Understanding of Self and Others In Literature and Propaganda

Chapter 4 Section 4

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This below is Chapter 4 Section 4:

Understanding of Self and Others In Literature and Propaganda

Basic experiences and basic emotions are the basis from which ideologies emerge. Ideologies are never devised by individual thinkers, but in them those experiences and emotions are clarified and articulated which are decisive for many people and inherently designed to take ideal forms. Their roots are in fundamental situations, which may involve people from many countries, several classes and several generations, but which can also be narrower in terms of time and space. If the syndrome of situation, experience, emotion and ideology does not come about, people act merely on interests. Where it exists, groups and parties are formed that are opposed to “the others” and understand both themselves and those others in a certain way, tending to see themselves as “the good” and the others as “the bad” or “the enemy.”

In its subtlest form, the self-understanding of the group or party, which always corresponds to the understanding of others, presents itself as literature and in its crudest form as propaganda. In the following, literature is not to be understood as the great literature of Shakespeare, Goethe and Dostoyevsky, which is always much more than ideological party literature, even if it can be interpreted in their terms, but first of all as the songs and the celebrations in which thousands and hundreds of thousands of people assure themselves of their commonality, and finally those novels in which the stirring events and struggles of the time are expressed in words in a committed or relatively distanced way. Both kinds of literature, unlike philosophy and great literature, are not separated by any moat of propaganda and agitation, but a party which can only engage in propaganda and cannot produce a song or a novel of any standing is a mere interest-group advocacy or power-acquisition society. A state in which only such parties exist would be neither totalitarian nor liberal, but merely a commercial society.

The best illustration of these considerations is provided by the literature and propaganda of the workers’ movement, which at the same time make it evident that the great political struggles of the interwar period were not entirely determined by the experience of the First World War, but were rooted in older soil. Thus, the basic experiences of the workers’ movement came from economic life and from what they saw as a purely economic society. The song, written by Eugène Pottier in 1871, appealed to the “damned of this earth” and draws the attention of all those “who are still being forced to starve” to the “ravens” and the “vultures” who must be driven away before the sun will shine “without ceasing” for the poor, for the “army of slaves.” How should the “oppressors” and the “idlers” be able to hold out for long, since the poor are “the strongest of the parties” and can “deliver themselves from misery” without needing the help of a “higher being,” may it call itself God, Caesar, or tribune? And so the refrain keeps repeating the sentences that express the universal claim of this movement just as clearly as its militancy and its relation to the future:

Peoples, hear the signals!
On to the last battle!
The Internationale
Fight for the human right. 

For decades “The Internationale” resounded everywhere in Europe and America, wherever large crowds of workers gathered for a festive occasion. It spread terror among enemies and confidence among friends. Those with a knowledge of history might gain additional confidence from the phrase that those who were now “nothing” would soon become “everything,” for in doing so the worker’s movement revived the most famous pamphlet of the French Revolution.

Trust in history and certainty about the future were in fact the main characteristics of the workers’ movement before the First World War, and nowhere did these emotions find a more beautiful expression than in a song that was written in a Moscow prison cell in 1897 and that became known in Germany, however, only after 1918 in the adaptation by Hermann Scherchen:

Brothers to the sun, to freedom
Brothers to the light.
Bright from the dark past
The future shines forth.

The awareness of being the originator of all wealth and yet suffering bitter hardship came to light even more impressively in a song composed by Johann Most “The Working Men” and first published in 1871:

Who digs up the gold?
Who hammers ore and stone?
...
Who gives the rich all their bread
And lives in bitter misery?
These are the working men
The proletariat.
Gather your strength
And pledge to the red flag
...
Quicken the fall of despots!
Then bring peace to the universe!
To the fight, you working men!
Up, proletariat!

It is obvious that for this confidence and sense of power, the First World War had to be the most oppressive and yet the most stimulating of all experiences. Hadn’t “the working men” of Europe killed each other instead of shaking hands? Didn’t the bright future seem much further away than before? How could the “vultures” and the “ravens” plunge the united and international proletariat into such a calamity? If one did not want to make the devastating admission that the proletariat is neither united nor internationally minded and does not comprise the great majority of the population, then the tone had to become much sharper, then one had to make much harsher reproaches, then one not only had a few “ravens” and “vultures” against you, but a powerful and vicious enemy who, above all, had to be hated.

