MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON RECEIVED today a letter from a young German friend of
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mine from whom I had not heard for several years. I first met him in 1938 when he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and when a brilliant future of success and usefulness appeared to be opening before him. Handsome, intelligent and energetic, he was universally liked and respected by his contemporaries, and seemed to all who met him to be a living justification of Cecil Rhodes' imaginative vision and practical good sense. Yet the cloud which had risen in his boyhood spread suddenly across his native sky ; all the sun- shine which should have been his was blotted suddenly ; and his adolescent world became dark and menacing and cold. He found himself faced with an appalling personal alternative. On the one hand he might return to his own country and either lose his soul by subscribing to the Nazi system, or else lose his liberty, and perhaps his life, by opposing it. On the other hand, he might sunder all links which connected him with a country which had betrayed or violated every principle of civilised humanity and find in exile some hope of maintaining his individual standards and self-respect. He adopted the second alternative. He emigrated to the United States, obtained an appointment at one of their older universities, and devoted himself to- teaching and research. He worked in close collaboration with Dr. Briining, he obtained his Ph.D. and for a space of time he was able to persuade himself that his decision had been justified and that he had been able to pre- serve, in company with a few of his fellow exiles, the ancient traditions of German scholarship and liberalism which in his native country were being either obliterated or turned to evil ends. Then came the French disaster, the ordeal of Dunkirk and the bombard- ments of English towns. He ceased writing to his English friends. " Trivialities," he now tells me, " in the face of such overwhelming disaster, seemed to me something obscene. Hence my complete
silence." * * * *
When Pearl Harbour came he was obliged to resign his post at the university. He worked as a farm-hand in Wisconsin, as a cow- boy in Colorado, as a teacher of German in Chicago, until he finally obtained employment as a journalist. He was offered a chance to enlist in the United States armies, but he refused to take up arms against his own country. The American authorities treated him with generosity ; the American public were, as always, kind and sympathetic. " Yet the mental agony," he writes to me, " was great. Every day brought the news of another city laid waste, of more human sacrifice. And the gloating of the Press was nauseating." Inevitably in such circumstances his old doubts returned to him. The existence which he led, his utter isolation, appeared to him pitifully unheroic. He feels today that he has missed what has been, for good or ill, the central experience of his genera- tion. He feels, as any decent man would feel, a " lingering regret" that he had not remained " with my own people, and fought with them, regardless of ideologies." " Yet my mistake," he writes, " was perhaps pardonable. I believed sincerely in the assurances once so freely given that there would never again be another Versailles. I even believed in the Atlantic Charter." Having sacrificed his patriotism to his faith in the liberalism of the Anglo- Saxon countries, he new feels inevitably that he has missed two worlds. His mother in Munich had been thrown into a concen- tration camp for assisting Jewish refugees. She is now living in a cellar in Munich. " She was brave and steadfast until now," he writes, " but her latest letters show increasing disillusionment and despair."
* * * * Through all these wretched and profitless years there remained to him one dream of future action and of future self-justification. " My plan throughout the war," he writes, " was to return to Germany as soon as feasible after the fall of the Nazis. All I have done in the last ten years has meaning only as the prepara- tion for the job of moral, economic and political reconstruction
which only the Germans themselves can do." But now even this hope of a valuable function, this ultimate exercise of duty, is clouded by the heavy mists of doubt. Is it not an illusion to imagine that a German, however devoted, who has been trained in the humanistic values of the Western World, could ever perform any useful function in the shattered, soul-shattered, Germany of to-day? Is it not futile to waste his manhood, as he wasted his youth, upon faiths and hopes which bear but slight relation to the hard facts of modern materialism? Is there in fact any prospect of re-establishing a community of thought or ideals between the nations of Europe? Or would it not be better to abandon all such dreams, to retire once again to some ivory tower, and to seek in scholarship those oppor- tunities for self-expression which a cruel destiny has denied? An awful loneliness seems to have descended upon him. His German friends have either been killed in battle or murdered by their Nazi oppressors ; his English friends, if they survive, seem sundered from him- by the dreadful gulf of war. How bitter for him to look back upon those carefree Oxford days, when the present appeared as an adventure every day renewed, and when the future shone as a sunlit plain of opportunity in which intelligence, energy and integrity would find their widest scope! How grim for him, when he is alone with his own dark ruins, to recall the gaiety, the seeming rightness, the effortless comradeship of his undergraduate days! There must be times when his Rhodes scholarship—of which he was so glad and proud—must seem to him a disguised misfortune which blurred the pattern of his days.
* * * * What can one reply to a man who has endured such moral agony and who is now faced with a predicament the issue of which will affect his whole future life? It is not possible for me to comfort myself with the belief that every German wherever situated and however placed is responsible for Buchenwald and Auschwitz. I cannot satisfy my misgivings by contending that the atrocities which were committed by the Nazis impose some almost mystic expiation upon every member of the German race. I am aware—and in his letter my friend reminds me of the fact—that it is easy for us Englishmen to answer such riddles in self-complacent, or even in self-righteous, terms. For us, who have never been faced with such fateful personal alternatives, it is all too easy to reply that the path of duty is the only path to follow, and that one's own conscience is the only certain guide. I know that there are many good Germans ; and this man was one of the best Germans that I have -ever known. How can I reply to such a man that he was wrong in 1938 in emigrating to America, that he should have returned to Germany and fought the Nazis with all his might? Do I honestly believe that a man even of his value could have accomplished any- thing or that six years at Dachau would, if he survived them, have left him unshattered in body and in soul? Can I eyen assure him that even if today he returned to Germany he would be able to re- educate his countrymen and to work for the reconstruction of his country upon sound social democratic lines? How dare I, sitting here among the primroses and the daffodils, give such facile, irresponsible advice? Could he come here to England and observe the active anxious seriousness which is ours, he might recover some at least of the illusions which have been broken. He might feel that his old Oxford dreams are unattainable ; he would not feel that they had been abandoned.
It is salutary for us to be forced, by such messages from across the Atlantic, to step aside for a moment from our own anxieties and preoccupations. Our own problems, political, social and ecnomic, are appalling problems ; but they do not entail deep spiritual problems as well. And although, as Wilde remarked, "Advice is always dangerous, but good advice is fatal," we can at least feel, and even think, humanely ; and not adopt towards those Germans who undeservedly have suffered more than we have an attitude either of Angry or complacent righteousness
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