LRC regularly
includes many articles related to antiwar culture
(for example, these on films
and songs).
With no forethought, I have recently come across three examples
of antiwar literature, fiction and nonfiction. I bought Kangaroo
(1923), by D.
H. Lawrence (1882–1930),
at a church book sale for 25p in Salisbury, UK. I had never heard
of the book and am not a particular fan of Lawrence, but living
in France it is nice to pick up some cheap books in English (I also
bought a small volume of Simon
Templar, "The Saint" stories by Leslie
Charteris). The other two, the novelBeware
of Pity (1939) by Stefan
Zweig (1881–1942) and An
Interrupted Life, the Diaries 1941–1943 by Etty
Hillesum (1914–1943),
were recommended by my wife. We had no discussions about the antiwar
aspects of either book before or after my reading them. The three
Europeans, writing after the First and into the Second World War,
in very different ways reflect on a common theme, that a fundamental
aspect to being antiwar is maintaining your own individuality while
recognizing the individuality of others. I hope you find the passages
presented here interesting.
As you might
expect, Kangaroo is set in Australia. The story follows the
experiences of an English writer named Richard Lovat Somers, newly
arrived in Sydney, who becomes involved with a fascist-like conspiracy.
The leader of the plotters is nicknamed Kangaroo. In fact, Lawrence
was forced to leave England with his German wife, spending a couple
of years in Australia. The following passage is from an autobiographical
chapter called "The
Nightmare" on his wartime experiences living in rural Cornwall.
He had known
such different deep fears. In Sicily, a sudden fear, in the night
of some single murderer, some single thing hovering as it were
out of the violent past, with the intent of murder. Out of the
old Greek past, that had been so vivid, sometimes an unappeased
spirit of murderous-hate against the usurping moderns. A sudden
presence of murder in the air, because of something which the
modern psyche had excluded, some old and vital thing which Christianity
has cut out. An old spirit, waiting for vengeance. But in England,
during the later years of the war, a true and deadly fear of the
criminal LIVING spirit which arose in all the stay-at-home bullies
who governed the country during those years. From 1916 to 1919
a wave of criminal lust rose and possessed England, there was
a reign of terror, under a set of indecent bullies like Bottomley
of John Bull and other bottom-dog members of the House of Commons.
Then Somers had known what it was to live in a perpetual state
of semi-fear: the fear of the criminal public and the criminal
government. The torture was steadily applied, during those years
after Asquith fell, to break the independent soul in any man who
would not hunt with the criminal mob. A man must identify himself
with the criminal mob, sink his sense of truth, of justice, and
of human honour, and bay like some horrible unclean hound, bay
with a loud sound, from slavering, unclean jaws.
This Richard
Lovat Somers had steadily refused to do. The deepest part of a
man is his sense of essential truth, essential honour, essential
justice. This deepest self makes him abide by his own feelings,
come what may. It is not sentimentalism. It is just the male human
creature, the thought-adventurer, driven to earth. Will he give
in or won’t he?
Many men,
carried on a wave of patriotism and true belief in democracy,
entered the war. Many men were driven in out of belief that it
was necessary to save their property. Vast numbers of men were
just bullied into the army. A few remained. Of these, many became
conscientious objectors.
Somers tiresomely
belonged to no group. He would not enter the army, because his
profoundest instinct was against it. Yet he had no conscientious
objection to war. It was the whole spirit of the war, the vast
mob-spirit, which he could never acquiesce in. The terrible, terrible
war, made so fearful because in every country practically every
man lost his head, and lost his own centrality, his own manly
isolation in his own integrity, which alone keeps life real. Practically
every man being caught away from himself, as in some horrible
flood, and swept away with the ghastly masses of other men, utterly
unable to speak, or feel for himself, or to stand on his own feet,
delivered over and swirling in the current, suffocated for the
time being. Some of them to die for ever. Most to come back home
victorious in circumstance, but with their inner pride gone: inwardly
lost. To come back home, many of them, to wives who had egged
them on to this downfall in themselves: black bitterness. Others
to return to a bewildered wife who had in vain tried to keep her
man true to himself, tried and tried, only to see him at last
swept away. And oh, when he was swept away, how she loved him.
But when he came back, when he crawled out like a dog out of a
dirty stream, a stream that had suddenly gone slack and turbid:
when he came back covered with outward glory and inward shame,
then there was the price to pay.
And there
IS this bitter and sordid after-war price to pay because men lost
their heads, and worse, lost their inward, individual integrity.
