What the Shadow Said
“The powerful command,” noted Duclos in his Considérations sur les moeurs, “the intellectuals govern, for in the long run they form public opinion.”[1] The verdict is that of an intellectual, and historians should be careful when dealing with attempts at self-justification. The influence of the intellectual may be greatest in the long run, but the cynical will surely recall Keynes’s quip that, in the long run, we are all dead. In the short run, intellectuals can either advise the powerful or criticize them. In the first case, the intellectual runs the danger of becoming a courtier who must defer to the men in power who actually make decisions. His dilemma is either to speak out and risk destroying his influence or compromise his beliefs. As an outside critic, on the other hand, the intellectual can hope to influence public opinion, and thus government. While the outside critic does not have to run the risk of compromising his views, he does run the risk that his views will be ignored.
At the beginning of the postwar period, Toller’s views briefly found an echo and affirmation, perhaps unknowingly. In 1947, Group 47 became a significant part of German literature for the next two decades. Its best-known member was Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass. Ambiguously left-leaning in views, they were, after twelve years of the subversion of German literature, ready to re-create their work based on the inner vision of the artist and his awareness of social and political issues, in this case somewhat similar to Toller’s situation immediately after the war. They acknowledged their moral duty to become politically involved and were occupied with the themes of the engaged writer as a force for social change. Grass in particular echoed Toller in his view that the writer had to give up the traditional purity and high-minded eminence of the Dichter, remote from everyday concerns, and embrace participation in the political.[2]
Toller’s view of the engaged political writer started with his creative life as a dramatist. Toller never wrote a novel. This may not be entirely accidental, for, in juxtaposition with the novel, drama in Germany had been associated with social purpose from the days of Schiller. It was Schiller who, long before Toller, conceived the theater as a moral institution, existing not merely to entertain but also to instruct. Many of his plays in the eighteenth century elaborated the underlying theme of the corrosive influence of power and were echoed in the plays of Büchner, Hebbel, and Hauptmann in the nineteenth and Toller in the twentieth. Schiller’s plays present stark contrasts, like Toller’s, between ideal and real, harmony and discord; his heroes champion the ideal of humanity but themselves are tortured beings. In his plays, Schiller viewed his protagonists’ tragedy not solely as a result of circumstances. The salvation of his heroes, like the heroes of Toller, is not in their surrender to fact but in a moral triumph, overlaid with themes of regeneration and self-sacrifice.
Toller was a symbol of a certain type of German intellectual. In his death, Toller represented precisely this type, just as he did during his lifetime. His end, observes one writer three months after Toller’s suicide, “symbolizes the fall of the democratic-pacifist ideology; his end coincides with the end of the illusions once concentrated in the slogan ‘Never again war!’”[3] But how effective were Toller and Germany’s left-wing intellectuals, all of them outside critics? For some historians, they were highly effective and bear a clear responsibility for the fall of the Weimar Republic and the subsequent rise of National Socialism to power. Gordon Craig, for example, sees their criticism of the Republic as “a grave one” since Weimar “needed all the friends and supporters it could find.”[4] Kurt Sontheimer sees the Republic “hopelessly squeezed in between a literary Left and a nationalistic Right” that allowed “no breathing space.”[5] In a similar manner, historian Golo Mann is also highly critical of the left-wing intellectuals’ failure to rally to the Republic.[6] Understand what Mann is saying here: leftist-intellectual criticism of Weimar’s democracy in pre-Nazi Germany frequently turned out to be an active commitment to its dissolution; Weimar intellectuals did not fully recognize this political logic. Yet such touching faith in the efficacy of the left-wing intellectual is singularly misplaced, for what is implied is that the Right could not have overthrown the Republic without the aid of the leftist intellectual. Left-wing intellectuals were hardly the caryatid on whose head the Weimar Republic was supported. Their influence on the political beliefs of fellow Germans beat as heavily as the wings of butterflies. While left-wing criticism was bitter, it was also largely ineffective. As Walter Laqueur observes: “The struggle proceeded in the streets, the political assemblies, the beer halls, the party headquarters, anywhere but the places frequented by intellectuals.”[7] Justifiably, it has been pointed out what should have been clear from the beginning: it was not the intellectuals who destroyed the Republic, but the Nazis and their right-wing allies.
The left-wing intellectuals of Weimar have remained prophets without honor in their own country. It has been argued, or at least implied, they were failures, although I argue that this needs reexamination. The argument runs as follows: unlike the eighteenth-century philosophes or the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia, left-wing Weimar intellectuals failed to influence the views of following generations. The members of the German resistance to Hitler, for example, drew their strength not from the views of left-wing intellectuals but from conservative revolutionary or Catholic philosophies. In addition, neither the following Bonn Republic nor certainly not East Germany nor the present Germany has any similarity to the aspirations of the left-wing intellectuals. At best a small and misunderstood minority, their positions were unpopular and their programs unattainable. The triumph of Hitler was at the same time a symbol of their failure. Yet if they failed, it was not because they did not try to succeed. Their organizing efforts were notable, the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte, Rat Geistiger Arbeiter, Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund. Their periodicals were well written and coherently argued. However, in the end, all their efforts were seemingly failures and all their ideals frustrated.
