THE BROKEN STONES

...see how the weeds and flowers and saplings grow again...

...We prefer being dead to just being buried...

...Ah, but stones do not grow, men must move them...

...by comparison with Darmstadt, an hour away...

...The I. G. Hoch-haus survived to be the American headquarters, and the German dye trust survived under other names, you will have to guess which, and in other places, you will have to guess where...

...In the first case, you're only a dead enemy...

...At least that's what the broken stones add up to...

...The removal of Hitler removed, with him, the cornerstone of German existence: durability...

...To face it would mean to realize that it would have been better never to have been born, never to have done this...

...They think that we have now come to the point of such need and that we will try to make an empire in our time...

...The war, and the Occupation, which seized what was left when the fires were out, was the time of the last generation...

...They don't even have to hit your neighbor's living room...

...You must remember, while you sit in your living room listening to the Presidents and the Generals, that your living room is the prime military installation and your grandmother's picture on the wall there, which you never look at because it will always be there, is the prime military objective...

...The reason is that the stones on which they stood, and in which they lived, are broken...

...The employed are doing what is still urgent, building machinery for factories and building sewerage systems, factories, power plants, railroad equipment, trucks, ships, the workingmen's bicycles, and all the urgent items, like pleasure cars, that are needed to attract urgent American dollars...

...So there aren't enough men to move the broken stones, and the rubble stands where it fell, or dangles where it half-fell, six or seven years ago...

...pictures are tiresome...

...You know you can't put Germany together again, any more than you can Poland or Korea...

...And now, only six or seven years afterward, whatever made any of you suppose that any of it would be rebuilt...

...and their beds at night...

...The second will appear in the December issue of The Progressive, followed by other installments throughout the winter of 1952...

...There never was any such thing as strategic bombing...

...All the rest was strategically unstrategic, and the Presidents and the Generals were only fooling us, and they were only fooling us because we wanted to be fooled...

...You did it, you know...

...A book might have been saved, or a pair of shoes, or a mother or a child...

...The trouble with words is that they are worth, as one of our former allies, Confucius, say, only one-thousandth of one picture...

...We build one every 50 years anyway...

...So is Korea joined to the very soil of Russia and to China's soil, and is separated from Japan by only a narrow strip of water...

...it was the only way to get rid of him, and, along with him, of everything that was built to last...

...It's all because you can't believe it...

...You literally and figuratively will not, can not, come face to face with reality...

...It would be one more folly on our part did we believe that we can ever establish in Korea a government favorable only to the United States...

...And a bombardier who lets go from a mile, or two miles, or five miles up, can hardly miss if he lets go over a city...

...There are no rural slums, no bulging, leaning, or caving bars...

...Rebuilt?—Why, they haven't begun to take the rubble away, not even in Frankfurt, the American showcase...

...Houses mean people...

...But it takes money to move hands, and there is no money...

...You don't stare (or avoid staring) because you're Americans, or because you're Germans, but because you are people, and people did this to people...

...whether the Germans have learned the lesson we had to teach I don't know...

...Nothing means people so much as a house, and these were people's houses...

...has he seen...

...And still, men are cheap in Germany...

...And then you go back, and stare...

...In the second you're a live ally...

...I think not, not for a few hundred years...

...Germans were best, and very good, in their quaint German way, when they stayed where they were with things as they'd been...

...Not the munitions plants, the airfields, or the switchyards, but the houses, the houses where the people lived, with their children and their old folks, with their cooking, their washing, their sewing, their Sunday dinner...

...Where is this Jove whose "Bombs away...

...I do not think it was Communism that made the Chinese soldiers fight against us in Korea...

...I know where he is, if he isn't buried, or unburied in Korea...

...These were the houses...

...Two thousand years to build, and then—bang...

...They want stones, great stones, German stones, and until they have them we observers will go on observing that the Germans do not know where or who they are, or what to think or what to do...

...The stark necessity of observing what every other observer observes compels me to observe that the central fact of German life today is that the Germans do not know who or what they are, or what to think or what to do...

...But then there are hands, like the hands that laid these stones a hundred or a thousand years ago...