Thus, in the “Red Poems and Songs,” which appeared in Berlin in 1924, the experience of the war and the effects of the war emerges more prominently than even the complaint about the monotony of work in the factory, than the contrasting of “fur, jewelry, silk dress” of the bourgeoisie on the one hand and “hunger, unemployment” of the proletarians on the other. A poem “To the Soldiers” says:

You man in the colorful skirt, you must now decide
Do you belong to the robbers or to us who suffer from hunger?
Our bitter fight is against the thieves of this world
And all who oppose us.
But if you count yourself among us, the starving proles,
Then you must fight with us, we want to kill the robbers.

“Orgesch,” [from Organisation Escherich] i.e. the Freikorps, and also “Hitler” already play a considerable role in these songs, and if Hitler and Dietrich Eckart and their “Nazis” are still considered ridiculous figures, the deadly serious word is addressed to the Orsch:

Shoot millions,
Orsch, you can't,
From our blood will sprout
The proletarian court.

But the song of the “Young Guard” sounds the most resolute:

We are the first line
We go on and on
We are the Young Guard
We attack, attack.
Forehead sweating with work,
The stomach empty with hunger, yes empty,
The hand full of soot and calluses
Around the rifle.
So stands the Young Guard
Ready for class struggle
Only when the burghers bleed
Only then will we be free.
...
Long live Soviet Russia
Listen! We are already marching
We charge in the sign
Of the Peoples’ Revolution!
Jump on the barricades,
Out to civil war, yes war,
Plants on the Soviet flags
To blood red victory.

But all these calls for war and civil war remain ultimately tied to the notion of a peaceful, harmonious, natural, uncomplicated life that seemed so close and was pushed so far into the distance by an enigmatic power called “the robbers” or “the reaction”:

The stock exchanges are crashing!
And also the banks
And everything else that we suffer from.
Blow up all the horror.
Don’t ask what’s going to happen;
We are sure to have
The rich earth.
She produces enough
To satisfaction and life,
For every human child!
As bread as vines.
...
We know what we’re doing
When we destroy
It is a fervent work
A holy judgment.
It is the clearest war
For the purest right.
Hail the the slogan:
No master, no servant.

For this early period one can cite German songs without hesitation if one wants to grasp the spirit of the Russian revolution, which was quite internationalist just above the elementary desire for land and peace and its champions had sung “the Internationale” with deep emotion on the evening of November 8 amidst the delegates of the Second Soviet Congress who were still present. Aware of having taken a step in world history, the revolution was then able to stage itself again and again in its great celebrations. In the midst of hunger and misery, Petrograd and Moscow were still very much alive cities in the early 1920s where a great deal of spontaneity was evident, even though the Party direction and control was already omnipresent. Observers thought they recognized a basic trait of the Russian people when improvised scenes in the streets led to a natural interplay between the performers and the audience. There, the workers of a fur factory put dolls in the masks of Mussolini, Lloyd George and other politicians of the capitalist world in a large cage and led them through the city to the great sympathy of the bystanders with the inscription: “Skins of world predators, tanned and processed by the Sorokumoff fur factory.” In another cage was a giant spider with the inscription “The Capital.” The crowd cheered as the spider was pulled out and burned. But large crowds also gathered when show trials were held against absent criminals, such as the trial of the murderers of Rosa Luxemburg or the trial of Wrangel.

All of this was far more celebration than mere propaganda, as the boundaries between those doing and those watching were erased, but the celebrations culminated in the great mass festivals where the revolution and its actors repeated and celebrated themselves. A huge stage is erected in front of the Winter Palace in Petrograd, and above in bright light fat burghers are dining with their mistresses, while on the square in front and below them a dark crowd, indistinguishable from the audience, begins to stir. Shots ring out, Red Guard detachments form, armored cars drive up. The feasting “Burschui” [bourgeoisie] are speechless with terror, they get up and flee, while revolutionary formations are now rushing in, screaming and shooting. The high wall in the background sinks down, behind it the tree of freedom becomes visible, tied with red ribbons, and the many people in uniform stream towards it and exchange their weapons for scythes, pitchforks and hammers: the great brotherhood of all mankind towards more peaceful work takes the place of war, the Internationale sounds, and fireworks illuminate the entire scene, in which actors and spectators become an indistinguishable unity. Individuals have thus transcended their singleness and narrowness and find themselves elevated to the unlimited power of the mass. Everyday life and the division of labor have disappeared; the new world and the new man are anticipated in the play, which is at once an after-play and a pre-play.

The celebration became a cult when, after Lenin’s death, the embalmed corpse of the founder of the state found its resting place in the mausoleum on Red Square, and day after day many thousands patiently waited in long lines to be allowed to take a look at the only and highest relic in the Soviet Union.

