The Sleepwalkers (58 page)

Among the many intolerances and limitations which were so common in pre-war days, and of which we are now rightly ashamed, there must be reckoned our total lack of understanding when faced with phenomena that lay even a little way outside the confines of a seemingly rational world. And since we were then accustomed to regard only Western thought and culture as valid, and to depreciate all else as inferior, we were easily disposed to class as inferior and infra-European all phenomena that did not accord with simple reason. So when a phenomenon of that nature, such as the Salvation Army, made its appearance in the unimpressive garb of peace and fervent petition, it was met with endless ridicule. People demanded simplicity and heroism, something æsthetic in other words, believing as they did that such were the attributes of European man; for they were entangled in a misapprehension of Nietzsche’s ideas, even although most of them had never heard his name, and the bogy which obsessed them was never laid until the world produced so many heroes that the sheer prevalence of heroism kept them from noticing it.

To-day, if I encounter a Salvation Army meeting in the street, I join it and am glad to put some money on the collection plate, and often I
enter into conversation with the soldiers. Not that I have been converted by their somewhat primitive doctrine of salvation, but I feel that we who were once given over to prejudice are morally bound to repair our past errors wherever possible, even though these errors could be palliated as mere æsthetic decadence and had moreover the excuse of our extreme youth. Of course one’s realization of these things came only gradually into consciousness, especially as during the war one seldom saw a Salvation Army soldier. I had indeed heard that they were developing a widely spread charitable organization, but I was almost surprised to meet a Salvation Army girl in one of the outlying streets in Schöneberg.

I suppose I must have looked somewhat lost and helpless, but my smile of friendly surprise encouraged her to accost me under a tactful pretext: she offered me a paper from the bundle under her arm. Perhaps she would have been disappointed if I had merely bought one, so I said: “I’m sorry, but I have no money.” “That doesn’t matter,” she said, “come to us.”

We traversed several typical suburban streets, passing derelict bits of ground, and I groused about the war. I believe she took me for a shirker, or even a deserter, who was forced by a kind of obsession to return to that theme, for she openly did her best to divert me to other topics. But I stuck to the war, I cannot now tell why, and went on grousing.

Suddenly we found that we had missed our way. We had taken a narrow road skirting a block of factory buildings, and as we rounded a corner we discovered that the block went on and on. So we turned left into a little path bounded by a slack and forlorn wire fence—it was incomprehensible why the path should be fenced off, since there was nothing on either side but rubbish-heaps, broken crockery, battered water-cans, and piles of jugs and pots that had been carted out to this remote and inaccessible spot for no discoverable reason—and the path finally came to an end in an open field, not a real field, for there was nothing growing in it, but a field that had at any rate once been ploughed, either before the war or in the previous spring. That was indicated by the hard-baked furrows, which looked like frozen waves of clay. But obviously nothing had ever been sown there. In the distance a train puffed slowly across the countryside.

Behind us lay the factories and the great city of Berlin. So our case was not desperate, although the afternoon sun blazed pitilessly down upon us. We debated what we were to do. Go on walking to the next village?“We’re not fit to appear anywhere like this,” I said, and she
obediently tried to shake the dust off her dark uniform. It was of the same coarse stuff as the uniform of the tram-conductors, shoddy stuff with threads of paper woven through it.

Then I noticed a wooden post rammed into the earth like a boundary mark. We made for it. We sat in turn in the narrow shadow of the post, speaking little, except of my thirst. And when it grew cooler we found our way back to the city.

Is this distorted life of ours still real? is this cancerous reality still alive? the melodramatic gesture of our mass movement towards death ends in a shrug of the shoulders,—men die and do not know why; without a hold on reality they fall into nothingness; yet they are surrounded and slain by a reality that is their own, since they comprehend its causality.

The unreal is the illogical. And this age seems to have a capacity for surpassing even the acme of illogicality, of anti-logicality: it is as if the monstrous reality of the war had blotted out the reality of the world. Fantasy has become logical reality, but reality evolves the most a-logical phantasmagoria. An age that is softer and more cowardly than any preceding age suffocates in waves of blood and poison-gas; nations of bank clerks and profiteers hurl themselves upon barbed wire; a well-organized humanitarianism avails to hinder nothing, but calls itself the Red Cross and prepares artificial limbs for the victims; towns starve and coin money out of their own hunger; spectacled school-teachers lead storm-troops; city dwellers live in caves; factory hands and other civilians crawl out on reconnoitring duty, and in the end, once they are back in safety, apply their artificial limbs once more to the making of profits. Amid a blurring of all forms, in a twilight of apathetic uncertainty brooding over a ghostly world, man like a lost child gropes his way by the help of a small frail thread of logic through a dream landscape that he calls reality and that is nothing but a nightmare to him.

The melodramatic revulsion which characterizes this age as insane, the melodramatic enthusiasm which calls it great, are both justified by the swollen incomprehensibility and illogicality of the events that apparently makeup its reality. Apparently! For insane or great are terms that can never be applied to an age, but only to an individual destiny. Our individual
destinies, however, are as normal as they ever were. Our common destiny is the sum of our single lives, and each of these single lives is developing quite normally, in accordance, as it were, with its private logicality. We feel the totality to be insane, but for each single life we can easily discover logical guiding motives. Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?

