Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1935-01-06

In the exercise yard he looked at the wall
where SO Reds had been shot to death.
The earth at it's foot was dark Was his
blood to make fresh stain there?
No. Tried in open court and with a
clever counsel stressing his war service,
he was found guilty of high treason, but
with honorable intent and confined for
five years in the Niederschoenfeld
fortress His active revolutionary career
was over.
When they shut him up the name of
Hitler had not begun to be heard; in
prison he heard it for the first time as
that of faction leader sentenced to a
brief Jail term for breaking up Bavarian
Monarchist meeting. When they let him
out Adolf'S name was beginning to mean
something, and the Nazis were SO strong
in Bavaria that the authorities provided
Toller with an escort into Prussia for fear
the Hitler men might aSsassinate him.
What had he left? Much. He had
youth; he was only 80 years old. He
had an immense reservoir of experience,
a huge pool to draw upon for articles,
plays, poems, books, lectures. All that
he had done, seen, suffered, had ripened
him.
A LSO, he had developed a formidable
concentration. He had written
'MasSe Mensch' that powerful indict-
ment of force, in week, writing at night
lying on the floor of his cell under the
table, cloth hung to conceal the light
of the candle. In jail he had planned to
escape over the border into Austria. 1t
could be done easily while visiting a
dentist in the town under a Warden'S
escort He had an a"complice, and every
thing was set. But at the crucial mo-
ment he found himself in the middle of
the third act of his play, "Hinkemann."
EScape-or stay and write the final scene
of act Ill? He stayed and wrote, while
the other prisoner escaped with ease.
What else had he left? Fame, and
some capitalists plays and poems, VAL
liable copyrights. He seemed cured of
his passion for action to realize his ideals.
He thought himself disillusioned, but
some illusions still chung
He thought he would be welcomed in
Moscow on his revolutionary record. But
when he went there to lecture the official
press denounced him as IAN illusionist,
a demagogue and traitor" He had
ruined the promising. Bavarian Soviet.
Instead of destroying the power of the
bourgeoisie by Red terror he had de-
clared for a dictatorship not of physical
force but of love
Back in the Fatherland, he saw the
growth of the movement against reason.
He saw, yet he did not see right through.
He was as astoniShed as Einstein and
Feuchtwanger at the violence of the
anti-Semitism which accompanied the
Nazi advent to power. He had not
realized it would be quite like this-that
there would be an edict exiting him, con-
flScating his money and copyright, DOOM
ing him to begin life over again in strange
lands, to earn the means of subsistence
by writing and lecturing in an unfamil-
lar tongue. But it might have been
worse. If he had not fortuitouSly been
in Switzerland when the blow fell he
might have persisted.
Again he comes to the end of phase;
again events sweep him forward to new
life. Wars and revolutions have provided
him with his themes SO far. Around the
social struggles of the time he has thrown
the pearl of his dramatic genius-thoSe
poems and plays which have been trans
lated into 81 languages, including Tartar
and Turkoman, Irish and Armenian.
He now says resignedly that, after all,
the artists business is not to prove theses.
but to throw light upon human conduct.