86
PARTISAN REVIEW
"And if you hear me crying: My god, my god, my god,
down streets and alleys
I am merely trembling (afraid, my god, my god,
to be nothing to fade away,
In grass, in stone.)"
(McAlpin Garfinkel, Poet}
But even then Gregory was half-aware, he turned it off and on, and has
now moved away. Saroyan has made this the
leitmotif
of his firsf
book, and the pseudo-intellectuals read him in wonder, for here at last
is the mystery of Pound and Jolas and Cummings and Williams wriggling
on the ground, in full view. Will he stay?
PHILIP RAHV
EXILES FROM REALITY
THE FORTY DAYS OF MUSA DAGH,
by Franz Werfel. The
Viking Press,
$3.00.
TABARAS, A GUEST ON EARTH,
by Joseph Roth. The Viking
Press,
$2.50.
There is a sense in which the German writer and the German intel–
lectuals as a group are to be held responsible for the triumph of Hitlerism;
theirs is an ineluctable portion of the larger social blame. Prof. Ernst
Robert Curtius, representative of an older Humanist tradition, in his
Deutscher Geist in Gefahr,
published on the eve of Hitler's accession, has
spoken of a "cultural breakdown" and a "culture hatred"; but the human–
ist's own muddled thinking is evinced by his dread of
"Soziologismus,"
his stress on the Jew's "sub-Marxist" tendencies and " national unassimil–
ability," etc. The end of Stefan George and his "singing youth" move–
ment, dating as far back as 1910, was the manifestations centering about
"'die Tat."
The end of the
"neue Sachlichkeit"
in literature is Herr Paul
Fechter, the editor of
Deutsche Diclztung der Gegenwart,
the representative
anthology of modern German poetry, published some years ago, who a
few months back made the startling discovery that Goethe was Hitler's
John the Baptist!
Nor are the slates of the "exiles" by any means clean. When we read
Klaus Mann 's
Kind dieser Zeit,
we get a picture of the intellectual weak–
ness in which the generation that came to adolescence during the War
was permitted to grow up,-a posturing decadence a Ia Cocteau and
les
Enfauts Terribles.
For Germany was the home of Expressionism, the
Teutonic correspondent of Cubism, a highly subjective individualism in
art that attained its slithering depths in the murky mysticisms of a Kan–
dinsky. As for the outstanding non-Marxist exiles of today, Johannes
Becher, in his address to the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, has
subjected them-such writers as Heinrich Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger
