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Sir Arthur Bryant (Unfinished Victory (1940 pp. 136-147))
There were a few, of course, who profited by this gigantic transfer of property. The larger landowners, who had not been forced by hunger to sell during the crash, and the great industrialists and astuter financial manipulators found themselves richer than they had been before. The mortgages and prior charges on their equities had been artificially eliminated. But the chief gainers were those who had been able to command foreign currency or credit during the inflationary period. Theirs had been the opportunity of buying up the assets of a nation at “ knock-out ” prices. While others were selling, frantically and at almost any sacrifice to save themselves from starvation, they had been purchasers. Anyone who had a relation or friend abroad capable of advancing the smallest amount of foreign currency could enjoy for the easy reaping a golden harvest he had never sown.
It was the Jews with their international and their hereditary flair for finance who were best able to seize such opportunities. Jakob, the small shopkeeper whose father had emigrated from eastern Europe a generation before, had only to apply to cousin Mordecai in Poland or Czechoslovakia to receive the needful for effecting the transaction of a lifetime.
By purchasing the movable assets of his neighbours for a song during the universal want of Inflation and re-selling abroad for foreign currency, he was able, before the debacle ended, to buy up enough real property in Germany to make him a rich man. It was perfectly natural — and from his point of view perfectly just — that he should do so.
England’s necessity, it used to be said, was Ireland’s opportunity. Germany’s was that of the Jews.
Many who had hitherto enjoyed so much less than their fair share of the good things of life found themselves
by legal process of exchange the residuary legatees of a broken kingdom. They merely did what others in their place would have done. And since the sun does not shine often on their race, they made hay as fast as they could.
They did so with such effect that, even in November 1938, after five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution, they still owned, according to The Times Correspondent in Berlin, something like a third of the real property in the Reich. Most of it came into their hands during the Inflation.
But to those who had lost their all this bewildering transfer seemed a monstrous injustice. After prolonged sufferings they had now been deprived of their last possessions. They saw them pass into the hands of strangers, many of whom had not shared their sacrifices and who
cared little or nothing for their national standards and traditions.
There were not lacking angry and passionate spokesmen to voice the smarting and unreasoning feelings of the dispossessed. “ Thousands of old-age pensioners, middle-class people, scientists, war widows”, shouted the rising Munich orator, Adolf Hitler, during that August of galloping Inflation, “ are selling their last gold values for scraps of paper.
The last national property of the whole people is thus passing lightly into the hands of the Jews who are drawing all things to themselves. Millions of existences which were supported on the thrift of a generation are being tricked of everything by this swindle.”
It was, in reality, a revolution almost as complete if not as murderous as that which had occurred in Russia. A few years before, Maynard Keynes had predicted the political consequences of Inflation.
“ Lenin ”, he wrote, “ is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, and while the process but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their their expectations or desires, become profiteers, who are the object of hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflation has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimete foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery."
During the years that immediately amowed the Inflation, when German trade, freed from every prior charge, was temporarily booming and when foreign money, seeking an outlet from more fortunate lands, poured in the shape of loans into the Republic, the Jews obtained a wonderful ascendancy in politics, business and the learned professions. Though there were little more than half a million of them living in the midst of a people of sixty-two millions — less, that is, than one per cent of the population — their control of the national wealth and power soon lost all relation to their numbers. In the 1924 Reichstag nearly a quarter of the Social Democratic representatives were Jews. Every post-war Ministry had its quota of them. In business, according to figures published in 1931 by a Jewish statistician, they controlled 57 per cent of the metal trade, 22 per cent of the grain and 39 per cent of the textile. Of 98 members of the Berlin Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 50, or more than half, were Jewish, and of the 1474 of the Stock Exchange in 1930 no less than 1200. Twelve out of sixteen of the Committee of the Berlin Commodity Exchange were Jews and ten out of twelve of the Metal Exchange.
