Insel pp211-256 Douglas (part 2)

Twelve Austrians, who according to the records were interned before the outbreak of war on 28 July 1914,^ⁱ have been repatriated. The Viennese upholsterer, who would very much have liked to see his large family once more before his death, has died in Liverpool on the transport back home; he had in his time helped us to furnish our hut and make it feel like home. I visited him often in the Upper Camp and listened to him telling stories of his beautiful homeland.

The War has lasted now for two years; who would have thought this long duration possible? Do all evil things, like good things, have to go in threes? The private money transferred to us prisoners by the German Bank, with considerable exchange-rate loss, which over the course of years has grown to be a vast amount, is no longer being paid out to us in banknotes of the Isle of Man, which are worth fifty per cent less than the English ones; instead they are being paid in variously coloured vouchers, with which we are then obliged to buy the discarded rubbish of the bankrupt shopkeepers of this island, at very top prices. A glittering business transaction for whomsoever it may concern.

Today I was once more with the Commandant in Eastcliff, his villa. After having had to wait a long time in the corridor, leaning against the wall, the sergeant calls the names; I wrote my name, high in the numbers. Colonel Madoc is sitting there, like a grand-prince, at his writing desk; he first looks at each man suspiciously, curt questions and answers, they then hand out a chit — and in the next man goes.

In the afternoon, the Commandant, together with 'Penny', his dog, opened the Art Exhibition in the Upper Camp. This attracted a lively crowd, even though the sun was bringing the black-tarred roofs almost to the point of melting. I saw myself hung up on the wall, and taking criticism. Ramenz, Michels and von Beyerheim had their best portraits displayed; Dr. Marshall, too, and Mr. Cunningham, smirked down from their [p. 212] frames. The caricatures of camp life also made a comical impression, as well as several naively composed studies of sailors' hands.

Everyone was up in arms after the evening meal, when a letter from a repatriated prisoner was read out to us by Herr Koe…, Director of the Mannesmann Tube Works in Cardiff. This ex-prisoner, after his arrival in Germany, had, as he had promised us, published an article in which he described his experiences in English prison camps, and pointed to the fact that little or nothing was happening at the official level to improve the fate of around sixty-thousand Germans. He had convinced himself earlier of how much better the few thousand interned Englishmen in Ruhleben were having it; they were even permitted to go to sanatoriums. The great bulk of civilian internees, thus he wrote in his article, had left their families, abandoned all over the world, and had in distress fervently attempted to reach their homeland; they had had their goods and chattels snatched from them, and been led off unlawfully, even from neutral territory, to years of imprisonment. He said he could not comprehend the lack of understanding shown by Germany's official circles towards these hard facts, and the English themselves understood this minimal concern even less. In answer to this, he continued, an opposing article had appeared in a German world-press newspaper, the Jewish-run Berlin Daily Newspaper,^ⁱⁱ in which the civilian internees were characterised as 'straw-mattress patriots' and 'barbed-wire heroes'. In the discussion which followed, we heard very strong and most appropriate comments on this case; while as far as I am concerned any comment is superfluous.

A neighbouring meadow with a stand of trees has been rented out to the Camp Treasury for the neat little sum of four thousand marks. A "Bridge of Sighs" is to be built out from our [p. 213] our camp over the carriageway, in the shape of a wooden corridor, with barbed wire as its top. They've been 'working' on this for six weeks now. The meadow will probably not be made ready for use before late autumn.

Herr von Beyerheim is sad and embittered, because his 'English wife'^ⁱⁱⁱ has, at the instigation of his jingoistic mother-in-law, begun divorce proceedings for 'wilful abandonment' (by which is meant enforced internment). He is devoted to his children, but henceforth these are no longer permitted to write to him.

Herr Bohltsmann has received the reward he is due, and today is conducting The Symphony with the Drum Beat" by Haydn.^{^iv} During the interval, Herr Baldur presented him with a large lyre made up of flowers, while his friends presented him with a music stand, which the School of Carvery had worked on. All very nice, but the atrocious noise of practising and the screeching of violins next to our hut, where the Camp Music Director lives, has frayed my nerves to the point of being red-raw. And on another tack: Herr Hilkes of the red waistcoat, has just told us that Sir Roger Casement, the 'Liberator of Ireland', was sentenced in accordance with a paragraph of law from the fourteenth century, and has been hanged in his cell; they say that the King was not left with enough time to grant a pardon.^{^v} So that's the same practice of English law as happened with Maria Stuart. That's just what these conservative Englishmen are like. While England is out there celebrating the deeds of its Irish regiments, the Irish patriots in Dublin were being stabbed to death, even in their beds! At the Front as well: first the Colonial Troops, and then in turn the Indians, Irish, New Zealanders, Australians, South Africans and Canadians are said to have shed their blood, and not until the very last were the native English, who also hold the highest positions as officers, thrown into the fray. In the German Army, the Guards would have been the first ones put in the line!