In this environment sounded the songs and poems of Demjan Bedny, who boasted that he was a nobody and an illiterate and therefore reflected the reality of the masses:

Millions of feet: one body. The pavement cracks...
Masses of millions: one heart, one will, one step!
Lockstep! Lockstep!
They march on. They march on.
March-march...

In this way celebration and propaganda merged, and the propaganda became all the more pure, the clearer was the effort by individuals or groups to influence others over a distance and to convey the right opinions to them. For many years the Soviet Union seemed to be one blackboard, covered from top to bottom with slogans, pictures, exhortations and accusations, all pointing in the same direction, whether actually on walls and statues or in pamphlets and books. There sits the “enemy capital” as a fat man with unsympathetic features in the midst of countless pieces of gold; there enthroned the League of Nations, embodied by three men in top hats and with bellies of money, identified by the national colors as France, England and the USA, under the inscription “Capitalists of all countries, unite” enthroned on a high stage before a miserable and depressed crowd; but there is also a hovering angel scattering flowers over a large crowd of people gathered for the “Holiday of the Workers of All Countries.”

Civil War era posters show Wrangel as a semi-human figure with animal teeth and a dagger; they have workers towing a giant grenade as a “gift for the white Pan” (the Polish landowners and capitalists), they render a world map on which the red flag is already waving over all of Europe. The representations and descriptions resemble those of the Whites to the point of being indistinguishable: charnel houses, severed heads, mass shootings, and they also lack any reference to their own terror. A strange and not very credible analogue to their own actions lies in the assertion that the Whites, of those prisoners whom they had arrested under suspicious circumstances shot all those who had calloused working hands without further investigation. A genuine difference is evident in the images of flogging, which in fact appear to have occurred only among Whites. On the other hand, Soviet propaganda became unbelievable for the foreigner when it reported mass shootings of German proletarian women and terrible tortures of captured communists in Germany.

At the end of the 1920s, the image of propaganda changed: large panels now showed only the Soviet Union and the major projects of the five-year plan were drawn in in many places, and everywhere the resolution of the 15th Party Congress was impressed on the people that in the short term the level of industrial development in the most advanced capitalist countries was to be “caught up with and overtaken.” But propaganda also was the carefully prepared trips of foreign delegations who wished to meet the people and yet only met agents of the Cheka or the GPU; propaganda was the office hours of the powerless “president” Mikhail Kalinin, and “agitation and propaganda” was the exclusive task of one of the largest departments of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Even as late as 1941 the Soviet Union was the land of propaganda, but even in its most routine and crude forms there remained something of the spirit of those early songs and celebrations in which the basic emotions and beliefs of a major international movement had found expression.

The tradition in which the songs of the National Socialist movement were rooted was completely different. It too went back to the pre-war period. Although nowhere in the songs of the workers’ movement was there any serious mention of “science,” they were, until 1914, overwhelmingly imbued with the optimistic spirit of the age of progress. Meanwhile, eminent philosophers had long since harshly criticized an all too banal and superficial concept of progress, the importance of myth and cult in antiquity had been discovered in literature and science, the “Wandervogel” [“Wandering Bird,” popular German youth groups protesting against industrialization by going on hikes] had rediscovered the homeland and its again and drawn them to its heart:

No beautifuler country in this time
Than ours far and wide,
Where we find each other under lime trees
At evening time.

Here the war could not be felt primarily as a collapse of the hopes and works of an evil minority, the ruling class. Rather, millions of Germans had experienced it as a liberation from routine everyday life, as a call for heroic sacrifice, as a confirmation of old convictions, and even for the large mass of the Social Democrats in August 1914 it was a palpable truth that the culturally much superior Germany had to defend itself against the long-standing and now acute threat from Tsarist Russia. And after the defeat it became apparent that precisely in this distress the emotional content that had once had its place in religion were able to unite with patriotism and bring about something like that ancient unity of fatherland and worship to which the longing eyes had already turned to before the war. Rudolf Alexander Schröder’s “German Oath” can be cited as an example:

Holy Fatherland, in danger
Your sons stand to protect you,
Surrounded by danger, Holy Fatherland,
Look, every hand flashes with weapons
...
By the stars is written what we swear
He who guides the stars will hear us
Before the stranger robs you of your crowns
Germany we fall head by head.
Holy Fatherland, lift at this hour
Boldly your face in the round
See us all inflamed son standing with sons
You shall stay, country, we perish.