...no tarpaper or clapboard shanties, except where the new refugees have put them together beside the tracks...

...that nothing lasts, nothing stays, that they, like us, must keep moving, and that life unembel-lished by television this year, and color television next, is not worth living...

...And then you would sit down, with what you had done all around you, and cry, like the little girl who got mad and tore her doll to pieces and then saw what she'd done...

...He hasn't worn his ruptured duck for years, and his kids have lost his ribbons...

...True, too, too true...

...The way to win wars is to hit homes, preferably with people in them, but to hit homes in any case...

...You must remember that it isn't your life and your work that yield the bomb its big dividend, but your The Only Hope for Korea The people of Asia are saying that Americans are no different from other white people...

...Has he seen, where the great gnarled iron fences that Germans love in front of their houses still stand twisted, with a big black X painted across the big brass nameplate on the iron letterbox that hangs from the fence...

...As they were bad (if relentless) tourists, so they were unspeakable conquerors...

...and there is not, so far as I have seen, a frame house, even a good frame house, in Germany...

...The reason the grown-ups refuse to face it is plain...

...seeing is not believing...

...This is what the Germans had to do, because they had to go on living...

...But the people who- say that Frankfurt wasn't hit hard are talking in blithe comparisons...

...Or a passport...

...Ruins...

...Exactly what words are there...

...walk— through the Platz der Republik to the Senckenberganlage, Frankfurt's Riverside Drive, and see what happened to the University, the Clinics, and the Museum, and, of course, always the homes...

...all of which would be as un-American as it is un-German...

...Only being there, being mangled in soul, being hit (or not being hit), running to it or from it, being bedeviled forever by what might have been done a half-hour before or a half-minute after...

...Words don't tell you anything...

...They try to find a place to live, or a way to live in the legal limit of one room to a person— counting kitchens and baths as rooms...

...If you didn't do it in Frankfurt, you did it in London...

...Then you go away from it somewhere where you won't see it—a little picture-book town like Marburg, and you forget all about it...

...III We must cure the Germans of their old romanticism, on which Nazism battened...

...Korea has always been a danger spot, a gate into Asia...

...They have fought, those Chinese, to keep us from the soil of Asia, which is their soil...

...Has he stared, and then wondered if anyone knows, and then marveled that nobody stares but him...

...This devotion to durability was cause and consequence of provincialism...

...It took two thousand years, and a little more, to build all this in the first place, two thousand years of man hours...

...That one glimpse of Worms says what no Christian American would say to himself, that there never was any such thing as strategic bombing...

...Korea should be like a Switzerland in Asia...

...They will not learn from us...

...But sleepless workers weren't moving so fast, and terrified workers were moving still slower, and workers whose homes were gone—and maybe a wife or child—weren't moving fast at all...

...There is only one way to learn to live with the broken stones—settled together now, with weeds and flowers and saplings coming up through cracks in the heaps—and that is to become part of them...

...the imagination is inadequate to really grand occasions like the bombing of a modern city...

...Right up until the total collapse of steel fabrication, the Germans had four rails in the yards for every rail in use...

...This was Frankfurt, or Hamburg, or Munich —or Rotterdam, or Warsaw, or Stalingrad...

...Shut your eyes and livel And where is the nice, clean-cut Christian American who was only a speck in the sky, beyond the flak, who opened the bays and dropped the phosphorous with the abandon that only raw rich America knows...

...But that is the lesson of the broken stones...

...I am afraid that we have taught them, by breaking their stones, what we ourselves believe, that last year's model is lousy...

...Or a child might have been saved if a pair of shoes had been let go, or a mother if a child had been let go...

...The war was Hitler's failure in Germany...

...Just another pleasant platitude from Geneva, from the Hague, and from Nuremberg...

...If a single bomb drops on Germany," said Herman Goer-ing in 1941, "my name is Meyer," and the Germans' idea of a joke, in 1942, was to refer to Hermann Meyer...

...It isn't possible...

...When its stones were broken, and the stones of the houses, the schools, the museums, the Germans lost their faith...

...Has he been back to see, from the ground, the handiwork of his finger...

...He is clerking in the branch bank, or the lawyer's office, or the railroad, or in the ready-to-wear department at the Boston Store or the Bon Marche or the Fair...

