Germany's Lost Generation
I
THE presidential elections in Germany have come and gone, but my friend Schmidt and my other friends of ‘the lost generation’ are not satisfied.
It was from Schmidt that I first heard the phrase, used to designate the generation of German youth which has come of age since the war — a generation of serious young men and women whose political opinions and views of life have been brought to maturity, not by years, but by fatigue, disillusion, and despair. ‘We are a lost generation, a generation without a future,’ said Schmidt. ‘A normal generation inherits a future to which it can look forward. That, our rightful inheritance, was taken from us by the war.’
Schmidt is a chap of twenty-five, a waiter by profession, but he has now been unemployed for four years. He is on the dole and receives about two dollars a week. Unemployment broke up his home. His wife left him after a particularly bitter quarrel over the lack of money, and vanished. Since then he has lived with a group of the unemployed who have built a colony, made from packing boxes, in one of the suburbs of Berlin. Around the little shacks lie gardens, neatly cultivated. Here live a hundred young men and women, all of them members of the lost generation. Homeless, cut off from civilized life, they exist upon such vegetables as they can grow in their tiny gardens during the summer months, and upon the slender resources of a common fund to which each member contributes what he can. Some of the colonists sell shoestrings on the city streets. A few, like Schmidt, are lucky enough to receive help from the state unemployment fund. Whatever money there is goes into the common treasury for the benefit of all.
This camp is not unique in Germany; there are many such camps, in many places. Colonies somewhat like them have recently sprung up in several large American cities, such as the one near Tenth Avenue in New York overlooking the New York Central freight yards. But there is a significant difference between these ‘squatter’ settlements in America and those in Germany. In New York, for example, the Village of Packing Cases is inhabited by down-and-outers, professional hobos, unfortunates of every description, who, for the most part, are middle-aged men and old men, worn out by laziness and dissipation or by hard work and hard luck. In Germany such colonies are the creation of youth; their members are young men and women in their twenties and early thirties.
The observant traveler in Germany will encounter these camps wherever he goes, and they will bring home to him one unforgettable fact — that thousands of youngsters, who in any other country would now be establishing themselves in positions of some economic security, are unemployed; and if he will take the trouble to talk to them individually he will discover further that hundreds have never worked a single day in their lives. I met numbers of them who left school six or seven years ago; they were unable to find jobs then, and they have never found jobs since. And because they have not worked the six months that is required by law they are ineligible for the state dole. After talking with such people, one begins to understand the grim seriousness, born of despair, that is written upon so many of their faces.
II
I do not want to give the impression, however, that all the members of Germany’s lost generation are unemployed. This is not true by any means. There are the lucky ones at work in government offices, in stores, in the professions. For them the present is taken care of well enough, but the future is uncertain. They have jobs to-day, but if conditions grow just a little worse they know that they may join the ranks of the unemployed tomorrow. Among this class one is conscious of an enforced gayety, as if these young men and women had taken for their motto, ‘Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow . . .’ They can be seen of an evening in the cafés, a couple at a table. Sixty cents, the price of two cups of coffee plus a cover charge, is all that is necessary for the privilege of dancing to the sleazy music of accordions, violins, and a piano. The tango is the most popular dance. The cafés are crowded; after all, those who have money must have some relaxation.
One evening a Russian friend of mine who was studying German in Berlin, employing as his tutor a German girl who had formerly been a stenographer, asked me to go along with them to the Resi Cabaret. This is one of the largest cabarets in Berlin, and we found it packed with people. Two orchestras tried to outblare each other. Revolving chandeliers splashed flecks of light upon the crowded dance floor. We managed to obtain seats at a corner table.
The little stenographer seemed feverishly happy. ’I have always wanted to come here,’ she gurgled. ‘I wish I could come every night. Here one can forget.’
‘What will you do when your pupil returns to Russia?’ I asked.
It was a tactless question. Her face turned pale, as if I had struck her.
My friend caught my sleeve and said in Russian: ‘She told me that after I leave she will probably have to go on the street. She had had no work for a year until I came. What other work is there? You see how it is. I was stopped sixteen times on my way home the other night — nice-looking girls, too — not a “professional" among them.’
Still other members of the younger generation are now in the universities, kept there, in most instances, at the cost of extreme sacrifices by their families. But when the university course is finished, what have they to look forward to? There are already too many doctors, too many lawyers in the Fatherland. There seem to be no places for these youngsters who are now coming along. Perhaps they can become teachers? In the past, graduating students have been able to say, ‘If I don’t know what else to do, I can at least teach.’ But to-day German schools are closing for lack of money, and teachers are being given double shifts to save hiring new ones.
At one university I saw a sign on the bulletin board which was a cruel illustration of the desperate plight in which these younger men and women find themselves. It announced that the debating club would meet to discuss the subject, ‘Where can we of this generation find a place in this world?’
Such, in brief, is the picture of Germany’s lost generation.
III
These young men and women are of all classes, of many types, and of many points of view, yet among them all there are certain similarities. Politically, they are not organized into any one group or movement, but they divide their allegiance chiefly between two parties.
‘My generation is convinced,’ Schmidt said to me one day, ‘that if we are to have a future we must make it for ourselves. Some of us follow Hitler, some of us believe in Communism, but we are all radical. The Republic, which stands for things as they are, must go. We want action!’
That word ‘action’ runs like an ominous refrain through all the talk of German youth. I heard it next from Baroness von Hedtwig, an attractive young lady from Silesia who described herself as ‘a human being made useless by the war.’ ‘No matter what we were trained for,’ she complained, ‘it is all so much rubbish to-day. I was educated to play a part in aristocratic Germany. That Germany is dead. What difference is there between me and a plumber who was trained for his job and now can find no place? So I live here, with my sister’s family. She just tolerates me. I should like to be useful — but how? Is it good for a young person to know that she is a parasite — a burden to others, a failure to herself? If we could only get action, a change in our system of life, then I might find something to do with myself.’
A little later I was coming down on the night train from Danzig to Berlin when, at some station in East Pomerania, a young man got on and came into my compartment. Seeing that I was a foreigner, he bombarded me with questions about America, and at length became expansive and began telling me about himself. ‘For four years I studied engineering,’ he said. ‘And what have I to show for it? A job as porter in a Baltic seacoast hotel — which has now closed. I suppose I shall have to become “an employee of the magistrate”’ (a slang phrase for one who lives on the dole). He talked on, not so much conversing as thinking aloud. From him I learned some of the implications of that ‘action’ which occupies such a prominent place in the thinking of these young Germans. ‘There will be no peace in Europe,’ he went on, ‘no permanent preservation of the present status as it was so nicely mapped out by the Treaty of Versailles, until the right of our generation to develop is recognized. We demand that right!’
One evening my friend Schmidt referred to the same theme. ‘What future is there for people like us,’ he asked, ‘so long as the present government endures?’ He was feeling particularly bitter. A job had been offered him, but he had been unable to accept it because he had long ago been compelled to pawn his waiter’s frock coat. The state employment agency had offered to get him another, but by the time its red tape was unrolled the job had been given to someone else.
‘Until the present Republic is destroyed, or until the chains that now bind Germany are removed,’ exclaimed Schmidt, ‘my generation will not be satisfied.’
There was something at once ludicrous and ominous in this outburst against the government, provoked as it was by a waiter’s mere lack of a frock coat. Somehow I could n’t help thinking of the kingdom which was lost for lack of a horseshoe nail. Apparently small causes may sometimes lead to the overthrow of states if conditions are such that the disaffected masses come to regard every trifling hurt as the symbol of prolonged, deep-rooted injustices. As I went about Germany I became increasingly aware that Schmidt, in his explosive utterance, had given me a true insight into the state of mind which is characteristic of the lost generation.
In order to obtain a better understanding of what these young men are thinking and doing, I made a point of visiting certain little saloons on the outskirts of various German cities where the disaffected groups are accustomed to congregate. Many of these young people, I learned, are unemployed, but they are not homeless; they are being supported, for the most part, by their parents. The saloons where they gather have three things in common: in all of them stock equipment includes a bar, a beer pump, a broken radio, glasses, a month-old piece of sausage in a fly specked case, and a housewife in the corner making a flannel petticoat, size 48; in all of them it is rare for anyone to be drinking even a glass of beer, for beer costs three cents, and to a penniless group that is money; and each of them flies a flag to indicate the political party that uses the place as a local headquarters. Some saloons fly a red flag, the mark of a Communist rendezvous; others display a red and white flag with a black swastika in the centre, a token that the followers of Hitler are assembled there.
