Not ashamed

Nikita Eliseev - about the book of Eric Mann "School of Barbarians"

Erica Mann, the daughter of a classic of German literature, in 1938 published a book in which she summarized the methods of Nazi propaganda aimed at the future of Germany - her children and adolescents. The “School of Barbarians” was almost simultaneously in two languages ​​and was intended for two audiences - German and American. The fact that the writer wanted to tell these two peoples, as well as that, thanks to the emergence of a Russian translation, we can subtract from it - in the material of Nikita Eliseev.

Starting from February 24, 2022, we were all in the face of the advancing barbarism, violence and lies. In this situation, it is extremely important to preserve at least the remnants of culture and support the values ​​of humanism - including for the sake of the future of Russia. Therefore, the editorial office of Gorky will continue to talk about books, reminding our readers that the world remains in the world and fiction.

Eric Mann. School of barbarians. Education at the Nazis. SPb.: Jaromír Hladík Press, 2023. Translation from English Vladimir Lazaris. Content . Fragment

Habent Sua Fata Libelli - this fragment of a line from the poem of Terentanian Mavra, Roman poet and philologist of the II century AD, has become a winged expression, aphorism: "Books have their own fate." Terentanian Moor further extended his reasoning as follows: the fate of books depends on readers. I like it - the book will become famous, you won’t like it - it will go to summer.

However, time made adjustments to this aphorism. Now we perceive it differently. There are books without history, without its biography, fate, but there is with your fate, biography, history. Eric Mann Book “School of Barbarians. Education at the Nazis ”with the preface of her father, Thomas Mann, who published in Russian translated by Vladimir Lazaris, just like this-with a biography and fate.

Her biography, of course, is closely connected with the fate of the author, the author of the preface and translator. Let's start with Erica. The daughter of the classic of German literature, the Nobel laureate, Erica became a writer, teacher, and cabaretics. Unlike the father, the conservative, the patriot and the traditionalist, she occupied the extremely left positions, relatives (let's call the monster with his real name) to the Communists. She emigrated from Germany in 1935. In 1938, in Amsterdam, she published the book “10 million children. The upbringing of youth in the Third Reich ”on German and the same year the same book - in English in the USA under a different name:“ School of barbarians. Education at the Nazis. " Erica worked out a huge number of children's and youthful, pedagogical Nazi magazines, Nazi textbooks, manuals, verses for children and youth and analyzed all ... this.

Thomas Mann wrote a preface to the English version of his daughter’s book. Here we must dwell on the position of the author of the introduction. I repeat, Thomas Mann never shared his left beliefs. During the First World War and immediately after it, he published two books - “Thoughts during the War” and “The Reasoning of the Apolitical” - with which he also pricked his eyes in America in America. Still! This is how he then appreciated the Brest world: “The world with Russia! What I dreamed about all the years of the war. Now the war will continue hand in hand with another anti -bourgeois, anti -democratic nation. It will be a war against liberalism, democracy and false sacred human rights! ”

These two books, again, are not without reason, are considered one of the ideological foundations of the “conservative revolution”, from which fascism and Nazism have grown. Those with more hatred were Thomas Mann to the Nazis. They discredited his traditionalism, his conservatism, his German patriotism. These sadists, pogroms, poorly educated boor, allowing themselves to be criminal jokes about their defenseless opponents - the embodiment of the German spirit? Defenders of traditional values? Are they knights? Bandits, criminals, for their crimes, are able to pull on any ideology that allows them to carry out what is sweeter to them is violence.

Anyone, but not they ... they dishonor, dishonor Germany worse than any occupiers. In this position, Thomas Mann remained until his death. In the “Reasoning of the Apolitical”, he devoted a whole enthusiastic chapter “Paclesrine” - the opera of Hans Pfitzner, his then friend. Pfitzner became a Nazis, one of the leaders of the musical life of the Reich. After the war, a very old, very sick composer, whose son died on the Eastern Front, and his wife, during the bombing, should have been called to the denazification commission. German intellectuals made up a requested letter to denazifiers, they say, well, leave the old man alone, he did not have long left, and his music is wonderful. They collected signatures, wrote Thomas Mann, they say, help your friend (albeit the former). Mann answered with restrained rage: “For this tonsetzer, I won’t move a finger ...” I will explain: the Nazis with all their might Germanized the tongue. Therefore, not a componist (a composer is a foreign word), but ... a sound engineer is Tonsetzer.