And when a man loses his inward, isolated, manly integrity, it
is a bad day for that man’s true wife. A true man should not lose
his head. The greater the crisis, the more intense should be his
isolated reckoning with his own soul. And THEN let him act, of
his own whole self. Not fling himself away: or much worse, let
himself be DRAGGED away, bit by bit.
Awful years
– ’16, ’17, ’18, ’19 – the years when the damage was done. The
years when the world lost its real manhood. Not for lack of courage
to face death. Plenty of superb courage to face death. But no
courage in any man to face his own isolated soul, and abide by
its decision. Easier to sacrifice oneself. So much easier!
Stefan Zweig
was an Austrian contemporary of Mises. His only novel, Beware of
Pity, is the psychological story of a simple young officer who,
unaware of her handicap, asks a lame girl to dance. From this incident,
and the pity he feels, Zweig describes in excruciating detail the
descent to a tragedy. In the prologue to the story a character like
Zweig meets a famous former soldier who received the highest honor
for bravery directly from the Austro-Hungarian Emperor. This soldier,
the formerly simple young officer, is compelled to describe his
life prior to the war to the Zweig character. The following passage
depicts the conversation at a party where they first get to know
one another.
Our Host,
a lawyer by profession and dogmatic by nature, opened the discussion.
Employing the usual arguments, he put forward the usual airy nonsense:
the present generation, he said, knew all about war and would
not let itself be tricked so innocently into the next war as it
had been into the last. At the very moment of mobilization the
guns would be pointed in the wrong direction, for ex-soldiers
like himself in particular had not forgotten what was in store
for them. I was annoyed by the smug assurance with which, at a
moment when in thousands and hundreds of thousands of factories
explosives and poison gas were being manufactured, he dismissed
the possibility of a war as lightly as he might flip the ash off
his cigarette with the tap of his forefinger. One should not always
let the wish be father to the thought, I protested with some firmness.
The ministries
and the military authorities who ran the whole war machine had
likewise not been sleeping, and while we had been befuddling ourselves
with Utopias, they had taken full advantage of the interval of
peace in order to organize the masses in advance and have them
ready to hand, at half-cock, so to speak. Even now, while Europe
was at peace, the general attitude of servility had, thanks to
modern methods of propaganda, increased to unbelievable proportions,
and one ought boldly to face the fact that from the very moment
when the news of mobilization came hurtling through the loud-speakers
no opposition could be looked for from any quarter. The grain
of dust that was man no longer counted today as a creature of
volition.
Of course
they were all against me, for, as is borne out be experience,
the instinct of self-deception in human beings makes them try
to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are
perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent, and a warning
such as mine against cheap optimism was bound to prove particularly
unwelcome at a moment when a sumptuously laid supper was waiting
for us in the next room.
And now,
to my surprise, the gallant hero of the day before entered the
lists in my support – the very man in whom my false intuition
had led me to suspect an opponent. Yes, it was sheer nonsense,
he declared vehemently, to try nowadays to take into account the
willingness or unwillingness of human material, for in the next
war all the actual fighting would be done by machines, and men
would be reduced to no more than a kind of component part of the
machine. Even in the last war he had not met many men at the front
had either unequivocally acquiesced in or opposed the war. Most
of them had been whirled into it like a cloud of dust and had
simply found themselves caught up in the vast vortex, each one
of them tossed about willy-nilly like a pea in a great sack. On
the whole, more men perhaps escaped into the war than from it.
I listened
in astonishment, my interest particularly aroused by the vehemence
with which he now went on: "Don’t let us deceive ourselves.
If in any country whatever a recruiting campaign were to be launched
today to some utterly preposterous war, a war in Polynesia or
in some corner of Africa, thousands and hundreds of thousands
would rush to the colours without really knowing why, perhaps
merely out of a desire to run away from themselves or from disagreeable
circumstances. But as for any effective opposition to war – I
wouldn’t care to put it above zero. It always demands a far greater
degree of courage for an individual to oppose an organized movement
than to let himself be carried along with the stream – individual
courage, that is a variety of courage that is dying out in these
times of progressive organization and mechanization. During the
war practically the only courage I came across was mass courage,
the courage that comes of being one of a herd, and anyone who
examines this phenomenon more closely will find it to be compounded
of some very strange elements: a great deal of vanity, a great
deal of recklessness and even boredom, but above all a great deal
of fear – yes, fear of staying behind, fear of being sneered at,
fear of independent action and fear, above all, of taking a stand
against mass enthusiasm of one’s fellows. It was not until later
on in civil life that I personally realized that most of those
reputed to be the bravest at the front were very questionable
heroes – oh, please don’t misunderstand me!" he said turning
politely to our host, who was pulling a wry face. "I do not
by any means except myself."