In view of the horrors of modern battles of material, one might scoff at the hymn-like tone; it might be disputed that this land of factories, banks, and long hours of work deserved such a song of praise. But if Germany had really been nothing more than a specimen of the global society made up of a few exploiters and countless exploited, then the poem could not have found an echo. One might see its effect as limited to bourgeois circles, but then the question arose as to how large or how small these circles were, whose feelings and thoughts were not exclusively concerned with the universal “contradiction between capital and labor.” In any case, during the Ruhr struggle, the social democrat Karl Bröger said essentially the same thing as Rudolf Alexander Schröder, even though he emphasized the task of “shaping” more strongly:

Nothing can rob us of love and faith
To our country; to preserve it and to shape it
We are sent
May we die, our heirs
Then the duty applies: to preserve and shape it,
Germany does not die.

These songs were not created by the National Socialists. The emotions on which they were based were neither artificial nor confined to small circles. Rather, they were the most powerful reservoir from which the new movement drew its strength, and if this source had not existed, nothing more than a new middle-class party to defend the economic interests of handicrafts and small industry would have emerged from all the “social resentment of declassed petty bourgeoisie”. What is extremely characteristic of National Socialism, however, is that it was able to adopt songs from the workers’ movement and give them a nationalist as well as an anti-semitic tone. (However, the other side also changed folk and soldier songs and made them subservient to their own songs.) So the Hitler Youth sang “Brothers, to the sun, to freedom” and added a new verse:

Hitler is our leader, he is not worth the golden wages,
That rolls from the Jewish thrones at his feet.
And the Silesian SA changed the song of the “Young Guard” as follows:
We are the assault columns, we go at it and at it
We are the first ranks, We attack bravely!
The forehead sweating from work, the stomach empty with hunger
The hand full of soot and calluses covers the gun
...
The hand grenade on the belt, the rifle shouldered
So march the assault columns in the ecstasy of victory!
The Jew gets the tremors, quickly unlocks the safe,
Pays the people’s bill down to the last penny.

Nothing would have been more ridiculous than if these songs had only been sung by “bourgeois boys” or “dandies,” as the pandering counter-propaganda tried to portray. The Hitler Youth was largely proletarian in composition, and so was the SA. If a group had to bleed, then it was very obvious to put the easily recognizable and not too numerous Jews in the place of the burghers, of whom nobody knew exactly whether only the financiers or the entrepreneurs or all “value-added consumers” and in the end even the skilled workers were to be included. And had not “Rothschild,” for the early workers’ movement, been the name in which everything hateful about the system had been embodied?

But after the victory, the solemn and heartfelt solemnity came to the fore again, which probably cannot be found in this form in the songs of any other people, but mixed with the harder and more nervous tone of joy in the fight for the sake of the fight and in the face of the threat of annihilation the “world enemy”:

Do you see in the East the dawn, a sign to
Freedom, to the sun?
We stick together, whether life or death may come,
Whatever may come
Why still doubt now, stop struggling,
German blood still flows in our veins,
People to arms, people to arms!—...
Young and Old and man for man clutch that
Swastika banner
Whether burgher, or farmer, or worker, they swing
The sword and the hammer.
For Hitler, for freedom, for work and bread.
Germany awake, Judah to death!
People to arms, people to arms!

From the present, however, a distant past was not infrequently referred to:

Long was the night and long was the misery, we laid weary and abandoned.
Didn’t the plague and death creep through the streets with a gray face?
Tambour, strike, jubilant sound, how the flags are rattling!
Tambour, God wants to admonish us, people set out!
Raise yourselves and gather together, let the drum woo you,
Free and glad, in Norman fashion, to conquer or die...
Victory in adversity, show your courage, he who hesitates is already lost.
God is the fight, and the fight is our blood, and that is why we were born...

Here, in the middle of the industrial age, the mythical primordial unity of God, battle and blood was invoked. If this was reactionary, then the concept had to be redefined and purged of the harmless ideas of the 19th century. But didn’t the revolutionaries also orientate themselves towards an even more distant, even less tangible past?

Most characteristic of National Socialism, however, were the songs about the Führer. Will Vesper says:

So let the custom of the forefathers apply again: the leader rises from the midst of the people.
Leader of the empire, as we mean it, you have long been in the hearts of your family.
They knew neither crown nor throne long ago. The men were led by their ablest son...
Whoever came before the army was called a duke.
Duke of the Empire...

