BERLIN LETTER
Dear Editors: I suppose our Allied sensibilities would be
outraged if one reported that the contemporary despair has very little
to do with recent vices of the Germans or with Hitlerism. We like to
think in terms of the formula that the Nazis infected the world with
their disease; its simplicity and easiness are very tempting. And only
recently a page from Goebbel's diary came to light, on which he had
written: "Should our great bid for power fail, let us at least leave
behind for those who succeed us an inheritance which will destroy them
too. The catastrophe must be of such monstrous proportions that the
despair of the masses, their cries of agony and distress, will be directed,
not against us, no matter how patently guilty, but against those who
feel themselves called upon to build up a new Germany out of this
chaos." This is typical fascist theatricality: even when he has been swept
off the stage of history he would like to throw his voice back into the
drama from the wings or the back alley by any kind of ventriloquy.
Still, in all historical truth, Hitler and Goebbels are dead and buried. The
German and European crisis of today, on its most immediate level, has
less and less to do with the era of the Third Reich; its responsible
architects are the current masters of world politics, especially Joseph
Stalin. On deeper, more long-range, levels it has to do with the material
difficulties of modern societies which Marx, in part, foresaw a long
time ago, and with the spiritual contradictions which Nietzsche, Kierke–
gaard, Burckhardt (and even Goethe befort; them) all understood.
Nazism, as a distinctive social · force, is a negligible factor in the
German picture. The defeat in May, 1945, smashed the party, disinte–
grated the entire apparatus. The surviving individual fragments have
worked themselves into the older traditional pattern of German middle–
class society. The muscled brown shirts and SS belong now to the usual
underworld of antisocial types; only occasionally is there an act of
violence with a political background (like the recent murder of the
socialist
Falken
youth leader in Hamburg). The lesser propagandists
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