OXFORD AND GERMANY
935
plough plunged deep and entangled in the web of the lake. And
all this life appeared to me innocuous, led by people naked in body
and soul, living in the desert of white bones and naked bodies which
was post-war Germany. I only regretted that there was something
about my appearance so inhibited, preoccupied and physically nerv–
ous, that it prevented these young people from being attracted by
me as they were by one another.
The lives of these young Germans flowed easily into all the move–
ments of the arts, literature and architecture which surrounded them.
Everything was "new," deceptively so. There were buildings with
broad clean vertical lines crossed by strong horizontals which drove
into the sky like railroads. There were experiments in the theater and
the opera, all in a style of their own which expressed facilely the
strange fusion of naked liberation with soured pathos which was the
young Germany. I once saw a movie which contained several se–
quences of street scenes, with trams and bicycles. Music had been
used to give these very realistic sequences a certain unreality. The
bells of the trams and bicycles, the noises of the traffic were woven
into music of a kind of macabre carelessness. This skillfully expressed
the mood of nihilism and primitive vitality which was the dangerously
attractive beginning of the New Germany.
In England I had been taught to accept the idea of the separa–
tion of the senses from the intellect, even in the arts, where the
physical elements, if not totally divorced from a poem or a painting,
were supposed to be sublimated. My continental experience now
made me understand a life where humanity was not divided into
the virtuous and the vicious, the aesthete and the hearty, the rarefied
intellectual and the type only concerned with his body. There seemed
to be a possible harmony where the physical experiences contributed
directly to the enjoyment of the arts and ideas.
It would be easy for me now to dismiss this whole phase of my
life as a period of illusion about the young Germans who deceived
me with their charms which were really a form of decadence. The
view that the sensual ecstasy of the Germany of the Weimar Republic
was a social decadence can be supported by the fact that very few of
my Hamburg companions who were so enchanted by their personal
liberty put up any serious fight against Nazism, though some of them
emigrated from it. Very few supported it, for that matter. For them,
