The Key West citizen. [volume] (Key West, Fla.) 1879-current, 1951-11-10

/
past thirty years has asked him
self these questions. How can il
be possible that seven or eight
million persons are today doing
slave labor in Siberia? Is it real
ly possible that nearly eight mil
lion Jews were destroyed in Eu-
rope under the holocaust of Hit
Ter. And the gas chambers, the
| concentration camps, the burning
of village churches full of people
|. how can civilized men and
women do these things? How can
men and women who have in
herited all the deep religious
thought, the science, and the rea-
son of the nineteenth century
have brought themselves to do
these things?
Step by step author Mehring
draws his picture of the auto
biography of this European cul-
ture and the intellectual prelude
to its collapse,
He describes the talk in the
European cafes around one-legged
marble tables where more books
and often greater ones are plan
ned than are housed in all the
libraries of the world put to-
gether, and where more deeds
have been committed than in
world history" It is the vie de
Boheme of springtime in Paris.
He describes the men who edit
and write the avant garde maya
zines, the writers after the First
| World War who thronged to the
mass meetings and whose breath
smelled strongly of vodka.
He shows Dadaism dividing the
world into two types of people
the Dadafst who saw how
| funny the madhouse was; and on
the other side the solid mass OF
paranoid idiots who thought
| themselves normal and resented
being made fun of "
He describes the artists once
more in advance of their time
returning to the crudity
to the awkward, archaic work OF
the African Negroes kraal, good
while before Europe, pallopine
along gaily on the nag Progress
had reached the brink of cave
life. Man in his free. natural
state, interrupted by the INTEL
ect, man as the noble savage
imbecile or child, is born art
ist-so the argument ran"
He shows society. philan-
thropic, liberal and socially mind
ed. become enthusiastic about
the proletariat, Negro art and
ragtime. And their sons, the gild-
ed youth, went crazy over
stage divas dressed in the cottons
of factory workers. as the nobili-
ty hand once tumbled in the hay
!
| ishing upper crust was hypno-
tized by the sight of the herd, by
the cries of Forward and down
with prominent literary fig
ures gave up their at homes and
their artists balls in favor of the
mass meetings of the race-and-
class scouragers."
And the COLLAPSED
The wall that his father had
built up for him volume by vol
ume did not hold up. Cracks APP
peared and the vitalistic or poll
ARCHAEOLOGICAL stereotype philoso-
ply of the day seemed only to
make matters worse
The German Kaiser. Walter
Mehring aptly calls a ham actor
who had tried to play the part
of Byzantine Emperor Hitler
he calls a NANCY cur,
abused and disregarded until il
went NADIA street mongrel
raised on the garbage of iingoiSm
and trained by universal educa-
ton until it became rabid when
ever ii came across anything that
smelled of intelligence
| And Mr. Mehring asks himself.
as amazed as so many others:
how had it come about.
how had things gone so far. that
such vast intellectual assets could
| possibly have been devalued so
that they were no longer worth
a copper; that humanism could
have been allowed to get so rag
ged and tattered: that every in
spired thought could have been
reduced to nonsense and ugli-
ness; that in spite of constant
theological social hygiene. in spite
of all the Investigations of liter
/ airy criticism, in spite of all cura-
tive ideals, a paralysis of the
brain had hit with such sudden
force?"
| He describes the state Of man
| under connunistic dictator
ship today: Personality, individ-
uality, is now the capital crime
There are restrictions on every