Dear Editor
Dear Editor 'Miles': New Ending Because I was traveling, the tribute paid in your letters column of January 2 by my friend Adolf Sturmthal to the memory of "Miles," the founder of the German...
...The members who rejected his view and carried on the work were not a pro-Communist "radical current," but the bulk, of the organizations' activists—Including all the people whom Sturmthal mentions by name, such as Karl Frank, the groups representative abroad...
...The danger of this sort of attraction is obvious...
...they may still be kept in the army of believers by those attractions which cannot be destroyed by the criticism of the dogma...
...When people join a party or other group that enters into a struggle for a cause, they find gratifications that have nothing to do with the quality of the cause: fellowship with others, a sense of dedication, a sense of purpose...
...It was Walter Pater, a quite different breed of cat...
...It was Erler who then reorganized and led the group in Berlin, up to his arrest in late 1938...
...To be sure, to some of them, and perhaps to many, the god will eventually reveal himself as a monster, and this will end the worship...
...In his review as in his previous works, Draper has contributed to the demolition of the totalitarian dogma, and this is a very necessary job...
...one section in Bavaria was destroyed by the Gestapo as late as 1943...
...Westchester, N.Y...
...Our office in exile, of which I was the main publicist under the name of Paul Sering, eventually re-established cooperation with the exiled leaders of the German Social Democratic party in London...
...The issue of cooperation with the Communists played no role in our decision to continue the work of the group...
...The wave of arrests of the winter 1935-6 was not the result of "internal strife leading to denunciations," as Sturmthal says, but of carelessness of the old leadership in disposing their archives as they left Germany...
...But we must not believe that by revealing the tragic self-deceptions of idealists who have fallen into the fascist or Stalinist trap we have necessarily turned them away from (he god that is destined to fail...
...it has materialized not only in the case of intellectuals who floated into the Stalinist camp in the 1930's and late 1940's, but also in the case of young people who, prior to World War II, were sucked into the fascist movements, although they did not want to kill Jews, enslave Poles and Russians and airbomb Ethiopians...
...Miles not only recognized that the overthrow of Nazism would require military defeat, but he concluded from this as early as 1935 that further underground work in Germany was useless...
...Groups with a dogma that implies fanaticism can supply these gratifications more fully than others, because the dogma can give a sense of direction some people do not find in a society based on pluralism...
...The group's activity ended only when we decided to merge it in the re founded party at the end of the War, and its surviving Berlin members played an outstanding role in resisting a forced fusion with the Communists in 1945-6...
...Berlin, West Germany Richard Lowenthal...
...Fritz Erler, the later outstanding Social Democratic leader...
...Professor Emeritus of International Relations tree University Correction I wonder how many of your readers noticed that it wasn't Schopenhauer—As Bruce Cook had it in his column, "Requiem for Rock"—who said that art aspires to the condition of music...
...Berkeley, Cal...
...But I do not know the recipe for this and neither, it seems to me, does Draper or anyone else...
...Richard Hanser Wrong Direction 1 have not read Vivian Gornick's book The Romance of American Communism, and I do not know half of what Theodore Draper knows about American Communism, so I cannot contradict the factual statements in his review ("The Romanticizing of American Communism," NL, March 13...
...and, incidentally, myself...
...Dear Editor 'Miles': New Ending Because I was traveling, the tribute paid in your letters column of January 2 by my friend Adolf Sturmthal to the memory of "Miles," the founder of the German Socialist underground organization "New Beginning" during the Hitler years, has only now come to my attention...
...Just the same, I feel uncomfortable with this review because Draper treats very lightly an important fact which, as can be seen from what he says, is one of Gornick's main themes...
...If we want to shorten this sobering process and make it more general, however, we have to show how the struggle to preserve a free society can offer the same gratifications as that for a totalitarian idol...
...Carl Landauer Professor of Economics, Emeritus University of California, Berkeley...
...our common colleague Henry Ehrmann...
...The praise of Miles' initiative and originality in founding that movement is certainly well deserved...
...but in describing its alleged end, Sturmthal has regrettably fallen victim to a legend...
Vol. 61 • April 1978 • No. 9