It makes little difference which group one listens to. Superficially they are very much alike. All day long, until police curfew at seven in the evening, the young men keep busy talking, day in and day out, and of one subject only — politics. Not that all of them are members of political parties. Membership means dues, and that means money. But they are all supporters of the chosen cause, spoiling for a chance to fight for it.
I met one ardent young follower of Hitler who seemed to be always out of breath. He spent his time going from meeting to meeting, and knew no rest from earliest morning until midnight.
‘You work awfully hard,’ I remarked.
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but if I had a regular job do you think I ’d give a damn about politics?’
Unemployment, or the threat of it, has driven most members of the lost generation into the camp either of the Communists or of the Hitlerites. These two parties are leagues apart in their points of view, but they have one thing in common, and it is this which has appealed most strongly to the younger men. Both groups believe that the only way to improve the economic situation and win back their lost future will be to establish a new form of government in Germany. Whether they hope to set up a Soviet or a Fascist state, it would mean in either event the end of the present Republic — and the end of the status quo in Europe.
Here, then, is the second unforgettable fact which impresses itself upon the foreigner in Germany: the lost generation is politically conscious, and is bent upon recapturing its lost opportunities through political action. This is the great difference between these young Germans and disillusioned youth in other lands. Other countries also have their young men and women who can see no way to use their training, no way to earn a living, but only in Germany does the younger generation believe, almost to a man, that the solution of all their problems lies in politieal action, and that their salvation will come only through a radical change in government.
IV
The aspirations of the younger generation have met defeat in the recent presidential elections. It has been decided that there is to be no immediate change; Hindenburg will continue to govern Germany. But, unless the government can reach some understanding with France and find some way to force a revision of the Treaty of Versailles, opposition to the Republic is bound to increase. It must not be forgotten that Hitler, in 1932, doubled his 1930 vote; and in the Diet elections of April 24, held in five German states, Hitler’s National Socialists became the strongest political party in four of them, including Prussia.
Even if Hitler were to die, and his party to go to pieces, the point of view of the lost generation would not change. In other nations which the war brought into being — in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, even in the tiny Baltic States, and, most of all, in Soviet Russia — the new generation can look forward to constructive work in realizing their newborn ideals. But in Germany youth can see a solution of its problems only in destructive action — directed against the German Republic, and through it at the Treaty of Versailles.
There can be no doubt that it is this revolt against the treaty, and against the Republic which half-heartedly accepts it, which has driven the lost generation into the ranks of the Hitler group and of the Communists. Until recently the Social Democrats — backbone of the Republic — constituted the largest party in Germany; to-day they have fewer than 10,000 members under the age of twenty-five. The great majority of the younger men are included among the 13,000,000 voters who supported Hitler and the 4,000,000 who supported Communism in the presidential election. The true significance of that anti-Republican vote can best be seen when the two figures are added together, for it must not be forgotten that the Communists are also opposed to the peace treaty. The presidential election indicated, then, that 17,000,000 Germans out of a total voting population of 36,000,000 are dissatisfied with the Treaty of Versailles, and are willing to upset their nation and all of Europe to escape from it. This radical vote is certain to increase, because every year new members of the lost generation will come of age.
European statesmen will have to reckon with the fact that in Germany to-day a desperate group, steadily growing in strength, is determined that ‘the Treaty of Versailles must be amended at all costs.’ Non-Germans often forget how literally this phrase is meant when the followers of Hitler repeat it. They may say that the treaty was legally made and must be carried out. They may publish lengthy analyses of Germany’s ability to fulfill the terms of the treaty. But if a large and ever-increasing number of Germans are convinced that from that document spring all their misfortunes and the death of all their hopes, and if at last they refuse to abide by it — what then ? It will not satisfy young Germany’s demand for its ’lost future’ if the rest of Europe continues to repeat complacently, ‘Well, Germany lost the war, did n’t she?’
Rightly or wrongly, the Hitler group blames all of Germany’s troubles on the Treaty of Versailles, which has placed upon the German people the burden of reparations, the restriction of the nation’s boundaries, and the stigma of war guilt. Whenever that document is mentioned it is usually called ‘the Slave Treaty,’ and it is a common occurrence to hear it said, ‘We are a people held in bondage.’ In Danzig, which was German before the war but is now a Free City more or less under the dominance of Poland, I heard a fiery speaker at a meeting of young Hitlerites proclaim, ‘What was German will be German, and no treaty can change it.’ These things are not isolated instances; the traveler in Germany encounters them on every hand. They are symptoms indicating the new mood of the nation.