I shall attempt to set down the description of some of the types of men who catch my attention around this small square, and who will wander around here in circles for goodness knows how long. There is a little chap in a suit of copper-red, which he has not so far changed for another, and who is for that reason called the 'Copper Dwarf'. Behind him, on his own, runs the 'barmy professor' in open shirt, open boots, no stockings; the vacant expression on his face shows that the once full magazines of his brain have been drained out. He laughs and talks to himself, washes his hands in the air, or now and again plays with a paper ball. Then there is the 'Bon Viveur from the Provinces'; as well as him, there's another in his late fifties, but he has his wits about him. A little hunting hat perches jauntily over his left ear, he playfully swings a dandy-cane, his crafty, piggy eyes wink, and that how he waltzes off, as if to a rendezvous in the 'Café National' in Berlin. Accompanied by two gentlemen, who tower high above him, like fir-trees over an acacia, Herr Stramm advances along, 'The Cocoa Man of the Cameroon'; he has neither thighs nor neck, and looks like one of those round-bellied roly-poly toys that can't be knocked down, and that is just what Herr Stramm is like, because he spent many years in the murderous climes of the tropics, without it having impaired his ability to stand up straight. Where everyone is busy circulating, Herr Schnudel can always be found there; 'Wherever in the camp you spit, you can be sure it'll land on Schnudel's fine clothes.' He is a bald-headed geriatric, twenty-one years of age, who has to get his nose in everywhere and never notices how intrusive and vacuous his company is to most people. I have sometimes pondered on just how a thick skin and dull senses often in life mean profit. For the last few weeks, the aged youngster has been walking around with a strolling clothing-rail, who wears a hat, stick and gloves, white spats, and in his button-hole has the latest modish flower: this is 'Herr So-and-So', the son of the Delmenhorst Linoleum-King, who lacks only nobility to make him the darling of [p. 215] all reactionary meeting-rooms and club-houses. Well, who knows, perhaps he will be included as the three-hundred-thousandth entry in Gotha's list of the German aristocracy.^{^vi} We must step aside, because 'Ahasver'^{^vii} is rushing past; he's always running around after the latest news, no matter whether he's in the sun's burning heat, or drenched in rain, or enveloped in rising mists. The swallow-tails of his frock-coat fly after him; his distinguished old head rises like a flower into the air from the midst of his grimy open-winged collar, the heavy government rowing-boats on his feet will last for a long time yet. Capt'n Rollin and the other 'old, honest seadogs' stride wide-leggedly out, as though they are on a swaying deck, their pipes ever a-glow, spinning their yarns, or keeping an eye out for the weather. Professor Werdow's appearance is prominent, too; faintly perfumed, in dainty footwear, his overcoat draped like a toga, he listens with disgusted miene to the latest smutty jokes, which Herr Bayerthaler with the little beard à la Havy^{^viii} serves him up on the way. On the other side of him walks Count Z. in his laced up morning-coat, and with a big black Border Collie on a lead. His fellow-countryman, Dr. H., also belongs to this group. Because of his feministic impulses and certain mysterious processes which he is reputed to carry out in his tent, his nickname of 'The Great Courtesan' is not badly chosen. Now here comes Herr Baldur, the Camp Capt'n, in an orange-coloured waistcoat, together with Flock, his Terrier Dog, which is close to bursting at the seams. He strides like the sun through this Zodiac. Shining around him is the glory of having fought against the English in the Boer War, and for doing that he had to suffer a three-year martyrdom in prison in Ceylon.^{^ix} Now he repays the Englishmen's evil with good. He is the only one who has a hut to himself, the rent for which we very willingly pay for him. The fact that many people drink away their misery in there, well, who can blame them? Von Gum……, one-time adjutant to the Prince of Albania, now holds this position with Baldur; in that way, everything has its order and its high class. Alas, now we [p. 216] come across the 'Toad', who was born in Paris, has a personal physician of the Tsar as his real grandfather, who once swelled the reputation of Il mondo, the Spanish newspaper, and who now as editor of the effulgent Camp Lantern^{^x} is furiously attempting to extinguish competition from the Twilight.^{^xi} 'Quo vadis'^{^xii} and 'Videant Consules'^{^xiii} are the titles of articles crammed with intellectual strength. Just as press and diplomacy go hand in hand, so also is also the editor-in-chief is assisted by Herr Neuen, studiosus rer. pol,^{^xiv} who has set his cap directly at an ambassadorial post. He already displays that meaningless smile of politeness, which is intended to fend off all difficulties; already he talks in a murmurous tone only of matters which are 'non-binding' and even at the height of summer holds a pair of heavy-lined kid-gloves in his left hand. He resides with Snell, who was studying in Oxford when the War tore him from the founts of wisdom in that place, and with a Mulus,^{^xv} whose home is in Lüneburg, at heart a true Guelph.^{^xvi} This trio feels called to set history on its ear. The fourth in the union is a domestic genius, whom they call 'Martha'; he looks like one of those persons who prove to tourists in the Alpine areas that such places 'are completely free of sin'.^{^xvii} Two pooch-dogs, 'Frufruschik' and 'Jefimowna', run dutifully behind them. Dear me! They are still coming, of the type which Nietzsche thinks we produce too many, and whom Schopenhauer calls nature's mass-productions — as we would say, 'conveyor-belt productions' —, but then there's Herr Schulz, son of a large-scale coffee trader from Berlin; Herr Schulz's motto is: "Money is no object"; he also looks like the Crown Prince,^{^xviii} and copies him, sad to say; I can't leave any of these people unmentioned. He is the representative of the "jeunesse dorée",^{^xix} and has been graced by the Commandant with the title of 'Entertainments Commissar'. Since then, we see him in discretely nonchalant stance, and in all aloofness, present at all 'entertainments': theatre, wrestling-matches, boxing-matches, swimming galas, [p. 217] etc., stationed behind the chair of 'God Almighty'. On the promenade, he is always accompanied by a Bull-dog with a silver collar, who looks compromisingly similar to the Commandant.

In the meantime, declarations of war have once more been pouring down! Italy has now at last also officially declared war on Germany; and following England's example, robbed all Germans in the Land of Oranges of their property, and interned the lot of them. Rumania declared war on Austro-Hungary; the following day, Turkey did the same to Rumania; and once more, a day later, Bulgaria to Rumania. There is scarcely a way left to find your way through the bellicose entanglements. One house sets fire to the other: it won't be long before Morocco, Tibet and Abyssinia, these three corner-stones of the world, will stand in flames.

While today I was sitting at the Café-Bar and listening to one of Dr. Pemmler's appeals to the Home Office, two young men came in from the Upper Camp. They were dressed up as saucy flower-girls, and were selling artificial wild roses for the benefit of our hospital. They were fishing-boat lads who had been captured on the North Sea. — Not for a long time now has anybody (apart from complete prudes and strict-going authoritarians) taken offence at such products of unnatural situations. Characteristics and complexes both female and male are said to be present in various percentage-relationships in both sexes. What now is present of inborn femininality in this domain of men gradually assumes shape on the stage and in other places, and actually takes on in the world of imagination an at first purely superficial 'substitute' for the female principle. This substitute often appears so genuine that it is able to mix up the transferred concepts and feelings [p. 218] and results in consequences which are not unharmful, as is illustrated by the examples of convictions in this sphere of individuals who have taken things too far. Mrs. Cunningham, the snake in spectacles, who can occasionally been seen in the kitchen, is the only representative here of the 'fair sex'; however, she makes this just as unappetising as she does for what she cooks for us. But this whole matter is very complicated, and needs a chapter to itself.

At the meal, slips of paper were handed out, which had on them the election regulations for a new native-born Camp Chief. Just as when fodder is scattered out in a large chicken pen, everybody rushed, fluttering and pecking, onto this, in itself, trivial matter. Voting of any kind has always had a subversive effect on the somnolent atmosphere of peace. Apart from that, this privileged right of self-determination is only empty show. As in all English vassal states, the Commandant, too, tolerates only empty authority outside himself, and always acts only in accordance with his own good or bad discretion, without ever asking the man so tediously elected; vice versa, the man elected can become rather more useful to the Commandant. In Ruhleben, too, greater honesty with regard to this matter is said to prevail.

After almost everything had fallen asunder because this man wanted to see his candidate elected and the others dragged him spitefully in the dust, a Herr Schnader from Hamburg got the majority; and as soon as the Commandant had verified the vote, he thanked the retiring Herr Baldur in 'a solemn scene', and crowned, as it were, the new Chief Captain. Whether this latter will adhere to his election promises is at least just so improbable as for every elected candidate in every parliament in the world. It was a lot of noise about nothing, a storm in a teacup — but everything will remain as of old, the way it used to be under Sovereign Lord 'Madoc the First'; and also, I hope, 'Madoc the Last'.^{^xx}

While I was sitting as a portrait study for Herr von Beyerheim in his studio, and while doing so immersed myself in the adventures of Lola Montez,^{^xxi} suddenly the 'Old Man' came in, together with his adjutant, Captain Bland (who used to be a notary in an Irish provincial backwater), and sneezed powerfully three times; then he went around and asked me quite directly: "How old are you really?" I said quickly: "Nineteen, Sir." "Right then", the Colonel replied, shaking his head, "in that case, I can't understand at all how they could be saying thirty years of age."^{^xxii} Herr von Beyerheim laughed at that, and the situation seemed saved. Somebody or other must have tried to get me into hot water. There are people everywhere whose major need is for gossip and intrigue. It is only a wrong thing if the wrong man gets wrongly accused.

