No Door

A Story of Time and the Wanderer

By Thomas Wolfe

. . . of wandering forever and the earth again . . . of seed-

time, bloom, and the mellow-dropping harvest. And of the big
•flowers, the rich flowers, the strange unknown flowers.
Where shall the weary rest? When shall the lonely of heart come home? What doors are open for the wan-
derer, and in what place, and in what land, and in what time?
Where? Where the weary of heart can abide forever, where the weary of wandering can find peace, where
the tumult, the fever, and the fret shall be forever stilled.
Who owns the earth? Did we want the earth that we should wander on it? Did we need the earth that we
were never still upon it? Whoever needs the earth shall have the earth: he shall be still upon it, he shall rest
within a little place, he shall dwell in one small room forever.
Did he feel the need of a thousand tongues that he sought thus through the moil and horror of ten thousand
furious streets? He shall need a tongue no longer, he shall need no tongue for silence and the earth: he shall
speak ^° word through the rooted lips, the sna\e's cold eye will peer for him through sockets of the brain, there
will be no cry out of the heart where wells the vine.
The dead tongue withers and the dead heart rots, blind mouths crawl tunnels through the buried flesh, but
the earth will endure forever; hair grows like April on the buried breast and from the sockets of the brain the
death-flowers grow and will not perish.
0 flower of love whose strong lips drink us downward into death, in all things far and fleeting, enchantress
of our twenty thousand days, the brain will madden and the heart be twisted, broken by her ki^^> ^^^ glory,
glory, glory, she remains: Immortal love, alone and aching in the wilderness, we cried to you: You were not ab-
sent from our loneliness.
Sometimes one o£ them invites you out to dinner:
I your host is a pleasant gentleman of forty-six, a little
bald, healthily plump, well-nourished-looking, and yet
OCTOBER: 1931
with nothing gross and sensual about him. Indeed he is
T is wonderful with what warm enthusiasm well-

I
a most aesthetic-looking millionaire, his features, al-
kept people who have never been alone in all their though large and generous, are full of sensitive intelli-
life can congratulate you on the joys of solitude. I gence, his manners are gentle, quietly subdued, his
know whereof I speak. I have been alone a great deal smile a little sad, touched faintly with a whimsy of
in my life—more than any one I know, and I also ironic humor, as of one who has passed through all the
knew, for one short period in my life, a few of these anguish, hope, and tortured fury youth can know, and
well-kept people. And their passionate longing for the now knows what to expect from life and whose "eye-
life of loneliness is astonishing. In the evening they are lids are a Httle weary," patiently resigned, and not too
driven out to their fine house in the country where bitter about it.
their wives and children eagerly await them; or to their Yet life has not dealt over-harshly with our host: the
magnificent apartments in the city where their lovely evidences of his interest in un-monied, precious things
wife or charming mistress is waiting for them with a is quietly, expensively, all around him. He lives in a
tender smile, a perfumed, anointed, and seductive body, pent-house apartment near the East River: the place is
and the embrace of love. And all of this is as a handful furnished with all the discrimination of a quiet but dis-
of cold dust and ashes, and a litde dross. tinguished taste, he has several of Jacob Epstein's heads