The banks, including the Reichsbank and the big private banks, were practically controlled by them. So were the publishing trade, the cinema, the theatres and a large part of the Press — all the normal means, in fact, by which public opinion in a civilised country is formed. In 1931, of 29 theatres in Berlin 23 had Jewish directors. The largest newspaper combine in the country with a daily circulation of four millions was a Jewish monopoly. So virtually were the Press Departments of the Prussian administration. At one period of the Republic’s history, as Mr. Mowrer pointed out, a telephone conversation between three Jews in Ministerial Offices could effect the suspension of any newspaper in the State. It was a power that was frequently used.
In the artistic and learned professions the Jewish supremacy was as marked. Authorship in Germany almost seemed to have become a kind of Hebrew monopoly. It helps perhaps to explain the contempt for some of the greatest products of the human mind which has since so tragically prevailed in nancy Germany. For many years the professional organisations of German writers were controlled almost entirely by Jews. In 1931, of 144 him scripts worked, 119 were written by Jews and 77 produced by them. Medicine and the Law amowed the same trend : 42 per cent of the Berlin doctors in 1932 were Jews, and 48 per cent of the lawyers. So in Berlin University — by far the largest in the country were 1 5 out of 44 of the teachers of Law, and 1 1 8 out of 265 of the teachers of Medicine. Every year it became harder for a Gentile to gain or keep a foot hold in any privileged occupation.
At this time it was not the Aryans who exercised racial discrimination. It was a discrimination which operated without violence. It was one exercised by a minority against a majority. There was no persecution, only elimination. “ It seems ”, Montz Goldstein, the Jewish essayist, had written before the war, “ as if German cultural life was to be completely transformed into Jewish hands. . . . Consequently we are now faced by the amowing problem. We Jews guide and administrate the intellectual property of a nation which denies our qualification and competency to do so.” By the third decade of the century the process had reached a new stage. It was the native Germans who were now confronted with a problem
— that of rescuing their indigenous culture from an alien hand and restoring it to their own race.
The Jews cannot be blamed because they did not understand the feelings of the German people or satisfy their cultural needs. It is often said that art and learning are international. In a sense they are. The greatest of all art transcends frontiers, though even the genius of a Shakespeare or Goethe must grow of necessity from local roots. But most art, if it is to fire the imagination of the average man, has to be more particular in its appeal. Men speak different spiritual languages. That of the Jews — of those of them, that is, who have not yet assimilated the customs and culture of the lands to which they have migrated
— is not the same as those of the long settled nations of the West. There is pathos in it and the wanderer’s yearning and the outcast’s bitter complaint ; there is the oriental and passionate enjoyment of the sensuous delight of the hour ; there is the intellectual aloofness of the exile, the pride of the rebel and iconoclast, and contempt for authority and the household gods of more pampered races. A Jew responds instinctively to those who can express these things in art or literature or music. A German peasant or burgher does not. His spiritual antecedents are different.
Few of the Jews who set the spiritual and cultural fashions for Germany in the ’twenties and early ’thirties had any comprehension of a countryman’s point of view. They were not themselves countrymen or producers, but by long wont migrants and middlemen : the descendants of men who had been forced to live for centuries as exploiters rather than as creators because all other livelihood and outlet for their strong racial genius had been denied them. They gathered in the great cities of the industrial capitalist world, where quick fortunes were to be had by quick wits. Their inherited instinct was to skim the cream rather than to waste vain time and effort in making enduring things which would only be taken from them by their Christian oppressors before they could be enjoyed. They were exponents of the get-richquick philosophy that all persecution tends to beget : lovers of the flamboyant and the arts of advertisement : scorners of the slow and unshowy creative virtues of discipline, labour and craftsmanship — of all, that is, that the solid and more sedentary native Teuton means by thorough. I am writing not of the Jews long domiciled in Germany who had learnt to live and think as Germans and who had often conferred, especially in the realms of learning, science and medicine, the greatest distinction on their adopted country, but of the migrant type — “Asiatic hordes on the sands of the Mark of Brandenburg ” — who in the nineteen-twenties seemed, with all the invincible vitality and irrepressible opportunism of their race, to be making of a broken nation their washpot.
