Berlin
BY F. YEATS-BROWN.
IS Berlin a fair sample of modern Germany ? In India and the U.S.S.R. . I do not believe that the great cities reflect the mind of the people, but in the West they do : the little things I have seen and sensed between the glitter of the Kurffirstendamm and the squalor of Koeslinerstrasse are, at any rate, symptomatic of what Germany is doing and thinking.
I can only Write of the little things : anything political would be out of date by the time it is printed : it is impos- sible to predict the moves of Storm Troops, Steel Helmets, lleichswehr, Red Fronts, but the day-to-day life of .the masses follows a more equable course than the manoeuvres of contending parties.
The masses are tired of politics, I fancy, and if it were not for the dire compulsion of want they would not be extremists. That there are 13,000,000 Nazis and 6,000,000 Communists is due chiefly to hunger, although, of course, there are idealists in both parties, particularly among the Nazis, who number in their ranks some-of the best brains of Germany. That is an objective fact which we should not shirk in England. A philosophy is being built up round National Socialism which will not be shaken by the sneers of intellectuals : to me, spending an hour at the Nazi headquarters in Hedernannstrasse, not interviewing officials, but loitering about, watching the buyers in the bookshop, officials passing in and out, the children in the street saluting their heroes, it seemed obvious that here was a movement based on something more than " promis- ing everybody everything." It is a movement in tune with the popular will. To shut our eyes to the threat of war it involves is very foolish.- Germany intends to have Dantzig and the Corridor : I have no brief for her. I deplore the fact that several million Germans would shed their blood for this cause, but since it is a fact, and since the Poles certainly cannot be talked out of their territory, how will the matter be settled except by arms ? I believe there must be a war in Europe : the best we can hope for is that it will soon be over, and 1 hat it will not spread.
The German people have been living on the brink of ruin for the last fifteen years. Hitler promises them a way out : eventually they will go his way rather than towards Communism, provided he adopts a more moderate policy towards the Jews, to whom the country owes much prosperity.
German Communists are at present receiving very little support from Moscow, because the Soviet Govern- ment relies on the capitalist system to supply it with a large part of its technical services and equipment : time enough to proceed with " the ruthless extermination of the exploiting classes " when those classes have them-- selves forged the weapons for their ruin. Someone has said " You can smell the steppes in Berlin as you can smell the sea in-London.?' That is true, but it is the obser- vation of a poet rather than a politician. The Slav against t he Teuton sets up a good tension in the German soul. If you stroll-in the Tiergarten on a fine Sunday afternoon and observe the people drinking their beer and listening to the band, or if you take the motor speedway to Wannsec and sec a hundred thousand Berliners there in bathing suits, you will have a measure of the integrating forces in Germany. Nothing that I have seen recently in Berlin, neither the ostentation in the West End nor the squalor in the North, has shaken my impression of a sane, strong, rhytlm-17loving, disciplined people.
But- I must admit that Berlin North made my blood -run cold. Drinking my Pilsener and looking at a horse- meat sausage in a certain red-lighted tavern, I noticed that only at our table was anything being served. Round us sat comely young people, some with the angelic mien of the Goth, others dark-haired, eager-eyed. I was told that everyone present was there to sell his or her body. We may wince at words, but what of the straits to which these children are driven by hunger ? I do not know how many drug-sellers and inverts there may be in Berlin to-day, but the general opinion is that there are more there than have ever before assembled in any city at any time in history. Some failure in civilization has made this possible. The proportion of the youth of Germany so affected may be small, but I believe that everyone in the land whO is young and unemployed and hungry—millions of boys and girls—feels that his spirit is being stifled in the toils of big business, repara- tions, and international finance. If I were a young German I should be a Nazi.
Nor will Berlin West reassure the sensitive observer : he will see wealth there, but it is a neo-Neronian fiddling and feasting—negro music, bare white hacks, orange lips carried to bubbling wine, fountains and flowet gardens in cubist restaurants, rich food, table telephones, paunchy men with cigars saying that, given time, the wheel of prosperity must come full circle. If I were a waiter at a fashionable place of this kind I should join any party that promised to exterminate the idle rich.
And yet the mass of the people are patient. I visited a very poor family in the Communist quarter : the man had been unemployed for a year : his allowance had continued to diminish until now he was in receipt of 30s. a week for himself, his wife, and nine children. They were living in two small roonis Three cabbages for their daily meal-of soup were simmering in a cauldron. A home-made wireless set stood on 'the only table. In a window-box some thirsty asters and a wilted geranium proclaimed that the constant struggle against over- crowding and poverty had not yet defeated the family, as have sometimes seen a family defeated in our slums. They seemed to have hope. They believed that things would come right. I asked the wife if she was a Communist ? - " Why do you suggest that ? " she enquired suspiciously.
" She thinks that the private relief she is receiving may be cut off if she talks politics," explained my guide. I was sorry I had asked the question, and reassured her. Presently she fetched her husband, who was nursing a sick child in the adjoining room.
" I come of a family that has always served in the Army," he said, " and I myself served the whole four yearn of the War. I voted for the Social Democrats last time, but what do these parties mean ? They don't bring us any food. I want a dictatorship, and the Kaiser to come back."
What of the rent, I asked ? Yes, that had been paid regularly, every fortnight, out of unemployment pay, even if they had all to go hungry for a day, as sometimes happened at the end of the week. (It was about 5s. a week.) They had never had quite enough to cat since the husband was out of work. But the children were healthy.
It was true that the children were healthy. Soup and bread is the diet of the majority of the populations of the vast tracts of country lying between Hamburg and Vladivostock. The Germans and the Russians have not starved. But the Germans, at any rate, have been accustomed to better things, and they.are not unnaturally discontented. I daresay a vegetarian would point with pride to the fact that such numbers of people can maintain their health on a diet of carbohydrates and starch, but man does not live by bread alone.
After I had left my poor friends I heard that only a .week before, the husband, weary with the hopeless quest for work, had tried to commit suicide by putting his head in the gas oven. His wife had been only just in time to save him. Neither his bearing, nor his wife's, disclosed the tragedy of suffering that lay behind their polite demeanour. The previous day I had been to a large literary tea. party in one of the most beautiful parts of Berlin. Thinking over our conversation there, I feel now that so must the Romans have talked at Herculaneum. Volcanic• forces are close to us in every one of the capitals of Europe. If we neglect them, dally with small palliatives, pursue the dangerous delusions of internationalism instead of the more laborious path of national prosperity and pander to Socialism with its cruelly false promises and its brutal materialism, our too-comfortable, too- sententious civilization will be overwhelmed by the fiery ashes of revolution—and it will serve us right.
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