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what the magic secret is that has given his life such
power, authority, and ease, and made all the brutal
struggle, pain, and ugliness of Ufe, the fury, hunger,
and the wandering, seem so far away, and you think
he is going to tell you—to give this magic secret to you
—but he tells you nothing.
Then, for a moment this old unsearchable mystery
of time and the city returns to overwhelm your spirit
with the horrible sensations of defeat and drowning.
You sec this man, his mistress, and all the other city
people you have known in shapes of deathless bright-
ness, and yet their life and time are stranger to you
than a dream, and you think that you are doomed
to walk among them always as a phantom who can
never grasp their life or make their time your own.
and figures, including one of himself which the sculp- It seems to you now that you are living in a world of
tor made "two years ago when I was over there," and creatures who have learned to live without weariness
he also has a choice collection of rare books and first or agony of the soul, in a life which you can never
editions, and after admiring these treasures apprecia- touch, approach or apprehend; a strange city-race who
tively, you all step out upon the roof for a moment to have never lived in a dimension of time that is like
admire the A^ew you get there of the river. your own, and that can be measured in minutes, hours,
Evening is coming fast, and the tall frosted glasses days, and years, but in dimensions of fathomless and
in your hands make a thin but pleasant tinkUng, and immemorable sensation; who can be remembered only
the great city is blazing there in your vision in its at some moment in their lives nine thousand enthusi-
terrific frontal sweep and curtain of star-flung towers, asms back, twenty thousand nights of drunkenness ago,
now sown with the diamond pollen of a million lights, eight hundred parties, four million cruelties, nine thou-
and the sun has set behind them, and the old red light sand treacheries or fidelities, two hundred love affairs
of fading day is painted without violence or heat upon gone by—and whose lives therefore take on a fabu-
the river—and you see the boats, the tugs, the barges lous and horrible age of sensation, that has never
passing, and the winglike swoop of bridges with ex- known youth or remembered innocence and that in-
duces in you the sensation of drowning in a sea of
ultant joy—and night has come, and there are ships
horror, a sea of blind, dateless, and immemorable time.
there—there are ships—and a wild intolerable longing
There is no door.
in you that you cannot utter.
When you go back into the room again, you feel very But now your host, with his faintly bitter and ironic-
far away from Brooklyn, where you live, and every- smile, has poured himself out another good stiff drink
thing you felt about the city as a child, before you ever of honest rye into a tall thin glass that has some ice in
saw or knew it, now seems not only possible, but about it, and smacked his lips around it with an air of rumi-
to happen. nation, and, after two or three reflective swallows, be-
The great vision of the city is living in your heart in gins to get a trifle sorrowful about the Hfe harsh des-
all its enchanted colors just as it did when you were tiny has picked out for him.
twelve years old and thought about it. You think that While his mistress sits prettily upon the fat edge of
same glorious happiness of fortune, fame, and triumph an upholstered chair, stroking her cool and delicate fin-
will be yours at any minute, that you are about to gers gently over his knit brows, and while his good
take your place among great men and lovely women in man Ponsonby or Kato is quietly "laying out his
a life more fortunate and happy than any you have things" for dinner, he stares gloomily ahead, and with
ever known—that it is all here, somehow, waiting for a bitter smile congratulates you on the blessed luck that
you and only an inch away if you will touch it, only a has permitted you to live alone in the Armenian sec-
word away if you will speak it, only a wall, a door, tion of South Brooklyn.
a stride from you if you only knew the place where Well, you say, living alone in South Brooklyn has
you may enter. its drawbacks. The place you Uve in is shaped just like
And somehow the old wild wordless hope awakes a puUman car, except that it is not so long and has
again that you will find it—the door that you can enter only one window at each end. There are bars over the
—that this man is going to tell you. The very air you front window that your landlady has put there to keep
breathe now is filled with the thrilling menace of some the thugs in that sweet neighborhood from breaking
impossible good fortune. Again you want to ask him in; in winter the place is cold and dark, and sweats