...especially somebody else's...

...It takes more than seeing to believe...

...Whatever is wrong with Beethoven Platz...

...Pearl S. Buck in Look magazine reason for living and your reason for working...

...They are saying that it was only when we had no material need of empire that we did not attack them as the others did...

...It was built to last, every house...

...If you come any closer, we will blow ourselves up with it...

...not to accept them, but to be accepted by them...

...Tomatoes are 10 cents a pound, dahlias a nickel apiece, because tomatoes and dahlias are only labor...

...Destruction"?—Yes, destruction was done, but destruction is done to old freight cars and mad dogs...

...And where are its windows...

...The strategy was to bomb cities, because the railroad yards and factories were there and because the homes were there...

...Marburg/Lahn, Germany YOU stare at it, like a child at a funeral, and then you see that the rest of the people, the grown-ups, don't stare, though you're sure they'd like to...

...Let them bomb America, and we'll build a new America...

...Perhaps the unemployed...

...Better not say it at all...

...I am afraid that we have taught the Germans something, some of them...

...So where there were homes, there are heaps...

...And, if we can't do anything else for them, we can at least stop talking about their growing, and their reeducation, and their democratization...

...No, not the unemployed...

...You must be more romantic than you ever were before and run away from it—and from the insurance policies, and the Nazi government's certificates of indemnification, and the shoes, the passport, the book, the child, or the mother...

...Even if you weren't spending half of what you have left on the last war and the next, you couldn't do it...

...You will not and cannot stare at it...

...They had to bury the meaning of the stones by being absorbed by them, the way you bury anything intolerable you have to live with— a craving for alcohol by becoming alcoholic...

...You are tempted, when you have merely seen a German city, to say that if every American could see one every American would vote the following ultimatum to Russia: We have the hydrogen bomb...

...There it is, just as it was the morning after the raid, only with weeds and flowers and saplings growing through cracks in the heaps...

...Rubble means garbage dumps, slag heaps, unburnable old bed springs or walls torn down for new walls...

...And, because it's the American showcase, it's had more new construction (construction, not reconstruction) than any West German city except, of course, Berlin, the American Maginot Line...

...But Germany was not like America...

...If you could, you'd go down the street like the rest of the people, the grown-ups, refusing to face it...

...The one thing they didn't need was Leben-sraum...

...a shrew...

...the very tenement houses were built (and so was everything else) of stone or of .gargantuan timbers laced together and covered with a smooth, impermeable stucco...

...First you must see the roundhouse in Worms, and then you will know all about the Big Lie (American), which is just as big as the Big Lie (Russian) or the Big Lie (German...

...And words and phrases like "hit," "got it," "knocked over," "kaput" talk about prize fights or three-balls-for-a-dime at an amusement park...

...Life is stronger than death...

...Isn't it intact, even to the little Christ Church, so perfectly proportioned, in the middle...

...Only so can the Korean people be independent until the nations are ready to set up world government...

...Freiburg was knocked over with one raid, Dresden leveled in 24 hours...

...All we can say is that Frankfurt was "hit," or "hit hard...

...the same old fear that made Japan our enemy...

...But how...

...If that seems unreasonable to any American, let him imagine the Russians taking over Mexico and establishing there a government favorable only to the Soviet Union...

...While in Europe Mayer will also do special assignments for the University of Chicago Round Table, the Great Books Foundation, and the American Friends Service Committee, with all of which he was identified in this country...

...Your first good glimpse of it is at Worms, and there you may see the picture that the picture magazines forgot to take—a great roundhouse, intact and untouched, and, a half-mile away, a whole row of walls that were once apartment houses...

...They fought because they believed that we are the new empire builders and Communist propaganda seized upon their fear...

...ruins fell down, little by little, or were knocked down, with magnificent effort, by people whose names and places are bleached by ancient suns...

...But every American won't see a German city, and those who will will learn at once not to look, lest they sit down in the center of it and cry and wish they had never been born, and then send the ultimatum to Russia...

...And the trouble with pictures is that you aren't in them...

...Wreckage is accidental...