If one want terms, poems like this are evidence of a Caesarist and populist collectivism. The “Christian-Germanic” conservatives of the 19th century could not have imagined anything more revolutionary and reprehensible. And in the Soviet Union, after 1936, there was no longer any talk of the class, but only of the people, who, as the Soviet Union, still had their world-revolutionary task ahead of them. In the National Socialist songs, only the liberation of their own people is the focus. In this respect they are characterized by particularism.

Thus, these songs lead to a certain type of celebration, which quickly took on the character of a cult: the celebration of the fatherland and the cult of its personal embodiment, the leader as God’s messenger or even God himself. The basis of these celebrations was usually the march past; the undertone was the unison of the boots; the environment was flags, standards and pylons; the backdrop was the many-thousand voiced “Heil.” Evidently, church celebrations were a model, but so was the “splendor of the Kaiserreich.” The Third Reich was an empire of celebrations as an end in itself and self-representation—that sparked sharp criticism from Oswald Spengler. But in these celebrations it presented a stark contrast to the Weimar Republic, which had looked gray and sober, and it could not be ruled out that the celebrations were intended to create the vigor and successes which Spengler felt must be their prerequisites. The dates of the National Socialist celebration year read like the festive calendar of the Catholic Church:

January 30th of each year was the “Day of the Seizure of Power” with the traditional march of the torchbearers through the Brandenburg Gate; in March, the focus was on “Heroes’ Memorial Day,” as the Weimar Republic’s “National Day of Mourning” was now called; April 20, the “ Führer’s Birthday,” was usually celebrated with a huge parade; on May 1st, “National Labor Day,” all of Germany was emblazoned in green and flags, and in Berlin alone a million and a half workers and employees marched to Tempelhofer Feld; on June 21 many party leaders in all parts of the empire addressed the “Summer Solstice” in front of blazing fires; September was the month of the annual Reich Party Rallies, which were also very impressive spectacles for foreigners because they offered moving impressions for all the senses and gave satisfaction to old shivers; at the beginning of October the “Harvest Festival” took place on the Bückeberg near Hamelin; November 9th was the commemoration day of the fallen of the movement, on which in Munich the sixteen coffins of those who died on November 9th were driven from the Feldherrnhalle to Königlicher Platz to the accompaniment of drums, where, following the example of Italian fascism, the dead were called by name and voices of Hitler Youth answered with a loud “Here”; December remained dominated by Christmas, but its transformation into the “Winter Solstice” was planned for after the war.

All this was no mere carnival, and even the term panem et circenses is hardly an adequate description of it. But since the celebration was so much an end in itself and aimed so exclusively at addressing the irrational forces in people, the distance between the emotional content and the rational staging or organization was far more striking than in the Soviet Union and among the German communists. Hence the propaganda was not a mere continuation of song and celebration. As long as it was primarily a polemic against “Versailles” and repeatedly showed “Germany’s bleeding borders,” it was able to tie in with some activities of the Weimar Republic in schools and in public. But no head of the “Reich Headquarters for Home Service” had ever expressed himself so coolly and cynically about the need for lies, primitiveness and repetition as indispensable means of propaganda as Hitler had done in “Mein Kampf.” Joseph Goebbels would have been perfectly conceivable as general director of a large advertising company and would probably have been very successful. He immediately recognized the extraordinary possibilities of radio and used them wisely: In even 1938, “Reich loudspeaker pillars” were erected. The Führer’s speeches were regularly broadcast on all German channels, and they worked in that medium, too, although their weaknesses in isolating the voice were more readily apparent than in the varied context of mass meetings. Press control was a work of skillful direction on the part of Goebbels, but even he could tune the German press to only one main tone, and considerable remnants of the old diversity remained, unlike in the Soviet Union, where Party propaganda permeated life to the farthest corners. Great events in German history were heavily emphasized in the films, but not anti-semitism, and it was rather an exception when Goebbels had Veit Harlan produce “Jud Süss” during the war. Although Julius Streicher’s “Stürmer” could be found in countless showcases, it was also considered a cultural disgrace by many party members. Even during the war, the proportion of non-political entertainment remained remarkably large, not only in films but also in illustrated newspapers.

At this point, the basic experiences and basic emotions, which were by no means the only ones but nevertheless were the most important, are to be made clear in the distanced reflection through contemporary novels, namely those associated with the Russian revolution. It is based on three novels and a diary, all of which were written before 1933 and are therefore not subject to any influence by the Third Reich: a work that stands on the Bolshevik side and is still not mere party literature, and three works by authors of the come from the other side, the anti-Bolshevik, not the National Socialist side—only one in the one case, because the views are simple and unambiguous; three in the other, because the complexity and ambivalence of this side should be made at least partially visible.

