Resistance is Fertile

Berlin is a morbid kind of town. You never quite know whose grave you're walking on. Bronze plaques in the paving stones outside houses tell you the names of murdered Jews who once lived there. And cycling into West Berlin today I realised I was extremely close to the area where 16 dissidents, including the academic Albrecht Haushofer, were shot in the night of 23rd April, 1945. No signs or plaques, just a shudder down your spine as you pass on through.

Haushofer is one of the poets featured in Charles W. Hoffmann's Opposition Poetry in Nazi Germany, a study of writers who attacked the Third Reich from within. 23 pages alone are dedicated to his Moabit Sonnets, a collection of verse he scribbled as he waited for the inevitable in his prison cell. Like putting names to faces, when you've read somebody's innermost thoughts, dreams, fears and reflections, the 64 years just melt away and you find yourself meeting them on every street corner. The ghosts of Berlin have felt even more present than usual lately.

I feel more than just a little bit pathetic, then, in the wake of the neo-fascist British National Party's successes in the European parliamentary elections this month. The BNP received fewer votes than they did in 2004, and yet won 2 seats in Brussels because mainstream voters stayed at home. There's been a lot of talk about apathy towards Europe and disillusionment with the major parties. But whatever the cause, the result is a nightmare come true.

Friedrich Schiller's theory of mankind's inner conflict offers an interesting explanation for the original advent of Nazism, and the resistance poet Rudolf Hagelstange elaborated on the idea in his own work. On the one hand we have our material impulses, and on the other we have morality and reason. Basically, it is the immediate versus the eternal. Today versus forever. We really need to keep a grasp of both, since if we had no material impulses at all we would be unable to feed or dress ourselves in the first place.

The Third Reich, according to the Hagelstange, came into being because this delicate balance was screwed up and we lost a sense of the universal, lasting values. Germany ignored spiritual matters for too long and allowed absolute Evil into the world in the form of Hitler and Nazism, the ultimate expression of short-sighted, destructive human vanity. The result was hell on earth and the systematic murder of millions.

Perhaps surprisingly for someone who clearly spent so much time and energy reading and analysing the stuff, Charles W. Hoffmann argues that most opposition poetry is of little or no artistic value whatsoever. It will not last as poetry per se, and will be of purely documentary interest for future generations. What counted more for Germany at the time, however, was the moral fibre of the men and women who risked (and often lost) their lives by attacking the Nazis in words or deeds. To put it another way, in the midst of the bloodshed and the chaos, creating high art was not a top priority. What was important for Christians and Marxists alike was the content rather than the delivery.

The poets, especially those in prisons and concentration camps who were effectively writing for themselves as they awaited probable death, realised that the most important thing was to transcend the idea of self. Worrying about your own life is an animal instinct, and these brute instincts had driven Germany crazy. What really mattered now was to go on the record as having resisted, no matter what the consequences.

"Even if we die," wrote Harro Schulze-Boysen from Berlin-Plötzensee prison, where he was murdered in 1942, "we know: the seed will grow."

Günther Weisenborn, a member of the Soviet espionage ring known as the Red Orchestra, used the same motif in a poem written whilst in incarceration:

The wind travels through the wheatfield
I lie under a tent of stars
And soon I will lie under the wheat

I'm still looking up, smiling
The whole thing doesn't stop with anyone
The dead have plenty of seed
For your world to inherit

"This is not good poetry," announces Charles W. Hoffmann with characteristic bluntness. He accepts, however, that the basic idea is a fine one. The whole thing ("das alles") implies something more important than any one life. For the communist Weisenborn this may have been the collective - the future socialist utopia. For the Catholic and Protestant poets it was God. But, as our own Shakespeare once asked, what's in a name?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer summed up the poets' sacrifices perfectly when somebody asked him why, as a Protestant pastor, he supported the plots to assassinate Hitler. "When a madman is behind the wheel of a car, and driving down the street," he replied, "as a pastor who is present I can't just console or bury those who get run over. I have to jump in between and stop him."

And now Britain in 2009 is experiencing its own version of the Schillerian imbalance. Instead of doing everything within our power to prevent the Nazis from winning seats, we focussed on temporary personal afflictions such as apathy and disillusionment and let them sneak in the back door. Even if it means voting tactically for a mainstream party we don't necessarily support, it is our duty as human beings to ensure that a political group which openly endorses the crimes of the Third Reich remains a lunatic fringe element and nothing more. A pretty straightforward challenge sent to us by God, or Karl Marx, or whoever you want, and we failed it with flying colours.

The opposition poets in Germany also wrote about the idea of collective guilt, that Hitler was something 'we' (as opposed to 'they') had allowed to happen, and everybody had something to answer for in the tragedy. This approach is as valid today as it ever was. On Sunday 7th June 2009, Britain, we, blew it. I didn't even bother to see if I could vote from abroad. I just crossed my fingers, went to bed and checked the BBC website the morning after to find out that we are now represented in Europe by two holocaust deniers.

In this city of ghosts, we are reminded on a daily basis of what happens when you let a madman behind the wheel. We've got two of them driving to Brussels now, and it's our fault.