Emil Meissner had been on the old field marshal’s staff during part of the war, and knew his present plight; but Emil was reserved in the presence of a foreigner, especially one who consorted with Jews and had a sister and a brother-in-law love to Adolf Hitler, and reported that the President refused to recognize this upstart even as an Austrian, but persisted in referring to him as "the Bohemian corporal," and using the name of his father, which was Schicklgruber, a plebeian and humiliating name. Der alte Herr had steadily refused to meet Corporal Schicklgruber, because he talked too much, and in the army it was customary for a non-commissioned officer to wait for his superior to speak first.
Emil expressed his ideas concerning the disorders which prevailed in the cities of the Republic, amounting to a civil war between the two sets of extremists. The Reds had begun it, without doubt, and the Brownshirts were the answer they had got; but Emil called it an atrocious thing that anybody should be permitted to organize a private army as Hitler had done. Hardly a night passed that the rival groups didn’t clash in the streets, and Emil longed for a courageous Chancellor who would order the Reichswehr to disarm both sides. The Nazi Führer pretended to deplore what his followers did, but of course that was nonsense; every speech he made was an incitement to more violence—like that insane talk about heads rolling in the sand.
So far two cultivated and modern men could agree over their coffee-cups. But Emil went on to reveal that he was a German like the others. He said that fundamentally the situation was due to the Allies and their monstrous treaty of Versailles; Germany had been stripped of everything by the reparations demands, deprived of her ships, colonies, and trade—and no people ever would starve gladly. Lanny had done his share of protesting against Versailles, and had argued for helping Germany to get on her feet again; but somehow, when he listened to Germans, he found himself shifting to the other side and wishing to remind them that they had lost the war. After all, it hadn’t been a game of ping-pong, and somebody had to pay for it. Also, Germany had had her program of what she meant to do if she had won; she had revealed it clearly in the terms she had forced upon Russia at Brest-Litovsk. Also, there had been a Franco-Prussian War, and Germany had taken Alsace-Lorraine; there had been Frederick the Great and the partition of Poland; there had been a whole string of Prussian conquests—but whose redness was notorious. On the other hand, an officer of the Reichswehr owed no you had better not mention them if you wanted to have friends in the Fatherland!
III
Three evenings a week Freddi and Rahel went to the school which they helped to support. Freddi taught a class in the history of economic theory and Rahel taught one in singing, both subjects important for German workers. Lanny went along more than once, and when the students old and young discovered that he lived in France and had helped with a school there, they wanted to hear about conditions in that country and what the workers were thinking and doing. Discussions arose, and Lanny discovered that the disciplined and orderly working people of Germany were not so different from the independent and free-spoken bunch in the Midi. The same problems vexed them, the same splits turned every discussion into a miniature war.
Could the workers "take over" by peaceable processes? You could tell the answer by the very words in which the speaker put the question. If he said "by parliamentary action," he was some sort of Socialist; if he said "by electing politicians," he was some sort of Communist. The former had the prestige of the greatest party of the Fatherland behind him, and quoted Marx, Bebel, and Kautsky. His opponent in the controversy took the Soviet Union for his model, and quoted Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Between the two extremes were those who followed the recently exiled Trotsky, or the martyred Karl Liebknecht and "Red Rosa" Luxemburg. There were various "splinter groups" that Lanny hadn’t heard of; indeed, it appeared that the nearer the rebel workers came to danger, the more they fought among themselves. Lanny compared them to people on a sinking ship trying to throw one another overboard.
At the school the "Sozis" were in a majority; and Lanny would explain to them his amiable idea that all groups ought to unite against the threat of National Socialism. Since he was a stranger, and Freddi’s brother-in-law, they would be patient and explain that nobody could co-operate with the Communists, because they wouldn’t let you. Nobody talked more about co-operating than the Communists, but when you tried it you found that what they meant was undermining your organization and poisoning the minds of your followers, the process known as "boring from within." Any Socialist you talked to was ready with a score of illustrations— and also with citations from Lenin, to prove that it was no accident, but a policy.
Members of the Social-Democratic party went even further; they charged that the Communists were co-operating with the Nazis against the coalition government in which the Social-Democrats were participating. That too was a policy; the Bolsheviks believed in making chaos, because they hoped to profit from it; chaos had given them their chance to seize power in Russia, and the fact that it hadn’t in Italy did not cause them to revise the theory. It was easy for them to co-operate with Nazis, because both believed in force, in dictatorship; the one great danger that the friends of peaceful change confronted was a deal, more or less open, between the second and third largest parties of Germany. To Lanny that seemed a sort of nightmare—not the idea that it might happen, but the fact that the Socialists should have got themselves into such a state of hatred of another working-class party that they were willing to believe such a deal might be made. Once more he had to sink back into the role of listener, keep his thoughts to himself, and not tell Hansi and Bess what the friends of Freddi and Rahel were teaching in their school.
IV
Once a week the institution gave a reception; the' Left intellectuals came, and drank coffee and ate great quantities of Leberivurst and Schweizerkase sandwiches, and discussed the policies of the school and the events of the time. Then indeed the forces of chaos and old night were released. Lanny decided that every Berlin intellectual was a new political party, and every two Berlin intellectuals were a political conflict. Some of them wore long hair because it looked picturesque, and others because they didn’t own a pair of scissors. Some came because they wanted an audience, and others because it was a chance to get a meal. But whatever their reason, nothing could keep them quiet, and nothing could get them to agree. Lanny had always thought that loud voices and vehement gestures marked the Latin races, but now he decided that it wasn’t a matter of race at all, but of economic determinism. The nearer a country came to a crisis, the more noise its intellectuals made in drawing-rooms!