BERLIN LETTER
515
planned stimulation of the mind. In another, "Pallas Athena," the
clear-minded sexless goddess, who pardons the matricidal Orestes, be–
comes the symbol of a new phase in world history which rejects the
warmth of the womb and embarks, by constant stimulation, on the dar–
ing construction of this dangerous artificer: mind. In other words, the
old rebel Benn represents a new version of the traditional German pre–
occupation: the dichotomy of
f{Natu-r'
and
«Geist."
Otherwise Berlin's literary situation resembles its political predica–
ment: it claims to be the capital but is only the hide-out of the very
faithful and the very tenacious. The difficulties of distribution have
driven out most of the larger publishers; only a few remain, together
with the returned house of Ullstein. But the successful German writers
are not attracted by Berlin's exciting position between two worlds ; they
prefer to live at more calm and scenic places, particularly around Lake
Constance.
Too bad: Berlin's story cries to be written. Human problems are
posed here with singular directness and nakedness. For better or worse,
it is the unique place where the great political problems of our age
inevitably take hold of the individual. Of everybody, not only of the
intellectual who makes them his responsibility. In this city hubris, po–
litical crime or the toleration of crime was paid for by all the castiga–
tions of war and conquest; and perhaps because of this soul-clearing
punishment, it emerged into the postwar world freer and saner than
other parts of Germany: a capital into which victors marched with the
joy of final triumph, only to find, three years later, that it was
in
their own best interest to feed and sustain every single soul in it. Along
the borderline, which divides this city as it divides the world, treason,
or the rejection of treason, is daily practiced-for ideals, for money,
or because of intolerable pressure. And freedom actually is a value for
which people every day leave all their possessions. What lessons in his–
tory and the anatomy of the human heart! Theodor Plievier, in the
third volume of the trilogy which began with
Stalingrad,
tried to write
some of this story, from the fall of Berlin to the rise of the workers
of East Berlin in June 1953, but only managed to give a sketchy pano–
rama, full of a rather annoying typicality. He failed, like so many other
writers of documentary fiction. Berlin has not yet found its literary voice.
II
It is now fashionable, particularly in America, to explain the
problems of a literary situation in terms of tradition or the lack of it.