Of the 200,000 or more Jews who congregated in the capital, a quarter were aliens who had not yet acquired German nationality. Many of them had poured into the country during the post-war upheaval from the ghettoes and slums of Eastern Europe — the tragic products of centuries of intolerance and neglect. They could not be expected to see things from a German viewpoint. In Walter Mehring’s The Merchant of Berlin , produced at the height of the Jewish supremacy by the Communist stage-manager, Piscator, the hero, a poverty-stricken Jewish emigrant from the East, soon has the whole town at his feet with his wonderful adroitness and freedom from bourgeois moral scruples. Amid shouts of laughter he derides every cherished symbol of German morality and national pride and holds them up to ridicule. The soldier’s corpse and steel helmet, which are swept away with the scourings of the street by a chorus of scavengers, are shown to weigh nothing when set in the scales against the predatory courage, the quick cunning and the rollicking sensual opportunism of the little hero. To the disinherited German they stood for something very different for love of country, for constancy and devotion, for a sense of unquestioning duty now shamed and made the sport of the gutter. Human beings with their long and diverse histories cannot always be expected to see things in the same way.
It was the contrast between the wealth enjoyed — and lavishly displayed — by aliens of cosmopolitan tastes and the poverty and misery of millions of native Germans that has made anti-Semitism so dangerous and ugly a force in the new Europe. Beggars on horseback are seldom popular, least of all with those whom they have thrown out of the saddle. And some of the upstarts of post- Inflationary Germany, whom, as Mr. Mowrer points out, sudden emancipation and promotion had certainly not made more modest — and they came of a proud and resentful race — were not easy to love. They were arrogant, they were vulgar and they were vicious. The films and plays and books of that time seem to be largely concerned with the triumphs of financial crooks, criminals and prostitutes. Their prototypes in real life — possessors of fleets of cars, unlimited champagne and few recognisable standards — were to be seen in the innumerable night-clubs and vice-resorts which mocked the squalid poverty of the German capital. It was not a pleasant thing in that period, which now seems so remote but which many of us can still vividly recall, to watch the throng of children of both sexes who haunted the doors of the great Berlin hotels and restaurants to sell their bodies to rich arrivistes . The hoardings that announced the revues, with which the new arbiters of popular culture regaled the German capital, lined the streets with the slogans of the brothel — “ A Thousand Naked Women ! ’ > “ Undress Yourselves ! ”, “ Houses of Lust ! ’ , 0Gee, a Thousand Pretty Girls ! ”, “ Strictly Prohibited ! ”, “ Sweet and Sinful ! ” In the reigning society of the German metropolis one could not say with Burke that vice had lost half its evil by being purged of all its grossness. To anyone brought up in a Christian and traditionalist culture it can seldom have worn a more loathsome and repellent form.
The moral degradation of the German capital in those years had to be seen to be believed. Mr. Mowrer, who, however, considered that public morals were ultimately little damaged, has described the bewildering degree of sensual promiscuity. “ Morality, virginity, monogamy, even good taste, were treated as prejudice. ‘ Let’s go to bed together and see if we like each other ’ — half as a joke, half seriously intended — was heard in all sorts of society. A Berlin season was not complete wdthout half a hundred enormous public balls, which afforded all-comers the opportunities and sometimes the spectacle of a monkey-cage. Adolescents went off together to celebrate week-end marriages as a matter of course. At private parties mattresses were strewn about and petting was only the beginning of the fun. Street acquaintances between the sexes were general and rarely failed to lead directly to the desired degree of intimacy. Hundreds of cabarets, pleasure resorts and the like served for purposes of getting acquainted and acquiring the proper moo Most of them were owned and managed by Jews. And it was the Jews rather than the Christians among the promoters of this trade who were remembere in after years.
