The artist must keep free of the idiotic fictions of his time. He must serve not nationalism but the union of nations. Not war, but peace, not war but human kindness, not hatred but understanding. The invisible motto of his books ought to be: To be honest, one must know. To be brave, one must understand. To be just, one must not forget. Whoever is silent and hides the truth betrays his human mission. —Ernst Toller, “Unser Kampf in Deutschland”
At the end of 1933, a second edition of Toller’s autobiography, Eine Jugend in Deutschland, appeared, a reproduction of the first in every word, with one small exception. Toller put in a dedication: “To the Germany of Tomorrow.” Thus began Toller’s new career as one of the premier spokesmen for this “other Germany.” The Nazis, of course, hated him while he was in Germany and feared him when he was not. One of their seminal publications, edited by the prestigious Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question in 1936, singles him out as “today one of the worst agitators against Germany in a foreign country.”[1] Three years earlier, on the tenth of May 1933, Ernst Toller was, fortunately, outside of Germany, about to spend the rest of his life in exile. In Germany, on that evening at 10 PM under a cloudy sky, a thick crowd assembled outside in Berlin to burn the books of Toller and other unwanted authors, uncomfortably offensive to the values of the newly appointed government. An hour later, a contingent of eager students from the university arrived, holding torches and trucks loaded with books. A small fire was started. The students threw their open torches into the flames. Wind and smoke and sparks fell on the crowd. A jubilant cry went up as books were thrown into the bonfire, their charred pages swept by the wind and flame up into the German air. The growing flame, fueled now by the hundreds of books, cast a sinister light. A writer from the French journal Nouvelles littéraires was there. He heard a young girl whisper to herself: “It’s German intellectual life that’s burning.” Another cried, “See the black soul of the Jews fly away.”[2] Toller was lucky to be out of Germany. Others of his acquaintance who participated in Bavaria’s revolution were not, and Toller would have surely shared their fate: Felix Fechenbach, Toller’s adjutant, shot “while attempting escape” at such close range his chest was blown apart; Erich Mühsam, another of Toller’s associates, branded with a swastika on his forehead, beaten unconscious, forced to dig his own grave, but the Nazis pulled back from killing him—it added to the torture. He was later mercifully executed.
Three months later, after the Nazi Book Fest of May, Toller had the distinction to be among those on the first list of Germans stripped of citizenship.[3] It was not a happy time, but the life of exile is seldom happy, and discussions of political emigration almost inevitably become essays on frustration and despair. It is little wonder that the exile experience is taken up with reluctance. When confronted with the choice of exile or death, Socrates selected the latter. Shakespeare’s Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, banished by Richard II, laments his fate and expresses his preference for death over exile. Echoing Shakespeare’s hapless Duke, Boris Pasternak, himself a translator of the English poet, wrote that to leave the borders of his native Russia “is for me the equivalent to death.”[4] Of course, upon occasion, the achievements of the émigré can counterbalance the sorrows of exile: the Divine Comedy, the Koran, the Septuagint, and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus were all penned by exiled authors. Yet exile often brings more casualties than successes. Particularly for the Weimar intellectual, forced to flee from Germany after 1933, a happy adjustment was difficult. As Toller wrote, there was little reason to write optimistic works in a world where “a ‘happy end’ is not foreseeable today.”[5] Nor was the lack of a happy end confined to the works of the émigré author. It was all too often reflected in the personal fate of exiled German writers, many of whom either drank themselves to death or, like Toller, committed suicide.
Toller, had he been in Germany, would certainly have been thrown into a concentration camp. On the night of the Reichstag fire, in February of 1933, police came to his Berlin home to arrest him. His apartment was ransacked, papers strewn about the rooms. It was only by luck that Toller was in Switzerland, where he had given a talk, rather unexpectedly, not on his own writing but on Flamenco dancing.[6] Toller was a bit more prepared than many who were precipitately forced to leave. At least he was legally out of Germany. The majority of exiles fled illegally, courting perhaps death, often without passport or job. The Nazi government did everything within its power to make life miserable for exiles and pursued them with great vigor. Nazi agents intimidated booksellers in England, Spain, Italy, and Poland for selling works by German refugees. They abducted those whose planes had to make emergency landings in Germany and even spirited away refugees in foreign countries. The most celebrated among the latter was the Jewish journalist Berthold Jacob, a Toller acquaintance who had written for Die Weltbühne, the publication that had printed many of Toller’s essays. In 1935, Jacob was kidnapped at night by the German secret police and brought back to Germany. More ominously, the writer Theodor Lessing was assassinated in his exile home at Marienbad. Even in the relatively safe capital of England, Toller, justifiably, felt unsafe, and, it was reported, fear of Nazi agents caused Toller furtively to move about residences in London.[7]
Although tragic, the exile group of intellectuals to which Toller belonged was a distinguished array, “the greatest collection of transplanted intellect, talent, and scholarship the world has ever seen,” as Peter Gay has characterized them.[8] The exile experience of German left-wing intellectuals may be better understood as twofold, metaphorically rather than merely geographically. Exile was more than a change of physical location. In many respects, it was a type of continuation of existence rather than a break, although an extremely painful one. Like all intellectuals, those on Germany’s left, even when physically present in Germany, were already separated from most of their countrymen in their ideas before 1933. Particularly in an era dominated by fascism and extreme conservatives, Germany’s left-wing intellectuals were already in a type of exile from the mainstream of Germany’s citizens. Physical exile was, in some ways, an attenuation of this first intellectual exile.
Within the first years of Hitler’s Chancellorship, a whole generation of Germany’s intellectual elite had physically withdrawn to foreign lands. Arthur Rosenberg, himself a leading left-wing intellectual, justifiably noted that the largest part of “thinking and intellectually creative Germany” had been lost to exile.[9] With the exceptions of the elderly Gerhart Hauptmann and Gottfried Benn, no major writer remained for very long in the new Third Reich. Nearly all who remained were of small repute and meager talent. The new Nazi state had replaced Brecht and Toller with the forgettable Hans Grimm, author of Volk ohne Raum, celebrating Teutonic joy in South Africa, and the now obscure Erwin Kolbenheyer. This was the best the Nazi literature could do, among those who stayed. There is not a single author during the twelve years of the Hitler Reich that is remembered today. Germany from 1933 to 1945 is remembered for many things—war, mass murder, aggression, taking over foreign countries—but no one remembers its writers. The Third Reich did not produce any lasting literature. The only valuable literature during those twelve years came from German exile authors. These included Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Lion Feuchtwanger, George Grosz, Walter Hasenclever, Georg Kaiser, and others of Toller’s generation. All had been marked out as opponents of the new regime because of their humanity, political views, or religion. Even though scattered across the globe in places as diverse as South America, Russia, and England, most of the exiled group, at one time or another, ended in New York. Schoenberg and Kurt Weill, Grosz and Max Beckmann, Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, Mehring, Brecht, and Toller—all added to New York intellectual life during the 1930s. It was little wonder that another exiled author, Hermann Kesten, greeted New York City as “Berlin revivius!”[10]
Yet for the exiled author, change of country, even if he did meet familiar faces, was more than just the inconvenience of a change of residence. It was frequently accompanied by painful readjustment to a new situation. In a world of bellicose nationalism, they were separated from their country, a small coterie of intellectuals with no power except the doubtful one of the pen. Forced to flee, many times without their families, they were strangers in a foreign land. Deprived of their property by the new German government, they were financially insecure.
However much we can debate the influence that Weimar left-wing intellectuals had on Weimar society, once they left Germany their influence came to an end. Of course, they did enable the true nature of National Socialism to become known abroad. They could publish, they could give talks—in Toller’s case, even speak with Eleanor Roosevelt—and maintain that another Germany did exist. Yes, it did, but so what? In their desperate struggle to inform the world of this other Germany, the war of words they fought never managed to put the Nazi government in danger. It did not at all dispel, for the ordinary German in the Third Reich, Hitler’s great popularity during the 1930s, a popularity that still existed even as late as 1945, after most of Germany had been reduced to ash by Allied bombing. The exiles are to be commended for their upholding of the dignity and traditions of Goethe and Schiller and of German culture before 1933—and after 1933 also. However, they were impotent before the dictatorship. But this martyrdom, of course, is what should force our admiration.[11]
Toller was forced to confront all these frustrations, and the last years of his life were not happy. His final years held few triumphs, and they brought him only the most uncertain artistic recognition. After leaving Europe for the United States, he found himself in a strange country for which he had seldom shown much sympathy. Toller shared the view of many European intellectuals who rejected the United States as money-mad, vulgar, philistine, and bigoted. The sketches of America in his Quer Durch were far from flattering. His descriptions of exploited workers, rundown prisons, Ku Klux Klan members, Southern lynching of blacks, and a visit to the Chicago stockyards as gruesome as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle made Toller feel little love for American civilization.[12] Furthermore, his militant anti-Nazism alternated with Weltschmerz mixed with the despair of one who believes himself not heard. Acutely aware of being a representative of the “other Germany,” he found that many did not share his intensity for the problems of mankind.