...Frankfurt, as big cities go, wasn't hit hard...

...If they can hit your living room, they can let your factory go...

...but a refrigerator is a thing, and only the very rich have refrigerators...

...When Ribbentrop's art connoisseurs started cutting paintings from frames in the Rijksmuseum in Holland, even before Herrmann Goering became Hermann Meyer, Germany was lost, because Germans believe that things, including Vermeer's painting, should always stay where they have always been, and when they broke the stones in Holland, they were already losing their faith...

...A master shoemaker charges you 12 cents for a half hour's labor, but new shoes cost you as much as they do in the United States...

...The trouble with words...

...We would not tolerate it...

...made broken stones of people's homes...

...Everything was built by—or for —people who would never move away until the last generation...

...It was hit and it burned itself out, and its walls and its steeple still stand intact, and a man hoes vegetables in the back of the churchyard...

...But why is the little Christ Church so quiet...

...at worst the nicely raked remains of one of those front-page fires where three firemen, overcome by smoke, are revived by the resuscitation squad...

...The closest thing to it was the German Stuka—the dive bomber—and the Japanese suicide bomber...

...One was the Patent Office in Berlin, a miracle of survival, and another, no less miraculously, was the headquarters of the German dye trust, the magnificent I. G. Hoch-haus, one of the world's biggest buildings, set off all by itself in its great private park in Frankfurt, one of the few sure things, to hit or to miss, in Germany...

...And from there to little Beethoven Platz, off Mendels-sohnstrasse, where Shumannstrasse, Schubertstrasse, and Dantestrasse meet...

...It is, indeed...

...A few million, the strongest, are dead, a few hundred thousand in prison in Russia...

...Why, my friends, the Little Christ Church is hollow, that's all...

...There are stones weighing a ton, and stone walls weighing a thousand tons...

...that the new, and only the new, is the beautiful...

...A worthy company, and little Beethoven Platz is worthy of them, one of those intimate little squares which all Europeans, and no Americans, knew how to create...

...You don't even dream about it, and that shows you really don't want to dream about it...

...Thus, there are not enough men to move it all away—or even begin— but there are too many men because there isn't enough money...

...He isn't staring, either...

...we are not romantic...

...The rest are either employed or unemployed...

...Then you're prepared for Frankfurt, and for every other bombed city, in at least one respect...

...Within two to six hours after a yard was hit, it was moving again...

...Even if the men weren't dead and the forests burned and the factories smashed and dismantled, the mines all stripped, you couldn't do it...

...They will grow through romanticism to reality—this on the assumption that reality is a good thing—or they won't grow at all...

...Civilian populations...

...Or Seoul...

...You see, there isn't machinery to spare from urgent construction, and the stones are heavy...

...The refugees came last, from the east, but even the western towns have increased their population by as much as 50...

...He'll get the idea when he sees yours...

...Men are cheap, but things are expensive...

...And then there are no one knows how many splendid testaments to the wisdom of conquerors— the houses seized by the Americans, French, and British (the French are the worst, the Americans next), and held empty for months and years...

...By breaking their old romantic stones and replacing them with jerry-built democracy and Coca Cola...

...Neutrality must be the goal, a sternly guarded and constantly maintained neutrality...

...MILTON MAYER, a regular contributor to The Proqressive, recently started a year's appoint' ment on the social science staff of the University of Frankfort...

...There were, of course, a few notorious cases of strategy, where clearly discernible targets were, so the gossip will go forever, off limits for bombing...

...Where are the men...

...But, then, Germans are not very funny, and they don't try to be funny now...

...Ruins are what you come to Europe to stare at, not to avoid staring at...

...II You see the first of it, coming from Paris, at Saarbrucken, but you don't see much there because the French had the patience to wait until they were liberated before stealing the Saar, with its German-speaking population...

...It's like saying that Christ, in the course of his carpentering, got a nail through his hand...

...a paralyzed body...

...And so you stop staring, and you go down the street like the rest of the people, looking at this new shop or at that old tower, but all the time, like a child who knows it's not nice but doesn't know why it's not nice, you stare secretly...

...Rubble...

...You must walk from the station— don't be an American...

...Wreckage...