MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
WHEN I was a younger man the Neue Rundschau was the most progressive of all the German quarterlies, exercising an influence comparable only to that which some of our own great
quarterlies exercised at the opening of the last century. Solemn it was, and somewhat difficult to read, and not always as simple as tired minds would wish. But it was a progressive publication which did much to widen the provincialism of the German mind and to suggest that the German view of life was not the only view and might even, in some of its many aspects, be incorrect. Then in 1933 the great darkness descended upon the Germans and the Neue Rundschau, as other expressions of the liberal spirit in Germany, having struggled on unhappily for a few years under the Nazi system, was, in 1935 or so, snuffed out. It must have been sad indeed for a German liberal, unable to express himself freely or to have free access to the thoughts of others, to see these little candles of enlightenment being extinguished one by one. We, in our com- placent manner, are inclined to condemn the German intellectuals for their subservience to a system which they must have felt to be dangerous and must have known to be wrong. We cannot imagine a situation in which the power of expression, the great gift of free speech, is suddenly denied to one ; when, almost in a night, one is severed from communication with other similar minds ; and when one finds oneself alone in some huge prison gallery, lit only by a search-light, all other sounds being drowned by the great pistons of " Sieg Heil ! " How often during the years between 1933 and 1939 have German friends exclaimed to,me " But what can we do?" I could find no answer to this question. But I learnt from their experience that Liberty is not some granite rock, but a frail creeper which can wither in a night.
Dr. Gottfried Bermann-Fischer, a true German progressive, had fortunately found asylum in Sweden. On June 6, 1945, which strangely enough was the day of Thomas Mann's seventieth birthday, he published in Stockholm a special number of the Neue Rundschau devoted entirely to this greatest of living German writers. And now through devious channels there has reached me the first regular number of the revived Neue Rundschau, dated October, 1945. I understand that some difficulty is being experienced, owing to these eternal obstacles of transport and currency, in securing any circula- tion of this quarterly either in Germany itself or among the many Germans still in this country or in allied hands. It seems regrettable that a publication of this nature, written by Germans although pub- lished in Sweden, should not be more widely used. We all know that we shall never achieve a stable Europe unless we achieve a stable Germany ; we all know that a stable Germany can only be created by the Germans themselves ; and we all know that the Germans will never recover from the physical and moral shock of their disaster unless they start thinking all over again. We ourselves, in various ways, can do something to start them thinking ; but obviously this can only be a temporary expedient and all formative thought in Germany must be a growth from within. Those Germans who have had the good fortune to escape from the prison house are in a position to explain to their countrymen why it is that a people possessed of so many intellectual and moral gifts should always have been fated to turn good into evil. The Germans will be receptive of such instruction ; they are in a condition to ask themselves why it is that Germany has proved herself a curse instead of a blessing to the world ; and we should do all that lies in our power to encourage the champions of liberal thought in Germany to educate their countrymen to realise that it was when she abandoned the humane conception of life that madness came.
* * * * The revived Neue Rundschau proclaims in its editorial that it will seek to render itself " a tribunal of the free spirit." In its first number it publishes an important article by Thomas Mann upon "Germany and the Germans." In this article Thomas Mann sets out to provide his fellow countrymen with what he calls " an essay in self-criticism." He begins by examining why it is that the Germans have never been able to adjust themselves properly to the external world. Why is it, he asks, that in every German you find a duality between cosmopolitanism and provincialism, between a desire to understand other countries and a nervous diffidence in regard to other countries? He well knows that every German would like to imagine that he possesses the Olympian serenity of Goethe ; whereas in fact it is not Goethe but Luther who is the real repre- sentative of the German temperament. Thomas Mann has no affec- tion for Luther ; he admits that he was a man of genius, that he did much to liberate German thought and to enrich the German language ; but he considers that his fierce fanaticism had a demoralising effect upon the German mind. "Luther," he writes, " was a hero of Liberty, but in the German manner, that is he had no conception of what Liberty really is." The Reformation did much to foster the dualism in the Germans' minds between the most daring abstract speculation and the greatest incompetence in prac- tical political thought. Moreover, it created a distinction, even a divergence, in their minds between patriotism, or nationalism, and the abstract conception of Liberty. It thus arose that in Germany the conception of Liberty was always a tribal and not a personal conception ; freedom for them came to mean, not the freedom of the individual German, but the freedom of Germany as against the out- side world. It thus assumed an aggressive, anti-European shape. There is much truth in this.
Even more interesting, and to our minds most curious, are the passages which Thomas Mann devotes to " the secret association which connects the German temperament with the daemonic." Music, in his opinion, falls within the " daemonic area "; he contends that when intellectual arrogance is mated with spiritual archaism or uncertainty then the devil is produced ; " Luther's devil, Faust's devil," he writes, " seem to me to be extremely German personages." It is this element of what we should call mental instability, and of what Goethe and Thomas Mann define as the " daemonic," which leads the Germans to such " foolish and sinister misunderstandings" of political reality. It is this, for instance, which renders them unable to see that politics represent the art of the possible, and to ascribe to " hypocrisy " those inevitable expedients and compromises which politically educated nations find it inevitable to practise. Why is it that the Germans are so apt to adopt towards all other nations that strange and disturbing combination of superiority and inferiority, of arrogance and uncertainty? Thomas Mann contends that the Germans are in inner revolt_ against the intellectualism and rationalism of the west ; a revolt which represents " the uprising of Music against Literature, of Mysticism against Clarity." These are abstruse sayings ; and it is only speculatively that Thomas Mann emits the hope that this terrific disaster may enable the "mass of good " which exists in Germany at last to break through the crust of her unfortunate history and to adjust_the German attitude to the outside world upon an individual, and no longer upon a tribal, basis.
* * * * I have always felt that the Germas suffered from too little indivi- dual self-assurance and too much tribal self-assurance. It is scarcely to be hoped that their recent disasters and present sufferings will be likely to increase their personal self-confidence. The daemonic within them will not be diminished by their experiences ; nor will the correct proportion between extraversion and introversion be achieved. It is for the Germans themselves to think out these sad problems of adjustment ; but if they are to acquire the habit of thinking calmly rather than either arrogantly or hysterically then it is their own great men alone who can be their teachers. Let us hope, therefore, that the Neue Rundschau will be the first only of these tribunals of the free spirit ; and that as the generations succeed each other German "Innerlichkeit" will become less morbid and more humane.
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