Etty Hillesum
was a young Dutch Jew, living in Amsterdam during the war. She is
a thoroughly modern woman. She enjoys sex and thinks about it often.
She becomes deeply involved as a patient, assistant, and lover,
with the psychoanalyst Julius Spier, who had studied with Carl
Jung in Switzerland. The Diaries are painful to read as the
Nazi noose is tightening around Etty and her family and friends;
not least because we know in the end they will all be murdered.
But they are also inspirational to read because her spiritual growth
is what I would call saintly.
15 March,
9:30 A.M. [ . . . ] Yesterday afternoon we read over the notes
he had given me. And when we came to the words, "If there
were only one human being worthy of the name of ‘man,’ then we
should be justified in believing in men and in humanity,"
I threw my arms round him on a sudden impulse. It is the problem
of our age: hatred of Germans poisons everyone’s mind. "Let
the bastards drown, the lot of them" – such sentiments have
become part and parcel of our daily speech and sometimes makes
one feel that life these days has grown impossible. Until suddenly,
a few weeks ago, I had a liberating thought that surfaced in me
like a hesitant, tender young blade of grass thrusting its way
through a wilderness of weeds: if there were only one decent German
it is wrong to pour hatred over an entire people.
That doesn’t
mean you have to be halfhearted; on the contrary, you must make
a stand, wax indignant at times, try to get to the bottom of things.
But indiscriminate hatred is the worst thing there is. It is a
sickness of the soul. Hatred does not lie in my nature. If things
were to come to such a pass that I began to hate people, then
I would know that my soul was sick and should have to look for
a cure as quickly as possible. I used to believe that my inner
conflicts were due to a particular cause, but that was much too
superficial explanation. I thought that they simply reflected
a clash between my primitive instinct as a Jew threatened with
destruction and my acquired, rationalist and socialist belief
that no nation is an undifferentiated mob.
19 February
1942. Thursday, 2:00 P.M. If I had to tell what made the greatest
impression on me today I would say: Jan Bool’s great big purple
chilblained hands. Somebody else was martyred today. That gentle
boy from "Cultura." I still remember how he used to
play the mandolin. He had a nice girlfriend at the time. She had
since become his wife, and there was also a child. "He was
one of the best," said Jan Bool, in the crowded university
corridor. They have finished him off. And Jan Romein and Tielrooy
and several more of the fragile old profs. They are now prisoners
in a drafty barracks, in the same Veluwe where they used to spend
their summer holidays in friendly guest houses. They are not even
allowed their own pajamas, or anything else of their own, Aleida
Schot said in the cafeteria. The idea is to demoralize them completely
and to make them feel inferior. Morally they are all strong enough,
but most of them are rather frail. Pos has retired to a monastery
in Haren and is writing a book. Or so they say. It was very gloomy
at this morning’s lectures. And yet it wasn’t altogether depressing.
There was one bright spot. A short unexpected conversation with
Jan Bool as we walked through the cold, narrow Langbrugsteeg and
then waited at the tram stop. "What is it in human beings
that makes them want to destroy others?" Jan asked bitterly.
I said, "Human beings, you say, but remember that you are
one yourself." And strangely enough he seemed to acquiesce,
grumpy, gruff old Jan. "The rottenness of others is in us,
too," I continued to preach at him. "I see no other
solution, I really see no other solution than to turn inward and
to root our all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that
we can change anything in the world until we have first changed
ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned
from this war. That we must look into ourselves and nowhere else."
And Jan, who so unexpectedly agreed with everything I said, was
approachable and interested and no longer proffered any of his
hard-boiled social theories. Instead he said, "Yes, it’s
too easy to turn your hatred loose on the outside, to live for
nothing but the moment of revenge. We must try to do without that."
We stood there in the cold waiting for the tram. Jan with his
great purple chilblained hands and his toothache. Our professors
are in prison, another of Jan’s friends has been killed, and there
are so many other sorrows, but all we said to each other was,
"It is too easy to feel vindictive." That really was
the bright spot of the day.
And now to
have a nap and then to learn a little about Rilke’s
girlfriend. Life goes on, and why not! I should write more regularly.
But there is much too little time.