At seven o'clock, von Beyerheim and I went to the Upper Camp, where Herr Z. was giving a lecture on Goethe's Faust, Part II. Because he presented the results of his studies in an unpretentious form, people liked listening to him; we have often enough listened in with others, to hear young whipper-snappers, as, for example, the editor of the Camp Lantern, Neuen…., the aspirant ambassador, and others, arguing down from the lectern or the beer table about God and the world, and speaking in dismissive tones about view-points that are 'passé'; or have smugly passed judgement on great men and their achievements, i.e., have condemned them; it reminds one too much of the pug-dog that yelps at the shiny, unattainable moon, or barks back at the thunder. — The sunflowers in front of our window are already eight-and-a-half feet tall.

Austrian soldiers have come across a man in Volhynia, who, when he was as yet a thirteen-year-old boy, saw Napoleon's march to Moscow. — Another lot of men have arrived from Knockaloe. Unfortunately they don't know Rodenhaus, but they tell that life there is becoming more and more unbearable day by day. They told me that one man had recently cut his throat, when he had been put to work in the stone-quarry; two others were sentenced for attempted suicide. What is the American representative doing now, when he should be checking that everything is in order? — He does: Nothing.

In the night, the alarm went off for all of us; the beach-batteries were thundering away, our watch-guard was doubled; there was tremendous excitement everywhere: Zeppelins were bombing Liverpool.^{^xxiii}

My sprained arm, the consequence of falling over a tent peg, is getting better. I haven't been able to write for a week, and had to go for a massage in the hospital and to wear a bandage because of the bruising. The fact that it is autumn can be recognised only from the yellow leaves of the deciduous trees and the departure of the songbirds. The palm trees spend the winter in the open air. The weather conditions go across the whole spectrum from hot through to cold. On the 1st of October, we had to put out clocks back by an hour (i.e., an extra hour's imprisonment).

The theatre has been very busy; one after the other it produced Hans Huckebein by Wilhelm Busch, Stein and Heller's Die von Hochsattel, Blumenthal and Kadelburg's Das weisse Rössl, while yesterday it was Thoma's Moral. It sounded very comical, when Herr Hagedorn said in a tearful voice: "Am I the President of the Morality Association, or am I not?" As for the female roles, these were young women, comical old women, society ladies, all of them beguilingly played, their costumes [p. 221] supplied by a well-known ex-Regent Street dressmaker, fit them like a glove. So at least we know what today's fashions are like.

I have read: Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas, for whom I have the greatest sympathy, Sturmzeichen by Richard Skowronnek, Marie Madeleine's Pantherkätzchen, Menschen von Gottes Gnaden by Karl Borromaeus Heinrich, very good; the Memoirs of Catherine the Great, and Ewers' Alraune,^{^xxiv} the Spawn of a Hideous Fantasy. Dr. Märkel in London attends to the intellectual sustenance of his imprisoned fellow-countrymen. Then I studied my way through Hermann Knackfuss on the history of Art, and Kant's Erziehung, Rasse und Nationalcharacter.^{^xxv}

A new acquaintance of ours, Dr. Behrs, the son of the Director of the Dresden Museum of Copper-Engraving ^{^xxvi}; he visits us often. He is a botanist, wears horn-rimmed spectacles, and runs around with a botanical box and butterfly-net, although on the Isle of Man there are very few insects. His steady companion is Mary, his dog, which we call 'Heaven's Goat'. Dr. Behrs has begun a tiny vegetable plot and bestows radishes upon us. Recently he told us about his journey to Pallagosa, one of the Dalmatian islands, which he considers to be the real Ithaca. With him, everything is a diminutive. He speaks, with grandfatherly benevolence; he always speaks of "the folks down there" or, if Herr von Beyerheim is speaking of famous contemporaries, Dr. Behrs replies: "Oh, you mean the nice person with the weird hair", or with what else he finds weird about him. When I began to speak about Schopenhauer, he promptly retorted with the old stock catchword 'Pessimism'.

In company with Baron von Br., the skeleton-like sailor, and his friend Siegfried Hinke, also a former midshipman and then seaman, I attended the 'swimming gala' in the baths beneath the dining hall. Herr Schulz had set up a lodge made of sail-cloth for the Commandant and Captain Bland. Different kinds of exhibition swimming were on show: [p. 222] endurance swimming, diving and headers; all with no bathing costume on. Every time anyone dived into the water, Captain Bland ducked deep under the sail-cloth, lest any drop fall upon the brave warrior. A victor's wreath went to Mooslechner, as best 'all round' swimmer.

Yesterday, together with Herr Rist, the representative of Christian Science in the Camp, I attended the opening of the school hut in the Upper Camp. A long-winded speech by schoolmaster Klose thanked all generous donors each by name, such as Mendes, the cabinet-maker, who had painted the blackboard free of charge, Herr Becker, who had placed a table, free of charge, at their disposal, then Messrs. So-and-so, who were willing to teach free of charge, and so on. A 'one-year' syllabus was to be introduced, the results from which were certainly (most un)likely to be accepted by the German Ministries of Education and Cultural Affairs. Gaukel, a fifth-former from the second-rank grammar school in Rastatt, took on the teaching of Latin (if his teachers only knew!), I was asked to lecture on literatures and history.

In the evening, this time with von Br., I went again to the Upper Camp, where every Wednesday there is a dancing class. The wind tore my hat off; then through the darkness and into the mud, the rain lashing into our faces. In Hut III, there were only three couples, their hands frozen blue and their noses red, dancing to the wailing notes of an accordion. It was very depressing. In the coffee room next door, we warmed ourselves up with a sugarless barley beverage, which tasted like water off the moor. This must be what it's like in Knockaloe and all the many other civilian internment camps. I couldn't sleep that night, and worked instead on a lecture: 'The signs of the times, looked at from a higher point of view'; I intend to give this in the school hut.

