Berlin Diary (51 page)

B
ERLIN
,
January
24

I think Percival W., a retired American businessman of German parentage who has spent most of his life in this country, sees something I’ve been trying to get straight. I had never met him before, but he dropped up to my room this morning for a chat. We discussed the German conception of ethics, honour, conduct. Said he: “For Germans a thing is right, ethical, honourable, if it squares with the tradition of what a German thinks a German should do; or if it advances the interests of Germanism or Germany. But the Germans have no abstract idea of ethics, or honour, or right conduct.” He gave a pretty illustration. A German friend said to him: “Isn’t it terrible what the Finns are doing, taking on Russia? It’s utterly wrong.” When Mr. W. remonstrated that, after all, the Finns were only doing what you would expect all decent Germans to do if they got in the same fix—namely, defending their liberty and independence against wanton aggression—his friend retorted: “But Russia is Germany’s friend.”

In other words, for a German to defend his country’s liberty and independence is right. For a Finn to do the same is wrong, because it disturbs Germany’s relations with Russia. The abstract idea there is missing in the German mentality.

That probably explains the Germans’ complete lack of regard or sympathy for the plight of the Poles or
Czechs. What the Germans are doing to these people—murdering them, for one thing—is right because the Germans are doing it, and the victims, in the German view, are an inferior race who must think right whatever the Germans please to do to them. As Dr. Ley puts it: “Right is what the Führer does.” All this confirms an idea I got years ago: that the German conception of “honour,” about which Germans never cease to talk, is nonsense.

Mr. W. tells me he was in Germany
until shortly before we entered the war in 1917 and that until the winter of 1916–17 there was no suffering among the civilian population at all. He says the present rations and shortages are about the same as Germany experienced in the third year of the World War. He is sure things cannot go on as at present, with the front quiet and nothing but hardship, especially the suffering from the cold we’ve had for more than a month now. “What the Germans must have,” he said in departing, “are a lot of quick victories.”

Joe [Harsch] dropped in yesterday. He said it was so cold in his flat when he was trying to type his dispatch that he had to keep a pan of water warming on the kitchen stove and dip his fingers into it every five minutes in order to hit the keys of his typewriter. Today the burgomaster warns the populace that they must not use gas for heating rooms or water. Hot water, even if you have coal, is restricted now to Saturdays. I’ve started another beard therefore.

B
ERLIN
,
January
25 (midnight)

Dined alone at Habel’s. A 1923 half-bottle of Bordeaux rouge, but despite the waiter’s assurances, it was not a good enough wine to withstand that age;
1934 is the best year now for ordinary wines. I was about to leave when a white-haired old duffer sat down at my table. As he had no fat card for a meat dish he had ordered, I offered him one of mine. We started talking.

“Who will win the war?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Why,
selbstverständlich
, Germany,” he laughed. He argued that in 1914 Germany had the whole world against her, now only Great Britain and France, and Russia was friendly.

“Each side thinks it will win,” I said. “In all the wars.”

He looked at me with pity in his old eyes. “Germany will win,” he said. “It is certain. The Führer has said so.”

But as we talked I was conscious that my remarks were jarring him. He became aggressive, irritated. He said Britain and France started the war.

“But you attacked Poland, and some people feel
that
started the war,” I put in. He drew himself up in astonishment.

“I beg your pardon,” he gasped, and then proceeded for ten minutes to repeat every lie about the origins of the war that Hitler has told. (The German people
do
believe Hitler then, I mused.) “The documents issued by our Foreign Office have proved beyond the shadow of doubt,” he went on, “that Britain and France started the war and indeed planned it for more than a year.”

“They don’t prove it to me,” I said.

This caused him to lose his breath. When he had recovered he said: “As I was saying, the documents prove it….”

I noticed my sour remarks were attracting the attention of the rest of the room and that two hatchet-faced
men with party buttons at the next table seemed to be on the point of intervening with some heroics of their own. I upped and left, bidding the old gentleman good-night.

