Ernst

My eye lighted upon Ernst Toller’s memoir of reference 1 the other day and having idly turned a few pages, I thought I would read it again. A book first noticed near ten years ago at reference 2. And, oddly enough, once the property of someone or something in Pixham, near Dorking, which we visited last year and noticed at reference 3. The pencil inscription in the front suggesting that the someone or something was ELR and that the book was in habit of being loaned out. Google offers Epsom and Leatherhead Railway, Employment Land Review and the Enlightened Lamp Recycling company, but none of these seem to quite fit the bill. Bing offers nothing at all.

A decently but not lavishly produced book from Bodley Head, properly bound in a dozen or so signatures and printed on the sort of paper that has horizontal stripes from the mould it was made in. Published during the closing years of Bodley Head as an independent publisher, then going then through various hands and winding up somewhere inside Random House. Complete with advertisements for English editions of some of Toller’s plays. Complete with a motif on the spine featuring the head of the Bodley for whom the Bodleian Library from the Morse and Lewis television dramas was named: a motif which I must have come across before but had completely forgotten about.

As suggested by the title, this is the story of someone who started out as an ordinary sort of German, swept into the war along with so many of the young men of his generation. But then radicalised by that war, ending up in the Bavarian Soviet Republic at the war’s end. One spell in prison before the Republic, a longer spell in prison after. With the present book being published in Germany to coincide with the burning of some of his other books by the Nazis, in the early 1930’s.

An ordinary sort of German from the Prussian middle classes from the borderlands between Germany and Poland. An ordinary sort of German who also happened to be a Jew and a writer, this last appearing at an early age, with Toller learning early that adding plenty of spice & colour to more or less trivial items of local news was good for sales. He didn’t get caught out very often. He also wrote poetry and plays and on the evidence of this easy-read book was something of a ladies’ man.

I learn that the short lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, in which Toller took a leading role, was an amateurish mess. Not least because the progressive forces seemed to be more interested in fighting with each other than with the forces of reaction. A lesson they failed to learn when they subsequently allowed the rise of Hitler. It was also a lesson on how a revolution can unleash a great deal of casual, brutal violence - while not achieving its objectives. I am reminded of similar material in Dr. Zhivago, noticed at reference 5 and awaiting final notice.

As well as being reminded of Pasternak, I was also reminded of Simenon, of his book about a young thug at reference 4, a lot of which is set in a prison. To the extent that I wondered whether Simenon read the present book before he wrote his, shortly after the second war, also awaiting final notice. With Simenon, for example, using the same device of the prisoner fantasising about an inaccessible girl, seen at a window.

A few bits and pieces follow.

Toller, like many Jews of his generation was a German patriot, perhaps to the point of being more Catholic than the Pope, as the saying goes. So as a child, he was happy enough to join in German abuse of local Poles. I am reminded of English abuse of the Irish, still going strong in the Customs’ sheds of Liverpool, I have been reliably informed, in the 1960’s. Not to mention the front windows of the keepers of boarding houses. While he, in turn, was abused for being Jewish.

Some evidence of tension between the Catholic Germans of the south and the upstart Prussian, Protestant Germans of the north.

Plenty of parallels with ‘The Good Soldier Švejk’, written in the same part of the world, about ten years previously. Some evidence of the tension between temporary officers and real officers, with the former apt to be officiously unpleasant. Some evidence of older, rear echelon men retaining the patriotic enthusiasms of the young, front line men, long after these last knew better.

The prisons might have been rough places, but not so rough that he was not allowed lefty books in his first prison and play writing in his second. Plays which were performed while he was still inside. There was also proper medical attention, with visits both to the hospital and to the dentist being recorded. Both off-site. There were also some very Švejk-like doctors, more intent on rooting out malingerers and lefties than on medical matters.

I mentioned the bureaucrats rolling on, events in the outside world notwithstanding, at reference 2. In which connection, on page 175, we are told of the officers of the old Imperial army supplying maps to the general staff of the new Revolutionary army. At about the time that Toller learns that revolutionary zeal is not enough: a Revolutionary army needs order and discipline just as the Imperial army did before it. A lesson which the Russians were learning at about the same time, and which they had to learn again at the start of the second war.

And, lastly, I have been reminded that Dachau, later infamous, was a small town near Munich. But big enough to have been home to a first war munitions factory and big enough for the Schloss Dachau of reference 7, postcarded above. Oddly, the Street View vans do not seem to have visited, although they have certainly been to Munich.

References

Reference 1: I was a German – Ernst Toller – 1934.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2011/11/half-day-in-good-ole-epsom.html. 

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/10/heritage-day-two.html. 

Reference 4: La Neige était Sale - Simenon - 1948.

Reference 5 : https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/11/dr-z-part-3-clerks.html. 

Reference 6: The Good Soldier Švejk -  Jaroslav Hašek – 1923.

Reference 7: https://www.schlossdachau.com/.