I've just come back from a complaints meeting, which had been called by Herr Zeige. Since the word's going round again that now, at Christmas 1916, the forty-five-year-olds will be up for exchange, the complaints meeting is going to tell them verbally (anything in writing would most certainly be confiscated) what they should say to the authorities in Germany, in order to shake up the lethargic dispositions of privy councillors, and most respectfully to cause them to attend to the fate of the approximately sixty-thousand interned citizens of Imperial Germany; which unfortunately would only be possible if reciprocal repressive measures were to be taken in the English Camp at Ruhleben; and also to ensure that all enemy aliens in Austro-Hungary, in Bulgaria and in Turkey will be interned. Additionally, complaints should be raised concerning the Americans, who allow themselves to be paid handsomely for their 'work' here, but who never reply to letters and never visit even one camp, while in Germany they appear to be mixing in with everything that will grant every privilege to the English jockeys, chauffeurs and business travellers interned in Ruhleben. A few days previously, a report had appeared in the Times that English officers in Travemünde were getting annoyed because they were not being permitted to go fishing; others were allowed on their word of honour to travel to Hamburg, where they then revelled in champagne orgies on Schwieger Street.^{^xxvii}

The meeting could not agree who their president should be, and Herr Lornsen broke up meeting by disappearing into the toilet. German unity in microcosm!

The English guards are making themselves more and more at home; they take deckchairs up with them into the guard towers, and smoke pipes or cigarettes, and place their bundooks in the corner. One soldier, back wounded from the Front, has the task of counting us, and calls out to everybody in German: "Lick my …."

Six students from the Upper Camp [p. 224] made up the audience to my short lecture. Outside it was so windy that the linoleum on the floor rose up and sank down like a wave; but those things, of course, are only external matters.

We may be of varying opinions about the character and the probable consequences of the events of our time and imagine the form in which in some time to come they will appear in the history of the world, splendid or base — yet we must be agreed that by now already they give cause for general meditation. When wars in earlier days only settled the fate of a few thousand square miles, or settled laws which at first only concerned regents, rather more than the countries they were the regents of, or really ended up with the strict status quo — people looked on them as dramas in the entertainment of curiosity, or they saw themselves usually only so long intertwined in their interest as they felt the pressure of them directly on themselves. The wars and political operations of the nineteenth century, which culminated in the World War, did, however, create a new world, reformed all conditions of life and impinged on the fate of all individuals, and everyone is awakened to ponder these great events, their causes and effects, and everyone demands knowledge of the primary cause of these enormous agitations and of their purpose.

There are observers who do not consider any reasons are needed at all for the course of the world, and so also not for the present turbulent and destructive march of events, this they think by seeing in everything that happens only the blind mechanics of nature, which turns things in their circle in accord with an vital eternal law, [p. 225] without any external, consciously and purposefully calculating force, exerting any influence on it. The world for them is the barrel of the Danaides^{^xxviii} or the stone of Sisyphus.^{^xxix} This view of world events has the advantage of simplicity and brevity. But it appears not to remedy the need that we all feel; because it does not indicate and reason for the phenomena, and explains one fact by the arbitrary fabrication of another. Neither does mankind's dignity gain anything by this view, for mankind is similarly of necessity tied to the course of nature; mankind, only succumbing to an unchivalrous compulsion, intervenes, doing and suffering, in the movement of the whole body; and, if anything great happens through his actions, or if great talents develop in him, then it is everywhere only the same one nature that is active, too, in the humans, just as nature does in the sunshine by its beams, or in the electrical cloud by the lightning. — Thus it is now the intellect which looks at and interprets the signs of the time. For the intellect cannot swing itself above its sphere, and is by its very nature tied to what is visible; in a word, to that which the senses offer it. It can and is supposed to clarify this material which has been brought to it, to bring its manifold nature down to one unity ('Intellect creates unity', Plato) and to make it clear to itself how this manifold entity is mutually dependent and relates to the things within it. But the world of the senses remains its goal, and the intellect cannot push out beyond this. When therefore men cultivate the intellect one-sidedly (better a kind of intellectual process of civilisation), then their gaze is caught and limited to the material and its shape; nature for them is nothing more than a mechanism, and if, despite this, they put their trust inconsistently in themselves, then at the most it is credit to wisdom. Not all men confess this view of the world to be theirs; but most of them express it in the maxims of their trading, [p. 226] even if without knowing it. A world view like this is therefore justly designated 'the general outlook on life', not only because of its low and demeaning character, but also because of its average distribution. But there is another higher, more primordial disposition in man, which drives him to step out from temporality and to turn to a new life, as intellect, a facility which allows him to see the shadow of another world beyond that of the senses, which opens up the vista into this world and simultaneously allows it to become the symbol, the husk of that other. This higher facility is reason, the ability to rise up from the sensual to the transcendental, from the phenomenon to the cause of it, from the provisory to the absolute, and to find the spirit which expresses itself in the letter of the sensual expression. The man, for whom this light has gone on, and shines in its full strength and clarity, ascends to the awareness of the one thing in which everything diverse coalesces, the awareness of things real and remaining, in which all illusion and transience (the world of motion) is anchored. The eternal flux of life receives through this its sense in another world. He finds beauty in the perpetual conflict of phenomena, truth in the impenetrable darkness of his understanding, and morality in the apparent compulsion of iron nature. While the materialist sinks down in the struggle with nature, the idealist swings himself up to an ideal, to that god who rules over these; and while the other man entangles himself in the chains of world of the senses, this man walks free and proud in the consciousness of his independence. Thus he moves up into the higher life, and in it he the finds the viewpoint at which the signs of each and every day and age open up to him in their true shape.

Neither do the signs of our day and age deceive him. He sees a spirit of disquiet poured out upon all the world, one of quest and counter-quest, [p. 227] of struggle and discontent, which undertakes to change everything and to shape them anew. In one place, he sees states and empires shaken and sinking down; in the other, raising itself up from the ruins in rejuvenated strength, deep-rooted habits dying away and new concepts taking effect with irresistible force, the great and magnificent in fading splendour, the small and despised in audacious rise; and everywhere he comes across the traces of intelligence which has come to its senses and with irresistible strength is expanding its dominance. But all this is to the meditative man not simply a phenomenon of nature, but in them becomes aware of the powerful and wise spirit, whose tools are men, and who charted out the plans for their progress and defined the last purposes of their movement, through which everything exists and by which all dissonances are united in one great harmony and everything individual and separated into one majestic entity.

But at this same viewpoint, it becomes clear at the same time to the meditative man what man is and what he should be to accord to the plans of that spirit. While he sees himself, and the men like him, as dependent on the law of physics, but at the same time independent, through the law in which reason makes itself known in emergence from the will of the world spirit. And by our asserting this independence, he finds the complete dignity of man, and its product, humanity. The events of time have for him therefore their real interest in making visible to him how they relate to the indestructible crown of mankind, which is humanity. The only thing he finds curious or worthy of history is what helps his dynasty directly or indirectly further on its path to perfection; or else what resists the attraction to superstition, to self-interest, seductive sophistication; in short, to all influences which are diabolic, that is, divisive. Neither is it great and glorious, [p. 228] heroic and wonderful deeds alone that attract him or what he seeks. For the one just as much as the other is nothing more than the development of natural strength and circumstances, and it can only become good or evil by its application. He measures deeds and men not by their successes and their strength, but solely by their relationship to morality. And with this yardstick in his hand he venerates many things which are despised by the world, and he despises many things which the world idolises. He entrusts it to those who permit simple intellect to be the highest authority in crowning wisdom and acumen, but he refuses them his respect, in case they are not subservient to a just and noble will.