But it would be a mistake to suppose that the reparations requirements and the other material aspects of the treaty are the sole causes of Germany’s discontent. In one of Hitler’s headquarters in Berlin I overheard a furious discussion in which an unemployed bricklayer took the leading part. ‘Until we have wiped out this thing which weighs upon the German people,’ he said, ‘we can have no spiritual progress.’ He had been speaking of the treaty, and I thought he was referring particularly to the clauses on reparations; but he continued violently: ‘Until we have removed the blot of having to bear the sole responsibility for the war, we are a slave people. It must be removed immediately!’ There was something sardonically irrelevant, albeit impressive, about a young man who, uncertain where his next meal was coming from, could work himself into a passion about a matter so intangible, so involved and impersonal, as the question of war guilt.
V
Among the members of the new generation which follows Hitler, this national idealism runs deep. With it, naturally enough, there is a resurgence of bitter feeling against France. Ancient hatred grows inflamed. Since the war much has been done to promote a better understanding between France and Germany, but nothing can bring the two nations together so long as the Treaty of Versailles divides them. Thousands of young Germans look upon France as the guardian of the treaty, and hence as the fundamental cause of all their current difficulties.
‘And what does France want?’ a young officer in the Berlin police force asked me. ‘I was escorting two Frenchmen around town a week ago, and they noticed the flower boxes at the windows of our apartments. One of them wanted to know how, if we had no money, we could still afford to buy flowers for our windows. He said we should send the money to France instead, and pay our debts.’
‘And what did you tell him?’
‘Oh, I said that we Germans should be delighted to send flowers to France at any time — the sooner the better!’
By the millions who look to Hitler for leadership it is commonly believed that France wants to keep Germany in a permanently subordinate position in Europe. ‘There can be only one strong nation on the Continent,’ a lieutenant of Hitler said to me. ‘To-day it is France. It is to the interest of France to remain dominant, no matter what it may cost our German people.’
I heard the same resentment expressed even more dramatically by a young German salesman who shared a compartment with me on the BerlinCologne express. We began by talking about the depression, and I asked him how business was with him. To my surprise he answered, ’My firm has had the best year it has ever known — we manufacture aspirin! ’ Conversation turned to France. ‘I have often been in France,’ the young man said, ‘and I find that the French make one mistake about Germany. They mistake cries of pain for cries of revenge, and they forget that a man can strike out more wildly and blindly from pain than from any other cause.’
VI
Toward what sort of future the members of this lost generation are looking, it is difficult to say. On all sides they seem to be hemmed about by darkness. Hindenburg’s victory means a continuation of the present state of affairs, and that, to the young men, is intolerable. To reach the promised land of Hitler, a hope which has now been deferred, will mean having to challenge the vital interests of France. To go the Moscow road will mean having to face the capitalistic world, as well as all the deeply rooted nationalistic groups within Germany herself. No matter which way this generation turns, it can see ahead of it only a period of destructive work, either through war or through civil war. The contrast between this young generation in Germany, groping for its future, and the young generation in Russia, or even in Czechoslovakia or Poland, where definitely constructive plans give to each ambitious man and woman at least an illusion of progress, is the most striking contrast in Europe.
It goes without saying that the defeat of Hitler will not rob the lost generation of its desire for change. If anything, the demand for action will become more insistent. That the Republican groups in Germany realize this danger is evident from President Hindenburg’s order, given immediately after the election, disbanding the Storm Divisions of Hitler’s Brown Army. Far apart as the Communists and Hitlerites may be in their political theories and programmes, they are at least united in disappointment over the election returns, and it is probable that that group which first manages to come to power, legally or illegally, will draw many supporters from the other camp. No matter what happens, the members of the lost generation are confident that it is only a question of time before victory will be theirs. Already they know that almost 50 per cent of the German people are hostile to the Republic, and they look forward to the day when the figure will change to a clear 50, then 55, then 60.
‘The key to the future of the lost generation is in the hands of other nations,’ my friend Schmidt said to me. ‘If they will not give it to us, we shall forge one of our own.’ We were walking between the rows of little huts in his suburban colony. In one of the shacks someone was playing ‘Deutschland über Alles’ on an accordion. ‘We cannot always go on living like this. You understand? We are here to-day because of forces over which we have no control. But we are going to control the forces of the future, either through Hitlerism or through Communism. We shall find our future yet!’