This rage, restrained by a polite tone, correct expressions, is tangible in the preface of Thomas Mann to the book of his daughter, Erica Mann. The country that now lives under this power is disgraced, disheveled. This is not my country. She deserves the defeat in the war that she will untie. In the Russian poet, this sensation is more clearly expressed, rude: “So the spirit of the Nibelungs and Schiller Spirit / once a Nazism was covered. / The legend of Faust died so much / in the shadow of the Hackengerian, under the canle of the eagle, / and the Fuhrer ended Dürer, / a Luther died of this. "

And finally, the translator, Vladimir Lazaris, the author of one of the best books about the 30-40s of the last century is the White Crow. He translated the book of Eric Mann in the USSR, in the mid-1970s, when he was "in refusal." I will explain again: he filed a repatriation in Israel, he was kicked out of work, but was not released from the country. This was called: "To be in refusal." Then he stumbled upon the book of Erika Mann, which he writes about in the preface of the translator: “This happened in the house of the theater department Lyubov Davydovna Wendrovskaya, who in his youth was an employee of Vakhtangov and worked at the Jewish Theater“ Gabima ”. She took out a battered American edition from the shelf, on the cover of which in the red collapse of the fire, the swastika was blackened, and books were burning in the stake. “The School of the Barbarians” became a complete revelation for me, because along with my generation I went about the same education that she talked about (I cannot but note the conscientiousness and objectivity of Vladimir Lazaris: for all, to put it mildly - dislike of the Soviet system, he still cannot admit that the Soviet education was exactly the same. - N.E. ). On the one hand, this book was late for me for many years, on the other hand, it came in handy, because at that time the Jewish repatriation in Israel was in full swing, and after the failure of the exit, I edited the Samizdat magazine Jews in the USSR, where several chapters from the Barvar School were published. A well -conspiracy machine reprinted the translation on the Erica typewriter, combining the name of the author of the book with the main instrument of samizdat, which is known (from the song of Galich. - N.E. ) “Beres Four Copies”. The fourth, the most blind copy, which survived two home searches and customs inspection, somehow miraculously reached me to Israel and lay in a table box for another forty years before the first journal publication (Lehaim, No. 5, 2016). The words of Adolf Hitler “to whom the youth belongs, the future belongs to this“ could become an epigraph for the “School of the Barbarians”. After all, this is exactly what this book tells about seduction, corruption and conquest of children's minds. ”

Better than Vladimir Lazaris, you can’t say about the book that was translated. Yes. The book is about this. About the generation, which from childhood is put in the false coordinate system. Therefore, another epigraph is seen (or heard): "Woe to the one who seduces these small ones, it would be better if he hung the millstone to himself in his neck." If even in just five years (from 1933 to 1938) in schools, newspapers, magazines, textbooks, military-sports camps to explain to children and adolescents that there is nothing better than a war that is packed by the spirit of the nation, that our country is surrounded by enemies who only dream of destroying it, that there are vile influence agents of influence, which are allowed (and encouraged) to report that our country is the most The best, the most spiritual, the most cultural and better let the whole world die than our country, that - even in these five years - will come of these children and adolescents?

Yes. It is exactly what will turn out: the thoughtless soldiers of the Wehrmacht and the SS, the warders in the concentration camps and the sadists in the Gestapo. It is these grown children and adolescents that will bring grief and torment to neighboring countries. It is to them that the boomerang will return to the grief and suffering that they brought down on others. There is nothing to add, except perhaps ... Addresses or recipients of the books of Eric Mann, her reader audience - German and English -speaking, American.