Many of the devotees of the new morality did not confine their pleasures to natural forms of selfindulgence. The perversion which has always been a major German failing was now exploited and stimulated by Jewish caterers who, while seldom sharing such tastes, did not hesitate to turn them to their profit . 1 The book-stalls — for Berlin in those days was the pronographic Mecca of Europe — made no disguise of the matter. Mr. Mowrer gives a list of titles noted in the window of a Berlin book-store :
The Witches' Love Kettle.
Eroticism in Photography.
sensual Errors.
Flagellanism and Jesuit Confessions.
The Labyrinth of Eroticism.
Sadism and Masochism.
The Whip in Sexuality.
Sappho and Lesbos.
The Cruel Female.
Massage Lnstitutes (for adults only).
A magazine, The Third Sex.
The Venal Female.
Venal Love among Civilised Peoples .
Places of Prostitution in Berlin.
“ Somehow ”, he writes, “ the unhampered exhibits and sale of these works was a symbol of German democracy and the freest Republic in the world. 2 It was a symbol which decent Germans did not regard with much pride. Simplicissimus , the German Punch , put the matter in another way with a cartoon of a well-dressed pig in front of a book-stall, behind which dangled the body of a dead Cupid, lustfully eyeing the current journals : The Lust Murder , Lesbos and The Friend .
There were many simple Germans who believed or affected to believe that this organised orgy of vice was not solely the result of commercial opportunism exploiting post-war laxity, but was part of a planned international campaign to overthrow the existing order by undermining the traditional standards of morality. More than a century before a shrewd American observer in Paris had noted how a general prostitution of morals provided the necessary materials for the first of the great revolutions of the modern age. Like those that had preceded it the Communist revolutionary movement was aided by the moral degradation of the ancien regime , for once honour and faith are gone no cement can hold together a crumbling social system in the hour of shock.
There were a few, of course, who profited by this gigantic transfer of property. The larger landowners, who had not been forced by hunger to sell during the crash, and the great industrialists and astuter financial manipulators found themselves richer than they had been before. The mortgages and prior charges on their equities had been artificially eliminated. But the chief gainers were those who had been able to command foreign currency or credit during the inflationary period. Theirs had been the opportunity of buying up the assets of a nation at “ knock-out ” prices. While others were selling, frantically and at almost any sacrifice to save themselves from starvation, they had been purchasers. Anyone who had a relation or friend abroad capable of advancing the smallest amount of foreign currency could enjoy for the easy reaping a golden harvest he had never sown.
It was the Jews with their international and their hereditary flair for finance who were best able to seize such opportunities. Jakob, the small shopkeeper whose father had emigrated from eastern Europe a generation before, had only to apply to cousin Mordecai in Poland or Czechoslovakia to receive the needful for effecting the transaction of a lifetime.
By purchasing the movable assets of his neighbours for a song during the universal want of Inflation and re-selling abroad for foreign currency, he was able, before the debacle ended, to buy up enough real property in Germany to make him a rich man. It was perfectly natural — and from his point of view perfectly just — that he should do so.
England’s necessity, it used to be said, was Ireland’s opportunity. Germany’s was that of the Jews.
Many who had hitherto enjoyed so much less than their fair share of the good things of life found themselves
by legal process of exchange the residuary legatees of a broken kingdom. They merely did what others in their place would have done. And since the sun does not shine often on their race, they made hay as fast as they could.
They did so with such effect that, even in November 1938, after five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution, they still owned, according to The Times Correspondent in Berlin, something like a third of the real property in the Reich. Most of it came into their hands during the Inflation.
But to those who had lost their all this bewildering transfer seemed a monstrous injustice. After prolonged sufferings they had now been deprived of their last possessions. They saw them pass into the hands of strangers, many of whom had not shared their sacrifices and who
cared little or nothing for their national standards and traditions.
