PARTISAN REVIEW
and intellectuals have been returned to the open literary markets, and
as gifted hucksters some are employed by the West, some by the East.
The business class (only a handful were snapped up by Nuremberg) has
become the white-collar wing of the new Christian and Liberal parties
and the bulwark of non-Nazi German reconstruction. Sure, you'd have
to squint real hard to see genuine evidence of recovery, but the old
bourgeoisie is still reckoned as indispensable. In the Ruhr, for example,
the restoration of the old managerial class has been quite complete,
down to the last legal counsel, corporation officer, industrial adviser,
_and chamber of commerce. Where there has been some displacement the
custodians or trustees .are nothing but the agents or front for the real
owners. What, by the way, has ever happened to the theory which
insisted that National Socialism was "a new form of society"? The mo–
ment the framework of the Hitler state fell apart, one found only the
familiar economic and legal relationships, and as of today the forms
of the traditional German class structure have been seriously affected
only by the industrial stagnation and the general national poverty.
If
Marx could get a visa from London to visit Dusseldorf (no mean achieve–
ment for a Jew and a German radical) he would not be surprised to
..find that capitalism is capitalism and that the proletariat still has a
worlti to win. (He might, however, be rather taken aback that with
the social revolution east of the Elbe, which has produced the only
working alternative, exploitation is still exploitation and the chains are
still rattling.)
The great administrative bureaucracy, too, has remained rooted
in its old imperial place. There has been no overhauling, no cleaning
of house. Its privileges were not suspended but, on the contrary, status
and tenure were immediately guaranteed by the occupying powers. The
result is that the enormous machine of Bismarckian civil servants now
etrays all the worst vices of its experience in three historic epochs:
the. bloodlessness of the Empire, the antilibertarianism of Weimar, and
the corruption and servility of the Third Reich. As for the
Kleinbur–
gertum,
it was always among the least attractive elements of old Europe,
narrow, petty, hardhearted; and today, robbed of its property and its
po~e,
it manages to give just the proper tone of meanness to this awful
..tmge..dy of a sick, diseased society. Sometimes it is pitiful, sometimes it
is yicious. In almost every queue the grumble can be heard:
Unter
Hitler war es doch besser!
(And no one has the sense or the courage
to ask,
When?
when one could order a steak dinner in '37, or when
one had to sit in the bunker, night after night, year after year, waiting
fox: the terror and fire of the bombs to pass ...
?)
No wonder, complains
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