The Oppermanns (McNally Editions)

by Lion Feuchtwanger

He was a mediocre man without any particular talent. To be mediocre was best. He was not ambitious. At any rate, not very.

“It is the very strength of this party that it disregards reason and appeals to instinct. It needs intelligence and willpower to proceed as consistently as those fellows do. The gentlemen understand their customers, as every good businessman does. Their goods are shoddy but saleable. And their propaganda is first-class, let me tell you. Don’t underestimate their leader, Herr Hintze. Oppermann’s Furniture Stores could congratulate themselves if they had such a good director of publicity.”

the others were reluctant to agree with him. Here, in Gustav Oppermann’s charming rooms, people were not inclined to concede that a thing as ridiculous as the Nationalist movement had a chance. Gustav Oppermann’s books, ranged along the walls, the library and study formed an agreeable combination of good taste and comfort; the likeness of Immanuel Oppermann, shrewd, kindly, lifelike, observed the company; one’s foundations were firm, one was equipped with comprehensive knowledge, enjoyed the fine things bygone centuries had developed, had a substantial bank balance. It seemed ridiculous to imagine that the tame, domesticated beast—the common man—threatened to revert to his wolfish nature.

“this gentleman expressed in a concise way what is coming to a head among people of that sort. The authority of sober reason is being undermined. The paltry varnish of logic is being scraped away. An epoch is at hand during which the large, partially hyperdeveloped animal, known as man, will revert to his fundamentals. Aren’t you thrilled to be living during these times?”

He always believed everything was all right as long as one could prove one’s statements.

It was to the effect that the growth of all dangerous movements had been watched for years, often for decades, without the logical inferences ever having been drawn from them. What history had taught him was surprise, a tremendous surprise that each time those in jeopardy had been so slow in thinking about their safety. Why, in the devil’s name, had so many French aristocrats been so asinine as to be caught in the Revolution, whereas any schoolboy nowadays knows that the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire, decades earlier, had indicated precisely what would happen?

The worst of it was that he sincerely believed the gibberish he was talking. Due to an inferiority complex, he had encased himself in an armor of the cheapest nationalism, through which not a ray of common sense could penetrate. And he, François, had to listen to all this rubbish with attention and courtesy. What terrible days these were. Once more Goethe was right: “There is nothing the rabble fears more than intelligence. If they understood what is truly terrifying, they would fear ignorance.”

“We have seen the proletariat let loose,” he proclaimed. “It was not a pretty sight. We have seen the substantial citizen let loose, the agriculturist and the militarist, and that was hideous. But all that will be a paradise compared to what we shall see when the petty bourgeois is let loose, the Nationalist Party men and their Leader.” “Do you really believe that, sir?” asked Gutwetter, gazing at him in friendly fashion with large, innocent eyes. “I have a different idea of it,” he added mildly. “I believe that the war was only a curtain-raiser. The century of the great conflict has just begun. It will be a century of destruction. The final generations of the white race will attack each other without mercy. The thunder will mate with the ocean, and fire with the earth. Man will have to develop brains with horns to cope with this struggle. Such will be the character, as I see it, of the future national state. A military power beyond conception, a judiciary power with severe, restrictive laws, and a school system to educate senseless brutes in the ecstasy of self-sacrifice; such is the outlook.” He spoke mildly, his carefully groomed head rose calm-featured from his coat, the childlike eyes looked dreamy.

He had nothing to offer the shouting, rebellious ward but the arguments of reason, the least suitable of all sedatives.

Don’t forget, Edgar, that our opponents have one tremendous advantage over us; their absolute lack of fairness. That is the very reason why they are in power today. They have always employed such primitive methods that the rest of us simply did not believe them possible, for they would not have been possible in any other country. They have simply shot down most of the important leaders of the Left, one after the other. They were not punished.

But their confidence had vanished, they brooded in heavy-hearted distress; for what they had to face, they felt it in their bones, was neither the attack of a single enemy nor a single stroke of Fate. It was an earthquake, one of those great upheavals of concentrated, fathomless, worldwide stupidity. Pitted against such an elemental force, the strength and wisdom of the individual was useless.

In the twentieth century, no doubt one got along better with common sense than with decency.

Certainly this arson has been managed clumsily and stupidly,” he said. “But everything they have done has been clumsy and stupid; nevertheless, so far, they haven’t made a single miscalculation. They have gambled on the stupidity of the masses with alarming accuracy. The Leader himself frankly stated that such gambles were the fundamental principle of his political actions: why shouldn’t they continue along these lines? With dreadful single-mindedness of purpose they continued the lies that General Headquarters had to drop at the end of the war. And the peasants and small tradespeople believed every lie they uttered. Why shouldn’t they have been taken in by those lies? The principle of those fellows was really appallingly simple: let your yes mean no and let your no mean yes. They don’t bother about unnecessary niceties. They are gigantic, shockingly coarsened, provincial Machiavellis. Their success is chiefly due to this primitive peasant craftiness. The fact is, the others inevitably persist in believing that no one could be taken in by such crudeness. And then, equally inevitably, everyone is taken in.”

“The skilled are sent into exile, the land is ruled by a few fools. Mob sovereignty is beginning. The man in the street has come to power and is making use of it in his own fashion. He wears the finest linen robes and anoints his bald pate with myrrh, he has a fine house and haylofts. At one time he used to run his own errands, now he sends other people. Princes flatter him and the high officials of the old regime pay court, in their necessity, to the new upstart.”