News Brief

Heinrich Mann, in an article in the April number of Foreign Affairs, contends that “the German dictatorship is perhaps unique in claiming nothing less than complete control over the whole intellectual and spiritual life of the nation.”

The article, “Dictatorship of the Mind,” states that, in contrast, thought and conscience are free in Soviet Russia and Fascist Italy, for “in these countries German writers can publish works that are suppressed in Germany on the grounds that they are liberal.”

Charging that the Hitler government has secured a dictatorship over the German mind, only after controlled economy had proven too difficult a task for them, the article cites the failure of the plan for economic socialization, the Four Year Plan collapse, failure to help the working classes, and increased profits for industrial barons and armamont manufacturers as proof.

“The regime tries to make up for its impotence in economic matters,” Mann writes, “by ceaseless interference in the intellectual and moral realm. It will tolerate neither opposition nor neutrality. Thought must be either National Socialist or it must not be; consequently, it is the former, because it is easter to control men’s minds than their interests.

“It is a regrettable fact that people living modestly by their talents or their brains can be brought into subjection much more easily than the moneyed classes.

“Great consideration has been shown to the latter in Germany even when they happen to be Jews. The great department stores, which were to have been utterly destroyed, are still open and full of customers, and the Jewish owners no longer take the trouble to conceal their identities behind men of straw. Even the Ullsteins have succeeded in retaining part control of their publishing house, which is the most important in Germany.

“One of the directors of a large bank chose the moment when his co-religionists were being most outrageously persecuted to declare that he had never been molested. A banker descended from a Jewish family which had been distinguished for two hundred years had himself declared an ‘Aryan.’.

“However, if Einstein were rash enough to return to Germany, he could not count on such polite attentions. After all, he would be of no help in provisioning Germany for the next war. His personal fortune was slight, and what there was has long since been confiscated. That method was obviously the most effective to adopt against intellectuals. Their money was not protected by the chemical trusts and other groups of national importance. So we who live by our pens were promptly relieved of our bank accounts.

THESE SUFFERED THEIR LOT

“Wishing to strike at liberty of thought, the authorities imagined it was intimately bound up with the liberty to draw checks. They made a great mistake. The scholars who were driven from the universities and the writers who were threatened with being put in concentration camps did not come begging for mercy to those who were, temporarily, their masters. They suffered their lot, which was to suffer or to disapperar.

“Many suicides occurred amongst the intellectuals, but they were mostly discreet, in the best of taste, not at all ostentatious. In taking leave of existence which had lost all meaning for them they were acting in just the same way as did those others to whom political or material ruin meant more than the will to live,” the article says.