Mikhail Sholokhov wrote the first parts of his series of novels “The Silent Don” around 1930, and in the present context the second book “War and Revolution” is of particular interest. The story begins in October 1916 with a Cossack unit of the Russian army, on which the shadows of defeat are already falling. War fatigue has spread everywhere, deadly exhaustion dominates the picture, but in the eyes of the officers all machine gunners are “contaminated” because among them are Bolshevik leaflets circulating, calling for an end to the war and to exterminate those responsible for the great murder with fire and sword: the Tsar, the nobles, the international industrial tycoons, the Russian “Burschui,” even the officers, the “dogs,” who issued or carried out the ruthless orders to attack, which cost so much blood. One of the Cossack officers, however, Ensign Bunchuk, feels similarly to the soldiers, so he deserts and joins an underground Bolshevik organization. Impotent anger fills the others against the “cholera bacilli,” the Bolsheviks, who want to hand Russia over to the German enemy. But at home, dejection and defeatism are rampant, and the rich merchant in the Cossack village feels the ground shaking beneath him, having never been able to suppress a guilty conscience because of his exploitative activities. Similarly, when the unit moves to Petrograd to protect the government, the officers sense that the Cossack soldiers are slipping away from them, for they are now willing to engage in discussion, but they know no answers to the soldiers’ “deadly simple views” of the necessity of peace and the punishment of those responsible. And so it is not the commander-in-chief Kornilov that gains the upper hand, who demands the ruthless extermination of all Bolsheviks as a deadly carrier of germs, but the former ensign Bunchuk, who reappears in the unit as an agitator and for his part raises the merciless demand: “They, us; or we, them... Prisoners are not taken... Such (like Captain Kalmykov) must be exterminated like vermin.” And then, after the Bolsheviks seize power, the front dissolves, and the soldiers “rob on the way and roll like a stormy, unstoppable avalanche through their fatherland,” gunning down their officers. The Cossack unit also returns to their village, and the men do not suspect “that even more terrible horrors and events than they had experienced during the war were waiting for them on the thresholds of their huts.” Very soon those wealthy but respected Cossacks who wanted the independence of the Don region from Great Russia appeal to them, but the Bolshevik agitators also court for their souls. Bunchuk fights near Rostov: neither side takes prisoners. Finally, in desperation, the ataman Kaledin shoots himself, and a procession of 5,000 Whites, including the former parliamentary speaker Rodzianko, tries to reach the Kuban by marching on foot. “Russia is going to Golgotha... the flower of Russia, Listnitsky thought... The same hatred and boundless rage that rages within me, each of these 5,000 doomed bears within them.” But the other side feels no less hatred and no less bitter anger. Bunchuk is ordered to the revolutionary tribunal: “Almost every day people sentenced to death were taken out of the city in trucks, the condemned and the Red Guards dug graves in a hurry...” Bunchuk is often depressed, but he consoles himself with the thought: “Before you plant flowers and trees, you have to clean up the dirt.” But under this “dirt” there are also many working people and simple Cossacks, and he cannot get rid of this oppression. In the end, his Red Guard detachment suffers a severe defeat in the Cossack area, and they are all shot, including Bunchuk and the most ardent Bolshevik among his comrades, the son of a priest.

In his novel “Between White and Red,” Edwin Erich Dwinger tells of much larger battles and a much larger train of people doomed to die—of the battles of Admiral Kolchak’s troops, joined by German officers who were prisoners of war, and of the victorious advance almost to the Volga, but also, after the alleged betrayal of the Czechs and the Allies, of the horrific retreat through wintry Siberia, which killed a million people, officers, soldiers, women, children—the flower of the Russian bourgeoisie, as the author puts it. There is no lack of broad descriptions of the atrocities on both sides: the indiscriminate shootings of mere suspects by the Whites, the beating of the commissars to death, the selections of the prisoners, but also the castrations and “rat trials” on the other side. Here, too, a simple world view is formulated, with which the Whites maintain themselves: the fight against the “asiatic chaos,” the self-assertion against “Moloch,” the “crusade for Western culture.” But more strikingly, the Bolsheviks are portrayed as believers who want to bring the “earth to the birth of a new age,” singing with fervent conviction: “The world has fundamentally changed. The slaves seized power.” Against this background, many of the White officers are seized with deep self-doubt: “We are supposed to win with this? And win against people who proclaim ideals?”— “And are they completely wrong, the Reds?”— “We are unnatural and decadent, rotten in body and soul... So, away with us!” And so the search for an idea of one’s own seems to become a mere postulate, a call to despair. What is most likely to assert itself is the urge even of the simple German soldiers to return to the fatherland, to the homeland, to order, where Russian fanaticism and Russian horror are far away and should remain far away.

