We shook hands.
‘One more thing,’ I said softly. ‘May I ask you a question? You must realise how little I know about what’s been going on.’
‘Go right ahead.’
‘Well, here’s what I’d like to know: how can life go on under these conditions? How can people stand it?’
‘Oh, they’re not so badly off. Your situation is exceptional: a civilian – and without papers! There are very few civilians left. Practically everyone who isn’t a soldier is a civil servant. That makes life bearable for most people, a good many are genuinely happy. Little by little one gets used to the shortages. When the potatoes gave out, we had to put up with sawdust gruel – they season it with tar now, it’s surprisingly tasty – we all thought it would be unbearable. But then we got used to it. And the same with everything else.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘It’s really not so surprising. But there’s one thing I still don’t understand. Tell me: why is the whole world making these enormous efforts? Putting up with such hardships, with all these laws, these thousands of bureaus and bureaucrats – what is all this meant to preserve and safeguard?’
The gentleman looked at me in amazement.
‘What a question!’ he cried, shaking his head. ‘You know we’re at war: the whole world is at war. That’s what we are preserving, what we make laws and endure hardships for. The war! Without these enormous exertions and achievements our armies wouldn’t be able to fight for a week. They’d starve – we can’t allow that!’
‘Yes,’ I said slowly, ‘you’ve got something there! The war, in other words, is a treasure that must be preserved at any cost. Yes, but – I know it’s an odd question – why do you value the war so highly? Is it worth so much? Is war really a treasure?’
The official shrugged his shoulders and gave me a pitying look. He saw that I just didn’t understand.
‘My dear Herr Sinclair,’ he said. ‘You’ve lost contact with the world. Go out into the street, talk to people; then make a slight mental effort and ask yourself: What have we got left? What is the substance of our lives? Only one answer is possible: The war is all we have left! Pleasure and personal profit, social ambition, greed, love, cultural activity – all that has gone out of existence. If there is still any law, order, or thought in the world, we have the war to thank for it. – Now do you understand?’
Yes, now I understood, and I thanked the gentleman kindly.
I left him and mechanically pocketed the recommendation to Office 127. I had no intention of using it, I had no desire to molest the gentlemen in those offices any further. Before anyone could notice me and stop me, I inwardly recited the short astral spell, turned off my heartbeat, and made my body vanish under a clump of bushes. I pursued my cosmic wanderings and abandoned the idea of going home.
*‘If the War Goes On Another Two Years’ was originally published under the pseudonym Emil Sinclair, which Hesse used again when he published Demian in 1919.
Christmas
December 1917
Even before the great reminder, I always felt vague misgivings at Christmas time, an unpleasant taste in my mouth. Here was something pretty but not quite authentic, something universally trusted and respected but which nevertheless inspired a certain secret distrust.
Now that the fourth wartime Christmas is coming, I cannot dispel that taste in my mouth. True, I shall celebrate Christmas, because I have children and wouldn’t want to deprive them of a pleasure. But I shall celebrate this children’s Christmas in the same spirit as I celebrate the prisoners’ Christmas in the course of my war work – as an official gesture, a concession to a time-worn tradition, a dusty sentimentality. For the past three years we have been treating these unfortunate prisoners of war like hardened criminals, and now we send them pretty little boxes and packages with snippets of evergreen in them – it’s touching, sometimes I myself am moved, I imagine the feelings of a prisoner who receives his little present, the flood of memories that come over him as he smells his bit of evergreen. But at bottom that too is sentimentality.
All year long we keep the prisoners in confinement, though they have done nothing but let themselves be surprised by enemy action, and then on Christmas we visit these unfortunate hundreds of 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