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 NO DOOR 9

with clammy water, in summer you do all the sweating

yourself, but you do plenty of it, quite enough for any
one; the place gets hot as hell.
Moreover—and here you really begin to warm up to
your work—when you get up in the morning the sweet
aroma of the old Gowanus Canal gets into your nos-
trils, into your mouth, into your lungs, into everything
you do, or think, or say! It is, you say, one huge gi-
gantic Stink, a symphonic Smell, a vast organ-note of
stupefying odor, cunningly contrived, compacted, and
composted of eighty-seven separate several putrefac-
tions; and with a rich and mounting enthusiasm, you
name them all for him. There is in it, you say, the smell
of melted glue and of burned rubber. It has in it the
fragrance of deceased, decaying cats, the odor of rotten
cabbage, prehistoric eggs, and old tomatoes; the smell bing his hand quietly into the horse's muzzle, and talk-
of burning rags and putrefying offal; mixed with the ing softly to it all the time.
fragrance of a boncyard horse, now dead, the hide of a Then you remember how a tree that leaned over into
skunk, and the noisome stenches of a stagnant sewer; the narrow little alley where you lived had come to life
it has as well the that year, and how you watched it day by day as it
But at this moment your host throws his head back came into its moment's glory of young magic green.
and, with a look of rapture on his face, draws in upon And you remember a raw, rusty street along the water-
the air the long full respiration of ecstatic satisfaction, front, with its naked and brutal life, its agglomeration
as if, in this great panoply of smells, he really had of shacks, tenements, and slums and huge grimy piers,
found the breath of Ufe itself, and then cries: its unspeakable ugliness and beauty, and you remem-
"Wonderful! Wonderful! Oh, simply swelll Marvel- bered how you came along this street one day at sun-
lous!" he cries and then throws back his head again, set, and saw all of the colors of the sun and harbor,
with a shout of exultant laughter. flashing, blazing, shifting in swarming motes, in an
"Oh, John!" his lady says at this point with a iridescent web of light and color for an instant on the
troubled look upon her lovely face, "I don't think blazing side of a proud white ship.
you'd like a place like that at all. It sounds simply And you start to tell your host what it was like and
dreadful! I don't like to hear of it," she says, with how the evening looked and felt—of the thrilUng smell
a pretty little shudder of distaste. "I think it's sim- and savor of the huge deserted pier, of the fading light
ply terrible that they let people live in places like upon old rusty brick of shambling houses, and of the
that!" blazing beauty of that swarming web of light and color
"Oh!" he says, "it's wonderful! The power, the rich- on the ship's great prow, but when you start to tell
ness, and the beauty of it all!" he cries. about it, you cannot, nor ever recapture the feeling of
Well, you agree, it's wonderful enough. And it's got mystery, exultancy, and wild sorrow that you felt then.
power and richness—sure enough! As to the beaut)'— Yes, there has been beauty enough—enough to burst
that's a different matter. You are not so sure of that— the heart, madden the brain, and tear the sinews of your
but even as you say this you remember many things. life asunder—^but what is there to say? You remember
You remember a powerful big horse, slow-footed, all these things, and then ten thousand others, but when
shaggy in the hoof, with big dappled spots of iron gray you start to tell the man about them, you cannot.
upon it that stood one brutal day in August by the Instead you just tell him about the place you live in:
curb. Its driver had unhitched it from the wagon and of how dark and hot it is in summer, how clammy
it stood there with its great patient head bent down cold in winter, and of how hard it is to get anything
in an infinite and quiet sorrow, and a little boy with good to eat. You tell him about your landlady who is
black eyes and a dark face was standing by it holding a hard-bitten ex-reporter. You tell him what a good
some sugar in his hand, and its driver, a man who had and liberal-hearted woman she is; how rough and
the tough seamed face of the city, stepped in on the horse ready, full of life and energy, how she likes drinking
with a bucket full of water which he threw against the and the fellowship of drinking men, and knows all the
horse's side. For a second, the great flanks shuddered rough and seamy side of life which a newspaper re-
gratefully and began to smoke, the man stepped back on porter gets to know.
to the curb and began to look the animal over with a You tell how she has been with murderers before
keen deliberate glance, and the boy stood there, rub- their execution, got the story from them or their moth-

