Lanny listened to the discussions of these Berlin intellectuals. They came from all classes,
brought together by community of ideas. They had the keenest realization of danger to the
cause of freedom and social justice. They all wanted to do something; but first they had to
agree what to do, and apparently they couldn't; they talked and argued until they were
exhausted. Lanny wondered, is this a disease which afflicts all intellectuals? Is it a paralysis which
accompanies the life of the mind? If so, then it must be that the thinkers will be forever
subject to the men of brute force, and Plato's dream of a state ruled by philosophers will
remain forever vain.
Lanny thought: "Somebody ought to lead them!" He wanted to say: "My God, it may be
settled this very night. Your republic will be dead! Let's go now, and call the workers out!" But
then he thought: "What sort of a figure would I cut, taking charge of a German revolution? I,
an American!" He settled back and listened to more arguments, and thought: "I'm like all the
others. I'm an intellectual, too! I happen to own some guns, and know how to use them—but I
wouldn't!"
V
There was a teacher of art at the school, by name Trudi Schultz, very young, herself a student
at an art school, but two or three evenings a week she came to impart what she knew to the
workers, most of them older than herself. She was married to a young commercial artist who
worked on a small salary for an advertising concern and hated it. Both Trudi and Ludi Schultz
were that perfect Aryan type which Adolf Hitler lauded but conspicuously was not; the girl had
wavy fair hair, clear blue candid eyes, and sensitive features which gave an impression of
frankness and sincerity. Lanny watched her making sketches on a blackboard for her class, and
it seemed to him that she had an extraordinary gift of line; she drew something, then wiped it
out casually, and he hated to see it go.
She was pleased by his interest and invited him to come and see her work. So, on another
evening while Irma played bridge, Lanny drove Freddi and Rahel to a working class quarter
of the city where the young couple lived in a small apartment. Lanny inspected a mass of
crayon drawings and a few water-colors, and became interested in what he believed was a real
talent. This girl drew what she saw in Berlin; but she colored it with her personality. Like Jesse
Blackless she loved the workers and regarded the rich with moral disapprobation; that made
her work "propaganda," and hard to sell. But Lanny thought it ought to appeal to the Socialist
press and offered to take some with him and show it to Leon Blum and Jean Longuet. Of
course the Schultzes were much excited— for they had heard about Lanny's having selected
old masters for the palace of Johannes Robin, and looked upon the wealthy young American
as a power in the art world.
Lanny, for his part, was happy to meet vital personalities in the workers' movement. More
and more he was coming to think of art as a weapon in the social struggle, and here were
young people who shared his point of view and understood instantly what he said.
He had traveled to many far places, while they knew only Berlin and its suburbs and the
countryside where they sometimes had walking trips; yet they had managed to get the same
meaning out of life. More and more the modern world was becoming one; mass production was
standardizing material things, while the class struggle was shaping the minds and souls of workers
and masters. Lanny had watched Fascism spread from Italy to Germany, changing its name
and the color of its shirts, but very little else; he heard exactly the same arguments about it
here in Berlin as in Paris, the Midi, and the Rand School of Social Science in New York.
These five young people, so much alike in their standards and desires, talked out of their
hearts in a way that Lanny had not had a chance to do for some time. All of them were
tormented by fears of what was coming in Europe, and groping to determine their own duty
in the presence of a rising storm of reaction. What were the causes of the dreadful paralysis
which seemed to have fallen upon the workers' movement of the world?
Trudi Schultz, artist-idealist, thought that it was a failure of moral forces. She had been
brought up in a Marxist household, but was in a state of discontent with some of the dogmas
she had formerly taken as gospel; she had observed that dialectical materialism didn't keep
people from quarreling, from being jealous, vindictive, and narrow-minded. Socialists talked
comradeship, but too often they failed in the practice of it, and Trudi had decided that more
than class consciousness was needed to weld human beings into a social unity.
Freddi Robin, who had a scholar's learning in these matters, ventured the opinion that the
identification of Social-Democracy with philosophic materialism was purely accidental, due to
the fact that both had originated in nineteenth-century Germany. There was no basic