Toller was perhaps one of the best examples of the frustrated left-wing intellectual, alienated from society because his sensibilities were in conflict with an insensitive age, one seeking a home but unable to find it. Throughout his life, Toller dragged about an entourage of demons. He was, as the poet Auden said at Toller’s funeral, “chased by . . . shadows.”
Ernst Toller was a sickly child and adolescent. As an adult, he was manic depressive, with numerous psychiatric hospitalizations and he possessed an acute sensibility—all were an integral and compelling part of this gentle genius. His further tragedy was his homelessness. Tearing himself from his Jewish heritage, he found himself equally as alienated from the German. The themes of wandering in search of an elusive harmony and of the wanderer’s loneliness at being unable to find it, the alienation of the wanderer from society and his frantic attempts to seek a lost Gemeinschaft are common themes in all his work; from Die Wandlung to his last letters, they consistently recur. Beneath the shell of his faith in humanity, there lurks Yeats’s ever-present beast slouching toward Bethlehem. In many of his plays, its heroes involuntarily watch the coming apart of a world to which they are emotionally bound. Unsympathetic to radicalism, they lay bare the sources of its power. Alien to its style of life, they penetrate its central dilemmas in both experience and ideology. Despite his humanitarian outlook, much of his work betrays a streak of pessimism and even futility. The literary image of the romantic rebel inspired by a search for a noble and uncorrupted society that causes the fighter to be misunderstood, mocked and, in the end, driven to death by those he wishes to save is a dominant motif. Unwittingly, his heroes find their own damnation. Desiring to do great deeds of kindness in the face of an unkind society, they meet with frustration. In the attempt to abolish cruelty, they must themselves become cruel; as men of ethics, they are weighted down by the guilt of violence.[8]
Toller was prescient in his analysis of Germany, probing its social and political entrails with the hands of an adroit haruspex. But he was more than this, much more. In his life, he faced the unknown, the never done before, and the unprecedented. He was a rebel, an iconoclast— sometimes the solitary figure on a far shore, sometimes the lauded writer, but always a bit apart from the majority of his countrymen, always, like all writers, a bit of a loner. In his plays, his reportage, his documentaries of the judicial system of Weimar, his speeches and poems, Toller looked at the world from his perspective, not the conventional wisdom of others. This can be a lonely calling, as any biblical prophet might attest. This ancient simile of the prophet as outcast, or at least as misunderstood, has its analogy in an American context. At one time, only a year removed from Toller’s death in 1939, the decade 1940s and early 1950s, solitary figures like Toller—saviors, soldiers, survivors, who followed their own codes—were acknowledged heroes in film noir. It may not be an accident that so many German refugee directors—Fritz Lang, Max Ophüls, Fred Zinnemann, Otto Preminger—defined film noir’s distinctive style. Pictures of Piscator’s production of Toller’s plays reveal what was to become film noir’s classic staging and camera angles. These reflect the heritage of Toller’s German expressionism, showing oddly lit and angled shots, chiaroscuro frames with shadowy illumination, and truncated foreground objects. Standing alone, the heroes of film noir became protectors, righters of wrongs, often misunderstood but a force for good. Under pressure and against odds, they attempted to correct society, fight for justice, and achieve small victories in a murky world that threatened to overwhelm a single solitary voice. From the hardened detectives Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe in The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep to the lone Marshall in High Noon, they are the walking wounded, but they live by their own code, standing up for justice against opponents more overwhelming than they in power and number. Like them, Toller, whose whole life could have come from a film noir script, heard what others did not, saw when others preferred not to, and courageously acted when so many others were spectators.[9]
Toller was what John Kennedy spoke about himself, an idealist without illusions. After his disappointing flirtation with revolutionary politics, he became a realist but never gave up his idealism. More than any other intellectual, he was unique. He did not merely theorize about activism but became active in a direct and violent way, taking on the government office in Bavaria and even leading troops into battle for that government. In this case, he was different from German intellectuals of the post–World War I era. None of his Weltbühne intellectual colleagues had done this, been politician, General, and writer. They did not have to make this choice. When Toller is criticized as a fuzzy-minded romantic (which he was before entering the crazed, cruel, and chaotic storm of Bavaria in 1919), he elected to make a choice his fellow intellectuals never had to make. This is precisely his merit, Toller’s distinguishing quality, one not shared by others. He demonstrated, in extreme form, the choice, ethically, morally, historically, that confronts each of us. Toller’s idealism was not in his admittedly fuzzy-minded naïveté before 1919. Before existentialism, before Sartre and Camus, Toller showed that, while we may not always make the correct choice, we must make a choice. In making this choice, we step out of the dream world of idealism into the hard world of reality and the creation of a future, perhaps better world, perhaps not. It really does not matter. What matters is the choice, for one thing in this uncertain world is certain: if we do nothing, it is certain that the hoped for reality will not appear.[10] This is idealism without illusions.
