The band plays a march, sounding rough in the cold. The journalists of Munich sharpen their pencils, representatives of those remarkable and courageous papers that largely without telephones or typewriters or offices still manage in some mysterious way to appear, printed in cellars ankle-deep with water on rainy days (the printers having to wade about in Wellingtons) — those same newspapers that, comically, at the wish of the Americans are ‘above party’, which has meant that more than one confused Herr Müller has read in the Monday edition of his local chronicle a Social Democrat leader prescribing the greatest suspicion towards the Christian Socialists, and then on Wednesday in the same chronicle a Christian Socialist leader exhorting readers to watch out for the Social Democrats, and then on Friday, still in the same chronicle, a Communist leader issuing an urgent warning against both the Social Democrats and the Christian Socialists.
So, the journalists are sharpening their pencils, in the loudspeakers one man welcomes another man, the voices die away and the music falls silent. A man who has taken off his overcoat rises and walks stiffly over the platform. The silence intensifies even further, something of the tension before a revolver shot about to be fired trembles in the cold air above Königsplatz. The man behind the microphone is Dr Kurt Schumacher, leader of the German Social Democrats.
Then when he starts speaking the spell breaks. We can see why he took off his overcoat. Dr Schumacher is a speaker who can talk in his jacket in a temperature of minus ten without feeling cold. At the Kästner Cabaret in Schau-Bude there is a Schumacher caricature: a new Führer who waves his arms and howls with the same hysteria as the old one. The caricature is inaccurate to the extent that its new Führer has two arms. Dr Schumacher has only one but his manner of using it is fascinating. And it is not quite true that Dr Schumacher screams. The impression he makes is due rather to his restrained passion, his sulkiness, the absolute lack of sentimentality in his tone, which allows him to utter sentimentalities that sound like bitter truths, and his sour crossness, which can so easily be taken for reliability and which sometimes allows him to tell half-truths that sound like whole-truths.
Dr Schumacher is regarded even by his opponents as a respectable personality and without doubt he has a kind of honest boldness, yet in his way he embodies the thesis that the German politician’s tragedy is that he is such a good speaker. One gets the impression that Dr Schumacher is seduced by his public, that the bold phrases pouring out of him are a result of an interplay between his own and the public’s feelings rather than of his own carefully considered political experience.
Of course he cannot have avoided noticing that his position is exposed, perilous even, to the extent that he becomes a medium for feelings that are fundamentally not in accordance with the political lines of his party. It would be naive to suppose that they are Social Democrats, those ten thousand in Königsplatz who rejoice when Dr Schumacher apostrophizes ‘the seven million absent comrades’ (the POWs), when he dwells on the shameful Munich Agreement (a most effective thing to dwell on when one has ten thousand listeners with their backs to the very building where it was signed), when he demands the return of the Saar, the return of the Ruhr, East Prussia and Silesia. It is also an illusion, and a more regrettable one, to think that the majority of those ten thousand care one jot for the democratic ideals which Dr Schumacher purposes, among other things, to represent.
The explanation of Dr Schumacher’s successes as a politician and the explanation of why together with Churchill he has taken the place in many doubtful German hearts obviously left vacant at the collapse, is that he has managed to find a common wavelength on which more or less all Germans, independently of their political leanings, can be gathered. The one-sidedness in Dr Schumacher’s political preaching makes it acceptable also to Germans who have not yet overcome their Nazism and do not really want to overcome it either. If we accept the reasonable supposition that Dr Schumacher’s case is one where a public seduces a much too clever talker then the phenomenon shows itself here in Munich in the way in which, right from the start, the speaker fends off any kind of objection on the part of his public, that is, stubbornly concentrates on those territorial injustices which even the most indifferent German mass must find disturbing. Only once does a small protest roll up from the sea of heads. It comes from a Communist who wants to let the Russians keep East Prussia.
‘It’s me they’ve come to listen to, not you,’ replies Dr Schumacher with cross humour and gets nine thousand seven hundred laughers on his side.
Dr Schumacher is without doubt good for his party, but the question is whether he is too good, that is, dangerous — dangerous not primarily because of his views, which are not just his own but are expressed with equal openness by Neumann in Berlin, by Paul Lobe and by other Social Democrat leaders, but most dangerous because of his enormous popularity, which will perhaps win election victories for his party — but what kind of victories?
It can be seen as a pious and risky piece of self-deception when German Social Democracy presents its electoral progress as proof that democratic attitudes are on the increase in the German people. Among those who vote for the Social Democrats there are still a considerable number who are without doubt captivated by the idea of asserting German nationalist views by way of voting for a democratic party and such a supposition is confirmed by the important difference between the voting figures for the parties and their real strength. It is worth remembering that in an average German city while the ratio of Social Democrat figures to those of the Communists is six to one, that between their respective memberships is more like three to two.
When his speech is finished one notices how helpless this tall, fragile man with the sad face really is. The speech has supported, the speech has warmed him, now suddenly he sinks, and someone comes and wraps a scarf round his neck and helps him on with his overcoat. Alone, he makes his way through the crowd towards his car. People call greetings to him which he ignores. People storm him with questions which he does not answer. He is due to travel to England next day and someone shouts ‘Don’t forget to say that in London too, Dr Schumacher!’ Dr Schumacher nods but does not smile. Dr Schumacher generally does not smile — Dr Schumacher who has won the confidence of a whole people through smiling as little as possible, Dr Schumacher who has given so many Germans the chance of voting democratically without their needing to be democrats, while indeed being quite the opposite. Dr Schumacher has of course not chosen this, but his frontier propaganda, in many ways reasonable but ideologically much too superficial, has had this result.
This most gifted of contemporary German politicians, who at the same time is the one with the cleanest hands, can hardly be accused on account of his views on the injustices committed against Germany by the Allied politicians: paralysing production through badly organized dismantling schemes; giving Germans charity in the form of provisions instead of helping peacetime production to its feet and thus giving Germans the chance of paying for their imports; using POWs for forced labour, which breaks the Hague Convention and is a highly unsuitable way of teaching the German people to respect it in the future; imposing the strikingly rigid frontier regulations that threaten vital German interests. If a German socialist who suffered more or perhaps longer under Nazi-German oppression than the socialists of any other country should express such thoughts, that is no more unjustifiable than is the case when for example an English liberal like Gollancz offers to interpret them.