The great question remains: how can an individual whose ideas have been genuinely directed towards other aims understand and accommodate himself to the implications and the reality of dying? One may answer that the mass of mankind have done nothing of the sort, and were merely forced towards death—an answer that is perhaps valid in these days of war-weariness; yet there undoubtedly was and still is, even to-day, a genuine enthusiasm for war and slaughter! One may answer that the average man, whose life moves between his table and his bed, has no ideas whatever, and therefore falls an easy prey to the ideology of hatred—which is in any case the most obviously intelligible of all, whether it concerns class hatred or national hatred—and that such narrow lives were bound to be subsumed in the service of any superpersonal idea, even a destructive one, provided that it could masquerade as socially valuable: yet even allowing for all that, this age was not devoid of other and higher super-personal values in which the individual, despite his narrow mediocrity, was already a participant. This age harboured somewhere a disinterested striving for truth, a disinterested will towards art, and had after all a very definite social feeling; how could the men who created these values and shared in them “comprehend” the ideology of war, unresistingly accept and approve it? How could a man take a gun in his hand, how could he march into the trenches, either to die in them or to come out again and take up his work as usual, without going insane? How is such adaptability possible? How could the ideology of war find any kind of response in these men, how could they ever come even to understand such an ideology and its field of reality, not to speak of enthusiastically welcoming it, as was not at all impossible? Are they insane because they did not go insane?

Is it to be referred to a mere indifference to others’ sufferings? to the indifference that lets a citizen sleep soundly next door to the prison yard in which someone is being hanged by the neck or guillotined? the indifference that needs only to be multiplied to produce public indifference to the fact that thousands of men are being impaled on barbed wire? Of
course it is that same indifference, but it goes further than that; for here we have no longer merely two mutually exclusive fields of reality, that of the slayer on one side and of the slain on the other; we find them co-existing in one and the same individual, implying that one single field can combine the most heterogeneous elements, among which, however, the individual apparently moves with the utmost naturalness and assurance. The contradiction is not one between supporters and opponents of war, nor is it a horizontal split in the life of the individual, on the supposition that after four years’ semi-starvation he “changes” into another type and stands in complete contrast to his former self: it is a split in the totality of life and experience, a split that goes much deeper than a mere opposition of individuals, a split that cuts right into the individual himself and into his integral reality.

We know too well that we are ourselves split and riven, and yet we cannot account for it; if we try to cast the responsibility for it on the age in which we live, the age is too much for our comprehension, and so we fall back on calling it insane or great. We ourselves think that we are normal, because, in spite of the split in our souls, our inner machinery seems to run on logical principles. But if there were a man in whom all the events of our time took significant shape, a man whose native logic accounted for the events of our age, then and then only would this age cease to be insane. Presumably that is why we long for a “leader,” so that he may provide us with the motivation for events that in his absence we can characterize only as insane.

Looked at from the outside, Hanna Wendling’s life could have been described as idle passivity within a perfectly ordered system, And, curiously enough, this description would have fitted it from the inside view also. Probably she herself would have agreed with it. It was a life that from her uprising in the morning to her lying down at night hung like a slack silken thread, slack and curling through lack of tension. In her particular case life, which has so many dimensions, lost one dimension after another, it barely sufficed even to fill the three dimensions of space: one could safely assert that Hanna Wendling’s dreams were more plastic and more alive than her waking states. But however closely this opinion
might have accorded with Hanna Wendling’s, it leaves the heart of the matter untouched, for it illumines only the large-scale view of that young woman’s existence, leaving almost unguessed-at the microscopic detail which is alone significant: there is no one who knows anything about the microscopic structure of his own soul, and unquestionably it is better that he should not. Behind the visible slackness of Hanna Wendling’s life, then, there was a constant tension of its separate elements. If one could have snipped off a small but sufficient portion of that apparently slack thread, one would have discovered in it an extreme torsion, as if every molecule, so to speak, were spasmodically cramped. The external symptoms of this condition could best be covered by the popular term “nervousness,” in so far as that implies the exhausting guerrilla warfare which during every second of its existence the ego has to wage against even the minutest encroachments of the empirical world with which its surface comes into contact. But although this term might account for much in Hanna Wendling, the peculiar tension in her life did not arise from nervous impatience with chance annoyances, such as dust on her patent shoes, or the pressure of the ring on her finger, or even the mere fact that a potato was not thoroughly cooked; it did not arise from that kind of thing, for all such disturbances were an infinitesimal rippling of the surface, like the shimmering of restless water in sunshine, and she would have regretted their absence, since they kept her somehow from being bored; no, it did not arise from that, but from the discrepancy between this infinitely modulated surface and the still, immovable profundity of her soul, which like the bottom of the sea was extended at a depth which no eye could ever penetrate: it was the discrepancy between the visible limited surface and an invisible limitlessness, that discrepancy which is the eternal setting for the most exciting drama ever played by the soul; it was the immeasurable gulf that stretches between the obverse and the reverse sides of darkness, a tension without equilibrium, a fluctuating tension, one might say, since on the one side there was life, but on the other that eternity which is the sea-bottom of the soul and of all life.

Hanna Wendling’s life was one largely emptied of all substance, and perhaps for that reason purposeless. That it was the life of the insignificant spouse of an insignificant provincial lawyer makes very little difference. For the significance of any one human life is not particularly great. And even if the moral value of a slacker in a time of deadly war
is not to be rated very highly, one must not forget that not one single person who voluntarily or under compulsion fulfilled the heroic duties of war-time would have been sorry to exchange his ethically valuable activities for the ethically valueless existence of a slacker. And perhaps—although only perhaps—the increasing paralysis that gripped Hanna Wendling as the war progressed in severity was nothing but the expression of a highly moral revulsion from the horror to which mankind saw itself committed. And perhaps that revulsion, that horror, had already grown so strong in her that Hanna Wendling herself did not dare to be aware of it.