Marie Büchner
During the month of November the Dreyfus case made the whole world hold its breath. My Own and I followed the affair with the greatest interest and sympathy. At that time Scheurer-Kestner, Bernard Lazare, and Émile Zola came out in favor of the reopening of the trial. The Figaro had published Esterhazy’s autograph; it was an ocular demonstration that the handwriting was the same as that on the bordereau. All the military, and especially the Anti-Semitic circles, were against a new trial. The interest which I took in the course of the affair is frequently reflected in my diary:
November 18. Probably the case will be taken up again. The mere possibility that the man banished to Devil’s Island is innocent would be horrible, supposing the sentence should stand ... and we are bound now to believe in this possibility. The public conscience would remain forever oppressed by this thought.... Again it has been strikingly shown that there is such a thing as a “European soul.” A French journal remarks, in a peevish tone, about the many comments in other countries, “In the last analysis, the matter concerns France only.”
No, no! such national exclusiveness has ceased in our day. If a catastrophe occurs in any country,—the assassination of a ruler, the burning of a charity bazaar,—expressions of sympathy stream in from all directions, making the afflicted country glad. But if it permits other countries to share in its good and evil fortunes, then it must also be willing that its right and wrong actions should be judged everywhere. The partisans of justice all over the world have an equal interest in the conquest of justice and truth over tyranny and concealment. And, vice versa, the partisans of authority, the race persecutors, are in the same camp all over the world; not only in France but also in Austria and everywhere are to be found passionate anti-Dreyfusards!
The two camps are growing more and more clearly divided. But the forces are very unequally distributed. The party that champions the right has certainly on its side the overwhelming power that is peculiar to its object,—universal human happiness; the other party has the actual power, however—has the cannon behind it....
Power engenders pride. Everything is permitted to it—so it thinks—and it wishes to make manifest that it is bold enough to attempt anything. So the whole Esterhazy investigation, the Esterhazy trial, and the shameful Esterhazy apotheosis are a pure satire on every judicial proceeding, a slap in the face of august Justice,—even more, a trampling of her scales under the spur-armed heel of the soldier’s boot! The people must knuckle under,—that must be borne in upon them so that another time the desire may pass of pulling down the General Staff’s sacred ensign of error! You wanted to run up against a res judicata, did you? Very well, now you have two of them. And quite right; the people knuckled under. “The affair is at an end” (Affaire liquidée is the heading over the leading articles in the papers); but a man got up and uttered the cry of his soul,—J’accuse,—one man against an army! The far-distant ages to come will praise this heroic action.
Even in our family circle there were disputes about the affair. My father-in-law, the conservative-minded, ardent reader of Das Vaterland, would hear nothing of the proofs in favor of the exile. He also believed in the “Jewish syndicate” that was bent on buying the rehearing. And my mother-in-law had nothing good to say about Zola; she had even gone so far once as to make a great auto-da-fé of such of his books as had strayed into the house.
The year 1897 closes with an event that might well arouse much anxiety among the partisans of peace. We know how it began, but we can never know how it will end; it carries war in its womb, for it is once more something undertaken under the emblem of force,—the voyage of the fighting squadron to the Yellow Sea.
So then ... Port Arthur besieged by the Russians, Kiauchau by the Germans,—that is the newly created situation. High Politics, that is fifty or sixty men and a following of newspapers, see to it that there shall never be any rest, that no progress can ever be made toward the healing of internal troubles, the elevation of human society. A cruel state of things for the champions of peace! For years there have been perpetual wars and rumors of wars, even while in the governmental circles there were constant assurances of peace. Japan and China, the Venezuela controversy, Spain and Cuba, Armenian massacres, Italy and Africa, Greece and Turkey, England and India, and now this East-Asiatic expedition! And all the time constantly increasing armaments and paroxysms over fleets. No wonder that the slow, as it were subterranean, peace movement remains unobserved by the masses.