DANIEL BELL
541
lege of New York. I had read Toller's
Masse-Mensch
and passionately
cited its arguments against "the left." I had devoured
The Swallow
Book,
the long poem written in prison , and then
Look Through the
Bars,
his letters written from prison, including his poems . His auto–
biography and his plays had framed my consciousness. I shared the
romanticism, yet feared, too, the unchained holocaust that the ex–
cesses of passion could fire.
I wrote to Toller expressing my admiration, and asked him to
join us as he, twenty years before, had asked his elders to join him.
He responded with a sad note expressing his dismay at the turn of
events in the world, yet consented to appear. It was an April day, a
chill was in the air. He came up to our platform, a slim, compact
man of swarthy mien, with deep-set eyes ringed in black. I began ea–
gerly, volubly, to tell him how much I loved his writing, but he
seemed distraught and ill at ease with this attention. I introduced
him to the crowd, most of whom had never heard of him. He spoke
slowly, haltingly, in broken English. Most of the students did not lis–
ten. After a short while he stopped and then, after a brief nod to the
knot of us on the platform, walked away. Two years later, after the
Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, his nerves broken by the tension of
his pacifism and his certainty of a new, brutal war, he committed
suicide, acting out his own ethic of ultimate end.
The second young man in the Weber circle with whom the
Webers "struck up a close friendship," (as Marianne Weber charac–
terizes it), was Georg von Lukacs. Lukacs was the son of a Hungari–
an-Jewish banker, Georg von Lukacs, who had been given a patent
of nobility for services to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and the
son retained the inherited "von" until he joined the Hungarian Com–
munist Party in 1918.
In the years shortly before World War I, Weber had broken out
of his own ascetic puritanism to explore erotic relationships; had
met, through Friedrich Gundolf, the famous aesthetic poet Stefan
George; and had become the center for a group of young Russian
students with whom he held long discussions on Dostoevsky and
Tolstoy, particularly on Tolstoy, whose dedication to moral purity
and discourses on the Sermon on the Mount attracted Weber
profoundly.
In this context, Lukacs, with his own burning aesthetic and
ethical concerns, found a ready audience. In 1910, at age twenty–
five, Lukacs had published a collection of diverse essays in
Hungarian,
The Soul and the Forms,
which appeared in a somewhat
