THE GRE.JT .JLLIANCE
17
at other times dim and confused feeling of hopelessness, pessimism, and
"tragedy!" It is to be noted how the poet, Gottfried Benn, a skeptic
and a nihilist, has evolved into a cynically open apologist of fascistic murder
and terror. His poems, filled with an hysterical adulation of a naked
and bestial violence, in the name of a "mystic force of destiny," are one
long threnody on the inevitable passing of the old bourgeois world of
classes:
This then the bidding: silence and power,
Knowing that it is crumbling all.
Hold fast the sword against time's hour,
When all the swords shall fall.
However wild and barbaric they may be in their unbridled raptures over
the might of war, of death and destruction, and the "suggestive power"
of their systematized falsehoods, as expressed in their art-works, they
themselves are aware that Fascism has the historic character of a last
despairing struggle; since, to quote Dwinger, "on the eastern frontier,
the great Freedom alluringly beckons."
If
Germany, the Germany of the
coal kings, the steel magnates, the Junkers and the hyenas of the stock–
exchange, does not succeed in saving us from Bolshevism, then "will Vesuvius
bury us all with
it~
lava," then "shall we soldiers die like Sampson, pulling
down with us the pillars of the western world."
Of such stuff is the false heroism of the fascist literature made, a false
pathos noisily compounded of mystical ideas and a hatred of reason. Karl
Marx once described the old Romantic, Chateaubriand, apologist of the
feudal Restorationists, in the following manner: "Romantically mas–
querading and strutting about in a gaudy new rhetoric, a false profundity,
a Byzantine excessiveness, an emotional coquetry, theatricality, a posturing
sublimity-in a word, as great a hodge-podge of falsity as was ever seen,
in form and in content." Yet these sentences seem almost colorless, when
it comes to describing the literary form and content of
the fascist romantic–
ism of today.
The hatred of the feudal counter-revolutionaries of 1820-
1830 for the "Jacobines" and for the "subversive tendencies" of the revolu–
tionary petit-bourgeois democracy was not so fierce, so brutal, so "atavistic"
as is the hatred of the Fascists for the proletarian revolution, for the
teachings of Marx-Leninism, for all the forces and ideas which are
inimical to Fascism. For the gigantic struggles of our era are of infinitely
greater import for the future of humanity than the periods of bourgeois
revolution formerly were.
To such an epoch as ours the prophecy of Marx is applicable:
"In times when the class struggle is nearing a decisive point,
the process of dissolution within the whole of the old society takes
on so intense and glaring a character that a small fraction of the
master class renounces that class and joins the revolutionary class,