Siegfried von Vegesack describes the world of the Baltic and especially the Livonian Germans as a miniature Germany, better: as an miniature of Old Germany. For him, too, the towers of Riga are “warning symbols and guardians of German culture in the extreme east.” He describes this world with affection and love: the natural and cultivated existence of the German nobility on their large estates, the sociable and mostly familial relationships, the vassalage loyalty to the tsar despite all attempts at Russification by the authorities, the inner understanding of the Latvian servants and tenants with the German “grand lords” and “grand women,” because, as one of the maids says, “the earth belongs only to the lords, just as heaven belongs only to God. That's the way it’s arranged.” But the author also and above all describes the shattering of everything that was taken for granted up to that point: the grumbling and the rebellion of the city workers in the revolution of 1905, after the Mother of God of Kazan had been recognized as the patroness of the empire and driven through the whole of Russia in a special train and was greeted everywhere by the population on their knees, the people becoming “shameless,” finally the burning down of numerous estates and the murders of precisely those most popular among the small Latvian intelligentsia who belonged to German culture.

And as a reaction to this, a new morality is developing among the younger Germans, who want to practice a determined counter-terror against the terror and want to replace the Latvian farm workers with Germans from Volhynia, while the “grand women” of the older generation only cling to their old Christian maxims all the more resolutely: “Should your new morality really take hold of us, that there are two kinds of law for Latvians and Germans, then we ourselves have played out here. Because right remains right, and wrong remains wrong.” But in other younger Germans there is growing doubt about their own way of life, about the meaning of a life of which it is said “one hunted, one rode, one crept, and every evening there one drank heavily,” so that the exclamation of a young count “How I hate this past,” is no longer isolated.

And then the war comes and the revolution breaks out, and finally the German troops occupy Riga until they themselves turn into mere heaps at the news of the revolution in Germany and the Red Army enters Riga and the Red Terror begins: on the ice of a river dozens of Germans who were dragged there have to undress, and they are then thrown into a quickly hacked hole and to a horrible death, in Dorpat the dead dukes of Courland are pulled out of the crypt and killed once again with bayonets, three hundred men and women have to dig mass graves for themselves and stand on the edge where they are shot. But when the Baltic Territorial Army and Belarusian troops liberated Riga without being able to prevent the murder of numerous men and women in the central prison, the counter-terror is hardly less bad: whole clusters of executed Bolsheviks hang from the trees, no prisoners are taken, the defenseless were gunned down. And when with the help of the English a Latvian government is established, the great estates are divided up and justice turns out to be leveling and uglification. The hero, however, who is an anti-hero full of self-doubt and scruples, goes to where he can still be alone at home, to Germany.

Finally, the Russian bourgeois daughter Alexandra Rachmanowa, whose diaries under the title “Students, Love, Cheka and Death” found a large readership in the Weimar Republic, also went to Germany, or more precisely to Austria. She, too, begins with a description of a life that was still carefree and cultivated during the war, the life of a doctor’s family somewhere in a provincial town. Here the revolution begins as a promise, and the later fiancé proudly and happily reports on the demonstrations in which he took part as a cadet. The atmosphere changes very quickly, however, with the crowds of drunken soldiers, most of whom have deserted, who are trying to insult the officers in every conceivable way. But the students are also in revolt and are demanding liberation from the yoke of the professors. The servants are constantly running into meetings, and everywhere the “Boschui pigs” and the rich are scolded, whose possessions should be distributed among the poor. 

After the Bolsheviks seize power, a house servant is made commissioner of the hospital, whose medical director was Alexandra’s father, and then the whirlwind of revolution dragged into the abyss not only the bourgeoisie and the church, but also those intelligentsia which had prepared it with so much enthusiasm. Shooting and being shot become the reality of everyday life. A commissioner proposes marriage to the wife of a privy councilor and, when she responds with a startled reply that she is already married, says lightly: “Well, that’s very simple, we’ll just shoot him.” In order to dispel the superstitions of the people, a well-known starets is taken from the island where he lives and impaled on a stake to an agonizing end. A priest is brought in to pray for the starets and thereby proving the impotence of his art, and then he, along with his wife and children, is killed with blows from a rifle butt,. After the assassination (attempt) of Lenin, the newspapers officially demanded that a thousand Burschuis must give their lives for the death of a Bolshevik.

