CHOLM: HEAPS OF SKULLS
535
much the individual should speak up of his own accord-in order,
as it were, to accompany with his falsetto the orchestra which at
Niirnberg is now only too evidently drowning his little voice with
many instruments.
Could not an answer be given to this: What do you as an indivi–
dual want? Your contribution is in truth so unimportant that you have
definitely not been invited to pass judgment. With that we do not
quarrel. What we are concerned with here is simply a profession of
the truth which today once more has to fight for its existence. Hard
truths need no embellishments. We Germans have from now on to
see nothing but the truth. The more simply and clearly we look at it
the better for us. Then we can also draw the line which separates
the past on one side from the future on the other. The reproach
leveled against Hitler today, partly by his own followers, is his lack
of realism, his cult of the visionary. Does not our fate as a nation, our
character as a people, mean more to us than the fate of a regime? We
cannot draw the line or begin anew without bringing ourselves and
our whole nation into question, philosophically speaking. In a word:
Is Germany so corrupted that she must face destruction, or are there
forces within her which can pull her through
this
crisis?
I am aware that every testimony is subjective. This subjectivity
must be taken into account and it is left to the reader to reckon with
it. But perhaps the reader will come to believe that subjectivity can
sometimes rise above its limitations. I would like to put something
straight in the minds of men, I would like to do away with prejudice,
I would like out of the mute self-accusation of many Germans to
make a more effective one- from manliness, perhaps because to me
this mumbling and whispering and German-national-conventicle psy–
chology seems silly, useless, effeminate, and abysmal.
And which policy do you favor? they will ask. One only and
precisely this: to sound a warning against a certain tendency, still
inarticulate, to make a new excursion into the blue which, instead of
making Germany free, can but deliver her once more into the hands
of an adventurer. And now to the description of what I have ex–
perienced.
III
The railway cars are rolling eastward. The east is fear, the east
is the unknown, but one thing is certain, it will in no way remind
us of the west, of France. This is war. The war will play itself out in
