the dock at the Reichstag fire trial. "You must rise or you must fall. You must rule and win, or serve and lose, you must suffer or triumph, you must be an anvil or hammer." Are we witnessing the inevitable tragedy inherent in such an outlook on life and politics ? It would seem that Mr. DimitrOv and his fellow European Communists failed to grasp that between the hammer and the anvil there must always lie, for either to do its work, a mass of molten metal. This must be willing to be beaten and twisted into shape, or else to be cast aside as so much scrap iron. In the cosmology of Russian Communism it would seem inevitable that the hammer should remain, in practice, in Moscow.
But the Marxian interpretation of such Germanic symbolism as the hammer and the anvil is not without poignant significance to my genera- tion, born in the aftermath of one world war and reaching its manhood at the beginning of another. Such symbolism seems to me the antithesis of the Christian approach to life and politics. For a philosophy based on the foundations of religion shows clearly that it is possible to fall most horribly, if the wrong methods are used to rise ; that it is, in fact, possible to lose by winning, to serve while ruling, and to triumph by suffering Finally, it shows that the hammer of life belongs to God, while an inevitable Nemesis awaits those who would wield it without the greatest humility and who make no attempt to be themselves the anvil of the divine will.
Except for those who follow the illusion of omnipotence and permanence for their thoughts and actions, is not the Cross still the most contemporary symbol of man's inhumanity to man ?---Yours sincerely, • Travellers' Club, Pall Mall, S.W.r. ANTHONY STRACHEY.
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