Like all intellectuals, Toller was caught between love of an ideal and contempt for reality. Occasionally, what seemed important was not alienation from society in general or from the ubiquitous bourgeois but, more specifically, from these phenomena as represented in Germany. The left-wing intellectuals of Weimar had spoken for a class that saw German justice represented in Toller’s observations of Weimar’s courts, German respect for the Reichstaat represented in toleration of antidemocratic groups, German culture represented in Grosz’s sketches. Few were more critical of Germany than Kurt Tucholsky in his biting Deutschland, Deutschland über alles. Even Toller, more charitable than Tucholsky in his judgment of his fellow countrymen, saw Germans imbued with the “slave spirit,” its population “passive and lethargic,” waiting for a dictator to take from them the responsibilities of self-government: “military discipline, complete physical and mental subordination—that sounds good to Germans.”[13]
While Toller may have been disillusioned with his countrymen, he remained dedicated to his country. His criticism never sprang from hatred of Germany, but from a genuine love. Unlike Tucholsky, Toller was never able to confess that Hitler represented Germany: “We love Germany and we hate Hitler . . . Hitler is not Germany.”[14] Fondly, Toller clung to the illusion of two Germanys, the one peaceful and democratic, composing the majority of the population, and the other, the minority, violent and aggressive, tyrannizing over their fellow Germans:
The hard-working, peaceable and peace-loving German people has not vanished from the earth. . . . I am not speaking against the German people, but against those who have the audacity to identify themselves with Germany but who have nothing in common with the noble ideals of the minds of that country.[15]
Like the self-exiled Heine, who castigated his countrymen while loving his country, Toller was to dream of his beloved fatherland, its austere pine-woods, the cadences of its speech. Like Heine, Toller was also to come to the conclusion that “it was a dream” and that the Germany for which he yearned, the “other Germany,” was a chimera. A democratic socialist and pacifist, he discovered that the ideals of socialism and pacifism were unable to combat those of fascism and war. An idealist, he saw with increasing lucidity that the power of Geist was insufficient to overcome the harsh realities of the European world during the 1930s. A believer in “the power of the word,” he tirelessly addressed organizations and wrote essays and political pieces d’occasion, only to have his warnings go ignored and his writings go unread in refugee periodicals. If Toller sought to be the conscience of humanity, he went unheeded. If he wished to be the voice of the silent and suffering “other Germany,” his exile showed the frustrations of the activist poet-leader who remained cut off from whatever popular following he had once enjoyed.
Only a year before, addressing a meeting of the PEN Club in Budapest, Toller had morosely observed the increasing supremacy of Macht over Geist and the contempt of the men of power for the men of ideas: “Today nothing is more despised than Geist, no one has a more questionable place than the intellectual (der geistige Mensch). . . . Perhaps in the next years, I and my friends will not be able to speak, perhaps our voices will be silenced.[16] Toller’s speculations of 1932 had become fact by 1933. In April, he was thrown out of a leading writers association, the League for the Protection of German Writers, as a “traitor to the Fatherland.” In May, his works were included in the book-burning in front of Humboldt University. In August, he was deprived of his citizenship, and, two months later, the reading of his work, along with that of other exiled authors “publishing the most slanderous lies and incitements to war against Germany,” was declared treason.[17]
Toller’s life as an involuntary exile, so hastily cut off from his native soil, was the result of a swift sequence of tragic events. As an activist, it was not enough for Toller just to meditate on such events; he needed to find a role for the writer in response to such a tragedy. While not denying the attractions of quiet contemplation, far removed from the disquieting events of the 1930s, Toller’s activist heritage forced him to renounce abstract meditation in favor of engaged commitment. “We too love the quietness of the study . . . but . . . a time in which the ideals of mankind are betrayed, force us to stigmatize and fight the betrayal wherever freedom is threatened.”[18] National Socialism, so clearly opposed to everything for which Toller stood, was well designed to bring out all the emotional fervor and moral indignation of an outraged humanitarian. An upholder of the betrayed ideals of humanity, Toller saw himself also as a devotee of truth. He saw National Socialism a denial of truth and, thus, dedicated himself to lay bare its mendacious foundations. It was the duty of the exiled writer “to expose lies wherever they appear” and by this to undermine and help overthrow a deceitful system.[19] Fondly, Toller quoted Shelley’s quip that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world and asserted his own view that the modern dictator lived in fear of “the judgment of the world.” “And who creates that judgment? We writers.”[20]
Toller’s views on engaged literature and the role of the writer were nothing new but merely an intensification of his earlier opinions. Concern of writers for political affairs, however, was not limited to one-time activists. Before 1933, it was possible for many German authors to establish the dichotomy the activists had rejected, one that made the task of the writer and development of political life seem mutually exclusive. After 1933, the writer who found himself an exile was forced to confront political issues, not surprising since politics was the main reason for their emigration. Noted writer Else Lasker-Schüler, for example, was severely criticized by many exiled German writers for her apparent indifference to political events. Even Thomas Mann, who came as close as any German author to an art-for-art’s-sake view of literature, was forced into a political stance. Censured by some of his fellow authors for his refusal to associate himself with Die Sammlung, an anti-Nazi periodical founded by his son Klaus, Mann was publicly challenged by Wieland Herzfelde to declare his open hostility to National Socialism. That Mann, in all his studied reserve, did eventually commit himself was a measure of how difficult it was to be unconcerned with current history.[21]
The problems of engagement and neutrality in literature not only touched German writers; it also began to extend during the early 1930s into the PEN Club, an international organization of authors founded in 1921 by the British author Catharine Dawson-Scott. Officially apolitical since its founding, PEN was not associated with any particular party, nor did it exclude any political view. Carefully avoiding contemporary issues, most of its members had given little attention to political affairs, and Toller’s assertion at the 1930 meeting in Poland that “to meet and ignore political and social questions is an illusion” had not yet found wide acceptance. In 1932, for the first time in the Club’s history, Toller had raised the question of the writer’s political responsibility, and his views were the occasion for much debate.[22] In part, the reluctance of PEN to deal with such issues was due to the policy of the group’s eleven-year president, John Galsworthy, who had, with increasing difficulty, attempted to avoid political controversy. With Galsworthy’s death in 1933 and his replacement by H. G. Wells, however, conditions for a radicalization of PEN had been prepared. If Galsworthy had attempted to ignore political controversy, Wells, it seemed, was prepared to cultivate it.
On March 28, 1933, at the annual PEN Congress in Ragusa, the new German government announced that Toller and nine others were communists and had been expelled. A motion was introduced that condemned the recent book-burning and censorship in Germany. After heated discussion, a conciliatory atmosphere prevailed, and the text of the resolution was modified to a vague statement that even the Nazi delegation was able to accept.[23] Fearing an attack by their enemies, the German representatives had stipulated that there was to be no discussion of the weakened motion, and when Toller, with accustomed theatricality, suddenly jumped up demanding to speak, the result was uproar. Suspicious Nazis “generally asserted that Toller had been brought secretly to Ragusa by the English in an automobile in order to make his appearance and carry out his attack on the German delegation.”[24] Whether this conspiratorial view was true or not, H. G. Wells, who had done little to disguise his hostility toward the PEN Nazis, recognized Toller’s request and allowed him to address the meeting.
Toller began his address by asserting that many had advised him to remain silent.[25] This he rejected as incompatible with the demands of Geist:
The writer is obliged only to Geist. He who believes that next to power there must also rule moral laws of life cannot be silent. . . . We live in a time of raging nationalism, of brutal racism. The intellectuals are isolated, they are threatened and oppressed by the nations who use power, who despise reason and who shame Geist.
In a string of rhetorical questions, Toller indicted the German division of the PEN Club for its failure to speak out against censorship and the persecution of writers “who must now live abroad, in exile, away from their work and can no longer serve Germany and humanity.” Anticipating that many Nazis might accuse him of treason, Toller made it clear he was not attacking Germany but was speaking out against
the methods of the men who are now ruling Germany, but who have no right to equate themselves with Germany. Millions in Germany cannot speak and write freely. When I speak here I am speaking for the millions who have no voice of their own. The masters of Germany claim to be the heirs of the great spirits, but how can they reconcile the spiritual teachings of Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Herder, Wieland and Lessing with the persecution of millions of human beings?
As men of ideas and representatives of Geist in a time of intolerance, it was inevitable that writers who spoke the truth would be unwelcome among the men of power. Toller concluded:
Let us not deceive ourselves. Politicians merely tolerate us and they begin persecuting us if we cause discomfort. But the voice of truth was never comfortable. In every century . . . men of truth were attacked, persecuted and killed because they did not bow down but preferred death to falsehood, because they believed in a world of freedom, justice, and humanity.
Toller said to his German colleagues:
I shall be accused in Germany of having spoken against my country. That is untrue. What irks me are the methods of those men in power today in Germany who have no legitimate claim to substitute themselves for the country. Millions of people in Germany no longer have the right to speak and write freely. When I speak here, I speak for these millions who no longer have a voice. I doubt whether we will often have the opportunity, in this Europe, to meet and talk together. Anyone who defends rebels today is threatened. What are we to do? Overcome the fear that demeans and discourages us. We are struggling on several paths. It may be that on some of these we meet face to face. But in all of us there is the idea of a humanity freed from barbarism, from lies, from social injustice and oppression.