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ers, climbed over sides of ships to get a story, forced Whittaker, the inventor, and Mad Maude, his oldest
herself in at funerals, followed burials to the grave- daughter, who would grumble at a broken saucer, and
yard, trampled upon every painful, decent, sorrow- then stuff lavish breakfasts down your throat, who
ful emotion of mankind—all to get that story; and still would patiently water twenty Httle feet of backyard
remains a decent woman, an immensely good, gener- earth from April until August, and until the grass grew
ous, and lusty-living person, and yet an old maid, and beautifully, and then would turn twenty skinny,
a puritan, somehow, to the roots of her soul. swarthy, and half-naked urchins loose into it to stamp
You tell how she went mad several years before, and it into muddy ruin in twenty minutes while she played
spent two years in an asylum; you tell how moments the hose upon their grimy little bodies; we, this old
of this madness still come back to her, and of how man, his daughters, and his grandson, three bank
you went home one night several months before, to clerks, a cartoonist, two young fellows who worked for
find her stretched out on your bed, only to rise and Hearst, and myself; we, good sir, who somedmes
greet you as the great lover of her dreams—^Doctor brought a girl into our rooms, got drunk, wept, con-
Eustace McNamee, a name, a person, and a love she fessed sinful and unworthy hves, read Shakespeare,
had invented for herself. Then you tell of her fantasdc Milton, Whitman, Donne, the Bible—and the sporting
family, her three sisters and her father, all touched with columns—we, young, foolish, old, mad, and bewildered
the same madness, but without her energy, power, and as we were, but who had never murdered, robbed, or
high ability; and of how she has kept the whole crowd knocked the teeth out of a woman; we, who were
going since her eighteenth year. fairly decent, kind, and liberal-hearted people as the
You tell about the old man who is an inventor who world goes, were the pariahs of Balcony Square—called
does not invent; of how he invented a corkscrew with so because there was neither square nor balconies, but
the cork attached that would not cork; an unlockable just a little narrow alleyway.
lock; an unbreakable looking-glass that wouldn't look. Yes, we were suspect, enemies to order and the pub-
And you tell how the year before he inherited $120,000— lic morals, shameless partakers in an open and indecent
the first money he had ever had—and promptly took it infamy, and our neighbors looked at us with all the
down to Wall Street where he was as promptly shorn shuddering reprehension of their mistrustful eyes as
of it, meanwhile sending his wife and daughters to they beat their wives like loving husbands, cut each
Europe in the nuptial suite of a palatial liner and other's throats with civic pride, and went about their
cabling them when they wanted to come back: "Push honest toil of murder, robbery, and assault like the
on to Rome, my children! Push on, push on! Your self-respecting citizens they were.
father's making millions!" Meanwhile a man was murdered, with his head
Yes, all this, and a hundred other things about this bashed in, upon the step of a house three doors below
incredible, mad, fantastic, and yet high-hearted family me; and a drunken woman got out of an automobile
which I had found in a dingy alleyway in Brooklyn one night at two o'clock, screaming indictments of her
I could tell my host. And I could tell him a thousand^ escort to the whole neighborhood.
other things about the people all about me—of the "Yuh gotta pay me, ya big bum!" she yelled. "Yuh
Armenians, Spaniards, Irishmen in the alley who came gotta pay me now! Give me my three dollehs, or I'll go
home on week days and turned on the radio, until the home an' make my husband beat it out of yah!"
whole place was yclHng with a hundred dissonances, "Staht actin' like a lady!" said the man in lower
and who came home on Saturday to get drunk and beat tones. "I won't pay yuh till yuh staht actin' like a lady!
their wives—the whole intimate course and progress of Yuh gotta staht actin' like a lady!" he insisted, with a
their lives published nakedly from a hundred open win- touching devotion to the rules of gallantry.
dows with laugh, shout, scream, and curse. And this had continued until he had started the en-
I could tell him how they fought, got drunk, and gine of his car and driven off at furious speed, leaving
murdered; how they robbed, held up, and blackjacked, her to wander up and down the alleyway for hours,
how they whored and stole and killed—all of which screaming and sobbing, cursing foully and calling down
was part of the orderly and decent course of life for the vengeance of her husband on this suitor who had
them—and yet, how they could howl with outraged thus misused her—an indictment that had continued
modesty, complain to the police, and send a delegation unmolested until three young ambidous thugs had
to us when the young nephew of my landlady lay for seized the opportunity to go out and rob her; they passed
an hour upon our patch of backyard grass clad only in my window running, in the middle of the night, one
his bathing trunks. fearful and withdrawing, saying, "Jeez! I'm sick! I
"Yuh gotta nekkid man out deh!" they said, in don't feel good! Wait a minute! Youse guys go on an'
tones of hushed accusatory horror. do it by yourself! I want a cup of coffee!"—^And the
Yes, we—good sir, who are so fond of irony—we, old others snarUng savagely:

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"Come on! Come on, yuh yellah bastad! I£ yah master, all in one, whose dark visage we cannot
don't come on, I'll moiduh yuh!" And they had gone, decipher from our own, whom we have fought, loved,
their quick feet scampering nimbly in the dark, while hated, finally accepted, and with whom we must abide
the woman's drunken and demented now to our death forever.
howls came faintly from the other So what is there to say? There has
end, and then had ceased. been life enough, and power, gran-
Your host has been enchanted by deur, joy enough, and there has also
that savage chronicle. He smites him- been beauty enough, and God knows
self upon the brow with rapture, cry- there has been squalor and filth and
ing "Oh, grand! Grand! What a misery and madness and despair
lucky fellow you are! If I were in enough; murder and cruelty and hate
your place I'd be the happiest man enough, and loneUness enough to fill
alive!" your bowels with the substance of
You take a look about you and say gray horror, and to crust your lips
nothing. with its hard and acrid taste of deso-
"To be free! To go about and see lation.
these things!" he cries. "To live And oh, there has been time
among real people! To see life as it enough, even in Brooklyn there is
is, in the raw—^the real stuS, not like time enough, strange time, dark se-
this!" he says with a weary look at cret time enough, dark million-vis-
all the suave furnishings of illusion aged time enough, forever flowing by
that surround him. "And above all you Uke a river, even in cellar-depths
else to be alonel" in Brooklyn there is time enough, but
You ask him if he has ever been alone, if he knows when you try to tell the man about it you cannot, for
what loneliness is like. You try to tell him, but he what is there to say?
knows about this too. He smiles faintly, ironically, and
dismisses it, and you, with a wise man's weary toler- For suddenly you remember how the tragic light of
ance of youth: "I know! I know!!" he sighs. "But all evening falls even on the huge and rusty jungle of the
of us are lonely, and after all, my boy, the real lone- earth that is known as Brooklyn and on the faces of all
liness for most of us is here"—and he taps himself a the men with dead eyes and with flesh of tallow gray,
trifle to the left of the third shirt-stud, in the presump- and of how even in Brooklyn they lean upon the sills
tive region of his heart. "But you! Free, young, and of evening in that sad hushed light. And you remember
footloose, with the whole world to explore—^You have how you lay one evening on your couch in your cool
a fine life! What more, in God's name, could a man cellar depth in Brooklyn, and listened to the sounds of
desire?" evening and to the dying birdsong in your tree; and
Well, what is there to say? For a moment, the blood you remember how two windows were thrown up, and
is pounding at your temples, a hot retort springs sharp you heard two voices—a woman's and a man's—^begin
and bitter to your lips, and you feel that you could tell to speak in that soft tragic light. And the memory of
him many things. You could tell him, and not be very their words came back to you, like the haunting refrain
nice or dainty with it, that there's a hell of a lot more of some old song—as it was heard and lost in Brooklyn.
that a man desires: good food and wonderful com- "Yuh musta been away," said one, in that sad light.
panions, comfort, ease, security, a lovely woman like "Yeah, I been away. I just got back," the other said.
the one who sits beside him now, and an end to lone- "Yeah? Dhat's just what I was t'inkin'," said the
liness—but what is there to say? other. "I'd been t'inkin' dat yuh musta been away."
For you are what you are, you know what you know, "Yeah, I been away on my vacation. I just got back."
and there are no words for loneliness, black, bitter, "Oh, yeah ? Dat's what I t'ought meself. I was t'ink-
aching loneliness, that gnaws the roots of silence in the in' just duh otheth day dat I hadn't seen yuh f'r some
night. It lies beside us in the darkness while the river time, 'I guess she's gone away,' I says."
flows, it fills as with wild secret song and the un- And then for seconds there was silence—save for the
measured desolations of gray time, and it abides with dying birdsong, voices in the street, faint sounds and
us forever, and is still, until we cannot root it from shouts and broken calls, and something hushed in eve-
our blood or pluck it from our soul or unweave it ning, far, immense, and murmurous in the air.
from our brain. Its taste is acrid, sharp, and bitter at "Well, wat's t' noos since I been gone?" the voice
the edges of our mouth, and it is with us, in us, and went out in quietness in soft tragic light. "Has anyt'ing
around us all the time, our jail, our captive, and our happened sinct I was away?"

