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jubilant when, fifty years ago, Hitler led German troops to Linz and
then to Vienna. Tens of thousands shouted "hurrah!" when the troop
trains left cities in August 1914. The Russian Revolution spread a
sense of triumph among progressives allover Europe. Mussolini's
march on Rome was certainly popular. Hitler's movement may not
have had an electoral majority in 1933, but it was close to it and cer–
tainly engendered much enthusiasm soon after. The same still was
true when Czechoslovakia was annexed and Austria domesticated in
1938, though both the
Kristallnacht
and, a year later, the beginnings
of the war were occasions of mixed feelings among many Germans.
These were precariously lifted during the apparent early successes of
the war, but after June 1941, one of the least comprehensible pro–
cesses of modern history began : the systematic murder of an entire
people, followed by the collective suicide of the murderers.
The temptations of evil were least excusable where they were
strongest, among the men of the mind. Stern wrote "National Social–
ism as Temptation" to describe what happened in Germany in 1933,
when not only Heidegger and Juenger and Freyer fell for the new
heroism of total mobilization, but even seemingly liberal authors,
some of them Jewish, toyed for a few weeks with the new regime. In
any case, they thought that it was a good thing that clear "leadership"
had taken the place of the "chaos" of democracy. Others had pointed
the way much earlier. Robert Michels stood for many disappointed
socialists who could not bear the grind of normal politics, who had
lost the belief in revolution and therefore turned to charismatic
leaders - in his case, Mussolini - as their salvation . Many of course
continued to believe in the revolution, or rather in the Third Rome ,
Moscow. I shall never cease to be amazed by how long it took for
that pseudo-god to fail. It is true that some were disillusioned by the
early news from the Soviet Union, others by Trotsky's expulsion .
The Ukrainian "harvest of sorrow" awakened some , the trials of
revolutionary heroes others. During the Spanish Civil War the other
civil war between Stalinists and social democrats became a tragic
scandal. But the book
The God That Failed
was published as late as
1950, and even after that, it took the Hungarian Revolution of 1956
and the Prague Spring of 1968 to persuade the remaining faithful of
the evil of really existing socialism, Soviet-style.
Manes Sperber was not one of these latecomers to liberty. His
own story- the story of his life and the story he told , from
Analysis
of
Tyranny
to the great cycle of novels ,
Like a Tear in the Ocean
-
is a pas–
sionate plea for humanity in the face of the inhumanity of the Second
