18
PARTISAN REVIEW
which is the one that holds the future in its hands."
With the whole of bourgeois society and bourgeois culture in the grip
of the great historical crisis, the literature and art based upon a bourgeois
realism could not fail to undergo a crisis of their own. The number of
their accredited representatives is dropping off. Many, it is true, sink: into
a mystical skepticism or nihilism that is without a future, with no way
ou~
without belief in mankind or interest for the concerns of working humanity.
But the best among the representatives of this variety of literary realism,
which turns in retrospect to the ideas of the great French Revolution and
the classical Renaissance,-the best of them, striving each in his own way
and with the means at his disposal to look our epoch in the face, are today
no longer able to cling, calmly and untormented by doubts, to the old
truths, now become untruths, of bourgeois culture. Those among them,
like Heinrich Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger, who abhor Fascism as
they
do the plague, have been brought by the very liveliness of the contemporary
struggle to a point where they begin to have a presentiment of and to
behold
the true forward-surging forces of our era.
Those who stand for
the
right~
of reason, and for an enlightened and creative view of art, one
that is acceptable to their reason, are at the same time those who com·
prebend, or who are beginning to suspect, that the age of Capitalism
is
drawing to a close, that new and mvincible forces are evolving within
the
bosom of the old· society, forces which have already brought freedom
to~
portion of the earth and which are constructively at work there, while the
old world is sinking ever deeper and deeper, amid shocks, catastrophe;,
the horrors of war and chaotic entanglements.
Heinrich Mann brings this out in his book,
Der Hass
("Hate"),
filled
from cover to cover with a loathing for Fascism: War, which in
aU
likelihood is the "last despairing gesture of a decaying world-capitalism,"
will be logically directed at the Soviet Union, and "a rearmed Germany
will be sent against Soviet Russia." But, continues Mann, "In all human
judgment, the system (of the National Socialist state) will be overthrown;
a revolution is not to be won whose ideas are lopped off by reality itself,
with all the reasonableness on the other side."
This is a statement which reveals a
deep insight
into the basic forces
of our era. In the face of the horrors which National Socialism has heaped
upon Germany, Heinrich Mann has exchanged the novelist's pen for that
of the political combatant. With many a bold, clear word , he has made
it plain that Hitler's dictatorship is a growth within the very entrails cf
the bourgeois republic. He has shown the quality of reality inherent in
Communism as the trail-blazer through the Hitlerian humbuggery.
These
are words that weigh heavily in the scale, words of reason, insight, a deep
sincerity. But the same Heinrich Mann has also uttered many a word
against Communism, he has become enmeshed in many a contradictim,