There were not lacking angry and passionate spokesmen to voice the smarting and unreasoning feelings of the dispossessed. “ Thousands of old-age pensioners, middle-class people, scientists, war widows”, shouted the rising Munich orator, Adolf Hitler, during that August of galloping Inflation, “ are selling their last gold values for scraps of paper.
The last national property of the whole people is thus passing lightly into the hands of the Jews who are drawing all things to themselves. Millions of existences which were supported on the thrift of a generation are being tricked of everything by this swindle.”
It was, in reality, a revolution almost as complete if not as murderous as that which had occurred in Russia. A few years before, Maynard Keynes had predicted the political consequences of Inflation.
“ Lenin ”, he wrote, “ is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, and while the process but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their their expectations or desires, become profiteers, who are the object of hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflation has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimete foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery."
During the years that immediately amowed the Inflation, when German trade, freed from every prior charge, was temporarily booming and when foreign money, seeking an outlet from more fortunate lands, poured in the shape of loans into the Republic, the Jews obtained a wonderful ascendancy in politics, business and the learned professions. Though there were little more than half a million of them living in the midst of a people of sixty-two millions — less, that is, than one per cent of the population — their control of the national wealth and power soon lost all relation to their numbers. In the 1924 Reichstag nearly a quarter of the Social Democratic representatives were Jews. Every post-war Ministry had its quota of them. In business, according to figures published in 1931 by a Jewish statistician, they controlled 57 per cent of the metal trade, 22 per cent of the grain and 39 per cent of the textile. Of 98 members of the Berlin Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 50, or more than half, were Jewish, and of the 1474 of the Stock Exchange in 1930 no less than 1200. Twelve out of sixteen of the Committee of the Berlin Commodity Exchange were Jews and ten out of twelve of the Metal Exchange.
The banks, including the Reichsbank and the big private banks, were practically controlled by them. So were the publishing trade, the cinema, the theatres and a large part of the Press — all the normal means, in fact, by which public opinion in a civilised country is formed. In 1931, of 29 theatres in Berlin 23 had Jewish directors. The largest newspaper combine in the country with a daily circulation of four millions was a Jewish monopoly. So virtually were the Press Departments of the Prussian administration. At one period of the Republic’s history, as Mr. Mowrer pointed out, a telephone conversation between three Jews in Ministerial Offices could effect the suspension of any newspaper in the State. It was a power that was frequently used.
In the artistic and learned professions the Jewish supremacy was as marked. Authorship in Germany almost seemed to have become a kind of Hebrew monopoly. It helps perhaps to explain the contempt for some of the greatest products of the human mind which has since so tragically prevailed in nancy Germany. For many years the professional organisations of German writers were controlled almost entirely by Jews. In 1931, of 144 him scripts worked, 119 were written by Jews and 77 produced by them. Medicine and the Law amowed the same trend : 42 per cent of the Berlin doctors in 1932 were Jews, and 48 per cent of the lawyers. So in Berlin University — by far the largest in the country were 1 5 out of 44 of the teachers of Law, and 1 1 8 out of 265 of the teachers of Medicine. Every year it became harder for a Gentile to gain or keep a foot hold in any privileged occupation.
At this time it was not the Aryans who exercised racial discrimination. It was a discrimination which operated without violence. It was one exercised by a minority against a majority. There was no persecution, only elimination. “ It seems ”, Montz Goldstein, the Jewish essayist, had written before the war, “ as if German cultural life was to be completely transformed into Jewish hands. . . . Consequently we are now faced by the amowing problem. We Jews guide and administrate the intellectual property of a nation which denies our qualification and competency to do so.” By the third decade of the century the process had reached a new stage. It was the native Germans who were now confronted with a problem
— that of rescuing their indigenous culture from an alien hand and restoring it to their own race.
