THE GREAT ALLIANCE
Johannes R. Becher
FASCISM DESTROYS AND LAYS WASTE,
falsifies and corrupts all that the
best minds of the past, the boldest thinkers, the greatest masters of literature
and art have left as a legacy to the revolutionary class of our time. The
fear of the proletarian revolution is the deepest root from which the fascist
despotism springs, and on which the reigns of terror and the mystic ideol–
ogies of Fascism feed. It is as
if
before mankind says a last good bye
to its past, to its pre-history, there were to be heaped up against it in
concentrated form all the forces of persecution, all the crimes, all the
inhuman spite and infernal horrors.
A red-glowing hatred of Fascism, that enemy of mankind, binds us
together with proletarians the world over. This pure, loyal, fruitful
hatred unites us with all those who love the truth. This hatred and this
love shall animate our literary labors, shall make our message stronger,
our art purer and more powerful. Our literary task is the service of
truth; we are called upon to unveil the visage of
the great "r·evoiutionary
truth,
to give tangible, living, rational form to the truth that lies behind
the Soviets.
But under Fascism how could there be an earnest, meaningful art
and literature, when realistic thinking, truthful thinking, is under a ban 1
Ernest Junger, who on the formal side of artistic expression is without
doubt one of the most significant of the fascist literati, has written any
number of books, all of which serve, in a "heroic-romantic" manner, to
dignify world-war; and all are at the same time written as a preparation
for the bourgeoisie's war upon the working class. Out of the odor of the
death-strewn fields of the last war, he distills a "heroism" for those
"political soldiers" who, upon the backs of an enslaved working class, are
out to set up the new fascist state. And who are the heroes whom the
fascistic Ernst Junger holds up as the leaders and rulers of the nation?
Noble-born officers and technically trained sons of the upper bourgeoisie,
in either case, officers of the sort who, according to Junger, speak of war,
destruction and murder in the same coldly sneering, blase manner in which
the young nobles of the eighteenth century spoke of love and sport. There
you have the class-profile of the heroes of fascist literature!
Permit me to call your attention to yet another characteristic cir–
cumstance. Fascist art, literature and ideology is full of an at times evident,
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