If the War Goes On . . .. Герман Гессе

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СКАЧАТЬ thousands or millions with tender gifts and remind them of the feast of love. That is just how we treat our children. Once a year we invite them to rejoice in the legend of divine love; for one evening, under the Christmas tree, we are touchingly attentive to them, while all the rest of the time we bring them up to shoulder the very fate that we all curse.

      When a prisoner of war throws the pretty Christmas package I have sent him in my face and tramples the sentimental evergreen, he is perfectly right. And when our children are not quite able to believe in our emotion, our beatitude in the presence of the Christ child, when they regard us as a wee bit hypocritical or ridiculous, they too are perfectly right. Except for a few sincerely religious people, our Christmas has long been sheer sentimentality. Or worse: a basis for advertising campaigns, a field for dishonest enterprise, for the manufacture of kitsch.

      Why? Because for all of us, Christmas, the feast of childlike love, has long ceased to be the expression of a genuine feeling. It has become the exact opposite, a substitute for feeling, a cheap imitation. Once a year we behave as though we attached great importance to noble sentiments, as though it rejoiced us to spend money on them. Actually, our passing emotion at the real beauty of such feelings may be very great; the greater and more genuine it is, the greater the sentimentality. Sentimentality is our typical attitude toward Christmas and the few other outward occasions on which vestiges of the Christian order still enter into our lives. Our feeling on such occasions is this: ‘This idea of love is a great thing!’ How true that only love can redeem us! And what a pity that our circumstances allow us the luxury of this noble sentiment only once a year, that our business and other important concerns keep us away from it all the rest of the time! Such feeling has all the earmarks of sentimentality. Because it is sentimentality to comfort ourselves with feelings that we do not take seriously enough to make sacrifices for, to convert into actions.

      When the priests and the pious complain that faith has vanished from the world and happiness with it, they are right. Our attitude toward all true human values is more barbarous and insensitive than anything the world has seen for centuries. This is evident in our attitude toward religion, in our attitude toward art, and in our art itself. For the widespread opinion that modern Europe has risen to unprecedented heights in art, or in ‘culture’ for that matter, is the invention of our culture-philistines.

      The ‘cultivated’ man of today takes a characteristic attitude toward the teachings of Jesus: all year long he neither gives them a thought nor lives by them, but on Christmas Eve he gives way to a vague, melancholy childhood memory and wallows in cheap, tame, pious sentiments, just as once or twice a year, while listening to the St Matthew Passion for instance, he makes his bow to this long-forgotten but still troubling and secretly powerful world.

      Everyone admits as much, everyone knows it, and everyone also knows that it’s very sad. We are told that political and economic developments are to blame, or the state, or militarism, and so on. Because something must be to blame. No nation ‘wanted the war,’ just as no nation wanted the fourteen-hour day, the housing shortage, or the high rate of infant mortality.

      Before we celebrate another Christmas, before we try once again to appease our one eternal and truly important yearning with mass-produced imitation sentiment, let us face up to our wretched situation. No idea or principle is to blame for all our wretchedness, for the nullity, the coarseness, the barrenness of our lives, for war and hunger and everything else that is evil and dismal; we ourselves are to blame. And it is only through ourselves, through our insight and our will, that a change can come about.

      It makes no difference whether we go back to the teachings of Jesus and make them our own again, or whether we seek new forms. Where they strike the eternal core of humanity, the teachings of Jesus and of Lao-tzu, of the Vedas and of Goethe are the same. There is only one doctrine. There is only one religion. There is only one happiness. There are a thousand forms, a thousand heralds, but only one call, one voice. The voice of God does not come from Mount Sinai, it does not come from the Bible. The essence of love, beauty, and holiness does not reside in Christianity or in antiquity or in Goethe or Tolstoy – it resides in you, in you and me, in each one of us. This is the one eternal and forever identical doctrine, our one eternal truth. It is the doctrine of the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ that we bear within ourselves.

      Light the Christmas candles for your children! Let them sing carols! But don’t delude yourselves, don’t content yourselves year after year with the shabby, pathetic, sentimental feeling you have when you celebrate your holidays! Demand more of yourselves! Love and joy and the mysterious thing we call ‘happiness’ are not over here or over there, they are only ‘within ourselves’.

      Shall There Be Peace?

       December 1917

      Only recently Wilson and Lloyd George proclaimed their unswerving will to fight on till final victory. In the Italian Chamber the Socialist Mergari was treated like a madman because he had spoken a few natural, human words. And today, with what wooden self-righteousness a Wolff dispatch denies the rumour of a new German peace proposal: ‘Germany and its allies have not the slightest reason for repeating their magnanimous offer of peace.’

      In other words, everything goes on as before, and if anywhere a peaceful blade of grass tries to pierce the ground, a military boot is quick to trample it.

      Yet at the same time we read that peace negotiations have begun in Brest-Litovsk, that Herr Kühlmann has opened the session with a reference to the significance of Christmas and has spoken, in the words of the Gospel, of peace on earth. If he means what he says, if he has even the faintest understanding of those tremendous words, peace is inevitable. Unfortunately, our experience of Bible quotations in the mouths of statesmen has not thus far been encouraging.

      For many days now the eyes of the world have been focused upon two places. In those two places, it is widely felt, the destinies of nations are coming to a head, the future beckoning, and disaster threatening. With bated breath the world is looking eastward, to the peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk. And at the same time it is watching the western front in dire anguish, for everyone feels, everyone knows that, short of a miracle, the most dreadful disaster that has ever befallen men is there impending: the bitterest, bloodiest, most ruthless and appalling battle of all time.

      Everyone knows it and everyone, with the exception of a few sanguine political orators and war profiteers, is trembling at the thought. Concerning the outcome of this mass slaughter, opinions and hopes vary. In both camps there is a minority who seriously believe in a decisive victory. But one thing that no one endowed with a vestige of good sense can believe is that the ideal, humanitarian aims, which figure so prominently in the speeches of all our statesmen, will be achieved. The bigger, the bloodier, the more destructive these final battles of the World War prove to be, the less will be accomplished for the future, the less hope there will be of appeasing hatreds and rivalries, or of doing away with the idea that political aims can be attained by the criminal instrumentality of war. If one camp should indeed achieve final victory (and this purpose is the one justification offered by the leaders in their incendiary speeches), then what we abhor as ‘militarism’ will have won out. If in their secret heart the partisans of war mean so much as a single word of what they have been saying about war aims, the absurdity, the utter futility of all their arguments staggers the imagination.

      Can a new massacre of inconceivable scope be justified by such a jumble of hopeless fallacies, of mutually contradictory hopes and plans? While all peoples with even the slightest experience of war and its suffering are awaiting the outcome of the Russian peace negotiations in prayer and expectation, while all of us are moved to love and gratitude for the Russians because they, first among nations, have attacked the war at its root and resolved to end it, while half the world is going hungry and useful human effort has been halved where it has not ceased altogether – at such a time, preparations are being made in France for what we shudder even to name, a mass СКАЧАТЬ