BERLIN LETTER
the lady in the streetcar, laundry gets dirty so fast (by which she means
brown shirts are no longer being worn). No wonder our sport is in
decline, says the enthusiast in the stadium (by which he means no
Kampflieder
are allowed to be sung).
If
a boy runs and trips in the
street it's because nowadays youth doesn't even learn
richtig marschieren;
if the grocer has no
Pfefferlinge
it's the fault of the land reform;
if
the
weather is bad it's because the meteorological bureaus were denazified.
But
if
all this is silly or stupid, there is worse. A doctor in a hospital
here told an aged, sick woman of my acquaintance (and with only the
normal amount of cynicism about human life), "Get out of the clinic!
Do you want to live forever?" And only the other day, when a Polish–
Jewish DP got into the subway at Zehlendorf, a man in the corner
near the door remarked, "They must have forgotten to burn him...."
It is true the conduct of the war established certain grievous pre–
conditions which rendered the resumption of a progressive, civilized
life, on any basis, almost impossible. First, the extermination strategy
which threw bombs at schools, hospitals, churches, and homes with
the same blitheness as at factories and those ubiquitous "marshaling
yards"; a shambles was made of every sizable city in the land, and
the people were reduced to utter psychical exhaustion. Second, the
refusal to consider the target politically (especially with the insistence
on "unconditional surrender") which nullified hope for the (admittedly
weak and minor) efforts to bring new, non-Nazi German forces into
play. The upshot was that the Germans suffered the terror and the
dictatorship and remained inactive in the face of monstrous destruc–
tion. Perhaps there can be no
political masses
under totalitarianism,
but certainly Western war policies aggravated the dilemma, and, I feel,
sacrificed real opportunities.
With the close of hostilities the Western peace strategy revealed
itself to be equally shortsighted, equally calamitous. How much havoc
has our international immaturity, our political backwardness wrought
in the world! Was it so difficult to
~ee
that the two great problems of
postwar Europe would be (a) Moscow's push to dominate a pro–
Communist continent, and (b) the general European need for a co–
ordinated economic recovery program to escape utter poverty and
complete collapse? But the West saw only the "German menace" with
Werewolf plots and Ruhr rearmament conspiracies. The most charitable
formulation of the mistake would be to say that in order to prevent
the errors of the last war they committed the errors of this war. I am
sure your readers don't have to be reminded that anybody with half
a literate eye open saw the outlines of the developing European crisis.
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