BERLIN LETTER
Dear Editors: In these vast and still unbelievable ruins the Ger–
mans perform their nominal human obligations, and that is about all. Life
here since the end of the war has been scarcely more than a formal gesture
of historic survival. There has been, of course, some resumption of normal
modern routines-trade, traffic, politics, city life. Yet no society exists,
and I am not being melodramatic when I suggest that these are tribal
days again in German history. There is neither state nor culture, only a
ruined, poverty-stricken, brutalized people, with little to eat, everything
to fear, nothing to hope for. The war destroyed the traumatic Third
Reich, and with it several centuries of physical achievement. The peace
has managed to convert the Germans into domesticated animals: they
do as they are told, and the years go by.
To write, then, of intellectual life
in
Germany is something of an
anachronism. I would rather send you a huge chunk of stone, cut out
of the Berlin rubble, with its Klee-like chalk scrawlings-"the Schmidt
family is not dead, but has moved into the cellar across the street
(1945)"; "Danger, still collapsing (1946)"; "Hans loves Hilda (1947)."
It might be more instructive than a dozen literary letters. But there is,
to be sure, an intelligentsia-in the universities, in the arts, and in
Kulturpolitik.
But intellectual life presupposes some kind of COf!Imunity
of the spirit, with its associations of friends, privileges of contemplative
leisure, and freedom of the word. None of these exist. They are either not
permissible or not possible. The whole cultural world here has been hope–
lessly atomized. Scholars have been cut off from each other and from
the apparatus of learning. Writers and artists are without the physical
and spiritual independence failing which there is neither craft nor in–
tegrity. For example, there is as yet no general study of Nazism written
by a German, and I don't know of any author who is even thinking
of the project! Libraries have been destroyed or removed; most of the
documents are unavailable in Allied hands; with the existing restric–
tions on travel it is quite impossible to collect historical data. This means
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