Ernst Toller: in the turmoil of history, writing directly into life

Ernst Toller, Niederschönfeld prison, 1924. © National Library of Israel, Schwadron collection.

© Wikicommon

Text by: Olivier Favier

6 min

"It is not only my youth that I am relating here, but that of a generation at the same time as a fragment of history" affirms Ernst Toller in Coup d'oeil 1933, "writes the day we have burnt book (s) in Germany.

The following story ends ten years earlier.

It tells of the collapse of a world.

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We remember Hinkemann, the hero of the eponymous drama, who returns emasculated from the Great War front and ends up like a monster decapitating rats with his teeth.

In Ernst Toller, whom some perceive as a minor figure of German expressionism intended to show that the giant Brecht was not alone in his time, violence is everywhere, and always detestable.

Reading it today is a staggering experience.

With him, the writing is a plunge into the absolute sincerity of the memory and it is an understatement to say that neither the author nor the reader leaves any page unscathed: we discover him ungrateful daddy's son squandering the family boarding house in the game and the alcohol of his student years in Grenoble, then banal go-to-war in the sudden bellicose unreason of the summer of 1914. We follow him in his blindness to the mud of the trenches he never ceases to cry out: " 

 " he begs as he serves in the artillery.

Live to fight

From childhood, he remembers that the Prussians hated Polish Catholics and that the Jews saw them as "the descendants of Cain".

He still remembers being deprived of a playmate, "Don't stay here, he's a Jew!"

»And that he cries without understanding the meaning of a word which for the first time will serve to exclude him.

He also remembers the small lead cartridge inadvertently used to kill a deer, the sight of the dying animal hours later, and the disgust at the hunt that followed.

He finally remembers his mother explaining that a friend is poor, because " 

 ".

His description of the time that elapses between the assassination of Jaurès and the general mobilization, where many pass almost instantly from anxious incredulity to deadly enthusiasm, is reminiscent of the testimony of the Austrian Stefan Zweig, in

, from France, too.

This series of images, flash memories, which he uses to trace the thread of his human and political education, has something to do with the work undertaken a few years later by the Soviet writer Mikhail Zochtchenko in

, another veteran who seeks to understand the origin of his melancholy.

Detail of the cover of “Livre des hirondelles”, by Ernst Toller, published by Editions Séguier, 2020. © Éditions Séguier, 2020

But Ernst Toller does not allow himself any weakness, he is an indefatigable fighter who, on his return from the front, turns his back on his class and on patriotic ideas to engage in revolutionary combat.

The crushing of the Spartacist uprising, seen as the distant origin of the rise of Nazism, once silenced those who could have best stood in the way of it, was historically described by Sebastian Haffner in

.

Both left Germany in 1933, but Sebastian Haffner was much younger and still a student, and it was only later that he understood the weight of these massacres in the failure of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism. .

The Revolution Betrayed

Ernst Toller was one of the leaders of the Munich Council Republic and he recounts this tragedy from within, with its share of horrors and political dissent - the murky game of the Communists, ready to turn against their allies , or that of the right-wing socialists, who negotiate and ally themselves with the reaction.

He goes through this time like everything he has witnessed until then, an extreme experience, where one who no longer has the strength to fight is no longer really alive.

The possibility of suicide is present from the dedication to his nephew Harry, who committed suicide at the age of 18.

She reappears over the pages, from the trenches to the cell where he writes his plays, during his five years of imprisonment.

She will return for the last time in 1939, when this exile of 45 years will no longer have the strength to face at the same time material misery, the abandonment of his companion, the collapse of the Republicans in Spain and the arrival now imminent World War II.

Published in German in Amsterdam in 1933, in French in 1974 under its original title

, the book is republished today as Le Livre des hirondelles, in reference to a collection of poems published by the author in the 1920s The end of the book evokes as a tragic metaphor of his generation the fight of the swallows to rebuild the nests that the prison guards are determined to destroy.

Each destruction leads to the construction of new nests, ever larger and more numerous, until the sudden day when the couple give up on surviving.

The female dies a few days later, having lost her raison d'être.

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