The response to Toller’s speech was enthusiastic, the applause that greeted it overwhelming.[26] As a result of his address, not only was a stronger statement passed condemning Nazi persecution of writers, but, a few months later, under the direction of Toller and Wells, the Club took an unprecedented step when it expelled the Nazi delegation and extended official recognition to the non-Nazi Deutsche Autoren im Ausland, an exiled group of German writers.[27] Toller’s enemies were quick to vilify him after his Ragusa speech, the Nazi press lashing out against “the Jew Toller” and accusing him of being a communist. Toller emphatically denied that he had spoken for any particular party. As he explained it: “It was a question of nothing other than the cultural demands of intellectual freedom, the struggle for the rights of man. It was the duty of all writers, no matter where they live, to make this fight for the rights of man their own.”[28]
Toller’s speech was a reflection of his own personal values but also served, through the publicity it received, to bring international attention to the problems of the exiled author and to underscore the nature of the new German regime.
Moreover, for the first time, it was made clear that the Nazi government did not represent all Germany, but only a minority and that it was the task of the exiled intellectual to represent the interests of the silent and suffering majority of the “other Germany.”[29] As Toller put it in an address the following year at the Edinburgh meeting of the PEN Club: “If we believe in the power of the word—and as writers we do believe in the power of the word—we cannot be silent. . . . We represent a Germany one never hears about in official newspapers. The suffering Germany, the Germany secretly struggling, that is greater than you suspect.”[30]
Toller’s Ragusa speech also stated views that Toller repeated throughout the 1930s. Not only had the Nazi leaders repressed the silent and unnamed millions who opposed them; they also had, as Toller’s allusions to Goethe and Schiller indicated, betrayed German culture. At a time when he saw Germany seduced by brutal usurpers, Toller emphasized the humanistic ideals of Germany’s “great spirits” and accused Germany’s leaders not only of robbing the nation of its freedom but also of dishonoring its intellectual traditions. It would be hard to select a statement more characteristic of Toller’s view of Germany. Besides emphasizing his humanism, Toller also disclosed his commitment to the German nation. It was an idealized nation, a malady to which many émigrés are prone but one to which Toller, in spite of his cosmopolitan outlook, was deeply attached.
In his rejection of German politics, Toller clung all the more strongly to German culture. To his way of thinking, the two should be merged. The connection between politics on the one side and culture on the other was the moral effect of the second, which was to alter the first. Next to power, Toller reminded his Ragusa audience, there must also rule Geist, the moral laws of life that oblige the writer to speak out. As his critique of Weimar had rested on two bases, the one pragmatic and the other abstract, so Toller’s rejection of National Socialism harked back to earlier themes. In both cases, he could point to certain concrete actions: Weimar’s failure to change and its reliance on undemocratic forces on the one side, Hitler’s brutality and his suppression of freedom on the other. On a more abstract level, he also rejected both for the same reason: in neither had moral laws become a part of political life; in neither had Geist merged with Macht. In what may have been his earliest critique of the Nazi government, written after the Reichstag fire, Toller characterized Hitler’s policy as a campaign against the spirit and approvingly quoted Heinrich Mann’s argument that the Nazis “had indeed attacked the Jewish spirit, but that their aim was above all the spirit itself.”[31] In such an age, Toller asserted a few years later, “when the times betray the spirit,”[32] it was the duty of the intellectual to be the conscience of humanity, to make society aware of the dangers of National Socialism and not allow the world to overlook Hitler or forget his actions. As Toller explained, “to forget is the sin against Geist.”[33]
Destitute of material power, the exiled writer who sought a role for himself in the fight against National Socialism was coerced to rely on “the power of the word” and the abstractions of Geist and “the Idea.”[34] In a eulogy to Toller one month after his death, Thomas Mann spoke of the decisiveness of the spirit and comforted his audience that the power of Geist was sure to conquer over Hitler:
We who are assembled here are only workers in the realm of the spirit, without immediate influence on the happenings of the world. Our words and common admonitions should not on that account be underestimated. The spirit, destitute of material power, has a quiet, yet irresistible, annihilating as well as formative effect on earth and its decisions carry force.[35]
In a similar manner, Toller spoke of the omnipotence of “the Idea” and attempted to console those writers who had nagging doubts about their impact on society:
I know only too well the doubts of the writers who live in such times and in such a world. They ask: “What good is my work? Why write poetry, novels, dramas? What good will it do?” For the men of power a new tank, a new poison gas has a thousand times higher value than a great work of art. But whoever says this is short-sighted. Facts triumph only a short time. In the end they are without power before the power of the Idea.[36]
If Toller had learned as early as 1918 that poetry and drama alone could not fight war,[37] he also knew that exclusive reliance on “the Idea” was insufficient to overcome National Socialism. An opponent of Hitler and a pacifist, Toller attempted to reconcile his desire to see fascism overthrown with his desire to see war prevented. As late as 1936, he had made a special point to correct The New York Times when it misquoted him as advocating a war against Germany. What he did say, Toller wrote in a letter to the paper, was that “the democracies must unite together to preserve peace. That is the only way to fight the danger of war which threatens the world today.”[38] Rejecting a war against Hitler, Toller at first saw only one way to help the victim of Nazi persecution: “the incessant voice of public opinion in free democracies.”[39] Through the force of public opinion, set in motion by the exiled intellectuals, Toller hoped to give support to what he believed to be a growing opposition to Hitler within Germany. He estimated that there was a minority “of at least five million”[40] within Germany actively opposed to Hitler and a majority opposed to Hitler’s bellicose foreign policy. Concessions in foreign affairs given Hitler by the European democracies, Toller asserted, could only serve to weaken this group and delay the time when the German people, sufficiently enlightened about the true nature of National Socialism, would revolt:
Do not forget that every concession which is given Hitler not only weakens the power of the democracies, but also the opposition within Nazi Germany. An opposition which is there, which lives—an opposition which has not only the Left, but also the Conservatives, Protestants, and even high officers. The opposition—indeed, I can say the majority of the German people—wishes no war. An army of peace and freedom awaits—in Germany.[41]
Illusions Toller may have held on the degree of internal opposition to Hitler were unfortunately misplaced. Had the revolt of Toller’s deceived majority against their rulers occurred, it would have made the conception of the “other Germany” more than just a consoling phrase. Such an uprising, of course, did not take place and only shows how Toller had overestimated the amount of resistance to Hitler. He failed to realize that those Germans not manipulated by Nazi propaganda found themselves subject to an apparatus of terror that effectively suppressed most of the regime’s opponents. Moreover, Hitler’s foreign policy successes and the rising standard of living that resulted from the increased needs for armaments further reconciled many to the National Socialist government.[42] Toller, once wishing to be an exiled poet-leader who from across the border would encourage an army for peace and freedom, had now become a General without a following.
If Toller could comfort himself for a time that internal resistance and the power of “the Idea” could both prevent war and overthrow Hitler, he was eventually forced to the conclusion that only violence and, by implication, war could stop Hitler. Writing in 1937, Toller confessed:
We all, and particularly those who have seen and felt the horror of the last war, hate war and love peace. But we do not want a peace as Hitler understands it. We want a true, genuine peace. This peace rests on freedom and justice. But when a government uses brutal force against its own people, robs it of their human rights and raises terror to a law, must one then not assume that it will also follow the same principles in its foreign policy?