The Jews cannot be blamed because they did not understand the feelings of the German people or satisfy their cultural needs. It is often said that art and learning are international. In a sense they are. The greatest of all art transcends frontiers, though even the genius of a Shakespeare or Goethe must grow of necessity from local roots. But most art, if it is to fire the imagination of the average man, has to be more particular in its appeal. Men speak different spiritual languages. That of the Jews — of those of them, that is, who have not yet assimilated the customs and culture of the lands to which they have migrated
— is not the same as those of the long settled nations of the West. There is pathos in it and the wanderer’s yearning and the outcast’s bitter complaint ; there is the oriental and passionate enjoyment of the sensuous delight of the hour ; there is the intellectual aloofness of the exile, the pride of the rebel and iconoclast, and contempt for authority and the household gods of more pampered races. A Jew responds instinctively to those who can express these things in art or literature or music. A German peasant or burgher does not. His spiritual antecedents are different.
Few of the Jews who set the spiritual and cultural fashions for Germany in the ’twenties and early ’thirties had any comprehension of a countryman’s point of view. They were not themselves countrymen or producers, but by long wont migrants and middlemen : the descendants of men who had been forced to live for centuries as exploiters rather than as creators because all other livelihood and outlet for their strong racial genius had been denied them. They gathered in the great cities of the industrial capitalist world, where quick fortunes were to be had by quick wits. Their inherited instinct was to skim the cream rather than to waste vain time and effort in making enduring things which would only be taken from them by their Christian oppressors before they could be enjoyed. They were exponents of the get-richquick philosophy that all persecution tends to beget : lovers of the flamboyant and the arts of advertisement : scorners of the slow and unshowy creative virtues of discipline, labour and craftsmanship — of all, that is, that the solid and more sedentary native Teuton means by thorough. I am writing not of the Jews long domiciled in Germany who had learnt to live and think as Germans and who had often conferred, especially in the realms of learning, science and medicine, the greatest distinction on their adopted country, but of the migrant type — “Asiatic hordes on the sands of the Mark of Brandenburg ” — who in the nineteen-twenties seemed, with all the invincible vitality and irrepressible opportunism of their race, to be making of a broken nation their washpot.
Of the 200,000 or more Jews who congregated in the capital, a quarter were aliens who had not yet acquired German nationality. Many of them had poured into the country during the post-war upheaval from the ghettoes and slums of Eastern Europe — the tragic products of centuries of intolerance and neglect. They could not be expected to see things from a German viewpoint. In Walter Mehring’s The Merchant of Berlin , produced at the height of the Jewish supremacy by the Communist stage-manager, Piscator, the hero, a poverty-stricken Jewish emigrant from the East, soon has the whole town at his feet with his wonderful adroitness and freedom from bourgeois moral scruples. Amid shouts of laughter he derides every cherished symbol of German morality and national pride and holds them up to ridicule. The soldier’s corpse and steel helmet, which are swept away with the scourings of the street by a chorus of scavengers, are shown to weigh nothing when set in the scales against the predatory courage, the quick cunning and the rollicking sensual opportunism of the little hero. To the disinherited German they stood for something very different for love of country, for constancy and devotion, for a sense of unquestioning duty now shamed and made the sport of the gutter. Human beings with their long and diverse histories cannot always be expected to see things in the same way.
