20
PARTISAN REVIEW
To these "realistic writers"-and their number is many-the ideas of
Humanism and Civilization are dear. But is this Humanism,
in its older
form,
adapted still to the true furthering of the cause ot human progress?
Has not this Humanism, rather, by passing over to the camp of the em·
battled workers, undergone a change in form and content, and
IS
not the
Humanism of our fighting proletariat the richer of the two and the bigger
with hope for the future? Is the bourgeois order and form of civilization
after all identical with civilization in general?
Friedrich Engels, confronted by the decline of all broad theoretical
interests among the so-called cultured classes of Germany, remarked that
the German workers were the sole
heirs
to those deep scientific and philo–
sophic preoccupations which in the classic period had laid the foundations
of Germany's renown. Today, the capitalistic profit-motive has brought
things to such a pass that the official rulers and rapers of the Geramn nation
are to be seen debasing all that once, a hundred years ago, was
~he
pride
of the German middle classes, and which only a short while back, vulgarized
and trivially distorted by academic convention, was still held in some
respect. At the present time, the fascist ideologians, who barbarically
make war upon all international thought, have yet the audacity to claim
as their own Goethe, the cosmopolitan, explaining in a manner Dr. Faust
as a forerunner of Dr. Goebbels, when they do not, as some of them do,
attempt to explain away the Goethean cosmopolitanism as a dereliction
and a weakness on Goethe's part, seeking by a trick of lying legedermain
to make the poet out to have been .a blustering nationalist. The same
fascist ideologians have further dared to lay hands upon the great Fried·
rich Holderein, dead and silent these hundred years now, who hymned
the national revolutionary struggle for freedom, who was the deeply wrath·
ful critic of German conditions and the herald of a greater and purer
social world to be; with bombastic phrases, they would lyingly transform
him into a prophet of the battlefield . of Langemarck, of commercial mas·
sacre for the benefit of the cannon kings and the colonial robbers. They
who have burned and banned the works of Heinrich Heine, along with
those of Marx and Engels, are engaged in polluting by word and deed the
works of the classic poets and philosophers of Germany, either by obscenely
reviling them, or, with a hypocritical roll of the eyes and a wry mouth
the while, by sniping and distorting them to fit the needs of their
"myti
of blood and honor/' which conceals nothing other than the bestial grimace
of the profit-hunter.
Such is the end of the road for the bourgeois class:
a Fascism demolishing and besmirching everything, everywhere it goes–
and bolting the door on Germany's past;
henceforward the fate of
classic
German culture, of the classic thought an.d poetry, all the heritage of
tht
past, is to be given over finally into those hands in ·which the future
/its,
those of the German working class.
They alone, as they stand in a heroic