If the world does not succeed in forcing Hitler to peace, he will transform Europe into ruins and destroy civilization. He only understands one language, the language of power. One must teach him and his supporters that each infraction of international law, each armed attack will be met by the united opposition of democracies.[43]
A pacifist since 1917, Toller had come to realize by 1938 the necessity of force and the failure of pacifism when confronted with the realities of European politics during the 1930s. “I was a convinced pacifist,” he sadly noted, “but reality set me right.”[44]
The problems of war and peace were not new for Toller. His experience as a soldier had turned the one-time warrior into a pacifist. War revealed the necessity for peace, while expressionist calls for regeneration ecstatically indicated its solution.[45] Unlike many pacifists, however, not only had Toller at first joyfully participated in war, but even after his conversion to pacifism, he was forced into violence. It was the paradox of Toller’s role in the Bavarian revolution that the nonviolent antimilitarist not only became caught up in civil war but, for a time, was “General Toller,” divisional commander of the Red Army, who unexpectedly distinguished himself at the battle at Dachau, where he defeated the forces of the Hoffmann regime. “The socialist revolutionary hates violence,” wrote Toller; he abhors it, and, when he uses it, he experiences a terrible means of tragic necessity.”[46] The tragic necessity of violence was unknown to Toller when he wrote Die Wandlung. Friedrich’s revolution is nonviolent, and Toller’s work was the response of the activist to the experience of war. In this respect, Toller was typical of the connection among war, activism, and pacifism. In Frank’s Der Mensch ist Gut, for example, individuals are tragically uprooted and roused to action by their disgust with war. From the brutality of war, it was but a short step to denounce, as did Toller’s Friedrich, the materialistic society that made war possible. The only hope for a new world, freed from the greed of the old, was through love, brotherhood, and nonviolence. Pacifism thus was to be a major part of the new revolutionary order. It was, therefore, the duty of the intellectual to see that he did everything in his power to stop war. As Toller put it: “It is the writer’s duty to awaken and to deepen the spontaneous feeling for humanity, for freedom, for justice, for beauty. The artist must serve not nationalism, but the alliance of nations, he must not strive for hatred, but for understanding; he must advocate not war but peace.”[47]
Throughout the 1930s, however, Toller remained convinced that war was imminent. If he held hope that such a conflict could be prevented, he had little hope such an ambition could be achieved through the League of Nations, an organization Toller saw as a league of governments, controlled by the bankers and the rich bourgeois. A cynical observer at the 1932 disarmament conference in Geneva, Toller felt, “One needs only to observe this conference for a few days. Can one really believe: here war will be prevented?”[48] Only through the education of youth in the ideals of pacifism, Toller asserted in 1934, could a genuine peace be established.[49]
Toller’s faith in youth was a reflection of the influence of the youth movement and of Toller’s own views that only the idealism of youth could overcome “that duality that the Realpolitiker defends: that the demands one wishes, the demands of justice, the demands of human brotherhood can only find fulfillment in the realms of art and philosophy, while in the ‘real’ in ‘practical’ life things must be done more prosaically.”[50]
In short, only youth could unite Geist and Tat and bring forth a genuinely just society founded on brotherhood and pacifism. However, the revolutionary pacifist of the 1920s had come to realize by the late 1930s that the pacifist society he so ardently wished had ended in failure. In a 1937 essay, “The Failure of Pacifism in Germany,” Toller indicted the Republic for failing to take advantage of the restlessness and longing for peace that he believed characterized German youth at the end of World War I. In rebellion during the war to change society as well as to make peace, the young pacifist revolutionaries found that after 1918 those who had managed the war also managed the peace. Betrayed by corrupt politicians, youth, asserted Toller, turned in disgust from politics and by their action unwittingly left the state in the hands of belligerent reactionaries who encouraged militarism. “Nowhere in the German Republic,” Toller lamented, “did youth find any glorification of the idea of peace.” Rather than holding up the ideals of social justice and pacifism, the Republic had surrendered itself to chauvinism, denouncing the attempts of youth to change society as insubordination and cultural Bolshevism. Here, concluded Toller, was the task of the political exile: “To remain true to the Idea” of those young revolutionaries of 1918, to bury the old and discredited values, and to create in their place new and living ones.[51]
Toller’s essay was deeply permeated with the idealism of the prewar youth movement and with his own disillusion with the failure of the German revolution. So deep were Toller’s own hopes for that revolution and for his own generation—who, in their rebellion against the stale and corrupt father world, were to inaugurate the debut of a new age—that Toller overlooked the other alternatives toward which German youth had turned. The searching and discontent of German youth, Toller observed, more often could end not in revolutionary pacifism but in the discovery of an organic philosophy of life finding outlet in one of the Republic’s right-wing groups. Toller’s personal transformation from warrior to pacifist in 1917 had had such a profound effect on the twenty-four-year-old writer that Toller uncritically assumed that most of those of his generation who had fought shared his revulsion to war and chauvinism. This was certainly not the impact of the war, for example, on Ernst Jünger, three years younger than Toller, but whose war memoirs, In Stahlgewittern, with their nihilistic celebration of the camaraderie of the trenches, revealingly contrasted with the revulsion to trench warfare Toller had expressed in his autobiography.[52] Moreover, Toller had overestimated the amount of pacifist thought in Germany even in 1918. That most Germans were tired of the war and wished for its end is undeniable. However, Toller tended to confuse the negative feeling of war weariness, shared by many Germans, with the positive feelings for revolution and pacifism shared by few.
Whether objectively true or not, Toller, nevertheless, felt acutely that the failure of pacifism in 1918 was directly related to the rise of Hitler and that for this the former Entente powers bore a major responsibility in their vindictive actions toward Germany after the war. Addressing an international congress of writers gathered in Paris in 1937, Toller reminded his audience:
At that time [1918 and 1919], Europe missed a great historic opportunity. The German people, instructed through hard experience of war, were repelled by war and had recognized the spirit of peace. Had the Entente at that time not made the people responsible for the sins of the Kaiser, the Generals, the Junkers, had they at that time not encouraged reaction out of fear before the will of the German people for a socially just order and discouraged the Republic, had they conceded to the Republic only a fraction of what they later conceded to Hitler, Europe would look differently and the world would not need to tremble before a new war.[53]
Toller’s view of traditional democratic government had, in part, been colored by Germany’s treatment at the hands of England, France, and the United States. As early as 1919, he had censured them for their hostility toward a defeated and defenseless Germany.[54] He was profoundly disillusioned by the Wilsonian rhetoric of a new world order and the postwar reality established by Germany’s enemies. A self-proclaimed radical socialist, Toller indicted not only their actions but also their forms of government as façades of democracy under which hid the sinister forces of capitalism and imperialism. Toller’s experience during the 1930s as a persecuted exile, however, caused him to change his views toward nations he had once rejected. He came to feel England “a second home” and the United States a refuge for those fleeing Nazi tyranny.[55] Their democratic forms of government he came to see as a partial embodiment of freedom and social justice. While he confessed that many times the ideals of democracy had been betrayed and had degenerated into a capitalist oligarchy, he refused to agree with those who repudiated a democratic form of government:
Democracy is a milestone in man’s evolution. The best of mankind have fought for democracy for centuries. . . . The ideals of democracy which were formulated in America before being swept through Europe by the French revolution have not failed. But we need an intensification of democracy: that means freedom plus social justice.[56]
Toller saw in the qualities of reason and individual responsibility the basis of democratic government. Without such qualities, democracy ran the danger of degenerating into fascism. Fear of responsibility, argued Toller, the desire for “a leader, a Caesar, a Messiah who will perform miracles, who will assume responsibility, who will banish anxiety, abolish misery, create an empire of splendor”[57] had allowed Hitler to take the burden of thought and responsibility from a nation that wished neither to think for itself nor to take the responsibility democracy demanded.[58] At a time when democracy was increasingly succumbing to the forces of dictatorship, it was more than ever necessary to defend “this most precious possession of mankind”: “common front must be created where all those come together who are willing to defend civilization regardless of their different religions and political views. We may have different opinions, we may work for different political aims; but in this deadly danger those differences are not important.[59]
No one familiar with Toller’s ideas can fail to see the consistency of his views. From the youthful revolutionary of 1919 to the disillusioned critic of Weimar to the unhappy exile of the 1930s, the theme of unity in the face of the dangers from the Right is a persistent motif in Toller’s political thought. A champion of left-wing unity during the Bavarian revolution, Toller also called for unity of all socialists during the Weimar Republic and hoped to stop Hitler by a Kampfblock of democratic forces. But such a call for left-wing unity was not a realistic option. Even if the German Left had been united and had fought the Nazi government, it is extremely improbable that left-wing unity would have been effective. Events in the Austria of 1934 tend to bear this out: a unified and potent labor movement was unable to prevent destruction by the power of police, army, and a fascist state.
Nevertheless, during the 1930s, Toller again reiterated the need for what became known as a popular front. Toller’s views of left-wing unity were echoed by an abrupt turn in Communist Party dogma. The decision of Moscow in 1937 to favor an alliance with socialist and nonsocialist radicals represented a hasty about-face. While Toller was calling for a united front to stop Hitler in 1932, German Communists were engaged in vilifying the German Socialist Party, the only significant organization that supported the Republic, as social fascists and, hence, the real enemy. Indeed, for a time, demented party dogma was that Hitler’s coming to power would represent a decisive stage of world communism since National Socialism was a manifestation of the death throes of monopoly capitalism. During the latter part of the 1930s, the realization became slowly prevalent in communist circles that National Socialism had perhaps been wrongly analyzed. While it was obviously too late to overthrow the Third Reich, it was possible for Moscow to give its approval to communist support for the French Third Republic and to order French communists to halt their attacks on socialists, emphasize the antiracism of the communists, and enter a coalition government composed of communists, socialists, and radicals.
Such sudden shifting of the party line was, of course, pure opportunism on the part of the Soviet Union, a desire to avoid the nightmare of an internationally isolated Russia facing a belligerent and powerful Germany. From his experience during the Bavarian revolution, when the German Communist Party first denounced the Council Republic and then supported it, opportunism on the part of the communists was familiar to Toller. Moreover, Toller’s relation to communism had always been hostile. In Die Wandlung, Masse Mensch, and Hinkemann, communist materialism in political ideology and communist ruthlessness in political practice were portrayed unflatteringly. Curiously, however, Toller always remained sympathetic to the Soviet Union; indeed, he remained silent on its shortcomings. Although Toller had called on all socialist parties to support the ailing Weimar Republic in the face of the dangers from National Socialism, there is no criticism in his writings of Moscow’s policy to denounce the German Socialist Party as social fascists or its encouragement that the Weimar Republic be overthrown. In Quer Durch, based on his travels through Russia and the United States, Toller had unfavorably contrasted America with the Soviet Union, “the land of the future.”[60] During the 1930s, he saw the defense of the Soviet Union as “the duty of all those who have preserved the belief in the historic mission of the working class.”[61] The enormity of the danger he saw in fascism as well as his own left-wing views, had considerably dulled Toller’s critical faculties when he came to analyze Soviet society. Writing in 1934, he noted that “My strongest impression in Russia was that while in fascist countries intellectual freedom is ever more closely circumscribed and writers who do not slavishly obey the orders of the dictators must go into exile, in the U.S.S.R. on the other hand, intellectual freedom is growing.”[62]
This is one of the few times in Toller’s evaluation of politics that he was naïvely and drastically incorrect. The best that can be said is that while the Russia of Stalin was as hostile to Toller’s view of a free, democratic, and humanistic society as the Germany of Hitler, Toller’s support went to those who opposed fascism, and he refused to recognize any enemies on the Left.
