16
p
ARTISAN REVIEW
inveighed against the
system
as well, and they, too, promised to smash it
upon seizing power. They did not settle for anyone being in
partial
agreement with them any more than the Communists did; they
demanded
unconditional
agreement and even subservience. Anyone who
did not submit joyously was not just an opponent but an enemy. The
number of the Germans who did not want to be regarded as enemies
and threatened by the Nazis increased with the economic distress of the
people and proportionately to the growing number of those whom the
inaction of the non-Nazis and anti-Nazis - in the government, in the
center, and on the left - led
to
believe in the victory of the Nazis. The
transformation happened step by step, but one step followed another at
an ever more rapid pace. Many people stopped making anti-Hitler
remarks in the presence of strangers, and they made such remarks more
and more infrequently even within their family circle or in conversations
with neighbors. Then it turned out that Hitler's opponents were greatly
exaggerating, that they underestimated him, and that their hatred blinded
them to his oratorical talent and his idealism. When Nazis were within
earshot, people repeated more and more frequently that Hitler, after
all,
only wanted the best for the entire German people.
Another explanation for the apathy of large parts of the popula–
tion, as manifested in those fateful months, is the confusing and ultimately
paradoxically neutralizing effect of thinking in terms of an enemy.
Wherever this type of thinking proliferates in the world, and no matter
what ideology it is based upon, it impels both the enthusiastic and the
timorous to submit to a dictatorship - for isn't everything six of one and
half a dozen of the other, and aren't the Catholic Bruning, the Social
Democrat Wels, and Hitler
all
Fascists?
As for the intellectuals of the far left, despite their better judgment
they lived in an atmosphere of a steady ascent. Their poems and songs,
their satirical and political plays and cabaret numbers that were per–
formed by countless small troupes in halls, courtyards, and village squares,
as well as their books and polemics -
all
these met with such a great re–
sponse that it seemed to them as if they were standing at the loom of the
times. The Party's speakers were enthusiastic when they returned from
their propaganda tours; at all meetings they had encountered a fighting
mood such as they had not experienced since the days of the revolution
fifteen years previously. At a rally at the end of an agitprop trip Willi
Munzenberg was so carried away by his audience's feverish desire for
great revolutionary actions that he quoted Ulrich von Hutten's words,
"Es ist eine Lust zu leben!"
["It is a joy to be alive!"]
Was it, then, revolutionary fervor or resignation of the masses worn
down by their misery? What was it now - an unquenchable thirst for
