MANES SPERBER
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into practice precisely what you are aiming for, because we take social
liberation just as seriously as national liberation. " I answered him, "I shall
see nothing and you will see nothing . . . Hitler wants war. We shall
meet again in concord - yes, in a mass grave.... " The student wanted
to make some reply, but I did not give him a chance to do so.
The country lived in a state of civil war that was not fought si–
multaneously everywhere but flared up here and there. Everywhere,
however, particularly in the cities, there was a civil- war atmosphere - not
only in the streets that echoed with provocative chants of hate, wild
threats, and shots, but also in countless rallies, where so- called
Saalschlachten
[public brawls] took place every evening. Family members,
neighbors, and people employed in the same workshop stopped talking
to one another, and of course so did the normally very eloquent intel–
lectuals. It was as though the political affiliation of talkers gave certain
words a completely different, usually antithetical meaning. In a Babylo–
nian confusion of tongues everyone knows that the others do not pervert
the meaning of words only with evil intent but also because they are
stupid or unprincipled.
Any member of the German left was apt to believe that with rare
exceptions all principled, intelligent people were on the left and that all
genuine intellectuals who had not sold out to the bourgeoisie were on
that side. Every intellectual knew how to use appropriate quotations
from Marx, Lenin, and Engels, and thanks to the Marxist crisis theory he
was able to demonstrate that
decaying
capitalism was approaching its in–
evitable end on forced marches and that the bourgeoisie, particularly
monopolistic capitalism, had to hoist Mussolini and Hitler into the sad–
dle in order to delay the victory of the proletarian revolution. Only
rarely did someone disturb the mood created by such a convincing ex–
planation by saying, "If more than thirteen million vote for Hitler, un–
doubtedly including hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers, this
probably can't be explained by saying that the capitalists are financing his
propaganda and his uniformed troops. Conversely, the more successful
Hitler is, the more money they give him. Why do twice as many people
believe the promises of the Nazis than believe those of the Communists?"
Only seldom did someone attempt to investigate the uncommon
appeal of the Nazis. The watchword remained "The worse, the better"
- that is, it was regarded as certain that economic hardship was a
revolutionary ·factor. Despite what the German proverb says, hardship
does not teach people to pray; it teaches them to fight, to fight against
the enemies of the working class and against the
system
that must
constantly be exposed and utterly destroyed. Incidentally, the Nazis
