I have a friend, in America, with whom I once discussed the question of the indeterminate prison sentence for felonies. Himself an opponent of prison sentences of all kinds, he was by way of being a firsthand authority in the field of penology; in his time he had left a half-dozen jails and penitentiaries without, as he put it, permission. When I met him, he was on his way to the Institution for the Criminally Insane at Menard, Illinois. Nobody could break out of Menard. My friend did, a few months later, and when I last heard of him he was at Alcatraz.
“I’ll tell you,” said Basil Banghart, for that was his name, “what’s wrong with the indeterminate sentence. If you tell me to pick up a big rock and carry it, and I say, ‘Where to?’ and you say, ‘To that pile over there,’ and the pile is a mile, or two miles, or five miles away, and I say, ‘And then can I put it down? and you say, ‘Yes,’ I can pick it up and carry it. But if I say, ‘Where to?’ and you say, ‘Until I tell you you can put it down,’ why, I can’t budge it. My condition then is that of a native I met in the United States Penitentiary on Marietta Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia; I am just too po’ to tote it.”
Every one of my ten National Socialist friends, and a great majority of all the Germans I met, no matter what their political history, their wealth, their status, or their cultivation, all seemed to me to be somehow overloaded with Überfracht, excess baggage, which, in the words of Basil Banghart’s native, they were too po’ to tote. There seems to be something heavy about the Germans—not, to be sure, about all of them, and not in the same degree or in the same form in those who are. How many of them are heavy? How heavy are they? I don’t know. I can’t imagine. All I know is (as every tourist has observed who has ever got out of the bus) that there seems to be something heavy about the Germans.
Their dumplings, their liturgy, their Blitzkrieg are heavy. So is their humor; they even have a word for the enjoyment of another’s misfortune. Their bowing and scraping are heavy, and their operas (and especially their light operas). Their poetry, too, Goethe almost alone excepted (and not always he; read his Erlkönig). Fantasists have even said that their women’s legs—Marlene Dietrich being the exception here, as Goethe is in poetry—are heavy.
We are in an uproar; our German friends pound the table (we make a note of the fact that they pound the table) and ask if we are to understand that Mozart is heavy? No, we are not; we are to understand that he came from Vienna. Are we to understand that Stefan Georg is heavy? No, we are not; we are to understand that he was exiled to Switzerland. What do we mean by talking about “the Germans”? How would we like it if somebody said that “the Americans” are money-mad? (A cry of, “They are,” is heard above the uproar.) How would we like it?—Not at all, but how are we to judge our own madness?
Why is the Germans’ politics so desperately heavy; their scholarship so marvelously heavy; their philosophy, with Will, Duty, and Destiny its central terms, even heavier than their public law and their public fountains? Their language—what is there left to say after Mark Twain’s The Awful German Language?—is so deadly heavy that it cannot be got under way without being pushed from behind. Strc prst skrz krk, which is Czech for, “Put your finger through your throat,” is a bit heavy, to be sure, but Die, die die, die die Äpfel gestohlen haben, anzeigen, is a no less impossible way of saying, in German, “Whoever reports the apple thieves.”
You may not say of the Germans (as you do of the Swedes) that you find them dull, for the Germans are capable of the wildest excursions; or (as you do of the Swiss) that you find them smug, for the Germans are most uneasy; or (as you do of the English) that the Germans are pompously reserved, for German pomposity is always assertive (for centuries the high bust has been known to Paris dressmakers as à la prussienne); or (as you do of the Russians) that they are stolid (or, when they’re on our side, stoical), for the Germans complain continuously. There is supposed to be something fascinating about the moodiness of the Hungarians; in the Germans this moodiness is manic-depressive, and depressing. What there is about the Germans, let them march or dance, let them roar or sing, is something heavy.
The German’s hand is heavy, on his wife and children, on his dog, on himself, on his enemies. His heel is heavy, as we know, and his tread, even when he is mushroom-picking-bent in the woods, is heavy. His woods and his winters, his whole world, are heavy. The German—with, naturally, some several millions of exceptions, including whole provinces—seems to be a heavy, heavy man. How do a people live with the Danes on one side, the French on another, the Poles on another, and the Austrians and Italians on another, and develop a state of being at such extraordinary variance with their neighbors? Only the North Swiss and the Rhenish Dutch, both of whom love nothing less than being taken for Germans, are much like them.
This catalogue of German characteristics is, of course, a moderately mad exaggeration. The whole gamut of variations in persons and places is ignored. German Moselwein is as light as French Moselle across the river; and Goethe and Dietrich are Germans and, had they lived in the same time and town, might have been very good friends. Who has not seen a Scotsman or a Bengal with a single plane from his clavicle to his occiput—or a German likewise constructed without saying, “Look at that German’s neck?” Let us say, then, that there seems to be something heavy about the Germans.
This heaviness has a character of its own. It is not solidity, for the Germans are the most volatile of human compounds; nor is it rest, for the Germans are the eagerest of beavers. It is not a dead weight which has gone just about as far as it can go and has made its peace with gravity. It has, rather, a living character, exerting a perpetual push and implying a perpetual restraint, like a buttressed wall. It betrays pressure and consequent counterpressure, which between them seem to me to account (better, at least, than any other crude notion) for German autocracy within and German aggression without.
We are speaking, of course, of living substances, persons; and the analogy of the “German spirit” with centripetal and centrifugal interaction is (besides being obvious) bound to be imperfect. Any explanation of human behavior in terms of a single condition, or set of conditions, is oversimplified anyway, and probably unsound. But no durable harm should issue from the pursuit of the analogy if, while we pursue it, we remember that analogy and will-o’-the-wisp are cousins.