A view such as this of history is more worthy of man as an emotional or rational being and therefore more comforting than the naturalistic one characterised above. But since our view assumes the World Spirit, Providence, or the Lord God, as the moving centre of all existence and living, and regards history as its unfurling, our viewpoint thrusts unity and importance into the hectic flow of events, raises contradictions which we must encounter on seeing them, and explains the delusions and burdens of life by reference to another world, for which here a place at least for the spirit has already been prepared. But if everything appears to us to be just a mechanism, and emergent nature the be-all and end-all, then it becomes impossible for us ever to gain rest, there is not for us any true perception of happiness, neither in hope nor in enjoyment, and the eye of our intellect, which is supposed to raise us above the world of the animals, seems then only to have been given to us so that we can recognise our wretchedness so much more clearly.

Christmas stands once more before the door, the third in a foreign land. Now that my arm has healed, I have joined the light-athletics club and the football association. In the mornings, I take part in general athletics exercises, which are held in a closed hall behind the Commandant's house, where at other times the English officers play 'badminton'. The indefatigable Herr Kretzschmer leads the squad here, too. The older students get 'excellent' for their knee bends; when Herr Stramm, the roly-poly man, does them or the fat-men Raden and Johst, than you can really have a laugh.

What I have to tell you now, is, however, much less laughable. Yesterday I did not appear at roll-call because of a headache, and was sent into hospital. Men with distorted faces came towards me, they could not speak, only gesticulate. When I came in, Dr. Marshall was sitting at the table and said: "Drink this"; it was a large glass of pitch-black liquid. I emptied it all in one go. Dr. Marshall smirked. But all of a sudden, I turned sick to my stomach. I ran down the stairs and threw up; other men were already standing there and doing the same. All those who had been absent from yesterday's roll-call had been made to drink the black draft, and amongst them were men with stomach problems, neuralgia, and even consumption. This was concentrated valerian, the strongest of laxatives, and left me no peace for the entire day. Men who had refused to drink the stuff were thrown into the 'Clink' for two days. — Now, when transportation home is in the offing, sick men and malingerers are reporting every day [p. 230] to hospital, in order to get on the list. The first time they do this, Dr. Marshall gives them all a pill, two pills on the second occasion, and so on; and while he's doing this, he says to Dr. Westen, "Pill number six, please". If this pill is not there, he prescribes pill number four and two pills number one. When Professor Althaus, forty-six years of age, and therefore on the going-home list, refused to swallow these strong laxative pills, Dr. Marshall threatened him with having his name taken from the list. Yes, you German privy councillors, I'm talking about you: bring in the pill-cure at Ruhleben; or, better still, take some yourself. — In the theatre, they put on "Mutter Landstrasse".^{^xxx}

There was such a gale in the night that the whole hut shook; we nailed the window up and stuffed all gaps with paper; the tall sunflowers have all been blown over.

Pastor Farbig from London has been here again. Like many clerics that I have heard, he can persuade you that black is blue, and even at Christmas time he was able to take the theme 'The Big Bird of Sorrow' and depict it as though everyone would have great fun in driving off this mischievous bird. I have also seen Herr Caserta again, of whom it was rumoured he had been shot as a spy. He now wears a new wig and is constructing a weaving loom for himself. We'll invite him round some time. In the evenings, Herr von Beyerheim is copying a Boucher,^{^xxxi} we spoke of the recently deceased Emperor Franz Joseph^{^xxxii} and the vicissitudes of his life, how, for example, the great-grandfather of the present Tsar had helped him to wrest back Hungary, which Nicholas II wished to take back again, how the great-grandfather of the German Crown Prince wanted to drive Franz Joseph out of Vienna, while the latter [p. 231] was now fighting for the Habsburg Monarchy to be preserved; and so on. Besides that, the funeral ceremony for the deceased emperor proceeded with great dignity, although Herr Schulz had, to be on the safe side, set up an armchair for the Commandant behind the catafalque, which, however, for reasons of world politics, remained unoccupied. Of political events still to be mentioned, one is that Asquith (or Ar-wisch,^{^xxxiii} as he is called in the Camp) has stepped down; his motto had been: 'Wait and see'. Well, we've been waiting for years now, and the world sees what a present was waiting for it. Now they are hoping for a cabinet of peace, that's because the simple-minded believe that the Christmas mood might exert a peaceful influence on the obdurate hearts of the politicians and military men. But these intractable old men enjoy their Christmas dinner at home; they fear death, yet they begrudge youth its short life.

Bucharest has fallen, Madeira has been shelled, and in Athens there was a street battle, during which French and English soldiers were wounded, only to be taken under guard to the Piraeus and deported.

Herr Casera came round to our hut for coffee, and told us of his adventures in London, to which he had been transported on circumstantial evidence found in the confiscated papers of a German diplomat. He had resisted all attempts to bribe him into making compromising statements, but the English authorities were still not giving up on getting something out of him, he said, adding that even the Commandant for his part had made clumsy attempts to pump him for information. In point of fact, Caserta was a German Scout, who had been sent to reconnoitre in America, and had previously been in the Boer War, he and only pretended that he was almost totally deaf. We certainly didn't do him justice in thinking he was spying for the English.

Today, it's once again my birthday. My friends were going to give me a special dinner, but, just as today would have it, a new order came out that all special dinners have to have had prior permission from Lord Raglan, the Governor of the Isle of Man. This has come about because the Isle of Man Times,^{^xxxiv} whose editor-in-chief is a full-blooded negro, had complained that the rich Huns were "stuffing themselves full of food", while the noble population of the Isle of Man was being left to starve. And the real fact is that whole island is living off our money! My mood sank again deep below zero, when it became known that Asquith's successor, Lloyd George, had scornfully rejected the Reich Chancellor's generous proposals for peace.

Herr von Ramenz presented me with a small copy by Rubens of Maria of Medici, Herr von Beyerheim gave me an edition of Birt's book "Roman heads of character",^{^xxxv} while von Br. brought a bottle of Palestine wine, and Hörns brought a bottle of port wine. I spent the whole afternoon running around, trying to get together, for money or for good words, the ingredients at least for a ring-cake, i.e. five eggs, two pounds of flour, a pound of margarine, three-quarters of a pound of sugar, one pint of milk. When I had managed partly to lay my hands on these items, and showed them to the Bohemian baker in the Upper Camp, he said he thought it was not enough, and was in any case too late for today. An innocent event of happy amusement was not going to happen, and we were altogether disappointed and crestfallen. Great lakes of blood lie behind us and in front of us a pitch-black future, lit up only by the garish flashes of lightning announcing new declarations of war — and with Christmas just standing at the door!

