PARTISAN REVIEW
and destroyed. The anti-Nazi cannot help feeling that authoritarianism
has survived the Nazi rule and that the difference between oppressor
and liberator is rather small. Hate and disgust grows, and dissipates into
despair. It cannot lead to a revival of nationalism, as the material base
for the latter has been bombed away. To get out of the country, rather
than to revive
it,
is the dream of its ambitious people. They are no longer
able, however, to feel embarrassment over the long Nazi dictatorship, and
they no longer brood over the atrocities committed. They have grown
cold to all but their own misery; and to tell them, as is often done, that
they "only got what they were asking for," causes no anger but only
tired gestures of resignation. Whatever they were and whatever they
have done, just now they only desire to live and to be left alone.
v
The desire to be left alone has nothing to do with the current issues
of self-government, national unity, Western federation, constitutions, or
the color of flags. It simply means to be left out of all activities con–
cerned with such matters. It is the desire to escape the manipulations of
politicians, profiteers, professional ideologists, and also the pressure of
the enchanted minority defending traditional values. It is a vague
longing for a new start, unaffected by the past, and an activity with no
other issues than those of making bread and of eating
it
undisturbed.
The desire is illusory but
it
indicates the prevailing state of mind. To
be left alone implies also the wish to escape the war now
in
the making.
The anti-war attitude is not based on theories but on direct experience
in
the bombed cities and on the battlefields of the world. They have learned
to place life above all those considerations which are evoked
in
the
justification of war. They are at any rate much too busy trying to keep
alive, to be concerned with the larger problems of world politics. They
do not really care about the changes of uniforms so long as they are
able to use the night for sleep.
Sleep is important, undisturbed sleep of even greater importance, as
the Berliners found out in the restless nights during the war. To go to
bed with the careless assurance that they will rise again in the morning–
this ordinary experience became the greatest desire of the bombed sleep
walkers. To sleep without the constant fear of death meant more than
victory or defeat. Sleep is not just the mind and body at rest, it shortens
the days,
it
helps against the cold,
it
is a substitute for food, preserves
energy, and is the hiding place of misery.
Food is another of the Berliners' great obsessions, and sleep over–
comes it only partly and temporarily. The individual awake is the per-
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