The Human Touch

The third issue of Europa—the magazine, not the boat—is out, with important articles by two of the leading authors of modern Germany, refugees both. These authors are Stefan Zweig and Lion Feuchtwanger. The Feuchtwanger article is particularly rewarding. It is entitled, “Are We Moderns Barbarians?” and although the data is discouraging enough, the scholar-novelist bids us not to despair, not to despair even for Germany, where the spirit of Goethe is only in abeyance, under the temporary heel of the barbarians.

Dr. Feuchtwanger concludes his article with answers to this question: “Can any individual do anything at all to accelerate the process of debarbarization of mankind, a process going with infinite slowness?” which question he renders anew in this form, “Is the individual really compelled ever to be merely the object of history, never the subject?” And to this basic question he gives answer in two precepts, a positive and a negative. The negative precept is: “I think there is very much to gain in just this alone: that every one on his part avoid military thinking.” And the positive precept lies in the application by individuals of the concept of fairness, interpreted by Feuchtwanger as “readiness in every case to give more than one must give, and take less than one is entitled to take.”

But despite this mildly comforting—but truly unsatisfactory—conclusion, the real point of the article is an interrogation of the whole concept of progress. We suppose that because we are living in the year 1934, we are about 1933 years ahead of the year one, but there are not always correspondences between physical and intellectual achievements, or, as Dr. Feuchtwanger states it “Our extraordinary technical achievements are not matched by corresponding inward achievements.” Or, as I recall Ludwig Lewisohn putting it once in a lecture: Our plumbing and our automobile may be of the latest models, but our moral concepts may be 300 years behind.

THE ROMAN PEACE

To make his point of retrogression-in-progress, Dr. Feuchtwanger takes us to the past, but he tries, I believe, not to fall into the error of investing that past with a romantic halo, in which the component elements are the qualities lacking in our own times. He takes us back to the centuries of the Roman Peace, and after all, his knowledge is not derived from a last-minute text-book cramming. {SPAN}#ion{/SPAN} Feuchtwanger, lest you forget, is the author of “Josephus” and he has more than a superficial awareness of the cost in blood and tears entailed by the march of the Roman legions through Palestine and the consequences of Titus’s successful siege of Jerusalem. But once Roman authority and Roman peace were established, there was an end to violence and disorder, bloodshed and persecution. There was a living principle in Roman law which has kept its fundamentals active to this day.

Perhaps it was peace at any price, perhaps it was an ignoble peace, perhaps it was a peace made possible through abject ###but for three centuries “### the contiguous regions of ### Africa remained welded ### in the Roman Empire, in ### the Roman Empire, in ### highly civilized unity ### achieved from that day to this.” And order was maintained with a use of no more than one-fourteenth part of the troops used in the same region nowadays nor were all the spaces ruled over by the Roman State barren wastes. For Egypt with its eight millions, a Roman garrison of 16,000 was sufficient; for “the populous Balkans” only 8,000 men and for “densely settled France” only 12,000—or a soldier for each town.

DIDN’T KNOW OF RACE

Dr. Feuchtwanger implies that in achieving certain concepts nations, peoples, groups of any kind, may go back just as surely as forward. What was “wrong” with the Roman picture was that Rome had not “developed” the notions of militarism, nationalism and race. The original “Aryans” had only recently achieved an upright position and hadn’t conceived either a Wagner or a Chamberlain. Here is for me perhaps the most interesting passage in Feuchtwanger’s article:

“The most amazing thing to us, however, is the fact that for the subjects of the Roman Empire the ideal of nationalism had just as little existence as militarism. We stand marveling before the fact that a region of the carth which nowadays needs forty-eight national languages then could get along on three highly developed languages. Race—that was a thing for which the Romans had not even a name. And nation, that was a faded echo from primeval ages, and even then a mere empty sound. During the Jewish war, for instance, a great part of Jews—more than there were in Judea—were living in other regions of the Roman Empire. Never did the Roman government, at war with Judea, think of extending its hostility to these other Jews. Throughout all these three first centuries after Christ, the Roman government observed extraordinary tolerance toward all religions, nations, Weltanschauungen, races. Throughout this whole period we find members of the most diverse races and nations in the highest posts, even on the Imperial throne.”

THE SOLACE

In his own lifetime Lion Feuchtwanger has seen how violent has been the throwback even from a pretense of civilization into Hitlerian barbarism. In his university days Germans learned fifty times more about Goethe than about Bismarck and whereas formerly it used to be a precept that every cultivated German was capable of writing a readable novel, nowadays “those invested with the power of government have trouble constructing a straight German sentence.” P. S. He means Hitler, especially.

But this is the solace he gives to those who despair of modern Germany:

“He who is familiar with German history knows with solacing certainty that the barbarian face of present-day Germany is not her true face. He knows how a large layer of Germans, despite all, are civilized from within. Do not let yourselves be deceived by the yelling of the barbarians who claim to represent Germany. Culture does not yell, the civilized man does not thrust himself into gaudy uniforms. Reason is still, but it is also tough…. Barbarian Germans broke up the Roman civilization, but this civilization has only moved into Germany.”