WILHELM LAMSZUS
Few books of its size—one hundred and eleven pages in the original edition—can perhaps of recent years claim the striking and instantaneous success of Wilhelm Lamszus's "Menschenschlachthaus." In appraising this success, I am less concerned with the number of copies sold (which now, three months after publication, approximates, I believe, one hundred thousand) than with the impression it has left on the mind of its readers in Germany and elsewhere on the Continent. Within a few days of its publication the author awoke to find himself famous—or infamous, according to the point of view adopted—in his own country. The fact that his book has been, or is being, translated into no less than eight European languages is evidence that its appeal is not confined to the conditions of one country, or of a single nationality.
Its appeal is broad-based. It is addressed to the conscience of civilized humanity, and as was to have been expected, the conscience of the individual has reacted to its stimulus in various ways.
The first evidence the author received of the success of his work was drastic. By profession he is a master at one of the great German public schools. He was at once "relieved" of his duties, but has now, I understand, been reinstated. The schoolmaster in Germany, it must be borne in mind, is primarily a state official. His most important function is to educate, not only the rising generation of citizens, but the future levies of conscripts. For a schoolmaster to write a book "with a tendency" to strip the pomp and circumstance of war of its traditional glamour—an integral factor in the German educational system—must, in the eyes of the orthodox of the "State-conserving" parties, have savored of an unholy alliance between blasphemy and high treason. The sale of the book was interdicted in the town of its first publication—the "free" city of Hamburg. The interdict had the effect of stimulating its sale elsewhere. It challenged a hearing. Even the "State-conserving" journals were unable to ignore it entirely.
A short time ago, in an open letter addressed to the German press, the author replied to the criticisms and strictures of his professional reviewers. As may be conceived, these criticisms and strictures lacked nothing in virulence or acrimony. "A peril to the public safety," "an hysterical neuropath," "a morbid phantasy," "a socialist-anarchic revolutionary," "a cowardly weakling," "a landless man," "an imported alien draining the marrow of patriotic backbone," may serve as an anthology (for which I am mainly indebted to the Hamburger Nachrichten) of the compliments showered on the author and his work. As this reply discloses what was in the author's mind when he wrote his book, definitely explains its purport and its purpose, it may be worth some consideration. It may serve to differentiate "The Human Slaughter-House" from the itch of mere literary sensationalism and enable the foreigner to understand the light in which the Commission for Instruction, Education, etc., of the nineteenth Universal Peace Congress at Geneva regarded it when last year it wrote officially to congratulate its author on having placed "a weapon of the greatest importance" in the hands of the pacificists.
At all times and at all places, Lamszus points out, patriotism has been of two kinds. The one sort takes its stand on the public market-place, with its hand on its manly chest, to advertise the public spirit that inflates it. In season and out of season, it never fails to invite the public gaze to dwell on the integrity of its patriotic sentiments. Its main strength lies in the spectacular and oratorical. As such it not infrequently deteriorates into the idle sound and fury of Junkerdom, Chauvinism and Jingoism.
There is that other type of patriotism that, no less loyal to its own country, believes in the dignity and worth of humanity, that believes in the patriotism of quiet, unadvertised, productive work and in the virtue of a sense of moral responsibility. It is sanguine enough to believe that it may yet be the destiny of a great nation to serve the cause of humanity by eliminating the hideous necessity for war. It finds its highest representative in the patriot of the type of the late Emperor Frederick the Noble, who, himself a soldier proven on the stricken field, found the courage to say, "I hate the business of blood. You have never seen war. If you had ever seen it you would not speak the word unmoved. I have seen it, and I tell you it is a man's highest duty to avoid war if by any means it can be avoided."
The issue Lamszus raises at the bar of public opinion of the civilized world is whether the patriot of this type must necessarily be either a "neuropath" or a "landless alien," as compared with him of the other sort; whether he be necessarily lacking in civic spirit, virility, and even soldierly virtues.
If the matter be of any concern, I gather that the author himself, so far from being physically a weakling, is a trained gymnast (of the type that our representatives will have to take into account at the next Olympic games) given to athletic exercises. He has also had sufficient medical training to have passed through a school of comparative anatomy. There are, therefore, no grounds for assuming offhand that he is of the nerveless type that faints at the first sight of blood; yet he writes of war with a shudder that the reader can feel in every line.
Yet—a contradiction his critics have not been slow to underline—this same man, who abhors the very thought of war, has written to the praise and glorification of war "like a professional panegyrist." While he was writing "The Human Slaughter-House," he was also engaged in etching some literary silhouettes, embodying the Dutch folk-songs, of the revolt of the Netherlands. The contrast is so striking that one or two of these "prose poems" may be worth quoting.