At six p.m. Fräulein X called for some provisions I had brought her from relatives abroad. She turned out to be the most intelligent German female I have met in ages. We talked about the German theatre and films, about which she knew a great deal. She had some interesting ideas about German character, history, direction. The trouble with the Germans, she said, was that they were “
geborene Untertanen
”—born subjects, though “
Untertan
” conveys also a connotation of submissive subjects. Authority and direction from a master above was about all a German wanted in life.

“A German,” she said, “will think he has died a good German if he waits at a curb at a red light, and then crosses on a green one though he knows perfectly well that a truck, against the law though it may be, is bearing down upon him to crush him to death.”

What embittered her—and she was brilliantly bitter—was that this Germany was staking all in a war which might end the very Western civilization which certain elements in Germany had not only contributed to but had tried to make one with Germany’s culture. She thought the present regime cared not a whit about Western civilization and represented the barbarian element which had always lurked below the surface in German history and for whom life only had meaning when it meant glorified war, force, conquest, brutality, and grinding down a weaker foe, especially if he were a Slav. She blasted away about the German’s utter lack of political sense, his slavishness towards authority, his cowardly refusal to think or act for himself.

The non-European, anti-Western civilization element,
as she put it, now has the upper hand in Germany and she thought the only way the west-European nature of the German could be saved would be by another defeat, even another Peace of Westphalia (which split up Germany in 1648 into three hundred separate states). I’m rather inclined to agree.

B
ERLIN
,
January
27

Some miscellany. With the publication of a pocket-sized edition of
Mein Kampf
for the troops at the front, total sales of Hitler’s Bible, I learn today, have now reached the fantastic total of 5,950,000 copies…. The greatest organized mass migration since the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey after the last war is now coming to an end in Poland
. Some 135,000 Germans from Russian-occupied eastern Poland and 100,000 Germans from the Baltic states are now being settled in the part of Poland which Germany has annexed outright. To make room for them an equal number of Poles are being turned out of house, home, and farm and sent to occupied Poland…. Dr. Frank, German Governor-General of Poland, has decreed the death sentence for Poles who hold back goods from sale or refuse to sell their wares when offered a “decent” price. This will enable the Germans to complete their pillage of Poland. If a Pole objects, off with his head…. A German court in Posen has sentenced eight Poles, including three women, to death for allegedly
mistreating
German flyers—probably parachutists. Even the Germans admit that not one of the flyers was killed.

A phony war. Today’s dispatches from the front deal exclusively with an account of how German machineguns fought French
loud-speakers!
It seems that along
the Rhine front the French broadcast some recordings which the Germans say constituted a personal insult to the Führer.

“The French did not realize,” says the DNB with that complete lack of humour which makes the Germans so funny, “that an attack on the Führer would be immediately rejected by the German troops.” So the Germans opened fire on the French loud-speakers at Altenheim and Breisach. Actually the army people tell me that the French broadcast recordings of Hitler’s former speeches denouncing Bolshevism and the Soviets.

B
ERLIN
,
January
28

It was difficult to believe in Berlin on this Sabbath day that a great war was on. The streets and parks are covered deep with snow and in the Tiergarten this afternoon thousands were skating on the ponds and lagoons. Hundreds of children were tobogganing. Do children think about war? I don’t know. This afternoon in the Tiergarten they seemed to be thinking only of their sleds and skates and the snow and ice.

B
ERLIN
,
January
30

Marvin Breckinridge here and tomorrow I shall get off on a jaunt which Hitler’s press chief and confidant, Dr. Diettrich, is organizing (to keep us in a friendly temper) to Garmisch. From there I hope to steal away to the Swiss mountains for a fortnight with Tess and Eileen. Hitler made an unexpected speech at the Sportpalast tonight on the occasion of the seventh anniversary of the Nazis taking over power. I had no burning desire to attend, so Marvin went off to cover it. She got a great kick out of watching the man.