For most antifascist intellectuals during the 1930s, it was the Spanish Civil War that represented the struggle of the forces of democracy against those of fascism, a clear example of good versus evil. As Toller wrote: “He who does not participate in this fight encourages and strengthens the oppressors. He who participates in this fight encourages and strengthens the oppressed.”[63] No cause in the twentieth century has exercised a greater degree of commitment from writers than Spain’s civil war. Many on the Left willingly exchanged their overheated pens for rifles and joined the fighting on the Republican side. Those on the Left, unable to be there in body, were there in spirit. While the civil war produced Spanish Republicans, not all who supported the cause were Spaniards. The cause of Spain was also that of André Malraux, George Orwell, Ludwig Renn, Arthur Koestler, Alfred Kantorowitz—and Ernst Toller.
Toller had been to Spain as early as 1932 and in March 1936, when he and his wife Christine spent six weeks touring Spain. Toller went there to observe the civil war and threw his considerable talents to the support of the republic. In a Weltbühne article of 1938, Toller denounced the domination of Italian fascists and German National Socialists supporting Franco. A victory for the fascists would not only mean a victory of fascism in Spain but would also mean a European war. Spain was important in understanding Toller’s politics during the 1930s. It clarifies his views as a committed, although nondogmatic socialist and illuminates, although with some explanation, the views he held as a believer in democracy, at least as Toller defined it. Toller formed the hypotenuse of the two points of Spain and the Soviet Union, joining them together in a political triangle. Committed to revolutionary socialism, he naturally supported the Spanish Republic. He was also a supporter of the Soviet Union but, like many intellectuals in post–World War I Europe, badly misjudged its social and political system. He remained a supporter of Russia, although at times veering between enthusiasm and mild concern. He gave voice to the first in Quer Durch:
The people of Russia should go their own way. Nowhere else in the world do we see such a self-unfolding of energy and action. If the experiment were not to succeed it would still be in world history a heroic example of the creative human spirit. If it is succeeds and many speak for it a world regeneration of culture will begin whose manifold effects we today can only suspect.[64]
This now appears an odd conclusion about a state that sacrificed more of its citizens to ideology than Hitler. Toller remained from 1919 to his death a firm supporter of the Soviet Union, even when its victims were those with whom he might be expected to sympathize. Toller did express great dissatisfaction with the Moscow show trials but did not speak out against them, even when he knew their unfortunate victims personally, such as Karl Radek, who died in a Soviet gulag. Many intellectuals made the same error. During the 1930s, Sidney and Beatrice Webb were absolutely delighted by Stalin and his Five Year Plan, touring the Soviet Union, proclaiming it a new civilization. This was naïveté, of course. Less credulous was André Malraux, who in private showed little sympathy for Russian communism but in public was a firm supporter because he did not want to undermine the antifascist cause.
Toller’s views were not as naïve as the Webbs’ and not as Machiavellian as Malraux’s. One of Toller’s leading chroniclers writes that Toller was as critical of communism as he was of National Socialism.[65] This is inaccurate. Richard Dove asserts that Toller was forced to moderate his views on socialism during the 1930s. This may only be partly true. Toller moderated his language, not his views. He did this to avoid alienating a middle-class audience he needed to oppose fascism, an audience that would find the vocabulary of socialism unfamiliar and repellent in a person who was supporting the virtues of liberal democracy verses National Socialism.[66]
Part of the problem is semantic. As early as 1930, in his speech “Reichskanzler Hitler,” Toller urged the formation of a unity front (Einheitsfront) of unions, the German Socialist Party, and the German Communist Party.[67] This would have been a shrewd policy that might have prevented torchlight parade celebrations in Berlin after January 1933. However, German Socialists preferred legal methods of struggle. They were conservative and opposed to the extra parliamentary action called for by Toller. German Communists were more creative. Communism then was centrally controlled by Moscow, and, taking their marching orders from Russia’s capital, German Communists attacked German Socialists, not Nazis, as the real fascists. This now sounds extremely strange, but it was followed with great energy and devotion, leading to the astonishing display of communists participating with Nazis to remove Prussia’s socialist government in 1932.
Toller, so often dismissed as an impractical dreamer, showed a hard-headed realism in his views of National Socialism and how to defeat it. He called for working-class solidarity because he believed fascism was a result of the capitalist system. And he believed in the need of the lower middle class (Kleinbürgertum) to have a party (the Nazis) that would defend them against Bolshevism and organized labor. For Toller, it was clear the struggle was indistinguishable from the logic of capitalism. What was needed was a unity of the working class and trade unions: a unity front (Einheistfront).
But in 1935, the Popular Front (Volksfront) became the Soviet’s new approach to fascism. Stalin, in spite of his later pact with Hitler, was under no illusions that the Soviet state would eventually have to fight Nazi Germany. He was also under even fewer illusions about the hostility of the West to Russia and the Soviet Union’s international isolation from the rest of Europe. Stalin attempted to allay British and French fears, turning toward the West in a common cause to oppose fascism, guard freedom, and advocate a broad antifascist alliance. He had finally given up the idea that central European socialists were a tool of fascism.
This appealed to Toller. He was not naïve. He knew the popular front dance was tightly choreographed by Moscow, but he also knew the Soviet Union was a major power, the largest land mass against fascism, and that if the Soviet Union could combine against Germany with Britain and France, Nazism could be not only fought but defeated. This was a way of overcoming the left-wing political divisions the Soviets had formally encouraged, and Toller had an active part in operations set up by the Comintern, Russia’s bureaucratic organ to promote communism.[68] It seemed the former dreamer and leader of the revolution of love had finally become a Realpolitiker.
Although Toller may have had reservations, not publically expressed, about what was going on in the Soviet Union, like an oyster absorbing irritating grains of sand and transforming them into a pearl, he lacquered this discomfort into something of value. The new Volksfront was not a partisan or political movement. It was the attempt to unite all, Catholics and Protestants, socialists and liberals, Trade Unionists and intellectuals, “all men of good will in which the feeling for justice lives.” It was consistent with Toller’s nonpolitical views of what he wanted as far back as 1919. Where previously he had been at best ambivalent about traditional forms of democracy, speaking out against Yankee, French, and British Imperialism, he defended Western solidarity in the Volksfront, if only not to offend opponents of National Socialism. Toller never was a traditional liberal democrat in the sense of approving of traditional parliamentary and elections. He was never as critical of Russian communism as he was of German National Socialism. The Volksfront was in harmony with his support of what the Soviet Union was attempting to do: stop Hitler.
In his 1932 trip to Spain, Toller had the opportunity to view the newly established Republic. While sympathetic to Republicans, he held little hope for a Republic he felt unviable and unable to withstand recurrent periods of dictatorship. Moreover, Toller saw alarming similarities in the development of the Spanish Republic and the Weimar Republic. In both, members of the old order still held positions of power, parliament excluded the interests of workers, and the government persecuted those it believed too radical. “Where have I seen that before?”[69] Nevertheless, by 1938, Toller had come to see the Republic as the embattled outpost of world democracy, a microcosm of the European struggle between the ideals of fascism and those of democracy and a place where the fate of Europe was being decided.[70] In addition, Toller was attracted to the Republic for other reasons. He viewed the Republic as an attempt to create a society based on freedom and justice, a state above parties and petty personal conflicts, a true democracy: “all work together, there are no selfish interests . . . All work for one goal: for the freedom and independence of Spain, for the protection and solution of fundamental moral principles which alone make possible a life of humanity and dignity.”[71] In short, the Spanish Republic was attempting to build the same society Toller had sought for Germany during the Bavarian revolution.
