Witness to the German Revolution (33 page)

In the second
Clarté
article Serge examines the state of German culture in
1923. He gives a broad definition of “culture”; as well as the arts and sciences,
he considers the role of the press and many facets of everyday life. Serge can be
accused of being too pessimistic about cultural decline in post-war Germany;
doubtless he was too busy to notice the Bauhaus and the early Brecht. However,
he did recognize the outstanding qualities of Käthe Kollwitz and Georg Gross.

Writers and Artists
Clarté
, December 1, 1923

Berlin, November 14, 1923

I shall never forget the painful impression that Germany made on me at the end of 1921, at a time when it had reached—in comparison with present times—the peak of its post-war prosperity: the mark was worth 20 centimes.
¹⁹³
In Berlin I felt a confused sense of oppression and almost of despair. On analyzing it, I soon discovered the causes. Already, you could see everywhere in this starving metropolis the indications of a profound cultural decline. A shamefaced poverty still rubbed shoulders in the streets with the blatant bad taste of the newly enriched. From the poster to the comic song, from the shop window to the hairstyle of passing ladies, from the illustrated magazine to the art exhibition, everything bore the
indelible mark of a defeat of civilization, of a
diminution of culture.
I noticed some young writers and poets. They had just published a remarkable anthology, under the significant title:
Dämmerung der Menschen
(Twilight of Humanity).
¹⁹⁴
I noticed thinkers; some coteries of dreamers or snobs were discussing the Buddhist wisdom of Count Keyserling, other, the anthroposophical mysticism of Rudolf Steiner—the philosophy of all decadences, recalling the intellectual corruption of the last centuries of Alexandria.—Above all they were discussing a great pessimistic book, steeped on every page with reactionary assertions, by Oswald Spengler, called
The Decline of the West.
¹⁹⁵
The decomposition of the capitalist regime meant a heavy fate was already hanging over the whole people. Those for whom culture is the most precious result of societies' efforts were living under the influence of a heartbreaking obsession with decadence…

What do they think today? It is difficult to find out amid the general demoralization. There are hardly any new books appearing. Today you couldn't begin to publish Spengler or the despondent poets. The book trade is one of the industries worst hit by the crisis. Thinkers and artists are silent. Nothing is heard but the voices of demagogues. On the stage of Munich, a Hitler, a long-winded NCO, proclaims himself dictator of the Reich after shooting six rounds into the ceiling of a beer hall. In the main thoroughfares of Berlin you hear shouts of “Kill the Jews!” just as they used to be heard, in the days of the Russian hangman, in the small towns of
Bessarabia, three centuries behind western culture. People are gnawed by hunger. A lawyer, famous thirty years ago, has starved to death. An old scholar has committed suicide… Those who want to live or just to survive face constant hard work. I know an old engineer in his seventies who has become a cobbler. Clever people speculate, buy, sell and resell dollars, banknotes from the gold loan, rare books and postage stamps. Think, write, read? We have to eat tomorrow. This evening we must spend the paper money which we were paid this morning, for fear it will be worth nothing tomorrow. On Sunday evenings near the approaches to the railways stations you can see elderly intellectuals coming back from the suburbs bent under the weight of sacks of potatoes.

I know people lived through a similar famine in Russia: but there it was in order to proclaim a new truth to the whole world, in order to lay, amid toil and blood, amid snow and anguish, no doubt, the first stone of a new Society. And everything that was really alive in the vast territory of Russia knew it: otherwise, the Revolution would have died long ago, and we should not be observing the admirable rebirth of Russian literature which is perhaps the only victory for the future amid the stagnation and general decomposition of European culture.