This view of Toller turns the one-time idealist into something unusual during the Weimar years: a hard-headed pragmatist who knew rhetoric, moral speeches, and articles printed in intellectual publications read by other intellectuals were not going to do very much. It may be well to remember that the young Toller had been acquainted with the great German sociologist Max Weber. In his 1918/1919 Munich lectures, “Politics as a Profession,” Weber noted two types of intellectuals: Ideologists (Gesinnungsethiker), dominated by adherence to theory and absolute moral principles based on that theory, and pragmatists (Verantwortungsethiker). Most of the expressionists were in the first category, more concerned with Geist and personal redemption, with eschatological yearnings for salvation rather than practical politics. Toller was not. His was a sober, sometimes wrong but more often right, assessment of what should be done, what could be done, and a plan on how to do it. This was particularly so in his views of the völkish Right, including at first the reactionaries he so tellingly satirized in Die entfesselte Wotan and, later, the more sinister National Socialists. Only someone like Toller, the converted revolutionary romantic, could write so tellingly about the minatory dangers from the radical Right. We have already seen this, above, in his essay Reichkanzler Hitler. But it was also seen in his Weltbühne article of October 1930. This, written after Nazi success in recent elections, warned against the dangers his fellow intellectuals ran when they dismissed Hitler as someone not to be taken seriously, and to be made fun of. Toller knew this was a formula for disaster. He knew the Nazis were ruthless, would quickly eliminate any institution opposed to them, and establish a reign of terror, and then it would be too late to remove them from the power they had seized.[11] While Toller had not been successful as a political leader in 1919, he certainly was a great success in seeing dangers of right-wing trends before others and warning against them. He continued in this leadership role throughout the 1930s, helping the helpless, working for the preservation of the Spanish Republic, giving his time, his energy, and what little money he had to tell the world the reality behind National Socialism. This was no small accomplishment and should be acknowledged.
Successful leaders grow from experience and can radically change their thought based on reality. It is useful to look at Toller as leader from this critical perspective. In 1917, when Toller was associating with the publisher Eugen Diederichs, who had drawn together a group of outstanding thinkers, including the historian Frederich Meinecke, the poet Richard Dehmel, the economist Werner Sombart, and sociologists Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber, Toller had written the goals for Cultural and Political Union of Youth in Germany. Weber was shocked at the wrong-headedness and unreality of the program and of Toller’s words.[12] A few months later, when Toller was in Munich in January 1918 organizing a munitions workers’ strike, his audience wanted food, peace, and better working conditions. Toller, who was writing Die Wandlung, and probably in a state of goofy euphoria, contributed to this by handing out copies of his unfinished play.[13]
One might wonder what agrarians and industrial workers might have thought about the role of this young man. A playwright seeking an audience? An audience seeking entertainment or wisdom? What would they have thought, gazing in woolly bewilderment with round wondering eyes, frozen in a paralysis of confused astonishment, and dumbstruck in sudden confrontation, with the fantastical apparition of—an expressionist playwright hawking copies of his latest drama? But the remarkable quality Toller had was to transform himself, between that cold Munich winter and the end of spring, from the sophomoric actions of an as yet unpublished playwright into a mature leader who reflected profoundly about the consequences of power and leadership.
One way of looking at both is based on the navigation of paradox. By May 1919, Toller knew good laws frequently have unintended consequences that create new problems; conservatives wish to maintain existing evils, liberals would replace them with others; seeking to do good results in implementing the good using unethical means. Ernst Toller was, more than any other intellectual of the time, aware of the delicate interplay of intellectual and moral alternatives in politics. Toller’s life and writings keep coming back to this. In Toller’s case, the paradox upon which all the others rested was that leaders frequently wield power for idealistic reasons and then become corrupted by it. Seeking to ameliorate suffering, they unintentionally cause it; seeking to end war, they kill. But Toller had discovered the forbidden fruit in this tree of knowledge. As Toller poignantly cries out: “Men grope for goodness. Even the evil doings wear the mask of goodness.”[14] He asks the central question of ethical leaders: “Must the man of action always be dogged by guilt?”[15] He saw that to live in a political world was always to live in a world of either ambiguity or misapprehension. Wisdom in politics is not in being certain. There are only thoughtful or not thoughtful ways of being certain, and not quite so certain; useful or useless ways of making thought become sometimes unwelcome reality.
In seeking to find a relationship to power or, more specifically, to government power, to Germany, the left-wing intellectuals had a serious problem after 1919. Germany had once been the center of European Marxism. After 1917, the situation had become more ambiguous and forced the left-wing into a dilemma. They could support the newly formed Weimar government and, therefore, repudiate the Russian model. Or they could accept the Russian model and attempt to undermine the Weimar republic and substitute it with communism. There was a third, albeit theoretical solution, particularly attractive to Germans: to look to Marxist theory to elucidate past error and prepare for action in the future.[16] The critical issue was the relation between theory and practice or, to use Marx’s term, praxis. This whole way of looking at the world, what in German is called Weltanschauung, was extremely Teutonic in its approach. It recalls our discussion of the theory of Geist, an attempt to connect reality with theory in a purely theoretical way. Its most astute commentator has ironically described it as a “dialectical relation to theory.” One of the earmarks of praxis, as opposed to mere action, was its being mixed with theoretical considerations. “The goal of revolutionary activity was understood as the unifying of theory and praxis which would be in direct contrast to the situation prevailing under capitalism.”[17] It became a main supposition of the Frankfurt School. As far as the Frankfurt principles can be understood at all, that of theory and that of praxis were in some fashion to overcome the contradictions the School saw between Weimar and Moscow. Toller, although not a part of the Frankfurt School, was friendly with one of its leaders, Max Horkenheimer, arrested after the Bavarian revolution and mistaken for Toller. Horkenheimer had supported the revolution, and Toller’s role during the revolution can be seen as an exercise, perhaps unconscious, of the School’s attempt to combine Geist with politics and reach praxis.