Christmas Eve! In the morning, after waiting for hours in icy-cold wooden huts, hundreds of us were allowed to file past the table where the censors [p. 233] sit. Four Englishmen brutishly and savagely ripped open the Christmas packages, which had been packed with so much loving care, in a way which sent the shreds of coloured silken paper flying everywhere, and broke many a tinsel-bedecked branch of fir completely in two. Then, in tearing haste, all the threads and bits of string get ripped open, cigarettes fall together here, fall together there, the filthy hands of soldiers rummage about in the cake boxes, chop complete sausages to bits and pieces. Then a photograph crashes on the floor, smashing both frame and glass. Here a censor clumsily unwraps the work of small children and laughs at it as well. Then the unwrapped shambles is shuffled off to the recipient with the words: "Get out with it".^{^xxxvi} My sister sent me a tin box with marzipan balls in it, and some chocolate bread; all the neat packaging had of course been ruined.

Professor Werdow, who belongs to that never-perishing gild of thin-blooded art aesthetes, has unfortunately been allowed to design the Christmas decorations. In doing this, he thought of everything, and transformed the dining hall into a bower of fir trees, but it was just the Christmas fir-tree itself that he did not wish to have. So the decorations we got were ones intended for a peasant wedding; which cost many thousands of marks. At the celebration, the Commandant — his dog, Penny, the Airedale, had to be with him there as well — gave a speech (the Commandant, not the Airedale), that dealt only with the bad weather, which, he hoped, would soon improve. Can anyone expect anything better from somebody who job of work used to be as canteen contractor in the Boer War? Discontentment and sadness rest more heavily on us this year than they did last year. The small gifts of love that came in from our relatives back home have put us in a melancholy mood, and when everybody started to sing the old carol Still the Night, Holy the Night,^{^xxxvii} tears came into our eyes. But as soon as Good King Alcohol made his entry from Sly-ham's wine cellar, the scene transformed itself into one of high revelry. [p. 234] Schneider, the director of the theatre, gave a political address in remembrance of the German armies, who now at deepest midnight, and on duty in enemy territory everywhere, were protecting the Fatherland. Then in the Hall there roared out a chorus of The Cry resounds like Thunder's Crash.^{^xxxviii} Herr Rist, dressed up as a German Father Christmas, spoke words from the heart, and finished with: "Farewell, may we next year celebrate our festival in the peace of our homeland, fare you well, goodbye!"^{^xxxix} That spoke from all our hearts.

Over the days of Christmas, the theatre dispelled our mood of gloom with three plays by Schnitzler:^{^xl} Literatur, Die letzten Masken, Das Abschiedssouper.^{^xli} Herr Mahsuch of the Dresden Bank acquitted himself splendidly by having chosen these plays himself and having paid for the decorations and scenery.

On New Year's Day, I was sitting with von Br. and Hinke in what they call the 'coffee-bar' in the Upper Camp, when suddenly there was a great rush of people. A twenty-four-year-old sailor had in an act of desperation cut through his genitals and was bleeding to death. They took him to hospital on a stretcher. — Despite this sad occurrence, the evening of light entertainment we had rehearsed went ahead. Ernst Pl. from Bremen had put on the costume of a Hussar, and sat, as otherwise did the Commandant, in a Box with Schulz's bulldog, and gave it to be known that he had been declared King of the Isle of Man, had appointed the Camp Capt'n as his Minister of Finance, but Herr Wiedemann as his Minister of War; he said he didn't need any Parliament, as those things were too costly, and beside that superfluous; at which point [p. 235] he solemnly declared war on the South Sea Islanders. Then Schneider, Kadisch and Herr Eicherten,^{^xlii} the fattest man in the world, came on stage as a trio of three female voices. A soldier, dead drunk, bellowed out in interruption: "I'll drop the lot of you!" I quickly took off out, then on the outside, I paced up and down, I needed to gather my thoughts for a while. Orion began to raise up his jewels from out of the darkness, and other constellations followed. I looked down from the rocky cliff on to the restless night sea. The ghostly quiet, deepened by the monotonous noise of the water, increased the feeling of abandonment.

The year started well. Splendid Riviera weather. A whole community of neutral journalists was being shown around the Camp by the Commandant and his staff. When the group reached the terrace, Herr Wiedemann seized the opportunity to give an impromptu speech on how we were being dealt with here. He said, word-for-word: "Gentlemen, Neutrals, just think of this: three thousand men in the Upper Camp, where the less well-off are crammed in together, have only one single blunt knife on their table to cover eight men, they have to eat off tin plates, with all the enamel on them already far past its date ten months ago. Help to change this was promised, but never came. During a rebellion eighteen months ago, the soldiers shot seven men dead. You can visit their graves in the prisoners' cemetery. Have you been taken up into the dark, atrocious, coffin-like huts, where each prisoner has only two square metres^{^xliii} of space to himself and the men have to sleep [p. 236] in three beds, each one over the top of the other, as tightly packed as herrings? They have neither chairs nor tables, and one small stove has to suffice for two hundred men. The profits from the Café Bar amount each year to somewhere around three thousand pounds: where is all this money, and the still greater amount that comes from the wine-bar canteen? We have never received an invoice for the approximately one hundred-thousand marks drawn by the Camp cash office. But if ever one of the poorest men in the Upper Camp needs a pound, and the Committee approves this, while the Commandant does not dispense even one penny…" The Neutral addressed in this way had long since proceeded on his way, and the journalists were trudging behind him: Herr Wiedemann had been troubling himself in vain. In the evening, when the journalists had once more disappeared, vengeance made itself known. Wiedemann was locked up in an ice-cold, empty cell, where he had to sleep on the bare stone floor, and stayed without food for twenty-eight hours. He suffered so much from rheumatics and arthritis that he collapsed completely, and had to be taken away to the hospital.

Two sections of volunteers at twenty-five men each were called in to work in the fields, each one of whom was to receive the giddy reward of thirty pfennigs a day. The Austrians, as well, and eight hundred Germans, who are placed as workers in the English brushes factory, don't get any more that.

It is very sad indeed; Herr Hilkes with the red waistcoat, our news centre, whose nerves had suffered complete collapse when eventually he was repatriated, died on the day he arrived in Berlin, of a heart attack. — Count Z., dead drunk again, shouted out at evening dinner: "You are all swine, I am the iron prince, Count Z." At the same time, this noble Tatar, descended, it is supposed, via the wife of an English officer at the Front, is receiving 'support'.

When we sit at breakfast in the morning in the dining hall, the incandescent ball of the sun rises once more full of splendour up from the Irish Sea. Today there was a burial for an extremely old lady who, many years before, had seen the departure of Napoleon, treacherously captured, from Plymouth to St. Helena. That puts me in mind of the great injustice that England commits time and time again, that of violating hospitality, that most holy unwritten law of the nations, an act which since the days of Maria Stuart has registered England's name as synonymous with its epithet of 'perfidious Albion'…^{^xliv}

The work of the German U-boats is coming more closely to our attention: sugar is no longer available in the Café-Bar, and what there is to eat is limited to fish. The joke is: a German sandwich used to be a meat coupon between two bread coupons; that will also soon be true of English sandwiches.