Finally, the city is conquered by the White troops. There is not much talk of White terror. And yet, in Alexandra Rachmanova’s diary, there is also an analogy to the self-doubt and pessimism that was found in Dwinger and Vegesack. Immediately after liberation all those goods which were sorely lacking under Bolshevik rule reappear in abundance, and immediately a thriving social life is restored. “Most people live like they used to before the Reds ruled, and nobody thinks about the front, everyone has calmed down.” Was it not logical then that her rich relatives in Irkutsk gave her and her family no significant help and even wished for an end to the White regime when she arrived at the destination of the White army’s terrible retreat? Even Alexandra Rachmanova’s book raises the question: had the Russian bourgeoisie, had the Russian intelligentsia deserve their terrible fate in the end, had they not at least to a large extent contributed to it?

Not one of the four books is a mere party publication. Basically, all four, including Sholokhov, paint a unanimous picture of the horrors of this great upheaval, but also of its deep causes. It is striking that almost nowhere do Jews appear, with the exception of a few scenes in Sholokhov; apparently none of the authors think that such events can be explained by the actions of a single ethnic group.

If one tries to survey the whole of these basic experiences and basic emotions, then the conclusion arises that the experiences on which the workers’ movement was based and which were adopted or appropriated by the Soviet Union in its war-related modifications as the basis of its self-image and how it was perceived by others, determined a large numbers of people more strongly and lastingly than did any other basic experience of the time. The class situation of ordinary workers was an overwhelming reality, and the consequence of the “call to class struggle” could seem compelling, though not without an alternative. If the bourgeoisie consisted in not or only partially sharing this class position of physically exhausting manual labor, insufficient pay, and being excluded from education and culture, then basic emotions could not develop in the bourgeoisie as strong and widespread as among the workers, and the politics of the Wilhelmine time is a vivid proof of this.

But the powerful reality of this class situation in bourgeois society was not something unchangeable and superhistorical, however slowly the changes might take place, and it could not remain without consequences for those emotions if hunger was at best a metaphor for very many workers, when the working hours were limited by law and when numerous opportunities for acquiring knowledge and education opened up. Then the revolutionaries, who clung to the old concepts, had to become much more shrill in their polemics against the reformists, and the citizens had to be far more deeply frightened, especially when a world war and revolution in a neighboring country, which until then had been both feared and despised, had created entirely new facts.

Even if one assumed that the Russian bourgeoisie and the Russian intelligentsia brought about their fate themselves and thus deserved it, could one really expect that nowhere within the so extensive and diverse German bourgeoisie would a determined will for preventive resistance develop and find a widespread sympathy? What seemed quite dissimilar might now become much more alike; strong and unified emotions might succumb to fragmentation, weak and scattered counter-emotions might concentrate. The faith of the workers’ movement, which had been so tangentially affected by developments and events that for many it now seemed to have become the property of a Russian party, might be opposed by a counter-faith, the celebration by a counter-celebration, the understanding of self and others by an opposite understanding of self and others. The dominance of the faith in Russia could then be traced back to the backwardness of the conditions and the power of the counter-faith in Germany to their progressiveness. A blurring of the clear lines and a reversal of the situation was bound to be the result.

But one difference, however, always remained clearly visible, and it was essential. In National Socialist literature, the Communist and Soviet opponents were accused and attacked, but they were not ridiculed for commanding too much frightened respect, even if it aroused perplexed anger that a significant number of Germans declared the Soviet Union their fatherland. National Socialism and the Third Reich fared differently on the part of the communist and even the left-liberal writers and propagandists, whether they were in Germany or in exile or in the Soviet Union: For a long time, Hitler and the Third Reich were more a mockery than a horror . Bertolt Brecht parodied the Horst Wessel song as follows:

The calves trot behind the drum
They supply the skin for the drum themselves.
The butcher calls. Eyes tightly shut.
The calf marches with a calm, firm step.
The calves whose blood has already flowed in the slaughterhouse
They go with him in spirit in his ranks.

Whether this rationalist mockery would prove stronger than the unleashing of irrational forces was an open question; whether it was not itself resting on an irrational foundation of assumptions and hopes was an undecided question, but everything indicated that the cultural differences between the two movements and regimes would become even more pronounced.