Evening Star Newspaper, January 6, 1935, Page 67

PART 6 [ ———— Magasine WASHINGTON D C, JANUARY 6, 1935. 16 PAGES. =io————— ] HIS RED UTOPIA DIDN'T WORK! In Fact, It Blez Up Over the German Landscape and Ernst Toller Ran Into Some of tile Rarest Adventures That Ever Befell a Poet and Playright—Today, in Exile, He Tries to “Rouse the World From Its Sleep.” VEN among the radical visages crowding the drawing room of Lord Marley, the British Com- munist peer, the man’s thin, dark, haunted face under its mane of black hair stood out sharp, vivid, and caught at one’s attention like a cry in the night, and a woman, a woman of high intelligence, murmured: “Who’s the Wandering Jew?” It seemed an incongruous observation in connection with Ernst Toller, that passionate idealist. Yet, looking again and more closely at the German poet= revolutionary, one saw that the woman had glimpsed a main motif in that com= plex human pattern. It was not the face of a man who would spit on even his hated enemy, but it was the face of a man born to suffer. And one won= dered whether, even if the swastika sign had never flamed over Germany, the poet propagandist—born of a Jewish mother, nourished in the Teuton tribal lands, formed by Europe, calling the earth his home and the world his fatherland—could have escaped tragic destiny or found a social system in which he could fit without pain. No one seems to understand him en=- tirely, and he seems constantly to be surprising himself. “Jew disruptor!” yells the Nazi. “A dangerous propa= gandist,” murmurs the conservative. *Traitor!” scream the Reds. “Martyr,” €00 the parlor pinks, adoring him at tea parties. “Comrade,” hail the intellectual radicals in every country. ONE must, however, note as the high- light of this poet his astounding capacity for survival. His toughness and resilience, his insistence upon living, his incredible luck overshadow the great drama of his career. He is 13 months on the Western front. Not a bullet pierces him, not a shell chips him. Adjudged unfit for fur- ther service after a heart and stomach collapse, he is subjected, and subjects himself, to enormous stresses and strains in the post-war revolution—and fails to succumb. In 1919 he is with Eisner at Berne when the Bavarian revolutionary leader denounces imperialism and the German warrior caste at the Congress of the Second International. Eisner refurns to Munich and is promptly assassinated. Is Toller again by his side, a target for the assassin’s gun? No; he has stayed in Switzerland for a little holiday. He flies to confer with the independent Socialists in Berlin. On two successive days his airplane crashes. Each time he escapes with nothing worse than a shaking. He goes out on horseback at night with a band to meet a White attack on Munich. As they ride along the dark road, crash! comes a rifle volley from a hidden enemy post. The man at Toller’s side falls, mortally wounded. ‘Toller rides back unharmed to Karlsberg. After the counter-revolution the Red leaders in Munich are shot so fast that the mortuaries prove inadequate and common graves have to be dug, as in war time. More eagerly than any one ‘Toller is sought, a price of 10,000 marks on his head. But he eludes the hunt for a whole month. It suffices. By that time the first keen edge is off the lust to kill. Captured at last, Toller gets a public trial and fortress imprisonment, the only one of the Red leaders to escape death. In his childhood in East Prussia the Ernst Toller, He has survived war, revolution and terrorism. =—From a Pastel by Leonebel Jacobs. By C. Patrick Thompson Teuton children now and then called “The Jew!” after him, and he longed to blend with the German tribe. He ex- perienced joy later on wihen he found that on sight he would not be taken for a Jew. He sang “Dcutschland, Deutsch- land Uber Alles” in the German Stu- dents’ Union at Grenoble, despised the French, rushed back to the fatherland to enlist when the war call came, wrote from the front to have his name struck off the list of the Jewish community. But the war, the front, destroyed this immature and superficial tribalism. He remained a German, but he wanted a Germany refashioned as a land of peace and social justice. Released from war service after his physical breakdown, he went to Munich and Nuremberg to study—and to found a student organiza- tion which demanded the ending of the war and the building up of a new and peaceful Europe. The youth revolt had started. Toller was its Bavarian spokes- man. THE military authorities went after him. He fled to Berlin, where he met Kurt Eisner. A fateful meeting. A stop-the- war strike started in Kiel, spread to Bavaria, and down there Eisner was on the Strike Committee. Toller thrust himself into the trouble, distributed verses and scenes from an anti-war play he had written—“Die Wandlung.” He was given the job of bringing out the women workers at a big factory. His oratory was successful. The strike lead- ers were arrested. Toller marched with a procession to police headquarters to demand their release. He drafted a leaflet designed to swing the populace to the Left. The police arrested him, - found the leaflet; he went to jail. His revolutionary education was beginning, So far he had been a natural radical, Now he turned to the books for theory and further light. In his cell he de- voured Marx, Engels, Lassalle, Baku- nin, the Sydney Webbs—heady wine' for an intellectual, war-warped young- -} ster whose mother had once told him some people were so poor “because it is God's will.” The Socialist writers told him that all kuman ills, from war to poverty, spring from the capitalist sys- tem. He had gone to jail the raw ma- terial of a revolutionary; he emerged the finished article. Unable to understand how a son of hers could become a workers’ leader, his mother came to his aid/ - 8She went to, the family doctor and got a court order - to have Ernst committed to the psycho- logical clinic in Munich for an exam- ination. He spent four days in the gen- eral lunatic asylum and two days among the melancholics. It was long enough. for him to become convinced that there are two sorts of lunatics—the harmless ones incarcerated in asylums and the dangerous ones who prove by argument that for some nations war is necessary and noble: Meanwhile the soil in which the Toller mind was to sprout so richly was being tilled and fertilized with blood and misery. As in Russia, the masses had lost interest in everything except the simple issue of war or peace. A fleet revolt started the revolution, and soon Germany had passed into the hands ol'. the people. A DOWN in Bavaria Eisner organized a march of 200,000 workers and peas- ants on Munich. The Wittelsbach King fled. Eisner took over the kingdom and - proclaimed it a fra state. Toller hurried down from Berlin. The Central Com- “!: mittee of Workmen, Peasant and Soldier ™ Councils elected the young student rev- - olutionary Eisner’s deputy. He was rising very rapidly in the revolutionary firma- ment. ; Did he understand the revolution? Scarcely. He found himself out of step. - The German majority was marching along the middle of the road and he was way to the Left, with Karl Liebnecht and Rosa Luxemburg. If he had stayed in Berlin he would probably have shared the fate of Karl and Rosa, killed when the Spartacus revolt was crushed. But he was in Munich, and he could only force his way into a Social Democrat meeting and cry that the great revo- lutionary leaders had been murdered, Perhaps he expected the assembly to cry, “Vengeance! Comrades, to Berlin!” But the crowd only shouted back, “Serves them right!” A more poised man would have been warned by that voice of the people. But Toller was young and crusted with illusions. The Deputies assembled in the Ba- varian Parliament. Eisner, small, gray- bearded, spectacled, self-sufficient, put on his hat and set forth. But he did not reach the Parliament Building. En route a young Nationalist bumped him off. Toller at this time was safe in' Switzerland. But the leaders of the unions and So- cialist parties soon rallied. They gath< ered in the Wittelsbach Palace and = formed a Soviet republic. Toller, then ; 25, was made president of the Central Committee. A little later on the White forces marched down and made an attempt to