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-to a kindly but unsparing cnttctsm. Willy Haas, exiled editor of
Die Literarische Welt,
may speak of Prussian Germany's having a "tradi–
tion of exile" for her intellectuals; but in the present instance, the German
intellectual, if he is honest, must surely find cause for an examination of
conscience. Ever since Nietzsche, his thinking has tended to become more
muddy, false and hollowly romantic. The result is the embodiment of
all this, in the "ideology" of Hitlerism.
Of the two novels here considered, the one is by a German exile who
resides in Paris and publishes in Amsterdam, the other by a writer who,
born
in Prague of Jewish parentage, received his education in Germany
and fought for her during the War, but who after the Armistice took up
his residence in Vienna, and whose works are now in disrepute in Mr.
Hitler's dominions. Both books, it may be stated, exhibit the same vice
that distinguishes the unspeakable literature of pathos and bathos now
coming out of fascistic Germany, namely, that of a romantic distortion
of reality. Herr Roth was one of those younger men who, before Hitler
came in, led the attack on Fechter's "new objectivity," an attempted
literary version of the Husser! philosophy. He, with Rudolph Kayser,
Alfred Doblin and others, rose to protest at once against a reportage dis–
guised as literature and (the description is Fechter's) "that highly personal
reality achieved by certain individuals who look out upon the world through
the lens of their own egos"; they spoke up in favor of a
"neue H erz–
lichkeit,"
or new sentimentalism, and Roth gave us his
Job, the Story of
a Simple Mon.
As
for the author .of
Class Reunion,
he had started out
as
a dramatic Expressionist (in his
Spiegelmensch,
of 1920), but would
appear to have thrown it off fairly well in the course of three or four
years
(d.
his
Juarez and Maximilian
of 1924), in favor of a vague all–
embracing humanitarianism that is not unreminiscent of French Unanim–
ism.
Distinct traces of the Expressionist influence nevertheless remain in
his work:, in the form of a romantic distortion and an animating romantic
spirit. From all of which it may be seen that both writers have decided
tares in their past, whtch are ever threatening to trip them up with their
clinging tendrils. As to how far either of them escapes, is a question.
The "new objectivity," the "new sentimentalism," Expressionism, an im–
ported Unanimism-the case-histories of most contemporary German
writers are not promising ones.
One of the sharpest notes the ear catches is that of evasion, evasion
in choice of subject as in the thought behind the handling of the subject,
the same evasion (geographic and temporal displacement of scene, etc.)
that is to be met with in the sorry product turned out by Hitler's writing
henchmen. Until one feels like rising up and shouting, if they mean
Hitler-and we know they do-then why in Hell don't they say so, as
any exponent of socialist realism would do? But they don't. Instead,
the exiled Herr Roth must compose a blood-and-thunder "legend," in the
tradition of that "myth-making" which Mussolini's Novecentisti are always
talking about.
A
hero who is something like M. CCline's Bardamu turned
petty Hitler, which is a thing, incidentally, that Bardamu might readily
become. This semi-conscious personage, Russian by birth and an emigre
to
America, is led on by a Coney Island gypsy to return to Europe and
the
World War and to wade through diminutive oceans of blood, in order
