BAHNHOF
109
a demand of us. I believe, despite all, that the peoples in this hour
can enter into dialogue.... To the task of initiating this conversation
those are inevitably called who carry on today within each people the
battle against the anti-human. Those who build the great unknown front
across mankind shall make it known by speaking unreservedly with one
another, not overlooking what divides them but determined to bear this
division in common."
Such a front does exist today. One would have to be deaf and blind
not to find it in Prague or Warsaw---or, to go by reports, in Moscow,
Hanoi, and maybe even Peking. It is one of the big reasons why the
unrest in the United States should not be explained away or otherwise
made light of. American youth has more to lose than its beards and
dirty jeans, and more to defend. Even Vietnam is not all that is at stake,
though it would be enough. Even World War
III
is not all that is at stake,
though, if it happened, it would engulf all else. At stake is the honor
of mankind, an irreducible human something without which mankind
would not deserve
to
survive and without which one would not even
want it to survive.
Does
one want it to survive?
Really?
This will be the crucial ques–
tion in the years ahead. I look around the corridor in Bahnhof Fried–
richstrasse. There are the officious little guards with their high black
boots and their military breeches. And here are we, their victims, waiting,
waiting in the dirty grey-brown corridor. To this corridor all the aeons
of evolution have led. And if I suddenly run to the door, the rifle of that
fellow over there will slip from his shoulder, and he will shoot me
down. Just outside is the new Glass House, through which one returns
to the West. Glass, so no one can hide. The House of Tears, the East
Berliners call it. Does one wish to survive? I should understand the
Easterner who said No, and as a Westerner I should also find it hard
to say Yes, if what the world offered was what the Western regimes are
currently offering, if, that is, the world were nothing more than the
world's regimes, the world's two sets of regimes. But it isn't. And I can't
agree that the outlook is blacker than ever before. That the outlook is
extremely black is nothing new. New, so far as I can judge, is only a
certain positive aspect to the whole situation, namely, that youth move–
ments, peace movements,
et cetera, et cetera,
are bursting out everywhere,
that there is more and more widespread unrest, and less and less in–
clination to accept eidl'er the world as it is or the measures proposed
by the regimes to change it. It always was, and it remains, unlikely
that the good will triumph, but can it not be said for the present
state of affairs that at least it provides some of us with a vocation?