In a trip to Spain from July to September 1938, Toller had been shocked by the suffering of the civilian population, the true victims of any war. When he found little being done to alleviate the hardships of innocent noncombatants, he took upon himself the task of organizing a civilian relief plan. His last humanitarian action before his death, Toller’s idea to aid the victims of Spain’s civil war transcended narrow political lines. As he explained in a speech: “Neither death nor suffering are partisan. There must remain in our humanity some realm where we forget the controversies of the day and come back to the basic principles of charity and solidarity.”[72] Singlehandedly, he sought to obtain fifty million dollars’ worth of food to feed the starving millions of Spain. Tirelessly, he travelled throughout Europe at his own expense, wrote numerous letters, had innumerable conversations in his attempt to secure government support for his plan. Because he was still known as a radical, it was easy for Toller’s Nazi opponents to refer to his revolutionary past, denounce him as a communist, call his nonpartisan motives into question, and discredit his humanitarian ideals. In spite of Nazi calumny, Toller managed to receive considerable support for his plan. Observed Christopher Isherwood:
He had contrived, somehow, to reach audiences outside the circles of the Left. He had touched the heart of a huge, apathetic Public. He had caught the ears of the right people, the Powers, and the powers behind the Powers. They invited him to their houses, as an honoured guest. Even the conservative press spoke well of him. He was in the process of becoming a respectable institution.[73]
By the end of 1938, Toller had a hearing for his ideas in Washington. In touch with Eleanor Roosevelt, he was invited to the White House in December and assured that the President had been informed of his plans. Three days later, at the instigation of Franklin Roosevelt, a committee was formed to ship 600,000 barrels of flour to Spain.[74]
With the imminent success of his relief plan, Toller ostensibly had good reason to be happy as the new year of 1939 approached. However, Toller was confronted by major personal problems. Toller’s income during the 1930s had been insecure. Unlike some exiled writers, Toller was unable to obtain large royalties through translations. Translations of his work, particularly Quer Durch and his autobiography, did not sell well, and his last play, Pastor Hall, which Toller believed his best, was refused production.[75] As a German playwright, Toller had unusually hard financial problems during his years in the United States. In contrast to the novel, there was almost no market for German drama. Particularly on the New York stage, German plays had traditionally been over looked.[76] Although Toller’s Draw the Fires, for example, was a hit in England and his Blind Man’s Bluff had a record run in Ireland, he had no success in producing his works in New York.
Nor was that all. Weimar-exiled intellectuals had a hard time with America and its mass culture. Their triangular cultural references to Geist, Kultur, and Bildung were both elite and avant-garde. As Arnold Schoenburg once wrote in a letter: “If it is art, it is not for the masses. If it’s for the masses, it’s not art.”[77] German culture was high culture, not American mass culture. There was in Germany a sufficiently educated population, cultural panoply of opera houses, concert halls, and intellectual magazines, which did not exist in the United States. What the émigrés found in America was to them a vast, dry, money-grubbing desert of popular kitsch and superficial entertainment. Their reaction to this was frustration, incomprehension, and bewilderment, mixed with despair. Rejected by their homeland, in America they could not find a home.
Hollywood scriptwriting provided relief for some German writers. Toller had had some prior experience in film when he worked with Walter Hasenclever on dialogue for the German version of MGM’s The Big House in 1931. Both Warner Brothers and MGM allowed a number of authors to come to California by assuring them of contracts. Toller had, through his contacts, sent two film plans to a Hollywood agent, one on building the Suez Canal, the other on Ireland. He was also thinking about a film on the mistress of Ludwig I of Bavaria, Lola Montez.[78] This actually became a script entitled Heavenly Sinner, written in collaboration with Sidney Kaufman but never filmed. Toller realized none of his scripts would be shot and in disgust left Hollywood for New York in 1939. Rather predictably, the relation between Weimar intellectuals and the Hollywood film world was not warm. Reaction to the tinsel and celluloid world of Hollywood ran the gamut from condescension to outright bitterness. Kurt Hiller gave expression to the latter sentiment when he angrily wrote that Toller “had worked hard for six or seven months [actually from the Spring of 1937 to the Spring of 1939 when he was under contract with MGM to write film scripts]. Hollywood, true to its Kitsch tradition, did not appreciate anything he did.”[79]
Moreover, while Toller lyrically wrote of the power of the word, certain conditions made that power considerably less potent. Like all German exiled authors, Toller was confronted with an increasingly smaller audience as Hitler extended his influence in Europe.[80] Although English became his adopted language, as a writer Toller was always painfully aware of his stylistic shortcomings. In 1934, he had asserted that the émigré could only defend German culture if he remained true to the German language.[81] Yet Toller was forced to use English as German periodicals became closed to him. Problems of effective self-expression were frustrating. While Toller could speak English fairly well, he never mastered writing, and the unpublished letters he did write in English betray an unfirm grasp of the language. In a questionnaire by the British Labour Monthly, Toller struggled with the written reply: “As long as the struggle for peace attacks only the symptoms it is bound to be inefficient. He will shipwreck who is unable to realize that the antagonisms of capitalist society will always make for warlike solutions and that it is necessary to remove the causes . . .”[82] As Toller lamented, “What is an author who is not heard in his own language and who cannot write in another?”[83] Toller was a man of undoubted courage and deep sincerity, but the suffering he endured and the brutal events of the 1930s of which he had been victim left their mutilating mark on his life.
Any suicide is the ultimate private act of a wounded creature whose life has lost meaning. When meaning is lost and all hope vanished, the soul dies and the body frequently follows. Depression is to the mind as Kryptonite is to Superman—a slow wasting-away of body and spirit. Profound suicidal depression, once it has captured a mind, lays it waste. It is always there, one’s constant most unwanted companion from which there is no escape. The act itself, however, is highly impulsive and sudden, like the crack of thunder during a midsummer storm. No suicidal person wants to die, although he may have told himself so hundreds of times. But after carrying about, perhaps for decades, the grotesque horrid baggage of hopes lost and dreams shattered, the pain of life simply becomes unbearable, and its victim will do anything to avoid the horror of awakening to yet another day without hope or meaning. Nothing has meaning. Ordinary pleasures slowly dim. Going outside on a warm spring day or cuddling with a loved one not only does not help but makes depression’s victim even more upset at being unable to feel the joy everyone else seems to feel. Everything becomes colored in the awful penumbra of a darkness that seems never-ending, dooming the unfortunate tortured toward an unwanted end. It is not death that is longed for. What is wished for is the terrible escape from the perceived horror of a life now seen as unbearable.
The creative connection between manic depression and creativity has been well studied. In ancient Greece, poets communicated with gods through divine madness and states of possession. Socrates in Phaedrus said madness comes from God. Aristotle may have been the first to make a connection between depression—he called it melancholia—and creativity. It is particularly virulent among prose writers and, even more so, among poets, coming, as Dante wrote in The Inferno, “to ferry you across the tide / To endless night, fierce fires and shramming cold.” It can strike suddenly and with great unexpected and overwhelming force. In Toller’s case, depression went back to his years in World War I when he was discharged for psychological reasons. Five years in prison probably only compounded his condition, and his wife had seen his struggle with depression, Toller frequently spending days of incapacitation in a dark room, brooding on his feelings of literary failure. His mood changes, typical of manic depression, moved violently. Days of somber foreboding suddenly gave way to obsessive conversation and a compulsive need for companionship.[84] As an émigré, Toller was not alone in following the tortured path of self-destruction. The exile road was littered with the bodies of authors. The list is formidable: Walter Benjamin, Walter Hasenclever, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Klaus Mann, Kurt Tucholsky, Carl Einstein, and others.
By January 1939, Toller had little money and was completely exhausted by his work for Spain, perhaps already suffering from the “left-wing melancholia” that affected other Weimar intellectuals.[85] Toller had plunged himself into his work with Spain in this, his last spasm of energy. With its failure, Toller’s life now became a flight from memory and grief. What time left remaining was a frantic attempt to beat back death. While he had hoped the Republic would win the civil war, it was becoming increasingly clear that the new society Toller wished for Spain would meet the same end as the Bavarian revolution. As he had blamed himself for the failure of the Bavarian revolution, so Toller also blamed himself for the Spanish Republic. “But it is we who are to blame,” he cried out: “because our voices were faint; we are terribly to blame.” He wrote to Stephen Spender in January:
I have been so completely tied up with the action for Spain that I have simply had no private existence at all. It was necessary to get the interest and sympathy of hundreds of newspapers and people, to obtain interviews, to get in touch with official functionaries, with different governments and so on. As you know the result was a very good one; but with things that are happening now in Spain, one feels that all this ought to have been done ever so much earlier, that all of us have somehow failed.[86]
It was with a crippling sadness that Toller heard of the fall of the Republic in March 1939. Not only was the defeat a triumph for fascism, but Toller feared that the supplies that had reached Spain had fallen into Franco’s hands and had been sent to Germany in exchange for arms.[87] This was a problem that affected all émigrés: their inability to affect history. The exiles did their best to fight this. Long before exile, Toller was perhaps the first in his play Die entfesselte Wotan to point out the dangers of National Socialism. No one believed his predictions. He continued to warn after 1933. It was terribly frustrating for them all. They warned America against Hitler. Their warnings went unheeded. They were viewed as Cassandras, the prophetess whose unwelcome predictions, while always true, was herself blamed for the misfortunes that she so tellingly foretold. The predictions of German émigrés were believed only by fellow German exiles—and these exiles were themselves powerless, unable to act on the course of history, living in a foreign land, their only weapon exile publications read predominantly by other exiles.