Today we were visited for coffee by one Dr. Mieter, who torrented words like a waterfall. He said he had been a monk, and now had the intention of apprising the world of the secrets of the monastery. While he is doing this, the former monk continuously combs his flowing mane with his hands. After the War, he wants to settle in Berlin, to write plays and criticisms; what's more, Mahsuch, the rich Jew, he tells us, will certainly launch his career. Herr von Beyerheim smiled indulgently. Suddenly von Br. storms in with a bottle of wine, to tell us that Schneider had given his neighbour, the fat master baker, a thump on the ear, and the master baker was about to take his tale to the Commandant; then we were to sign a letter of complaint against Dr. Pemmler, because he was known as an animal abuser. The man, he said, was already half-crazy, and threatening Herr von Ramenz, this mild-mannered street-barricader. Then von Br. showed us a clock that he had bought in Dyfryn Aled,^{^xlv} his former prison camp, from a soldier, who for his part had taken it from a clock-maker in Liége and had given him a receipt for it, on which he had written "Give me a kick!" [p. 238] Finally we were joined by a young Greek, who had been brought in during the last few days. He told us that his father had been German Consul on Chios. One day the house had been surrounded by English sailors. The doors were battered in and his seventy-year-old father, he himself, and his brother had been dragged off to England. And, let us bear this in mind, by race and birth, are subjects of Greece. That, then, is the way the rights of the small nations get paid their due respect!

Letter-writing day! I was going to write to Rodenhaus, but prisoners are forbidden to write from camp to camp. Princess Eliese, who today is eighty-seven years old, has written to me. I hope I'll see her once more before she dies!^{^xlvi} News from home: Pastor Hartog, my former confirmation class teacher, has died aged eighty-four, and Kurt Wahrendorf, barely eighteen years of age, has fallen in battle at Fleury;^{^xlvii} my brother, Patrick,^{^xlviii} who went up into the sixth form at school, has now been called up. Ted Gibson, my friend, who once gently broke the news to me (how innocent he was!) of the outbreak of the War, wrote after a long interval to tell me that he was an airman based in Cardiff. Ah well, that's all so long ago, and here am I, completely caught up in a web. The days are like steady rain in summer, not enough to drive you to despair, but enough to give everybody distorted faces — and each day lasts an interminable length of time.

A Viennese Jew by the name of Grünbaum has just arrived from Knockaloe. He has rented a tent and shows everyone his set of real-gold toilet accessories (which haven't yet been confiscated!) Sad to say, he sits opposite me at table and is incredibly garrulous. When he talks about Society at the Viennese Court, he speaks as though [p. 239] he been on first-name terms with everyone. So it was Mitzi^{^xlix} Colloredo here, and Ferdl ^{^l} Dietrichstein there. All the same, I invited him across to provide some diversion with his jocularity for Herr von Beyerheim, who is once more confined to his bed. It was in this way that Herr Grünebaum spoke of the owner of our neighbouring island, the late Marquis of Anglesey,^{^li} who was well known for his eccentricity.^{^lii} On one occasion, he is said to have had a great pantomime put on in the chapel attached to his castle and to have sent out heralds on horseback to invite all people living on the Isle of Anglesey; since Herr Grünbaum happened to be there, he, too, he told us, had been taken up to the castle in the Marquis's carriage. This unbecoming theatricality in God's House was then followed by a stupendous banquet. Processing along behind the Lord of the Court and his staff, the Marquis, decked out diamonds worth up to a million marks, then made his entry on the arms of two actresses. The gracious sovereign lord prince had then hosted all these people until the early morning. Herr Grünebaum then (by way of proof) showed us two diamond-set cuff links which he had acquired after the death of the Marquis at an auction of the decedent's estate. — If stones could only speak!

Emperor's Birthday^{^liii} was celebrated with exhibition gymnastics; on 'three cheers for the Emperor', the English officers also rose to their feet. The choir sang Herr Rist's verses:

"Understanding forbids our celebrating,
Celebrating does not accord with the Emperor's intent.
Not while the blood of our brothers flows away.
Who can celebrate on days such as these,
While widows and orphans lament? [p. 240]

Who can raise the glass in celebration,
Drinking only for the Emperor's life?
No one, say I. The money for the wine,
Gather it up for those who suffer!

Help, where ever you can, that is better and simpler
Than the finest Bengal Lights!
Hearts, now at last may go aflame,
Hearts together of all Germans!

For the Emperor, who is there, who will deny it?,
Is a rock of iron to members of his Nation.
Providing succour to sufferers on their mountainous climb,
'May joyous life be preserved unto Germany'."

Dr. Wildeck is a journalist of the old school, it's a bad thing, that he'll be leaving soon. He told such interesting things about Bismarck, who once in Kissingen was present at a journalists' drinking bout, and while he was there smoked his famous long-pipe. Regularly following after that was his interview with the present King of Saxony after the scandal with his Chief of the Army Staff. Warned not to speak of this, he nevertheless did so, while the King sat silent at his writing bureau, and broke one pencil after another, then only rang the bell and had the pencil taken out. But in the evening, he said, the King did come to a press drinking session and drank a good old lot. That way, everyone had brought their gramophone records out, which people liked to listen to now and again. Dr. Wartemberger, too, brought his records along; they tell about journeys in all five continents. Von Br., the former seaman 1st Class, would like to go with him after the War to St. Domingo, to start up a pig-farm there.

All Europe has been declared in a state of blockade, Germany is finally threatening to send everything, from hospital ships to neutral fishing boats, to the bottom of the sea. Now the War will rage on in an even more tremendous tempo over land and seas, in the air, under the water, with the most gigantic guns, and armies of millions!

As it happens, today the men over forty-five years of age left us! Captain Schnader gave them words of farewell to take with them, Dr. Wildeck, the journalist promised to publish leaflets, Herr von Ramenz, the painter, will draw caricatures to fit in with the text. Herr Hopfe has played the Deutschlandlied^{^liv} and the Austrian Doppeladler^{^lv} for the last time with his Seafarers' Band.

Today, in an old book about Napoleon, I happened to read the following letter from Tallyrand to Napoleon I.^{^lvi}

"The law of nations, a product of three centuries of European civilisation, is founded on the principle that nations in times of peace should be of the greatest possible good to each other; however, in war time the least possible evil. In accordance with the maxim that war is not an issue of man to man, but of State to State, in which individuals are only accidental enemies, not as men, not even as members and subjects of the State, but solely as their defenders, according to this maxim the law of nations does not permit the violence of war and the right of conquest, which results from the former, to extend to the peace-loving and weaponless citizens, to private dwellings and properties, [p. 242] merchandise, means of transport, vessels on rivers and seas, in a word, not to the individual and the possessions of the private individual. It is to this law of nations that civilisation owes its progress and Europe its growing prosperity, even amid frequent wars, which divide it.