Just recently I visited the Autumn Exhibition of painting and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts. None of the feasts of color normally offered to our gaze by French or Russian painters. An overall impression in greyish black tones. No harmonious sculpture, no pure lines, no light. Torment, suffering, weary effronteries, above all ugliness, sadness, a psychology of neurotics. The artists I believe to be the best—Kokoschka, Barlach, Albert Birkle, Max Klewer—share with their more mediocre contemporaries the fact that they
know nothing of joy.
On the other hand, there are some who, it seems, cannot and will not see anything but darkness. Barlach makes wood carvings of heavy, thick-set, obstinate, contorted, ill-natured
peasants whom one would guess to be sorcerers, spell-casters, arsonists, insurrectionists, Vendeans,
¹⁹⁶
straight out of the hallucinated landscapes of a Verhaeren.
¹⁹⁷
In thirty drawings Käthe Kollwitz
¹⁹⁸
reveals a different obsession. The haggard working-class girl, her belly swollen with pregnancy, seems to embody for her all the suffering of our time. The Mother, the Child, Hunger, Death: Käthe Kollwitz's art combines these four characters into a never-ending
danse macabre.
And I can understand this artist. Does she not live in the north of Berlin, in the middle of a poor working-class suburb? Her studio is next to her husband's surgery; he's a doctor in a poor district. Looking at other works, by the most varied artists, a question forced itself on my mind: “Is this man, this misshapen freak, that we find on all the canvasses, in all the sketches; is this grimacing, contorted mask the human face?” And I was forced to conclude: Yes, Behold the man! That's exactly how the decadent
¹⁹⁹
art of a dying civilization represents man. Defeated. Mutilated. Degenerated.

Two general features: the absence of joy, the absence of force. A double result: ugliness and despair. The only one of the German artists today in whom one finds constantly a tone of vigor is Georg Gross—a revolutionary.
²⁰⁰
But for him, man, the man of the ruling classes—has strength only because he is essentially a brute who kills, stuffs himself and fornicates…

The culture of a people is embodied in its way of life rather than in the works of its intellectuals. From this point of view, the spectacle of Germany today is even more painful to observe. A whole series of major social facts, which have been continuously accelerating for some years now, characterize its decadence. They are:

There is a corollary common to all these four facts: the deterioration of public health. About half the schoolchildren in most working-class centers are undernourished and tubercular. The diseases of poverty are making progress; the birth rate is falling and infant mortality increasing.

But to give the reader a more precise sense of these things, I want to refer to how they affect some of the details of daily life. In Berlin taking a bath has become a luxury which only the rich can indulge in. The public baths have all closed down. The bathrooms
in petty bourgeois homes serve as lumber rooms; people are happy to be able to fill the bath with potatoes. For fuel is prohibitively expensive. In boarding houses you have to pay for
a glass of hot water!
Another luxury item is the newspaper. This morning I paid 50 billion for mine with the official exchange rate of the dollar at 620 billion. That puts a single issue at a price of 1.50 francs. In recent days the average price was 70 centimes. Manual and office workers can now only read newspapers when they are displayed in shop windows. There you get crowds of people hanging about all day. The end of the circulation of newspapers has had the effect of considerably livening up life in working class districts; people come to get the news. Whatever the weather, large groups hang around, from dusk till the dead of night. The lack of reliable information gives currency to the most bizarre rumors. Not an evening goes by but you hear of some coup being announced for the following day.

The streets in Germany—in the working-class districts—have completely changed their appearance in a few months. Until the great hunger, they had preserved their respectable, impassive, petty-bourgeois appearance. In Germany, you pass along the streets; you don't live in them as they do in Latin countries. Now it seems as though the greyness of the desolate houses has got darker. The windows are dirty, and so are the pavements (they're saving money on cleaning). Outside bakeries, grocers' shops, dairies, there are queues of sometimes a hundred or more persons, standing there for an indefinite period of time, however bad the November drizzle. There are queues outside the kitchens run by the Salvation Army or the local council; queues at the milk carts; crowds, thousands of people, outside the squalid offices where they pay unemployment benefits; crowds wandering in the evenings, along badly lit thoroughfares, at a loose end, bitter and anxious. Berlin has no less than 200,000 unemployed, and if you add to this figure the
wives and children of the unemployed, that is some 500,000 people almost completely without resources. What happens to them in the evening? The cold, unlit house with no bread is uninhabitable. They go out onto the street, gather in groups, wander aimlessly, listen to the nationalist agitator, read the anti-Semitic leaflet that is being given out… In a Baltic port, as freezing drizzle was falling, I saw the quaysides in the evening covered with a crowd of motionless men, almost silent, waiting like this, with faces of cold anger, for the pointless evening to pass…