Toller was in a particular tradition of modern German thinkers. He sought to relate art and truth and then reconcile both with life. He bore both the mantle of prophet and advocate for action that went beyond his environment and was felt by the world at large. In this, he was an heir of a long array of German intellectuals: Nietzsche, Stefan Georg, Rilke, Mann, and Kafka. Each faced somewhat different problems, but their work has a commonality. They were concerned about the role of the writer and his effect on society and were artistically narcissistic, that is treating art and the artist with great seriousness and placing it in the center of their work.[18]
Toller was, like all intellectuals, alienated in the sense of a critic. He was uncomfortably out of step with the political and social direction of his countrymen. Alienation, however, is not Nihilism. It is rather something positive, a way of looking at the world without being attached to any program formulated by others as final. Nor is it unpatriotic, although many may see it as so. Toller shows that an intellectual can be a critic of his country and yet, as an upholder of the ideal of the “other Germany,” be an advocate of its promise.
In spite of his pessimism and the fits of depression that so frequently assailed him, all who knew Toller attested to his extraordinary compassion for others. Even up to the last few months of his life, Toller was tireless in his efforts to help starving and tortured Spain, meeting with Catholic prelates to ask for help, meeting with the American Secretary of State, and, in December 1938, having lunch with the First Lady, who promised to bring Toller’s plans to the attention of the President. Two weeks before his death, Toller, himself in poor financial shape, was writing to the wealthy Prince Löwenstein, soliciting money for the writer Walter Mehring, one of Weimar Germany’s most satirical authors, whose books had also been burned along with Toller’s, because “he finds himself in great suffering and near to hunger.”[19] He was acutely aware of suffering humanity and saw himself as the self-proclaimed leader of man, the “poet of humanitarian warmth,”[20] one who would do battle for the forces of freedom, justice, and brotherhood against the evils of injustice, poverty, and reaction.
Toller’s century was singularly unready for his ideas. As Thomas Mann noted in his novel Doktor Faustus, 1918 was clearly the end of the epoch “of middle-class humanism” in Germany.[21] The humanitarian rhetoric of Toller had little place in a society whose symbols were the Freikorps bullet and the martial ethos of the “Horst Wessel Lied.” Like all the left-wing intellectuals, Toller was isolated and lonely in opposition to his age. The humanism that characterized the leftist intellectual was hardly in accord with a society born from defeat in war, humiliated by what was viewed as an unjust peace, and expressed in a rising tide of nationalism that was the antithesis of what the activist meant by Geist. Reason had little place in a society increasingly dominated by irrationality. In his bleaker moments, even Toller recognized the dilemma: “I believed in the power of reason, believed in it so strongly that it seemed that whoever recognized reason must follow it. . . . How laborious it is to lead man; his opponents do not give him his hardest defeat . . . he gives it to himself.”[22]
Toller saw himself as the poet in politics, the ethical man who, by the force of his personality and the justice of his ideals, would call forth a new Germany. In his poetical preface to Die Wandlung, he sees man as “heavy with dreams and blind”:
With horror ringing in our ears. Mankind cried out.
A man, a brother,
Molded by suffering and joy,
By mad illusion and disdain;
A man, temple of the will,
Of rapturous joy and holy sorrow.
We heard the fierce and urgent cry:
The Way!
The Way!
O poet, lead us.[23]
We may commend such idealism, but as a leader Toller has been characterized as less than a success. Aspiring to be Germany’s leader, so the argument runs, the historian cannot say that he inspired a significant following. While Toller may have longed to become a poet of the people, his following was limited to the sophisticated.[24] George Grosz, whose work was the pictorial counterpart of what the left-wing intellectuals wrote, saw Toller’s view of himself as a leader destined to failure:
He was not the type. . . . He visualized himself as another Lassalle, not one of those boring masses of anonymity who reported what was going on in the factories. He would stand beside a fluttering red flag, his eyes fixed on the great, the beautiful, the ideal. He stood above the people and among them at the same time. He was of a romantic and sentimental nature. He lacked all the essentials of a genuine leader: firmness of will power and—innate to all real leaders—contempt for the masses. He viewed both swallows and people poetically and confused poetry with politics.
He knew no defiance. For him everything was precious to a certain extent. He should have learned that in order to control the masses, one must carry a whip, even if it is never used, but kept concealed in its wrappings.[25]
“He was not the type . . . He lacked all the essentials of a genuine leader . . .” A quite different case can be made. In the Western world, particularly in America, success is lauded and awarded, admired and extolled. We love the rags to riches theme. We worship and celebrate those whose cause has triumphed—especially if they were the underdog, overcoming impossible odds and finally standing in unalloyed triumph amidst the raucous cheering of an awed, appreciative crowd. American films are replete with this theme, particularly sports films. One thinks of Sylvester Stallone in Rocky or Alfred Green’s The Jackie Robinson Story, Robert Redford in The Natural, Gene Hackman in Hoosiers, or Gary Ross’s Seabiscuit. All underdogs. All winners. In each, the victory is certainly not without travail; the hero suffers but survives to bask in the glory of achievement and ultimate success. It is difficult to imagine any culture that would not give accolades to such ostensible greatness.