If Toller had been able to rely on friends, he could perhaps have overcome his depression. Yet Toller’s intense dedication to the cause of humanity made many uncomfortable in his presence. For the sake of his work, he made extravagant demands on friends and acquaintances, who preferred to avoid him rather than meet the tasks Toller had so gratuitously set for them.[88] During his last months, he was virtually friendless. To this was added a poor marriage. He had married the German actress Christiane Grautoff, twenty-four years younger than he, in 1935. By 1938, they had separated, and it was only Toller’s lack of money that prevented a divorce.[89]
Toller had become a knotted pretzel of dashed hopes, anguish, and despair. Friends who saw him in New York City tell of a prematurely aged man, slowly losing a battle against paralyzing sadness. He had degenerated into a tragic simulacrum of his former self. Wildly famous in Germany, the man who in 1925 could once fill a huge auditorium of thousands to hear him read poetry could now barely fill a small room in New York.[90] Christopher Isherwood noted the change that had occurred in Toller during his last two years. In 1937, when Isherwood first met Toller:
He was all that I had hoped for—more brilliant, more convincing than his books, more daring than his most epic deeds. It was easy enough to see him on that cinema platform, fifteen years ago, when he told the workers “You must occupy the factories. You must resist.” I could picture him at that magnificent moment of defeat, crying out to his judges: “You can silence me. You can never silence history.” I watched him pace his cell, five years long, in the mountain fortress, aloof and dangerous as the untamed tiger. Yes, he had done all that. And he could do it again—tomorrow, if need be. The years which had cloaked him with authority had left the vital spark untouched. The man of forty was as undaunted as the boy of twenty-five.
Two years later, Isherwood was surprised when he met an overwhelmed melancholic: “I was struck by the change in his appearance and in his manner. He looked older, yellower, thinner. The black eyes were somber.”[91]
Toller was now in mean and woeful circumstances. His soul had withered, his eyes were now deadened, his heart and spirit fearsomely tired, his mood soured by what he had experienced since exile. He had never been physically or emotionally strong, and the experience of exile only increased his stress; since 1937, he had been under psychiatric care.
While in Hollywood, he was subject to severe depression and insomnia. By April 1939, Toller was again complaining to his doctor:
“It is the same situation all over again as you have known me in. Not quite as deep but painful enough. The worst is the incapacity to work. What that means for an emigrant depending entirely upon his daily work needs no comment. . . . The question is how to pull myself out of this state.”[92]
A sense of melancholy had encroached like that of a cloudy late afternoon in winter, bleak and grey and cold. His physician suggested creative work to keep busy and fight off depression. Toller frets and broods with a sense of oncoming doom, slumping into morose musings:
It’s quite all right to suggest creative work but that is just where I am hampered. The thought that again and again such a breakdown has to happen will not enter my hand [sic] I am willing to undergo any treatment if there is but the slightest chance to get rid of it for good. It seems to me that in a good state I am building up life and work and then I am thrown back and have to start all over again.
Human relations are going to pieces. I am unable to help others as I try to do in good times. The uncertainty of my whole existence is growing. All this drives me to sheer despair.[93]
Toller, who breathed life in great draughts as he walked through the turbulent decades of the twenties and thirties, from the heated excitement of revolution through the chilled vestibule of exile, was now traversing the chasm between mournful melancholy and deep depression. He had reached the dead end of hopelessness, living in a state of chronic destitution. He now looked increasingly vacant, spent, all hopeful emotions smoothed away, about to enlist the tragic army of those coerced to destroy the self. Isherwood saw Toller just before his death. He was chain-smoking. Isherwood noticed his hands tremble a little as he lit one cigarette after another:
“You know,” he told me, “I long very greatly to return to Europe.”
“You don’t like it here?”
“I hate it. Look,” he pointed. “Over there is the Zoological Garden. You have seen the Sea Lions?”
“Yes, I have seen them.”
“When I’m lying in bed at night I can hear them. And sometimes it seems to me that they are angry, that they are crying aloud to demand the destruction of this city.”
Isherwood suggested Toller write about the city. He shook his head. The finality of his refusal was the last memory Isherwood was to carry away: “No, Isherwood. No I shall never write about this country. I have come here too late.”[94] Toller was scheduled to leave the United States on Tuesday, May 21. He had written to friend and fellow writer Hermann Kesten that he wanted to meet in Normandy and then go to England together if France fell to the Germans.[95]
The idea of suicide was not new to Toller. In 1919, after the failure of the Bavarian revolution, he had contemplated it, and shortly before his release from prison, he had toyed with the idea of taking his own life. It may be of significance that he dedicated his book about his life, I Was a German, to “my nephew Harry who shot himself at age 18 in 1925.” Many of Toller’s plays include suicidal characters. On the evening of May 21, however, in a conversation with Ludwig Marcuse, Toller had vehemently rejected the idea of suicide.[96] Just a few days earlier, Franco had a triumphal parade in Madrid, celebrating his victory in the Spanish Civil War. On May 22—a New York afternoon, appropriately, of dark, overcast clouds and sprinkles of rain—shortly after 2:30, Ernst Toller was found in the bathroom of his New York hotel, The Mayflower, across from Central Park. He had taken the cord from his bathrobe and walked into the bathroom. There he had carefully placed a chair. He tied the cord to a firm fixture, then around his throat, stepped on top of the chair and jumped off, quickly slipping away from life.[97] Like Karl Thomas, the hero of his play Hoppla, wir leben!, a character Toller would have preferred to have seen continue to fight rather than to die by his own hand, like Eugene Hinkemann in his eponymous play, who kills himself, the forty-five-year-old Toller, unable to endure a postwar world lacking a sense of humanity, took his own life. “There are only two choices left,” wrote Toller in Hinkemann, “to hang oneself or to change the world.”
Left-wing intellectuals, including Toller, had commented on the materialism of America. The New York Times account of his funeral on May 24 noted: “he died comparatively poor.”
Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question, Die Juden in Deutschland (Munich: Nazi Party publication, 1936), 202.
Jean-Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The Anti-Fascist Emigration in Europe and America (London: Verso, 2006), 46.
Harold Poor, Kurt Tucholsky and the Ordeal of Weimar Germany (New York: Scribner, 1968), 204.
Quoted by Harry Levin, “Literature and Exile,” in Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 63.
Ernst Toller, “Rede im Englischen jungen PEN-Club,” in Deutsche fűr Deutsche (Leipzig: Verlag für Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1935), 3.
N. A. Furness, “Ernst Toller and the Exigencies of Exile,” in German Writers and Politics 1918–1939, edited by Richard Dove and Stephen Lamb (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 180.
Northampton Chronicle and Echo, June 26, 1935, cited in Furness, “Ernst Toller and the Exigencies of Exile,” 182, 190.
Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), xiv.
Arthur Rosenberg, “Zur Geschichte der politischen Emigration,” Mass und Wert 2 (1938): 371.
Hermann Kesten, Der Geist der Unruh (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1959), 126, quoted by Robert Cazden, German Exile Literature in America, 1933–1950: A History of the Free German Press and Book Trade (Chicago: American Library Association, 1970), 138.
Palmier, Weimar in Exile, at 900 pages, is certainly the most comprehensive study of German exiles.
It was only when Toller came to consider the United States as a refuge from Nazi tyranny that he began to feel more sympathy toward America. However, the land of gaudy Hollywood movies, vulgar society, and dollar worship always held little appeal for Toller.
Ernst Toller, Letter to B, 28.6.23, in Look Through the Bars: Letters from Prison, Poems, and a New Version of “The Swallow Book” (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937), 212.
Ernst Toller, “Unser Kampf in Deutschland,” Das Wort (Moscow) 2 (1937): 52.
Ernst Toller, “The Cultural Consequences of the Reichstag Fire,” Typed Manuscript, Toller Collection, Department of Historical Manuscripts, Yale University Library, 8. Hereafter referred to as TC.
Ernst Toller, “Rede in Budapest,” Die Weltbühne 28 (1932): 853–54.
Dietrich Strothmann, Nationalsozialistische Literaturpolitik (Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1960), 73; Wilhelm Sternfeld, “Die Emigrantenpresse,” Deutsche Rundschau, April 1960, 250.
Toller, untitled speech of 11/10/33, TC, 4.
Ernst Toller, “Rede auf dem Pariser Kongress der Schriftsteller am 25. Juli 1938,” Das Wort (Moscow) 3 (1938): 126.
Ernst Toller, “The Modern Writer and the Future of Europe,” TC, 7.
William Pfeiler, German Literature in Exile: The Concern of the Poets (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1957), 54, 41.
See Toller, “Rede in Budapest,” and Alexander Marai’s comment, “Ungarische Antwort: Warum lohnt es sich zu leben,” both in Die Weltbühne 28 (1932): 853–56. “PEN Kongress in Polen,” Die Weltbühne 26 (1930): 51.
Ernst Toller, “Rede auf dem PEN-K1ub Kongress,” Die Weltbühne 29 (1933): 741–44.
Wladimir von Hartlieb, “Zum PEN-Klub Kongress in Ragusa,” Die literarische Welt, quoted in “The P.E.N. Club and the Nazis,” 445.
Ernst Toller, “Rede auf dem PEN-K1ub Kongress,” 741.
