GERMANY THE ENIGMA
The Dear Monster. By G. R. Halkett. (Cape. ms. 6d.)
SLNCE we are all more or less preoccupied nowadays with the problem why we get on so well with Germans and so badly with Germany, this is an important as well as a fascinating book. Its author is a German, not yet forty, who has a Scottish name derived from a Scottish ancestor, but who has never thought of himself as anything but German and never lived in this country until he came here as /In émigré in 1936. There has been nothing remarkable about his career. Born in a well-to-do family, the son of an army officer, he was a cadet during the War and reached the front in its last year. Living through the chaos and confusion—it could hardly be called a revolution—of 1919, he took service for a short time under a more or less mythical Lithuanian Government, became a university student, dabbled in art, worked for some years as a journalist, and lastly served as an officer in the (at first camouflaged) Air Force.
Except that he is now bitterly anti-Nazi, it would be diffi- cult to assign a political label to Mr. Halkett, and he never seems to have belonged to any political party. Perhaps a certain subconscious incompatibility between the military and monarchical tradition, in which he was brought up, and the vaguely " Left " and Republican leanings imbibed in the post-War debticle kept his political sympathies fluid. Perhaps he has something of that fundamentally non-political outlook which he rightly attributes to the majority of Germans. When the Kaiser fled to Holland, " monarchy itself committed suicide. Monarchy became a matter of no consequence and of no interest in Germany. For the monarchist, abdication without putting up any defence meant the breakdown of everything. For the anti-monarchist, it was the confirmation of his opinion that this system had always been hypocritical and decaying." Where all deeply felt values had collapsed, the Weimar Republic merely filled a void. Worse still, it had been presented to Germany from without, and was accepted (like membership of the League of Nations later on) with resignation, but no enthusiasm. " As the Germans had been provided with a republic without much asking and almost without struggling for it, one could not be over-surprised when they did not know how to run it."
All this has been said before. But Mr. Halkett says it again with the added conviction of personal experience. More original, and equally convincing, is his emphasis on the affini- ties of National Socialism with the pre-War and post-War Youth Movement—the Wandervogel, the Free German Youth, the Communities of Craftsmen and other characteristic pro- ducts of youthful German idealism. " Here the phraseology was invented which was later taken up by the Hitlers and Goebbelses. No politics. No system. Feelings. Blood. Faith. Enthusiasm. Above all: Gemeinschaft, which literally means Community, but which sounds deeply mystical and supernatural to a German ear." And if it be asked how this passion for unlimited philosophising goes with the regi- mentation of the intellect, and how the ideal of spiritual self- sufficiency fits in with the standardisation of the totalitarian police-state, the answer must be found in the bewildering and apparently irreconcilable Anglo-German conflict about the meaning of the word freedom. There are many Germans who sincerely assert today that they are more free than Englishmen. That inner freedom which consists in the fulfil- ment of a cherished ideal is compatible with the most rigid external discipline. Democratic freedom is external and illusory because it involves the voluntary acceptance of a strait-jacket of convention. In this (from the English stand- point) bizarre conception there lurks one important truth. Democracy only works where it can count on a large measure of self-restraint on all sides. It will not work in Germany because most Germans prefer to be restrained by some external authority rather than suffer the indignity of restraining themselves.
So even Germany itself was not a political reality, but a dream in the minds of idealists and philosophers. " If you were not content to love your Bavarian mountains or your Brandenburg lakes . . . if you wanted to love Germany the non-existing, you had to create it." Herr Hitler has set out to create it by the only methods known to German politics. But, being an idealist, he can only cope with reality by pretending that it is not there or that it is other than it is.
This is what the rest of the world calls lying, breaking promises and being a gangster, whereas Herr Hitler, far from being a gangster, " can't help being a little bourgeois with moral scruples."
But can the rest of the world come to terms with this phenomenon and settle down with it in their midst? Mr. Halkett thinks not. " The only way to create Germany is to make Germany a danger to the rest of the world." Wars between Capitalism and Communism, or wars between reli- gions—suggests Mr. Halkett—are less ruthless, because you can choose your own side and fight for the principles chosen by yourself. (This was certainly not true of the class war as preached by the too per cent. Old Style Bolshevik, who wanted the elimination, not the conversion, of the bourgeois, and was hardly true of the wars of religion when religion was the real issue which divided the world.) Now you are " either born an Aryan Superman or a Sub-Human Non- Aryan," and therefore predestined to rule or to be ruled over. Without wishing to minimise the gravity of the challenge, one does feel that this is a considerable over-simplification. Herr Hitler has not yet declared the English people non- Aryan, nor the Japanese Aryan—so that these categories do not appear to be decisive for his policy. Nor, even if to dominate the world is his aim, does he show any sign of wanting to take on the whole world at once. The immediate German programme cannot be quite as ruthless and quite as rigid as is here suggested. But Mr. Halkett seems determined to close every avenue of hope. Even the cheers at Munich were cheers, not for peace, but for a victorious war won without the tiresome business of having to shoot.
Considering how intimate Mr. Halkett's picture is of some aspects of German life, there are some curious omissions. He remarks that " the workman's world is one of extremely naked facts . . . and these facts are economic facts." But apart from the passing embarrassments of the inflation period, he passes over in silence the naked economic facts of post- War German history. So long as he was in Germany, he himself seems—except when he quarrelled with his family— to have been always tolerably well off ; and the problems which concern him are the problems of art or philosophy, not the problems of bread and potatoes. Nor, except for the assump- tion that world domination is its ultimate goal, is there any discussion of German foreign policy. Mr. Halkett acutely observes that the German attitude towards Britain is governed by the love-hate complex, and that envy is its largest ingre- dient. But hardly anything is said of Germany's attitude to other countries. The book gives us many vivid sketches of the behaviour and thoughts of what was left by the War of upper and middle class Germany, and an admirable impres- sion of the state of moral and intellectual confusion in which National Socialism took its rise. But when description gives place to analysis there is a good deal of that abstract philoso- phising and passion for the absolute which Mr. Halkett him- self diagnoses as the weakness of the German character.
E. H. CARR.
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