To try to account for human behavior on the basis of pressure and counterpressure requires the antecedent recognition that psychological pressure is just as real as “real” pressure. The Germans have, to begin with, more than their share of “real” pressure. I am sorry to have to say that Hitler said that Germany was encircled, because I am sorry to have to say that Hitler was right. Germany has more frontiers—and they are “soft” frontiers—and more historically dissimilar neighbors than any other nation on earth. Its people first knew and became known to the world through the hostile invasion of their land.
It has, by being prepared to invade, and by invading, been defending itself against this invasion, unconsciously since the Spanish succession to the Holy Roman Empire, consciously since the destruction of the Empire by Napoleon. At the Peace of Pressburg, in 1805, the full focus of European pressure finally fell upon the future German nation, and there it remains. From Richelieu to Barthou the first principle of French policy was the encirclement of Germany; the mortality of “Schuman Plan” ministries in France since the first fine flush of post-1945 rapprochement suggests that the principle is still operative.
The North Sea, far from being an open coast, has been the “northern front” against Germany since the seventeenth century. A hostile Denmark and an unfriendly (and often hostile) Netherlands pressed in upon that one German outlet, with England and Sweden behind them. The French seized it in the eighteenth century, and the English sealed it in the nineteenth. The first World War ended with the “central powers,” that is, Germany, more central than ever—doubly encircled, geographically by the partition of Austria-Hungary and the erection of Czechoslovakia and the Corridor, politically by the world alliance which excluded Germany and Russia. It was not anti-Semitism or socialism or the New Order that first animated the Nazis; their first slogan was, “Break the chains of Versailles.” Der alte Fritz had broken the circle, by making peace with Russia in 1756, before it was quite completed; der kleine Adolf had to begin with the circle closed.
In 1888 Wilhelm II, then Crown Prince, wrote to Bismarck that Russia was “merely waiting for the favorable moment to attack us in alliance with the [French] Republic.” Bismarck disagreed, but the year before, as insurance against a two-front war, he had made his secret treaty with the Tsar, agreeing to support the latter’s occupation of the entrance to the Black Sea. “I wake up screaming,” he wrote later, when Wilhelm accused him of being pro-Russian, “when I dream of our Russian alliance failing.” He had reason to; his dismissal, and Wilhelm’s abandonment of his policy, brought the French-Russian entente into being and the destruction of Imperial Germany.
What the rest of the world knows as German aggression the Germans know as their struggle for liberation. And this liberation has no more to do with individual liberty than it has in Poland or Abyssinia or South Korea—nothing whatever. “I don’t want what belongs to nobody else,” says the peasant in the story, “I only want what j’ines mine.” Every aggression is a defense—at worst, a premature defense—including that of September 1, 1939. Were not the French and the English, in July and August, making frantic overtures to Moscow, to tighten the circle of Europe? Were they letting their ideological differences with the Communists embarrass them? Why should the Germans? Who (except, of course, the innocents who read and write the newspapers) could suppose that ideology had anything to do with it? Twelve hard years later Herr Schumacher, the Social Democratic leader, arose in the German Bundestag to say, “The German military contribution makes sense if the world democracies will defend Germany offensively to the east.”
“Defend Germany offensively.” Wilhelm’s plea for “a place in the sun” is identical with Hitler’s for “living space.” In 1914 the great German economy bestrode the Continent; in 1939 Germany’s population density was lower than England’s. The problem had something, but only something, to do with population density and economics, still less with colonies. Germany’s need was every place in the sun, all the living space. The man who dreams that he can’t breathe in a telephone booth can’t breathe in a circus tent. Bismarck’s nightmare is the perpetual nightmare of Germany.
Proponents of the theory of aggression as a conscious, purposive pattern of German history—still more, those who propound it as German nature—have always had a hard time explaining Bismarck’s indifference to both colonial expansion and Pan-Germanism. He armed Germany to the steepletops, created a naked power state faster than any man in history except Friedrich Wilhelm I and Adolf Hitler, and what was his purpose? His purpose never wavered; with power and even with war as his means, it was the perpetuation of the German Reich which he saw himself as having completed.
External pressure—real or imaginary, it doesn’t matter which—produced the counterpressures of German rigidity and German outbreak, the ordered, explosive propensity of the pressure cooker. How rigid will the rigidity be, how big the outbreak? The answer is: How great is the pressure? Ask the carrot in the cooker how far out it wants to go, or the German dictator to set a limit to his requirements. The transition from the Lincolnian sentiment of Deutschland über Alles, “The Union above the States,” to its latter-day implication of world domination was inevitable; there is no basis for supposing that the Germany we have known recently would stop short of world domination, or stop there. How much air does the man in the nightmare need when he cries out, “I can’t breathe”?
What do we find inside the pressure cooker, among the carrots? We find the perfect pattern of organization, be it in the street-cleaning department, the Church, or the concentration camp, in the Hegelian order of the morally absolute State or the Kantian order of the morally absolute universe. Who has ever reached for the stars like the Germans, breaking asunder the bindings of reality that constrict the human heart and restrain that teetering creature, the reasonable man? Reality’s ambivalence makes Hamlets—cowards, say Hamlet and Hitler, who burned Hamlet—of us all. Hitler cut all the knots that freemen fumble with. He did not resolve the problems that immobilized his people; he smashed them. He was the grand romantic. I asked my friend Simon, the “democratic” bill-collector, what he liked best about Hitler. “Ah,” he said at once, “his ‘So—oder so,’ his ‘Whatever I have to do to have my way, I will have my way.’”