When the grandmother asks the young doctor to do something he must therefore first clench his teeth and swallow and say that he has come here not to help them but to show a Swedish journalist ‘how nicely we travel in German trains these days’. A young boy in a shabby naval uniform, lying on his back in the straw, laughs hilariously at the joke.
Rumours of our arrival have in the meantime spread through the whole train, and children and old people are waiting impatiently in the rain and cascading us with questions. Someone has heard that the train is going to be put back on the line and sent off somewhere and not even the engine-driver has the least idea where the train is to go this time. Someone else earnestly begs the doctor to arrange it so that the train can be immediately driven out into the countryside, where the passengers can themselves find some way of living.
‘With the farmers,’ someone hisses indignantly. ‘We’ve had enough of our farmers!’
Someone else has a sick mother lying in the straw, starved and coughing — but what is the good of visiting her when all one can offer is consolation instead of medicine? A sympathetic young family hand down a little baby through the wagon opening and ask me to hold him for a moment. He is a small blue one-year-old whose eyes are inflamed by the draughts in the wagon; his parents are simultaneously proud and anxious. The husband insists on letting me know that all the travellers on this train know where the responsibility lies, ultimately it is Hitler and no one else who is to blame, but the authorities down in Bavaria, which is the least affected part of the whole nation, could have behaved in a less inconsiderate manner, and at least they could have warned the Essen authorities that they could expect a train.
‘Our lords and masters may be in charge,’ says a lively old lady from the darkness inside the wagon, ‘but it’s always us who get stuck in the middle.’
On the whole spirits are quite high in spite of the hardships. The knowledge that none of them needs to suffer alone has generated a kind of communal wellbeing that spills over into black humour. The sides of the wagons are covered with chalked grafitti: the old Anschluss slogan, ‘Heim ins Reich’ now in an ironic context, or ‘Wir danken dem Herrn Högner für die freie Fahrt’ — we thank Herr Högner (Bavaria’s Social Democrat Minister-President) for the free journey — or a drawing of an ox-load with the inscription ‘Bavarian farmers can now carry their own dung.’ And everywhere that infamous notice about the wagons’ liability to let the rain in. The doctor strikes it with an angry glove.
‘No longer suitable for goods. Only for people.’
And more bitterly: ‘Just think, fellow-countrymen evicting fellow-countrymen. Germans against Germans. The worst of all.’
The very fact that it is Germans who are responsible for having dispatched this train seems to cause him more distress than the condition of the train and its occupants. The young doctor is a Conservative anti-fascist who at a pinch can regard even Nazism from the point of view of national necessity. When he talks about the occupation of Norway, where he was sent as an army doctor just after passing his exams, he tells me about wonderful ski trips in the moonlight on the Norwegian mountains near where he was stationed. Hearing him speak like this one would think the Germans occupied Norway for the sake of winter sports. And yet it is hard to avoid feeling that Dr W. is in his way a decent person.
Now at any rate he is sufficiently well bred and sufficiently honest to accept and even co-operate loyally with the Allied authorities in the cleaning up of Essen. But for him, as for many other young people from the better-off classes who were nourished not on Nazism but on an idealistic nationalism which involves a respectable kind of ruthlessness in victory and loyal dignity in defeat, the experience of German ruthlessness towards Germans comes as a terrible shock.
It is possible that in this respect the country is now finding itself in a situation unique for Germany: the conflicts between the large interest-groups within the population are so acute that to a certain extent they deprive the reactionary powers which exist in the people’s consciousness of an operational base from which they can conduct effective neo-nationalist propaganda. The passengers on this train hate Bavarian farmers and Bavarians in general, and the relatively prosperous Bavaria looks with mild contempt on the hysteria rampant in the rest of Germany. City people accuse country people of letting food land up on the black market, while country people in turn maintain that city people rove about the countryside like plunderers. The refugees from the east speak bitterly about the Russians and the Poles, but are themselves regarded as intruders and end up living in a state of war with the people of the west. The oppressive atmosphere in the west is criss-crossed by rancorous feelings which are as yet not explicit enough to cause more than isolated explosions of violence.
A good many of the people on the train have been into town and found their old apartments taken over by strangers. Now they are sitting in the straw nursing their bitterness, but on the platform two old ladies are arguing about how Hitler really can be alive, as the rumours in the Western Zone have it.
‘Der Schweinehund,’ says the elder and more ragged of the two and makes a cutting gesture across her throat. ‘If only we had him here!’
In the meantime some members of the Swedish Red Cross have arrived with dried milk for those children on the train who are under four. We search through the train, followed by a begging crowd who are clearly older but who are still hoping for something. Someone opens a closed door on one of the wagons and a ragged white-haired patriarch appears from the darkness.
‘No, no children here,’ he stammers, ‘only my wife and myself. We’re nearly eighty. We live here. It’s our fate. So ist unser los.’
And in a dignified manner he closes the door. But in another wagon there is a girl in a wheelchair in a state of shock. The uniform seen in passing must have wakened some terrible memory in her, for she breaks out in a scream, a dreadful shrill cry that suddenly cracks and gives way to a dog-like whining. The rain is pouring down, and the barefoot boys are running about silently on the platform. The smoke from the stove-pipes protruding from the doors spreads its veil slowly out over the abandoned marshalling yard. All the hopelessness of the Ruhr is lying like a grey cloud of leaden wet coldness over our heads; anyone coming to this for the first time would find it hard not to scream. Someone lifts down the hysterical girl’s wheelchair and begins to wheel it found on the platform. Round and round in the rain and mud.
The Rivals
It is convenient but not necessarily helpful to regard Germany as a patient, Europe’s ‘sick man’, in desperate need of injections of anti-Nazi serum. There is no doubt that in one way or another Germany ought to be cleansed of Nazism, but what is doubtful in this connection is that the patient theory presupposes a mystical unity which simply does not exist in Germany today. It is just not the case that the German people are thus divided into two blocs: a small anti-Nazi victory monument of gravestone dimensions, and a huge Nazi memorial of vast proportions ready to tip over at the least puff of opposition and bury all the little barricades of freedom under its threatening weight of marble.