934
PARTISAN REVIEW
times rather sordid, bits of string. Nevertheless, even if the term
"decadent" may be employed with justice about the Germany of
the late 1920's, there was about this life-among the young at all
events-a certain innocent openness.
In
the long run, perhaps this
very innocence involved the young Germans in another kind of
guilt: the culpability of those who are so convinced of the importance
of their personal relationships and the rightness of their impulses,
that they cannot conceive of themselves as involved in the mistakes
of the society in which they live, which appears to them as quite out–
side them, although they are a part and even a product of it.
For these young Germans who had very little money, and spent
what they had immediately, the life of the senses was a sunlit garden
from which sin was excluded by simply denying that it existed. Per–
haps they were deeply influenced by the feeling that their generation
had been purged by the great inflation of 1923 of money and of the
sense of property, and without this sense of possession life had an
extraordinary simplicity for them.
It
was a catalogue of travel, meet–
ings, and intimacies all taking place in the broad light of day, like
the life which is felt in a poem by Walt Whitman. The sun--symbol
of the great wealth of nature within the poverty of man- was a
primary social force in this new Germany, where thousands of people
went to the open air swimming baths or lay down on the shores of
rivers and lakes, nude or almost nude, where the kings of life were the
boys who had turned the deepest mahogany, as though, living in
the open air, they had reverted to primeval life.
While the sun healed their bodies, made them conscious of the
independent life of the surface of the skin, of the quivering muscles
underneath, of the transparent blood which showed like red glass
against the light, of the eyelashes which held the sky as in prongs;
their minds also were filled with an abstraction of a huge circle of
fire, an intense whiteness blotting out the sharp lines of all other
forms of consciousness, destroying above all the sense of time. All
their leisure, day after day, was sucked up, absorbed into vast light,
as moisture is drunk from the soil.
I went to parties which began in semi-darkness and ended at
dawn with the young people lying in each other's arms, and then I
walked home along the Alster where between the drooping boughs
of willows I saw the stars reflected in the misty water, the glittering
