Anyone who has spent some time with Germans from different levels of society soon discovers that what appeared upon a brief acquaintance with current German thinking as an unbroken unity is in fact a mesh of diagonal, vertical and horizontal cracks. What was assumed to be unshakeable unity is only a superficial agreement on certain elementary opinions: all Germans think that the seven million POWs should come home and that those who come home should weigh more — quite physically — than those Germans who return from Russian arsenals and French mines. All Germans agree that the zone boundaries should be abolished and that the dismantling of industrial plant, if it is really necessary, should not mean for example that expensive machine-parts confiscated by the Russians are left to lie rusting away on barges in Hamburg’s docks. Further, all Germans in the Western Zone agree, albeit on the basis of differing premisses, that the huge consignments of refugees from the east to the west are a form of invisible pressure exerted by the Russians on the Allies; by pumping the Allied zones full of destitute people the Russians would be able to create quickly a situation of Verelendigung which at a given moment of maximum stress must give vent to an explosion of a kind devastating for the Western occupying powers.
Opinions with regard to the Allies are unanimous only in the sense that a certain feeling of restriction is common to all Germans. Still, it is felt even in strongly reactionary circles that there is no objective basis for any sort of resistance, including the passive sort. In reality the Germans regard themselves as occupied in a different way, for instance, from how the French regarded themselves as occupied: one finds no public contempt for the occupying power, hardly even for the occupier’s girl-friends, and the only kind of democratic education which the Allies have so far attempted — the efforts made by the Americans to turn German youngsters into good baseball players — has in its way met with a lively interest on the part of the youngsters.
It is not difficult then to identify common views cutting like highways through all the different social classes, just as here at home it is not difficult to identify the lack of divided opinions on modernist poetry or certain aspects of tax law. But what is important is that these shared views do not in any way contribute to the erosion of the bitter frontiers between the rival groups within the population. The hatred between the farmers and the city people has already been mentioned, and the even greater hatred between the poor city people evacuated to the country, whose distress is every bit as acute as that of the people left in the cities, and the farmers, who this autumn were still bartering food for clothes and linen but when inflation in the value of clothes and linen set in, even in the countryside, then wanted gold, silver and watches in return for potatoes, eggs and butter. The class divisions between the poor and the least poor have also been mentioned, the rising irritation between refugees and residents, and the reckless rivalry between competing political parties.
But there is another antagonism which is perhaps more fateful than any other: antagonism between the generations, the mutual contempt between youth and middle-age, excluding youth from the trade union leadership, from party leadership, and from executive ranks of the democratic institutions.
The absence of young people from political, labour and cultural life cannot be attributed simply to the inability of Nazified youth to interest itself in democratic undertakings. Within the parties and the unions young people are fighting their elders in a vain struggle for influence, which the older generations will not hand over to the younger, who, they say, have grown up in the shadow of the swastika, and which the younger in their turn will not entrust to the older, who, they say, bear the responsibility for the collapse of the old democracy. The defeat of the young results in a disillusioned and fateful predisposition against all forms of democratic organization, which are increasingly seen as something for old people.
What is remarkable about this generation conflict, however, is the fact that the representatives of the older generation are so old and those of the younger generation are in many cases no longer young. In the trade unions you can watch the fruitless struggles of a thirty-five-year-old against the sixty-year-olds; men who were radical youths before 1933 and did not shift their opinions during the Nazi years find it as hard to get a hearing as the youngsters who have known nothing other than Nazism. It is not altogether unjustified, in certain parts of Germany, to talk about a crisis in the parties and in the unions, and one of the main causes of this crisis is the fact that survivors of the 1933 collapse were too quick to grasp the rudder with their shaking old-man’s hands.
The most tragic aspect of the big meeting under canvas which I attended in Frankfurt-am-Main just before Christmas and where the old Social Democrat and former Parliamentary President Paul Lobe spoke, was not perhaps that it was impossible to spot a single young person in the thousand-strong audience. What was tragic and frightening was that the audience were so advanced in years. About eighty per cent of those present were old men with woeful faces and frozen smiles who had come here to reminisce, not to find inspiration for the struggle to bring a new democracy to birth. The eighty per cent stood there round the arena while music bellowed from a loudspeaker and they mumbled The Internationale, and in the chilly silence round their dried-up voices, dry after thirteen years of silence, I had the unpleasant sensation of finding myself in a museum for a lost revolution and an equally lost generation. And outside the big tent youngsters had stood pointing the way with a sarcastic phrase: ‘Hier geht alles nach rechts! Here everyone goes to the right!
German youth are in a tragic situation. They attend schools where slates have been nailed over the windows, schools where there is nothing to write on and nothing to read. These are the most ignorant children in the world, declared the young medical officer in Essen. From their school-yards they have a view over an endless panorama of ruins, and in the worst cases the ruins have to serve as school lavatories. Every day the teachers preach about the immorality of the black market, but when those youngsters go home they are forced by their own hunger and by their parents’ hunger to take to the streets to find something to eat. This creates a terrible conflict, whose insolubility does nothing towards bridging the gap between the generations. It would be absurdly optimistic to imagine one could find such youngsters in any of the organizations of the dawning democracy. One has to face the naked reality and admit that German youth have their own organizations: the robber-gangs and the black-market centres.
Lost Generation
Germany has not just one lost generation, but many. One can argue about which is the most lost but never about which is the most regrettable. Those aged around twenty hang about the railway stations of small German towns long into the gathering darkness without having a train, or anything else, to wait for. Here one can observe small, desperate attempts at robbery carried out by nervous striplings who toss their heads defiantly when caught, or drunk school-girls clinging to Allied soldiers or half lying on waiting-room benches with drunk Negroes. No young generation has experienced such a fate, declares a well-known German publisher in a book written for and about this generation: they had conquered the world at eighteen and now at twenty-two they have lost everything.
In Stuttgart, where it is difficult to identify the remains of a lost beauty behind blackened façades, a meeting is held one evening for this the most regrettable of all lost generations. The meeting is held in a little church hall with space for about a hundred and fifty people and for the first and last time during my stay in Germany I saw a gathering with a full house, with participants who were not indifferent to what was happening, with a public that included young people: pale and destitute with hungry faces and ragged clothes, intellectual youngsters with fervent voices, young girls with a frightening hardness in their features, a rich arrogant young fellow in a fur collar who begins to smell American when he lights a cigarette. The chairman of the city’s ‘Young Democrats’, who have arranged the meeting, introduces and welcomes a small, pale old man: this is one of the city’s denazification lawyers.