Lead dogs: Kriegszittern and the post-war

 

Kafka being an expert on work related accidents was called upon, in World War I, to use his talents in Prague’s Temporary Psychiatric Hospital for shell shocked soldiers. He wrote a publicity sheet for the Hospital that rather disconcerts his biographer, Reiner Stach.  Far from Kafka the response of the Dadaists, which was to spit on the war. Instead, this is how the sheet begins: “Fellow Countrymen!  The World War, in which all human misery is concentrated, is also a war of nerves, more so than ay previous war. And in this war of nerves, all too many suffer defeat. Just as the intensive operation of machinery during the last few decades’ peacetime jeopardized, far more than ever before, the nervous system of those so employed, giving rise to nervous disturbances and disorders, the enormous increase in the mechanical aspect of contemporary warfare has caused the most serious risks and suffering for the nerves of our fighting men.”

 

This is written for a good purpose, because returning shell shocked soldiers – the famous Kriegszitterer – were definitely in need of care. But it is clothed in the average middle class patriotism of a good Kakanian citizen. Nothing here leads one to doubt the systems at play – they are the given.

 

Of course, at the same time Kafka’s feeling about these systems flowed into such stories as the Penal Colony, where the functionaries of the system that destroys its victims themselves submit to its machinery – but only, note, because there was some bug in the machine, some fault.

 

It is interesting to contrast the end of World War I and the end of World War II. In the second case, the end led to what the French call the “thirty glorious years” – a Keynesian capitalism subtended by extensive social democratic institutions, which were funded, the latter, by heavy taxes on the wealthiest. The former ended with a vast global spirt of liberalism – in the U.S., taxes on the wealthy were halved, and regulations were loosened, while in Britain and France, the movement was to gold standards and financialization of capital.

The currents of the collective psyche are murky. Contemporaries can dive in there, but they come back with doubtful impressions. It is even worse diving into the collective psyche of eras past. However, I do wonder if, after bombing had extended the trauma to civilian populations, the fauna of the urban postwar in the twenties – the crippled, the Kriegszitterer spastically selling pencils on street corners, the literally defaced, all of which became part of ordinary life without really pushing society into a more pacifistic and socialistic system – I wonder if the memory of this worked on the good people streaming away from the onset of the Soviets, cleaning up the rubble in Berlin and London, figuring out the balance of treachery and resistance in Paris, etc.  – I wonder if this memory worked as a powerful incentive to the social insurance put in place in the late forties and fifties. The fate of the mustard gassed veteran from World War I was now no stranger to the firebombed or V2-ed citizen of any European urb.

 

The shell shocked did not only include veterans – in Germany, in particular, it led to an art of shock, of outrage that included in its scope not only the leaders but the led, the frustratingly led. The led who never woke up, who spoke in an already outmoded feudal trance.  There’s a poem of Kurt Tucholsky that has this spirit of outrage in it – Lead dogs. Actually, Tucholsky’s entire work contains this demon of outrage, but this one is short and sweet.  It was published under one of his pseudonyms, Theobold Tiger, in the Weltbuehne in 1921.

 

 

Clever dogs lead the tip tapping blind through the streets

Knowing how to find the right ways, scent and seek.

Once, you sightless, others lead you for four and a half years.

They growled and howled and made living men fear.

 

Once, blind ones, wolves led you into filthy pits,  

Put you in chains and foddered you with bits.

They ran away when it all collapsed. Following their bloody feasts

they skipped over the border with the liability round their necks   . . .

Carefully, your dog quivers at the end of his lead.

His look is faithful, ears cocked, watchful for your need.

 

You, blind men! None, none, of your puffed up, pimped up

Leaders stands so human and high before God as your pup!