Yet there is one where success is defined in a different fashion. Japan has certainly had its share of the successful hero. But the tradition here is more nuanced and complicated than in the West, representing, as it does, something alien and unsettling. It represents the exact opposite of the culture of accomplishment. This is the person, alone and ignored and defeated, at least by Western standards, whose “sincerity” (sei jitsu, 誠) does not permit him to be successful the way we in the West understand it. At first, this person’s courage and determination may fling him rapidly upward (like Toller), but this is tragically followed by being cast into seeming defeat because he is aligned to the losing side. Redoubling his efforts, he defies convention and even common sense until, in final defeat, he is overcome by his enemy, the “successful one” who, through ruthlessness, imposes a new order on the world.[26] This is a different way of looking at the definition, at least the Western version, of success. The struggle has seemingly been in vain, the battle useless, the war lost. As one kamikaze pilot who survived his encounter recalled, “Is it true that self-sacrifice is the only thing that gives meaning to death? To this question the warrior is obliged to reply ‘yes.’ Knowing full well that his suicide has no meaning.”[27] The West certainly has had great men who have lost, but they become great despite their defeat. Napoleon is celebrated, but not for losing the battle of Waterloo. Hannibal is remembered for his victory at Cannae, not for his eventual destruction at Zama. The closest American comparison to the Japanese might be the celebration of the genius of Lee, despite his overwhelming defeat by Grant and Sherman, and Lee’s futile struggle against overwhelming force to preserve the Old South.
There is a certain nobility and heroism that should be divorced from the achievement of goals. It is seen in Toller’s life and death and is illuminated by the Japanese example: during the second decade of the twentieth century, fighting to save the Bavarian revolution and striving to create a new humane political form; during the twenties, castigating Weimar for its weaknesses and its forced compromises with the forces of reaction; during the thirties, Toller, now fully aware of the danger of National Socialism, defending Germany’s frail democracy against the unstoppable force of evil and, finally, in a last gasp, attempting to save the unfortunate Spanish Republic. Few, if any, German intellectuals during the 1920s and 1930s fought so much with such dedication and tenacity and selflessness.
As an individual, Toller was a product of the dual revolutions of 1918 and 1933.[28] A supporter of the lost ideals of the first, he died in exile, an opponent of the triumphant ideals of the second. His life is rather like an axial tomography of German mentality from Weimar to the Third Reich and conveniently falls into three main phases. The first ended with his war experience. His existence before was that of the adolescent, unsure of his ideas, rebelling against his religion, seeking security. In an attempt to become integrated into German society, he renounced his Jewishness and turned instead to nationalism. Barely twenty in 1914, he abandoned his studies at Grenoble, returned to Germany on the last train before the border was closed, and enthusiastically supported the war effort. He enlisted in the artillery and requested transfer to the front, where he fought for thirteen months before he was declared unfit for further duty.
His second period began with his conversion from nationalism to humanitarianism and ended with his exile after 1933. Trench warfare opened his eyes to the futility of war and turned him into a pacifist. Opposing the war, he participated in strikes and was arrested for his activities, only to resume them upon his release. In an attempt to put his ideas on society into practice, he became one of the leaders of the Bavarian revolution. The failure of his political sojourn led to his trial and eventual imprisonment in Niederschöenfeld. Although his literary activity preceded his prison years, it was in Niederschöenfeld that his best-known plays were written, and it was while in prison that he achieved his greatest success as a dramatist. Here, he polemicized against the complacent Philistine mentality, showed up the deficiencies of Weimar society, and fashioned the wrath of his literary bullets against the rising reactionary forces”[29] that threatened the democratic humanitarian society he so ardently sought to achieve.
The year 1933 began the third phase of his life. Under the impact of Hitler, an increasing pessimism dominated his thoughts. It became difficult to plead for humanism in an age characterized by brutality. An individual who believed in freedom, he saw with despair the rearguard action fought by democrats against the forces of dictatorship. An advocate of world fraternity, he was unable to stop resurgent nationalism. A pacifist, he was forced to the conclusion that pacifism was an ineffective phantasm when confronted with the brute force and unsentimental ruthlessness of fascism. Like his eponymous character Hinkemann, Toller too was forced to the conclusion “that’s how human beings are. . . . They could be otherwise if they wished, but they don’t. They stone the spirit, they mock It; they disgrace and crucify life.” In his youth given to the wildest of political enthusiasm, he now surrendered himself to the depths of political despair. A homeless wanderer, cut off from his native soil, he became increasingly unhappy, yearning for and dreaming of an ideal and distant Germany that had never really existed. So curiously blended a disposition naturally made for a curiously blended dissonance of character. The peculiar Zerrissenheit that the German historian Koppel Pinson once observed as a common theme in German history and literature[30] stamped Toller’s personality; his two souls were held in uneasy balance. He was an embodiment of paradox.
