Books: Return to Sparta

THE GERMAN TALKS BACK — Heinrich Hauser— Henry Holt ($2.50).

The German Talks Back is a shocker.

It will shock readers not merely because it is an impassioned, often hysterical defense of the Prussian tradition, but because, with the ink of the peace treaties barely dry, it brusquely awakes the war-dazed U.S. mind to the fact that suddenly there is no longer any such thing as “subversive” literature. The very freedom for which the U.S. has been fighting demands that such books be given a hearing.

“We read it,” confesses Publisher Holt, “with anger [and] revulsion, [but] we recognized that these emotions . . . did not answer the question whether the book should or should not be published.” Berlin-born (1901) Heinrich Hauser is an experienced journalist, and author of 30-odd novels and political studies (Hitler versus Germany; Battle against Time). In 1939 he fled Germany, not so much, it would seem, because he hated Hitler, but because his children were half Jewish. He wanted to write freely, and he believed that Germany was “accursed.” After six years on a farm outside New York City, Hauser still fears that Germany is accursed, but feels an “irresistible call” to get back just as soon as he can.

“America and Europe,” he has decided, “have come to a final parting of the roads.” Separated by an unbridgeable “spiritual chasm,” America and Germany today represent to Author Hauser not only the “extremes of wealth and poverty” but also the extremes of decadence and the Spartan spirit. Readers of The German Talks Back, which is partly autobiographical, will catch on to the manner of man Author Hauser is when they recognize that ever since childhood he has arbitrarily split his worlds into “decadent” and “Spartan” halves.

Phony Culture. Author Hauser was raised in old-world Weimar, home of Goethe and Schiller, and one of German culture’s most sacred shrines. Academic, humanistic Weimar prided itself on representing the exact opposite of German militarism. But to young Hauser, Weimar’s “phony cultural activities” were the epitome of decadence. When World War I broke out, he and his school friends were deliriously happy at the thought of “action, motor cars and planes, dynamic life.”

Adolescent Heinrich served on the East Prussian border, guarding Russian PWs.

He had Junker relatives, and on their estate he found the Spartan antidote to Weimar decadence. Prussian history books taught him that the famed Prussian tradition was founded on the rock of religious faith, that it demanded austerity, unflinching loyalty and toil. Prussianism in action was “the militant church,” and those who sought to crush it attacked “the fundamental values and virtues of every monastic order in the world.” The Arrogant Americans. In the black post-War I years, Hauser learned to hate both the ineffectual democracy of the Weimar Republic and the luxury-ridden democracy of the U.S. Like many un employed Germans, he lived in flop houses, sought rest and warmth in movie houses.

The spectacle of American pie throwing, egg smashing slapstick filled his hungry body with loathing. On the street, he found the “drunk, amorous” American tourist “strutting haughtily” with the “insufferable arrogance [of] a master race.” “This we can never forgive or forget.”

Soon Hauser joined the Tat-Kreis (Action Group), haven of “the young generation of the German Right.” Its main plank: “That democracy had proved a failure and would never be anything but a failure in Germany.” Today, twelve years after Hitler’s rise to power, Author Hauser’s views are still the same. In the new Germany to which he is returning he does not expect to find much more freedom of expression than existed in Nazi Germany. But he believes that the new Germany will be preferable to the U.S. His reasons:

¶The American way of life is not democracy but “tyranny.” It is dominated by “that human type which Jefferson with courageous bluntness could still call the canaille, but which [is now] eulogized as ‘the people.’ “

¶ American industry and trade unions have deliberately fostered “a mass-training of human robots such as has never been seen before in history.”

¶ America’s “matriarchal society” has reduced education to the level of “an uninterrupted picnic.” Lack of disciplined education is turning Americans into ignoramuses who have been “prematurely exposed to the democratic process.”

¶ Mechanized farming, wilful waste and modern youth’s snobbish contempt for the land are reducing the American countryman to the same degenerate level as the city dweller, i.e., a soulless, luxury-mad “parasite on the good earth” who wanders through life “with a kindly, moronic smile of self satisfaction.”

¶ Whereas World War II has so devastated Europe as to force her people to turn Spartan, it has merely been “highly profitable [and] swell for U.S. workers, for farmers, for a majority of Americans.” Few Americans realize that in “fighting German Naziism and Jap Shintoism, [the U.S.] is gradually being dragged down to the moral level of what she fights.”

The Germans are well aware, says Author Hauser, of what has happened to America. If America attempts to impose upon them a democracy which they consider to be a fraud, the result will be rebellion and chaos. Nor will the Germans, sitting among the ruins of their devastated cities, recognize the right of the builders of the Flying Fortress to sit in judgment over them.

Hauser thinks it would be a good idea if General Eisenhower were given autocratic power to command the Germans like an army in the field, with crack U.S. troops to keep them jumping. The Germans would like this, Hauser believes; but since the U.S. will not do it, Germans will turn to the only country who will—the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, Author Hauser hopes that he and “the best German patriots” may somehow have a chance to work on the land in socialist unison toward “the resurrection of the great spiritual values—the values of Christianity, the values of abnegation and of discipline which once created Prussia.”