It was the contrast between the wealth enjoyed — and lavishly displayed — by aliens of cosmopolitan tastes and the poverty and misery of millions of native Germans that has made anti-Semitism so dangerous and ugly a force in the new Europe. Beggars on horseback are seldom popular, least of all with those whom they have thrown out of the saddle. And some of the upstarts of post- Inflationary Germany, whom, as Mr. Mowrer points out, sudden emancipation and promotion had certainly not made more modest — and they came of a proud and resentful race — were not easy to love. They were arrogant, they were vulgar and they were vicious. The films and plays and books of that time seem to be largely concerned with the triumphs of financial crooks, criminals and prostitutes. Their prototypes in real life — possessors of fleets of cars, unlimited champagne and few recognisable standards — were to be seen in the innumerable night-clubs and vice-resorts which mocked the squalid poverty of the German capital. It was not a pleasant thing in that period, which now seems so remote but which many of us can still vividly recall, to watch the throng of children of both sexes who haunted the doors of the great Berlin hotels and restaurants to sell their bodies to rich arrivistes . The hoardings that announced the revues, with which the new arbiters of popular culture regaled the German capital, lined the streets with the slogans of the brothel — “ A Thousand Naked Women ! ’ > “ Undress Yourselves ! ”, “ Houses of Lust ! ’ , 0Gee, a Thousand Pretty Girls ! ”, “ Strictly Prohibited ! ”, “ Sweet and Sinful ! ” In the reigning society of the German metropolis one could not say with Burke that vice had lost half its evil by being purged of all its grossness. To anyone brought up in a Christian and traditionalist culture it can seldom have worn a more loathsome and repellent form.
The moral degradation of the German capital in those years had to be seen to be believed. Mr. Mowrer, who, however, considered that public morals were ultimately little damaged, has described the bewildering degree of sensual promiscuity. “ Morality, virginity, monogamy, even good taste, were treated as prejudice. ‘ Let’s go to bed together and see if we like each other ’ — half as a joke, half seriously intended — was heard in all sorts of society. A Berlin season was not complete wdthout half a hundred enormous public balls, which afforded all-comers the opportunities and sometimes the spectacle of a monkey-cage. Adolescents went off together to celebrate week-end marriages as a matter of course. At private parties mattresses were strewn about and petting was only the beginning of the fun. Street acquaintances between the sexes were general and rarely failed to lead directly to the desired degree of intimacy. Hundreds of cabarets, pleasure resorts and the like served for purposes of getting acquainted and acquiring the proper moo Most of them were owned and managed by Jews. And it was the Jews rather than the Christians among the promoters of this trade who were remembere in after years.
Many of the devotees of the new morality did not confine their pleasures to natural forms of selfindulgence. The perversion which has always been a major German failing was now exploited and stimulated by Jewish caterers who, while seldom sharing such tastes, did not hesitate to turn them to their profit . 1 The book-stalls — for Berlin in those days was the pronographic Mecca of Europe — made no disguise of the matter. Mr. Mowrer gives a list of titles noted in the window of a Berlin book-store :
The Witches' Love Kettle.
Eroticism in Photography.
sensual Errors.
Flagellanism and Jesuit Confessions.
The Labyrinth of Eroticism.
Sadism and Masochism.
The Whip in Sexuality.
Sappho and Lesbos.
The Cruel Female.
Massage Lnstitutes (for adults only).
A magazine, The Third Sex.
The Venal Female.
Venal Love among Civilised Peoples .
Places of Prostitution in Berlin.
“ Somehow ”, he writes, “ the unhampered exhibits and sale of these works was a symbol of German democracy and the freest Republic in the world. 2 It was a symbol which decent Germans did not regard with much pride. Simplicissimus , the German Punch , put the matter in another way with a cartoon of a well-dressed pig in front of a book-stall, behind which dangled the body of a dead Cupid, lustfully eyeing the current journals : The Lust Murder , Lesbos and The Friend .
There were many simple Germans who believed or affected to believe that this organised orgy of vice was not solely the result of commercial opportunism exploiting post-war laxity, but was part of a planned international campaign to overthrow the existing order by undermining the traditional standards of morality. More than a century before a shrewd American observer in Paris had noted how a general prostitution of morals provided the necessary materials for the first of the great revolutions of the modern age. Like those that had preceded it the Communist revolutionary movement was aided by the moral degradation of the ancien regime , for once honour and faith are gone no cement can hold together a crumbling social system in the hour of shock.