The German book is addressed to emigrants and those who remained (for one reason or another) in Germany, who will get either a miracle either the book itself or its typewritten copy (blind, fourth copy). With the appeal to emigrants, everything is clear. No matter how hard it is in exile, we did the right thing that we left. There (if we are employees of culture) it makes no sense to stay. There is nowhere to hide from the human rights. If one of us will have to write textbooks on arithmetic, then he will have to give examples the appropriate ones-not about apples and plums, but about bombs and cartridges. If someone is engaged in local history, then he will be forced to write about the German spirit of his native land and the corruption of the Jews. If you are there, you will work for them - you want it or not.

Appeal to those who remained, oddly enough, more personal. The main array of examples of Eric Mann is the Bavarian educational and propaganda literature. Erica Mann was born in Munich. A layer of local intelligentsia there is enough thin. One way or another, everyone (or the enemy of the enemy) knows. Eric Mann's appeal to them is not so obvious, but it is. How can you? Doctors of sciences, director of gymnasiums, educated people - how can you do this? Are you really not ashamed? In the end, they could relate to patriotic events. Advertising texts about women's linen on the third floor of the Ulshtein publishing house write, scatter reviews, but do this? The answer is also clear: not ashamed. One of the slogans of fascism: not ashamed.

Eric Mann gives one of many examples of Nazi repressions against those decent people who remained in Germany. The pastor of the town of Netherben, Friedrich Müller, taught his parishioners that the party, the government and the Fuhrer with God and the Fatherland should not be confused. For God and Fatherland, one can and should become a martyr, but for the party, government, Fuhrer? No. The pastor was arrested. Then (in 1935) they limited themselves to a fine. (Pastor Müller was sent to the concentration camp in the 39th, he died in a concentration camp-in the 42nd) The Black Corps official body about the arrest of Müller in 1935 wrote this: “Now the pastor Müller in prison. He trains a martyr. " A person who allowed himself such a joke is deprived of not only the heart, he is devoid of shame. He is not ashamed to joke like that.

The addressee and recipient of the English -language and American book Eric Mann is an American of 1938. Typical, medium. He knows that there is nothing worse than the war (Oldington and Hemingway, he read). He knows that he should not intervene in the internal affairs of other countries. America has enough its problems. American conservative, anti -communist journalists drive Nazi Germany and write books about how Hitler stopped the communist infection, how the German people love him, as a wonderful, in traditional spirit, educate Germany youth.

Children and adolescents are not slying through the streets after school, but united in alliances: girls - into the "Union of German Virgins", kids in - units of "Pfimfs", those who are older - in the "Hitler Youth". Sports camps, interest mugs - what is bad?

The Americans Eric Mann explains what German children are taught in all these wonderful sports camps and interest circles. They are taught to war. They are being prepared for war: march marks, the ability to throw a grenade, shoot, kill. They are taught not just the technical skills of war, but the fact that war is wonderful, heroism, valor, front -line fraternity. Children are turned into small soldiers. In those soldiers who will ruthlessly fight against you, Americans. It’s not too late (1938) - stop this horde. She rushes on you not next year, so in a year. If a whole generation is pumped up by war, then it (this generation) will blow itself up and the whole world in a terrifying disaster.

This is not just a country with its own characteristics, with which you can trade, negotiate, negotiate something, to make some concessions-this is an horde, barbarians. It is impossible to agree with them and negotiate with them. They want war. And they will arrange a war if they cannot be stopped. How? At least not to listen to conservative American journalists who excitedly tell you how good Germany is under the guidance of its effective manager, Adolf Hitler.

There is a third recipient of this book - you and I, the inhabitants of today's Russia. Well, here is how the card will lie down. How someone reads this book. That's what I was interested in, or rather in her notes. The fate of those who scribbled methodological manuals, textbooks, poems for children and youth ("Old bones tremble ..."!). What happened to them after the war? Nothing special. With rare exceptions (they committed suicide in 1945 or in 1946) they lived normally. Continued to produce methodological manuals, teach. Many of them were not even members of the Nazi party and therefore were not subject to ... denazification. And the denazified for five years did not work by profession, could not occupy state debts, did not have the right to choose and be elected (so he did not choose anyone with Nazism), then returned to the profession. No, I don't mind. A democratic solution to the problem who argues. The question remains for them: how was it not ashamed of them? But this is a personal, intimate question. Why ask him? So, not ashamed.