BERLIN LETTER
munism, are contradictory and/or complementary. I know all the old
historical and theoretical distinctions we used to make. Still, the ugly
patterns in reality cannot be blinked away. One great police apparatus
has moved in behind the other. The system of political arrests and
terror has continued. The same principle of ruthless economic exploi–
tation of machines and labor governs everyday life. Ideological rectitude
m the press, in culture, in education, is mandatory; hatred is taught
and fear required. No, the people have remained enslaved, for they have
only had their masters changed. What may surprise is actually how much
of the old system was taken over and reconverted-the black lists at the
post offices and telephone exchanges; the block-warden system in the
neighborhoods; the Labor-Front-for-the-State apparatus; the strategy of
high-pressure cajolery in intellectual life; even down to local party
organizers and secretaries. What is new is only that there is no longer on
the Marxian side the old familiar courtship with eighteenth-century en–
lightenment and nineteenth-century optimism; there is no time for a
honeymoon with fine idealism. The children of light have become the
children of darkness. In the last years I have often had a chance to
talk with leaders of Russo-German bolshevism and neither publicly nor
privately did they ever trouble to cover their hand or hide their face.
No bones about it: they would hound you, arrest you, shoot you, wipe
you out.
If
in the East there is movement and energy, the familiar spectacle
of tyrants and exploiters, in the West there is little energy and much
despair, but no tyranny or exploitation apart from the coils of the black
market and the general situation of loose suspension in which the peo–
ple's rights are found under a foreign occupation by military forces of
three democratic nations. There is no forced labor and no puppet press,
no concentration camps and no fanatical party lines. The absence of
these four anti-Freedoms in the onsetting European darkness is, to
be
sure, notable. But it can't unfortunately be reckoned as anything more
than a negative virtue of the Anglo-American condominium.
Were there ever real alternatives? I hate conceding it-because then
the whole tragedy has such a terrifying inevitability-but I suspect that
once the ·anti-Nazis failed to strike a serious blow against Hitler there
remained almost no hope for a genuine German reformation. A people
can only emancipate itself. We conquerors, to be sure, in our (now
almost completed) romantic period of military government, went through
the formal motions of freeing this unhappy nation. Among the profun–
dities introduced was a French suggestion that all new or reconstructed
bridges in the land be reduced in width by two-and-a-half meters, thus
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