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"Nah! Nuttin's happened," the other made reply. II
"About duh same as usual—you know?" it said with
diiEcult constraint inviting intuitions for the spare pain- OCTOBER: 1923
fulness of barren tongues. My life, more than the life of any one I know, has
"Yeah, I know," the other answered with a tranquil been spent in soHtude and wandering. Why this is true,
resignation—and there was silence then in Brooklyn. or how it happened, I have never known; yet it is so.
"I guess Fatheh Grogan died sinct you was gone," a From my fifteenth year—save for a single interval—I
voice began. have lived about as solitary a life as a modern man can
"Oh, yeah.?" the other voice repHed with tranquil have. I mean by this that the number of hours, days,'
interest. months, and years—the actual time that I have spent
"Yeah." alone—has been immense and extraordinary.
And for a waiting moment there was silence. And this fact is all the more astonishing because I
"Say, dat's too bad, isn't it.?" the quiet voice then said never seemed to seek out solitude, nor did I shrink
with comfortless regret. from life, or see^ to build myself into^a wall away from
"Yeah. He died on Sattiday. When he went home on all the fury and the turmoil of the earth. Rather, I
Friday night, he was O. K." loved life so dearly that I was driven mad by the thirst
"Oh, yeah.?" and hunger which I felt for it.
"Yeah." At college, I would prowl the stacks of the great
And for a moment they were balanced in strong library at night puUing books out of a thousand shelves
silence. and reading in them Hke a mad man. The thought of
"Gee, dat was tough, wasn't it.?" these vast stacks of books would drive me mad; the
"Yeah. Dey didn't find him till duh next day at ten more I read, the less I seemed to know; the greater the
o'clock. When dey went to look for him he was lyin' number of the books I read, the greater the immense
stretched out on duh bat' room floeh." uncountable number of those which I could never read
"Oh, yeah.?" would seem to be. Within a period of ten years I read
"Yeah. Dey found him lyin' dch," it said. at least twenty thousand volumes—deliberately I have
And for a moment more the voices hung in balanced set the number low—and opened the pages and looked
silence. through many times that number. If this seems unbe-
"Gee, dat's too bad. . . . I guess I was away when all lievable, I am sorry for it, but it happened. Yet all this
dat happened." terrific orgy of the books brought me no comfort,
"Yeah. Yuh musta been away." peace, or wisdom of the mind and heart. Instead, my
"Yeah, dat was it, I guess. I musta been away. Oddeh- fury and despair increased from what it fed upon, my
wise I woulda hoid. I was away." hunger mounted with the food it ate.
"Well, so long, kid I'll be seein' yuh." And it was the same with everything I did.
"Well, so long!" For this fury which drove me on to read so many
A window closed, and there was silence; evening and books had nothing to do with scholarship, nothing to
far sounds and broken cries in Brooklyn, Brooklyn, do with academic honors, nothing to do .with formal
in the formless, rusty, and unnumbered wilderness of learning. I was not in any way a scholar and did not
Ufe. want to be one. I simply wanted to know about every-
And now the old red light fades swiftly from the old thing on earth; I wanted to devour the earth, and it
red brick of rusty houses, and there are voices in the drove me mad when I saw I could not do this. In the
air, and somewhere music, and we are lying there, midst of a furious burst of reading in the enormous
blind atoms in our cellar-depths, gray voiceless atoms library, the thought of the streets outside and the great
on the manswarm desolation of the earth, and our fame city all around me would drive through my body like
is lost, our names forgotten, our powers are wasting a sword. It would now seem to me that every second
from us like mined earth, while we lie here at evening that I passed among the books was being wasted—that
and the river flows . . . and dark time is feeding like a at this moment something priceless, irrecoverable was
vulture on our entrails, and we know that we are lost, happening in the streets, and that if I could only get to
and cannot stir . . . and there are ships there! there arc it in time and see it, I would somehow get the knowl-
ships! . . . and Christ! we are all dying in the dark- edge of the whole thing in me—^the source, the well, the
ness! . . . and yuh musta been away . . . yuh musta spring from which all men and words and actions, and
been away. . . . every design upon this earth proceed.
And that is a moment of dark time, that is one of And I would rush out in the streets to find it, be
strange million-visaged time's dark faces. hurled through the tunnel into Boston and then spend
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 Gotterdammemng
By Suzanne La Follette
In the twilight of the German industrial gods comes
Adolph Hitler. Is he a prelude to a new barbarisml
What follows may determine the future of German
culture and the German people.