Historical circumstances, and Toller’s response to contemporary events, account in large part for these alluring complexities. Ernst Toller was always an outsider. As a child, he was a Jew among Christians; as a young adult, a German among Poles; in war, a pacifist among militarists; in peace, a left-wing intellectual in an anti-intellectual society; in exile, an emigrant among natives. Possessing an “enchanting simplicity,” he was of a complicated nature.[31] He was a frustrated man, sometimes desperately anxious to be accepted, despite his religion, sometimes forlornly wishing to stand alone, but always persuaded of the impossibility of either. An avowed socialist, he disdained the lifestyle of the proletariat. He loved humanity but remained on intimate terms with death and, as early as 1919, had contemplated suicide. A collectivist, he nevertheless maintained a respect for the individual that at times seemed to place him above the community. Seeking a home, he found it impossible to attach himself to any particular party. Striving for a revolution, he drew back with horror from its consequences. An antimilitarist, he attained fame as military commander of the Bavarian army. Wishing to be a leader, he was plagued by an inner discord that made him doubt his capacity to fulfill the exalted tasks that he set himself. Although a man of ideas, he approached the problems of his time from the perspective of a frustrated political thinker and was torn by an inner conflict between his ideals and political reality. He was intimately bound up with politics both as participant and critic. However, Toller was too much an intellectual to become a politician, too uncompromising to deal with a media resting on compromise. Yet as an individual, he could not stay away from politics. It alternately attracted and repelled him. Toward it, he felt every emotion—disillusion, hope, fear, love, hate—save one, apathy.
Toller was too passionate in everything to be apathetic about anything. He was too immersed in political feeling to devote his whole time to literature and too much the engaged author to be divorced from politics. An intellectual, he was unable to place ideology above the daily concerns of humanity. Skeptical toward ideology, he was too genuine a humanist to try to force man into a rigid framework. A pacifist because he saw in it a way to save humanity, he became a socialist when he saw that pacifism was not enough and, in the end, took his own life when he realized that neither was really effective. If the measure of a man’s existence is his success in fulfilling his goals, Toller’s life is ostensibly disappointing. He failed to live up to the exalted goals he set for himself. His part in the Bavarian revolution can be seen either as a heroic disaster or a comic fiasco. In either case, it was not a success. Disappointed as a revolutionary, as a critic of Weimar he was unable to influence its politics or its policies. As an exiled opponent of National Socialism, he fought valiantly but unsuccessfully to overthrow a pernicious political system. Toller’s relief plan for Spain was an initial success, yet the defeat of the Spanish Republic turned this also into a disappointment. Paradoxically, the only area in which Toller was a sure success was in that which he hated most: war. During his period as a soldier in the World War, he was recognized as a courageous and brave fighter; as “victor of Dachau” in Bavaria’s civil war, his unexpected military abilities gave him even greater martial fame. But this was not Toller’s legacy. Rather surprisingly, much of Toller’s legacy in life lay not with his disappointments but because of them.
Toller’s plays are a metaphor of Toller’s character and a contribution to understanding Toller’s legacy. This legacy ought not to be lightly dismissed. The Jewish religion has a fascinating interplay with two ostensible contradictions: the messiah that is awaited and the outcast who is present.[32] We see this already in the Book of Genesis. God casts out Adam from the Garden of Eden, Joseph is cast out by his brothers, Moses is cast out of Egypt, the prophets are cast out, their messages going unheeded. Yet each takes on the mantle of the heroic individual whose purpose is to save humanity and enrich it. Toller’s plays frequently return to the theme of the outcast taking upon himself the championing of a messianic belief in the primacy of the individual in the fight against injustice, who nurtures humanity in its dark nights of terror.[33]
Toller practiced what he wrote. Cast out of Germany, persecuted by Nazis, fighting debilitating depression, an exile, he took upon himself an extraordinary role, a messianic one. Not only would he be the first writer to speak out against the Nazis during the 1920s in his play Wotan Unchained; he would continue to do so in the 1930s with his anti-Nazi play Pastor Hall. He then alerted Western countries to the danger of Hitler, predicted that National Socialism would not be something temporary, defended democracy, fought fascism, and attempted to save the Spanish Republic. He would also take on further, more personal, burdens during his exile. He collected money and circulated support for Erich Mühsam’s widow, whose husband had been shot for his participation in the Bavarian Soviet; for Carl von Ossietzky’s wife, whose husband had won the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize and later died a captive of the Nazis; for Ossietzky’s daughter; for German language periodicals. He supported a German Library of the Burned Books, and also sought help for a number of Nazi political victims in German prisons. Singlehandedly, he conducted a campaign to help his friends, feed the starving refugees scattered across Europe, help widows and children. He had almost become a character in one of his own dramas, championing the cause of humanity with repeated rescue operations for those unable to speak for themselves and too weak to resist, fighting, as Klaus Mann wrote, against “infamy in all its forms and with all his means, through literature, through essays, through speech.”[34]
There are different types of leadership: political, intellectual, moral, revolutionary, heroic, opinion leadership, group leadership, party leadership, legislative leadership, executive leadership. No one is equally good at all. Most are good only in one and poor in the others. Toller was not good in executive leadership, nor was he much of a politician either (nor would he have wanted to be). Most who have studied leadership have really not looked at it all. They have observed pieces. They have examined intelligence, toughness, determination, and vision (all of which Toller had). They have looked closely at popularity, power, charisma. They have looked at pieces and not the whole. A great leader accomplishes his goal through the power of others, often in paradoxical ways. Think of the conductor of an orchestra. The orchestra’s purpose is to create sound. Yet—and here is the intriguing paradox—the musicians’ leader is the only person the audience sees during the whole performance who produces no sound. Silently and alone, he stands waving a mute baton while not he but the musicians make the sound.
