PARTISAN REVIEW
a democratic order are blandly overlooked. Juenger, for example, circu–
lates in unauthorized editions, and when I suggested that the safest and
healthiest situation would be an uncensored distribution and free, unre–
stricted controversy in press and journals I was answered by minds who
understood only that
dangerous ideas have to be forbidden.
So it is that
we will probably never have a situation here in which papers and jour–
nals are not
licensed,
where manuscripts can be freely judged and selected
and not merely
permitted,
where literary and cultural ventures have not
first to be
authorized,
where the writer and artist can work in ease and
security without anxiety about some possible official reproach.
I don't have space to indicate how this semi-totalitarian dimness in
the German picture has given Russian and German Stalinism precisely
the half-light it needs to have its own way. The supreme right of the
State in matters of art and culture, the partisan party standard as the
measure of a writer's legality-these are the two great principles ac–
cepted both by East and West in Germany .. . the Anglo-American
West out of weakness and confusion, and the bourgeois ignorance which
feels the best way to combat Nazism is to hide all copies of
Mein Kampf
. . . the East, out of high Stalinist conviction. Under this cover of dark–
ness Stalinism may yet eliminate all "decadence in culture" and "dis–
ruption in politics" from Central Europe. The campaign has been build–
ing itself up, and only recently the almost solid Communist cultural
front (led by Friedrich Wolf and Johannes Becher) was reinforced by
the stalwarts, Ludwig Renn and Anna Seghers. But this is spilling over
into the entire German political question which I want to reserve for
my next letter.
Melvin
J.
Lasky
68