then more than 25 per cent state-capitalist. Within six

T
HE crash of a civilization is an easy thing to pre-
dict; it is exciting to read about in a comfortable months a letter from an experienced and reliable ob-
later era; and it is an agonizing thing to expe- server informed me that the percentage had already
rience. With relation to the time-sense of the individual risen to more than 60.
it is like a slovz-motion picture-drama, each phase of Now there are several advantages to be derived by
which unhurriedly rolls itself out to inexorable and capitalism from direct control of the state organization,
intolerable completeness. The current phase which is of which the most important is that the capitaHsts arc
thus unrolling itself in Germany may be considered thus enabled to place the burden of their losses on the
worth a paragraph by a future Gibbon, but to the con- taxpayers. I remember suggesting to a certain banker in
temporary German scapegoat—the persecuted Jew, Berlin that German capitalism seemed to have taken
Communist, or Socialist—it must seem a long-drawn- Russia for its model. "Yes," he answered frankly, "but
out nightmare, a cruel and interminable major opera- our purpose is to protect capital; the Russian purpose is
tion undergone without anaesthetic. to use capital for the benefit of labor."
The observer placed at a safe distance can regard it To protect capital by thrusting under its collapsing
somewhat more objectively—read it, as it were, like structure the cushion of the taxing power; this is the
the beginning of a chapter in Gibbon, deducing the end purpose of state-capitalist measures, in Germany and
from the general trend of the events already narrated. elsewhere. The advantage to the,capitalists is obvious;
Thus seen, the rise of the Nazis to power appears as a and so is the further advantage of being able to make
logical and indeed inevitable stage in German capitalist resistance to capitalist oppression appear as resistance to
history—and, what is important for us, a probable government. The capitalists can bring the armed forces
impending phase in the history of all capitalist coun- of the state to bear against discontent among the work-
tries. It is, to be sure, an expression of national hysteria ers, without any need to wait for or to create occasions to
induced by defeat and the subsequent hardship and "maintain law and order."
humiliation suffered at. the hands of victors drunk with For such a state of things necessarily implies attacks
power. But this fact, and the further fact that its leaders upon the workers. A capitalism in need of the cushion
give every sign of being lunatics—with a lunatic of the taxing-power is in no position to make conces-
shrewdness, too—need not blind one to its essential sions to labor; on the contrary it is forced to take away
nature as the desperate expedient of a thwarted but from labor such concessions as it has made in its pros-
still powerful capitalism against the growing discon- perous years. Another German banker with whom I
tent of the workers. spoke remarked that wages must come down. "Can
When I visited Germany in 1931 I was astonished your workers stand it?" I asked, and he replied as
at the rapidity with which it was becoming state-capi- calmly as if he were commenting on the weather,
talist, which is to say, of course, at the rapidity with "Well, of course, it is going to take a good deal of
which the capitalists were effecting a direct liaison be- starvation to get us through this depression."
tween themselves and the government—becoming the And what has all this to do with Hitler ? I am com-
government to all intents and purposes. It was just after ing to that. The predominant force—not, be it noted,
the financial collapse of July, when the government had the controlling, but the predominant, force—in Repub-
taken over control of the principal banks and conse- lican Germany was the Social Democratic party. This
quently of the industries which those banks controlled. party was the most numerous and highly organized in
I was informed on good authority that the country was the Reich; no government could function without its

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