As one observer of leadership noted, a leader:
may not possess or display power; force or the threat of harm may never enter into his dealings. He may not be popular; his followers may never do what he wishes out of love or admiration for him. He may not even be a colorful person; he may never use memorable devices to dramatize the purposes of his group or to focus attention on his leadership. As for the important matter of setting goals, he may actually be a man of little influence, or even skill; as a leader he may merely carry out the plans of others. His unique achievement is a human and social one which stems from his understanding of his fellow workers and the relationship of their individual goals to the group that he must carry out.[35]
Daniel Goldman has called this emotional intelligence a key distinction, separating the outstanding from the merely adequate. The qualities are the soft skills of self-awareness, self-discipline, empathy, the ability to rally followers. Without these, having an incisive mind or being fecund in ideas will mean little.[36]
Toller had all these attributes and was a leader in numerous ways—and an effective one. He was an intellectual leader. Die Wandlung remains one of the exemplary plays of German expressionism. During the 1920s, he continued this intellectual leadership and became a leading writer for Die Weltbühne, Weimar Germany’s leading organ of the Left. He was a main leader of the PEN Club, the major writers organization in the world. He showed his considerable organizational leadership skills, leading strikes and speaking to crowds in Munich during the turbulence of 1919. From nothing, he created a worldwide humanitarian aid effort for Spain. Indeed it was during the 1930s that Toller matured as a leader. Many, for example, during the 1930s thought National Socialism a domestic German issue and failed to see its dreadful and destructive future. And others supported Hitler as a bulwark against Russian communism. Many did not know, did not want to know, or were just ignorant of the pathologically aggressive character of the new Germany. Throughout the 1930s, Toller tirelessly explained to foreign audiences the nature of the Hitler regime. In 1936, he undertook a United States engagement, delivering over fifty anti-Nazi addresses within four months, beginning in October 1936 and finishing on the West Coast the following February.[37] The tour also was the end of Toller’s exile in Europe, and he was now to remain permanently in the United States until his death, partly for financial reasons (Toller had been contributing what little he had to helping German émigrés). The schedule was grueling. He spoke at colleges. He spoke at universities; he spoke at magazine and book fairs; he spoke at anti-Nazi rallies and in major cities, including Boston, Montreal, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, where pro-Nazi groups demonstrated.[38]
Toller represented exiled Germans to Americans as the good against the evil, the Germany of Beethoven, Goethe, and Schiller against that of Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels, “the best Germany” in the words of Heinrich Mann.[39] They were an elite, highly educated group, in that case totally unrepresentative of those who stayed in Germany. But they were articulate elite, able to explain to an ordinary audience the extraordinary threat Hitler represented. Toller, in his six years of exile, untiringly took every opportunity to speak out. Of course, he was not the only one to do so. But it can be said of all the exiles that Toller’s activity, compared to that of other immigrants, was more intensive and more effective.[40] Ernst Toller was in many ways an extraordinary leader. Wrote his friend, Hermann Kesten:
He had many weaknesses. But he was fearless, indefatigable, undaunted in his desire to help humanity. He loved freedom as a brother, justice as a mother loves her son, the poor as one loves his beloved. . . . Courageous to the point of self-abnegation, he risked danger and even death out of love for humanity. He hated evil because he saw in it barbarism and the degeneration of man. He was a lover of knowledge who believed in the identity of reason with goodness. He loved the cheerful, the happy, the beautiful and fought for the poor, the oppressed and the weak . . . an unforgettable person, in his best moods so enthused, so full of hope, so poetical, so noble; a beautiful soul in the sense of Goethe, a beautiful man in the sense of Schiller.[41]
Writing in 1874, Nietzsche foresaw the dilemma of twentieth-century Germany. “Who is there,” he asked, “to guard and champion humanity amidst the dangers of our period? Who will set up the image of man when men . . . have fallen to the level of animals or even of automatons?”[42] It was Ernst Toller’s concern for man in an age of animals and automata that at once was his misfortune and yet commends him to posterity. He had glimpsed humanity as a strange, suffering creature, alone below an indifferent and blazing universe. This alone would be enough to earn him a flawed but noble greatness.
Perhaps his best epitaph comes from Toller’s own melancholy book of poems, Schwalbenbuch: “O my swallows you are like the poets / Man and his ways are the cause of their suffering / Man they love with inextinguishable fervor.”
Quoted by Peter Gay, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), 131.
See Gordon Craig, The Germans (New York: Putnam, 1982), Chapter 10.
Oscar Fisher “The Suicide of Ernst Toller,” New International 5, no. 8 (1939): 244–45.