A Nazi observer of the Congress was less sympathetic. Wladimir von Hartlieb, a self-proclaimed opponent of “the bombastic ideology of freedom,” noted: “I had never overestimated his [Toller’s] intellectual qualities; I had considered him a real fanatic. But the man I saw and heard was nothing but a poseur, a routine comedian to whom nothing seems genuine because he is a literateur in the worst sense of the word and thinks only of the effects of applause. The content of his speech was pathetic and parts of it were ridiculous. Nothing would be easier than to reduce his statements to absurdity. Of course, he was overwhelmed with applause.” “The P.E.N. Club and the Nazis,” 446.
It was not until 1957 that PEN expelled its second delegation, the Hungarian, for its approval of the Hungarian regime’s measures against those involved in the 1956 revolt.
Interview of Toller by Victor Rubcic, Sarajevo, June 8, 1933, copy in Akademie der Kunst, West Berlin.
John Spalek, “Ernst Tollers Vortragstatigkeit und seine Hilfsaktion in Exil” (unpublished paper read at Washington University Conference Center Symposium). “Opposition and Resignation: German Writers in Exile,” April 14–16, 1972, 12. I wish to thank Dr. Spalek for allowing me to see a copy of his paper.
Ernst Toller, “Ernst Tollers Anklage,” Deutsche Stimmen, 10 August 1934, 9.
Toller, “Cultural Consequences of the Reichstag Fire,” TC, 1, 7.
Toller, “Rede in Englischen-jungen PEN-Club,” 3.
Toller, “Ernst Tollers Anklage,” 9.
See Thomas Mann, “Writers in Exile,” in Twice a Year (N.P., 1939), 37–38.
Mann, “Writers in Exile,” 37.
Toller, “Rede in Englischen-jungen PEN-Club.”
See chapter 5.
See New York Times, October 19, 1936, 18:5.
Ernst Toller, “The Meaning of the Andre Trial,” New Republic 89 (1937): 331.
Ernst Toller, “A Minority Hitler Never Mentions,” Tribune (London), October 14, 1938, 13.
Ernst Toller, “An England,” Die neue Weltbühne 34 (1938): 1296–97.
See David Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1967), 100–101; Werner Link, “German Political Refugees in the United States during the Second World War,” in German Democracy and the Triumph of Hitler, edited by Anthony Nicholls and Erich Matthias (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971), 242.
Toller, “Unser Kampf in Deutschland,” 51–52. See also Toller, “Rede auf dem Pariser Kongress der Schriftsteller,” 122–26.
“Man and the Masses: The Problem of Peace,” TC, 1.
W. A. Willibrand, Ernst Toller and His Ideology (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1945), 31.
Ernst Toller, Quer Durch: Reisebilder und Reden (Berlin: Kiepenheuer, 1930), 99.
Toller, “Radio Speech of September 16, Anti-Nazi League,” TC, 5.
Ernst Toller, “Menschliche Komodie in Genf,” Die Weltbühne 28 (1932): 397.
Ernst Toller, “The Twentieth Anniversary of the War,” Special Manuscript Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University, 11–12.
“Ernst Toller an die Jugend,” Vorwärts, 8 May 1922, 2.
Ernst Toller, “Das Versagen des Pazifismus in Deutschland,” in “Ernst Tollers amerikanische Vortragsreise, 1936/37,” by John Spalek and Wolfgang Frühwald, in Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch im Auftrag der Görres-Gesellschaft, N.F. 6 (1965): 305–11.
For a psychological explanation of the effects of the war and its profoundly unpacifist influence on Germany’s “youth cohort,” see Peter Loewenberg, “The Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort,” American Historical Review 76, no. 1 (1971): 1457–1502.
Toller, “Unser Kampf in Deutschland,” 50–51.
See Ernst Toller, “Die Friedenskonferenz zu Versailles,” Neue Zeitung, April 1, 1919.
See Toller, introduction to Seven Plays (London: John Kane, 1935), x.
Toller, “Are We Responsible for our Times?” in “Ernst Tollers amerikanische Vortragsreise,” by Spalek and Frühwald, 298.
Toller, “Are We Responsible for our Times?” in “Ernst Tollers amerikanische Vortragsreise,” by Spalek and Frühwald, 297.
Toller’s reaffirmation of democracy allowed him to give even the Weimar Republic a positive aspect. Although Hitler denounced the Republic, wrote Toller, “He has not created a fraction of the creative administration to which the Republic can point. The Republic built achievements which were models for the world. Its social policies, its hospitals and rest homes . . . its cultural achievements, the freedom of thought which characterized it, have inspired the admiration of the world.” Toller, “Unser Kampf in Deutschland,” 47.
Toller, “Are We Responsible for our Times?” in “Ernst Tollers amerikanische Vortragsreise,” by Spalek and Frühwald, 301.
Ernst Toller, Which World—Which Way? Travel Pictures from America and Russia (London: Sampson Low, 1931), x.
“Schriftsteller stellen sich űber die Sowjetunion and über Sowjetliteratur,” International Literatur (Moscow) 5, no. 3 (1934).
Toller, writing in New Statesman and Nation, November 3, 1934, 615; Toller’s italics. According to Ilya Ehrenburg: “Abroad Toller always defended the Soviet Union, even the things he did not like about our country. He had friends in Moscow with whom he had long frank talks. At our last meeting he said to me that the one hope he had was Moscow.” Ilya Ehrenburg, Memoirs, 1921–1941, translated by Tatania Shebunia (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1964).
Toller, Letter to Dean of Canterbury, August 18, 1938, TC.
Quoted in John Fortheringham, “From Einheitsfront to Volksfront: Ernst Toller and the Spanish Civil War,” German Life and Letters 52, no. 4 (1999): 434.
Spalek, “Ernst Toller: The Need for a New Estimate,” 591.
Richard Dove, Revolutionary Socialism in the Work of Ernst Toller (New York: Peter Lang, 1986), 435.
Fotheringham, 331.
Ernst Toller, Gesammelte Werke, 5 vols., edited by John Spalek and Wolfgang Frühwald (Munich: Hanser, 1978), 1:206; Fotheringham, Ernst Toller, 334.
“Am Sender von Madrid,” Die neue Weltbühne, September 1938; Ernst Toller, “Das neue Spanien I: L’Espana es Republica,” Die Weltbühne 28 (1932): 553.
See speech by Toller, “Few People . . . ,” TC, 6.
Ernst Toller, “Am Sender von Madrid,” Die Neue Weltbühne 34 (1938).
Toller, YMCA Speech, “In every modern war…” TC, 3.
Christopher Isherwood, Exhumations: Stories, Articles, Verses (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), 127.
See “Spanish Civilians get U.S. Flour,” New York Times, December 30, 1938.
See Toller’s letter to Barrett Clark, December 17, 1938, TC.
Cazden, German Exile Literature in America.
Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 499, 148–49.
Jawaharlal Nehru, A Bunch of Old Letters Written Mostly to Jawaharlal Nehru (London: Asia Publishing House, 1960), 205–206, 229; John McManus, “Mr. Toller in the Cinema,” New York Times, November 1, 1936, X, 5.
Kurt Hiller, Köpfe und Tröpfe: Profile aus einem Vierteljahrhundert (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1959), 294.
The problems of publishing “emigrant literature” in Europe were touched upon by Toller at the Edinburg meeting of the PEN Club. See “Ernst Tollers Anklage,” passim.
Ernst Toller, “The German Theatre Today,” Manchester Guardian, February 17, 1939, 13.
Fürness, “Ernst Toller and the Exigencies of Exile,” 186.
Toller, quoted by Kurt Pinthus, “Life and Death of Ernst Toller,” Books Abroad 14, no. 1 (1940): 7–8.
Dove, Richard, Revolutionary Socialism in the Work of Ernst Toller, 218. See also Kay Redfield, Touched by Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Free Press, 1993.
The term is Anthony Phelan’s. See his “Left Wing Melancholia: Kurt Tucholsky’s Humanism,” in The Weimar Dilemma: Intellectuals in the Weimar Republik (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985).
Toller, quoted by Harry Slochower, “Ernst Toller,” Twice a Year 3, no. 3/4, 133.
To1ler, Letter to Stephen Spender, January 28, 1939, TC; Pinthus, “Life and Death of Ernst Toller,” 6.
Isherwood, Exhumations, 129.
See Toller, Letter to William Meloney, December 9, 1938.
Stephen Lamb, “Activism and Weimar Politics: The Case of Ernst Toller and His Contemporaries,” in Expressionism in Focus, by Richard Sheppard (Blairgowries, Scotland: Lochee, 1987), 116.
Isherwood, Exhumations, 125–26, 131.
Toller, Letter to Dr. Ralph Greemspohm, April 8, 1939, Collection of Professor John Spalek, Albany: State University of New York at Albany. Hereafter referred to as SC.
Letter of Toller to Ralph Greemspohm, April 14, 1939, SC.
Wolfgang Frühwald and John Spalek, eds., Der Fall Toller (Munich: Hanser, 1979).
Harold Hurwitz, “Opfer oder Held,” in Dramaturgische Blätter Berlin, May 1947.
See Ludwig Marcuse, “Ernst Tollers letzter Abend,” Rhein-Neckar Zeitung (Heidelberg), July 5, 1949.
New York Times, May 25, 1939, 3.