Gordon Craig, “Engagement and Neutrality in Weimar Germany,” in Literature and Politics in the Twentieth Century, edited by George Mosse and Walter Laqueur (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 55. Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratischen Denken in der Weimarer Republik: Die politischen Ideen des deutschen Nationalismus zwischen 1918 und 1933 (Munich: Nymphenburger, 1962), 395.
Sontheimer, Antidemokratischen Denken, 395.
Golo Mann, “The Intellectuals: Germany,” Encounter 6 (1955): 47.
Walter Laqueur, “The Role of the Intelligentsia in the Weimar Republic,” Social Research 39, no. 2 (1972): 226.
This is Peter Heller’s excellent analysis. See Peter Heller, “The Masochistic Rebel in Recent German Literature,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 2 (1953): 204–13.
See Anneli Rufus, Party of One: The Loner’s Manifesto (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 2003), chapter 3, for an analysis of heroes in film noir. This book, although not about Toller at all, was also useful in understanding Toller’s personality.
Michael Ossar makes a similar point in Anarchism in the Dramas of Ernst Toller (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980), 157.
Kurt Hiller, Köpfe und Tröpfe: Profile aus einem Vierteljahrhundert (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1959), 294.
Marianne Weber, Max Weber: Ein Lebensbild (Heidelberg: Mohr, 1950), 644.
Martin Kane, Weimar Germany and the Limits of Political Art: A Study of the Work of George Grosz and Ernst Toller (Tayport, Scotland: Hutton, 1987), 79.
Kane, Weimar Germany and the Limits of Political Art, 197.
Kane, Weimar Germany and the Limits of Political Art, 194.
Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 3.
Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 4.
See Hans Reiss’s excellent analysis of this in The Writer’s Task from Nietzsche to Brecht (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978), 27 and 161–77.
Dieter Distl, Ernst Toller: Eine politische Biography (Munich: B. Bickel, 1993), 175.
Hiller, Köpfe und Tröpfe, 294.
Quoted by Klemens von Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 221.
Ernst Toller, Eine Jugend, in Prosa, Briefe, Dramen, Gedichte (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1961), 177. Hereafter referred to as PBDG.
Toller, Die Wandlung, in PBDG, 240.
István Deák, Weimar Germany’s Left-Wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the “Weltbühne” and Its Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 272.
George Grosz, Ein kleines Ja und ein grosses Nein (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1955), 269–70.
Ivan Morris, The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), xxi–xxii, and Toshokan Kokkai, “Tenraku-kei no Nihon Eiyuu-zoo” (“The Japanese Hero and the Pattern of Falling”) Shuukan Asahi 6–8 (1973): 114–17.
Morris, The Nobility of Failure, 312.
W. A. Willibrand, Ernst Toller: Product of Two Revolutions (Norman, Oklahoma: Cooperative Books, 1941).
Solomon Liptzin, Germany’s Stepchildren (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1944), 196.
Koppel Pinson, Modern Germany: Its History and Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 3–4.
Walther Victor, Ich kam aus lauter Liebe in die Welt: Lebensgeschichten und Gedichte (Berlin: Aufbau, 1965), 30.
Michael Lowy, “Jewish Messianism and Libertarian Utopia in Central Europe (1900–1933),” New German Critique 20 (1980): 105–15.
See Frank Trommler, “Ernst Toller: The Redemptive Power of the Failed Revolutionary,” in German Writers and Politics, 1918–1939, edited by Richard Dove and Stephen Lamb (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 69, 73.
Quoted by Ulwe Naumann and Michael Töteberg, Zweimal Deutschland: Aufsätze, Reden, Kritiken 1938–1942 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1994), 119.
W. C. H. Prentice, “Understanding Leadership,” in Harvard Business Review on Leadership at the Top: The Mind of the Leader (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 151.
Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam Books, 1995).
See John Spalek, “Ernst Tollers Vortrragstätigkeit und seine Hilfsaction im Exil,” in Exil und Innere Emigration 2, edited by Peter Uwe Hohendahl and Egon Schwarz (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1973), and John Spalek and Wolfgang Frühwald, “Ernst Tollers amerikanische Vortragsreise1936/37,” in Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch der Görresgesellschaft, 1965, 267–311.
“Financiers Block Peace,” New York Times, February 1, 1937, 1, 5; “200,000 Words Credited to U.S.,” New York Times, November 10, 1936, 23; “Anti-Nazis Here Mark German Day,” New York Times, December 14, 1936, 13; “Peace Plane Made by Ernst Toller,” Boston Herald, October 19, 1936; “Appeal to Fight Fascism is Heard,” Montreal Daily Star, November 2, 1936; “Germany Is Brewing War,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 14, 1937, 5; “Ernst Toller Flays Nazism,” Anti-Nazi News, January 20, 1937, 1–2. The Yale Library lists eighty lectures, but Toller normally gave four versions using material from the eighty.
Heinrich Mann, Der Sinn dieser Emigration (Paris: Europäischer Merkur, 1934), 33.
Spalek, “Ernst Tollers Vortrragstätigkeit und seine Hilfsactionen im Exil,” 87.
Hermann Kesten, Meine Freunde die Poeten (Munich: Kindler, 1959), 164, 166.
Quoted by R. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), 12.