England alone has clung to the customs of barbarian times or taken them up once more. Under the name Right of Blockade, England has contrived a monstrous theory and turned this into practice. By custom and in views held by the political nations, a blockade is permitted only of fortresses or fortified places. England has extended this to include unfortified trading places, harbours and estuaries. Against a power that disregards so very completely all ideas of justice and all humane feelings, one can do nothing other than forget oneself for the moment, so as to force such a power not to injure those ideas any further.

The right to natural defence permits one to face his opponent with weapons which he himself does not use. That is because justice between nations exists in precise reciprocity…"

One hundred years later England gave just as dangerous an example in the Boer War, where unarmed civilians, women and children were detained in so-called civilian imprisonment,^{^lvii} something which it repeated at the outbreak of the current War, and forced all other nations to adopt the same wrongful countermeasures, violating as they do the law of nations. Millions of civilian prisoners have become their victims.

When today von Beyerheim was doing a painting of Count B….f, the nephew of the German Ambassador in Washington in the garb of a Canadian farmer, a Bavarian master blacksmith came down from the Upper Camp [p. 243] and into the studio, in order to ask whether Germans had permission from the German Government to carry out work for England. To this Herr von Beyerheim answered: "Yes, so long as the same wage is paid as English workers get, and the work itself does not support the war effort." At that point, the honest man went into detail about the pressure that had fallen upon him from the Commandant and the English Government, who had sought to take away the Government grant, which the wives of the German pipe-makers in the camp got for being of English birth, just because their husbands were on twenty marks a week while employed in the prison. But — and this, he said, was where the problem lay — the Commandant took away eight marks from these twenty to pay for better food, and four marks for the construction of their own wooden hut; with the result that the whole family had to be provided for by the mere eight marks that were left in the kitty.

In the evening, we had boxing, Hach, the dainty-boy boxer, has once again challenged Dubois, but when after the first round he saw how badly beaten up he was, he threw in the towel, and was disqualified; scarcely an edifying performance, especially not with Englishmen present.

Today on the 'message board' stood the notification, which the Commandant had withheld for four weeks: "The German Government will issue punishment to every civilian internee who is carrying out, inside or outside the Camp, any work that can be done by Englishmen." For the Commandant, who amongst other things gets his pile of money from the brushes factory, to which each day eight hundred Germans and Austrians are escorted at bayonet point to work, this decree means a blow in his counting-house. He therefore withheld this announcement [p. 244] for half a month^{^lviii} and added: "The question seems to be undecided at the present time, and until a more definitive answer is given, work can by all means be continued." What are the many, many thousands of men who get not even a pfennig of financial support from the German government, and whose property has been confiscated in a foreign country, or who have used up the remains of their savings, supposed to do then? Germany says that they must be punished if they do work and earn a few paltry pfennigs, when all their other possibilities of earning have been stolen from them by imprisonment; and there are those in England who out of self-interest are willing to exploit the distress of these men. One struggle follows another. People are being punished for the injustice that has been done to them. Summum jus, summa injuria.^{^lix}

End of February. The mild days are continuing. It almost seems as though the earth is clothing itself again in a light, fluffy sheen. The sky is cloudless, and a fragrance of resurrection lies over the earth.

The meadow leased by the prisoners for four thousand marks has been given over to us, and everyone who was able to walk scrambled over the Bridge of Sighs. I found a handful of beechnuts, sloes and maple kernels, all of which I planted in flowerpots; I wonder if they'll take root?

In the theatre, Gorky's hideous Night Shelter^{^lx} was put on; Mahsuch played the down-at-heel actor, who mostly lay close to a large stove and bent his fat head forward, clucking and sputtering — "his organs had been poisoned with alcohol". In our own repugnant situation, this play, which in an extremely realistic way portrayed the dog's-life of wretchedness under the Tsarate economy, [p. 245] this brutish savagery and squalidness mixed with Slavonic-Mongolian indifference and axiomatic melancholy, did not exactly serve to raise our spirits. And while today millions of poor human souls and bodies are being driven westwards under the lash of the Russian pashas, the feeble Tsar and his Tsarina live under the visionary power of a peasant monk in mythical ecstasy.^{^lxi} — Even our recently "repatriated" forty-five-year-olds are stranded in the Stratford soap factory; they are not now letting them go back home — because of the blockade. Poor Herr von Ramenz, Hagedorn, Wildeck and so on, how you rejoiced and trusted England's promise! I would rather be stuck in jail, knowing the exact day when I would be released, than have to endure this endless nerve-racking uncertainty! Certainty allows us to take action; unknowingness gives tranquillity; uncertainty paralyses any move to action and keeps you on edge!

Young R., who plays roles as a flapper girl, is a badly-off young man and resides in the Upper Camp, was invited by Dr. H. into his tent. When a Camp-Capt'n asked where, for a while now, he had been getting all his many new things and his money, it all came out. Other tales are going the rounds that I won't pay any attention to. They, to, are simply to be seen as the natural aberrations of unnatural circumstances.

Lloyd George, the 'Welsh Wizard' as they call the mercurial little despot, lies cowering like a schoolboy in his bed, because he would like to postpone his 'Irish Statement' once again. The American Senate will not give President Wilson the legal authority to arm the fleet. Bravo! — Count Zeppelin, whose name and invention [p. 246] is the admiration and terror of the nations, has died.^{^lxii} How many more statues that follow Professor Werdow's precepts are going to be set up to him, with airship reliefs and every fold of his modern suit: horrible! It will have to be a bust; a head without a name, but with its great size expressing its importance. The English are once again making a determined move towards Bagdad; the Turks, who have already been at war now for eight years, can't throw anything more into the combat, and when that happens, German blood will have to flow once more, so it can lend its colour to the Euphrates as well! — A consumptive has died in the hospital: a man who lay dying for a year, but was not repatriated, because he was a sailor. Just imagine, this German sailor fills Neptune's own nation with such great terror! In the Upper Camp someone has eaten poison hemlock, to take his own life; he's lying now in the most dreadful cramps. When he gets better, he'll be rushed out of the prison camp and into to a real prison, in accordance with English law: the penalty for attempted suicide!

A terrible sultriness weighs upon the world in the expectation of a terrible explosions. Omen after omen, like pseudo-cirrus clouds in advance of a thunder storm. Three women and one man set out to poison Lloyd George.^{^lxiii} Riots convulse Russia's mighty body. In England and in Germany, truces have been sworn to; China has been forced to declare war on Germany: and what will America do? — Full of unease, we all circle silently around the playing field, listening to awful wailing of the fog horn — and yet it's supposed to be spring. — Ruhleben is being disbanded; every week, sixty interned English prisoners are sent back home; and us, what's going to happen with us: with us: with us?

The German Theatre is playing "Typhoon", the Japanese political drama (1911) by the Hungarian writer Melchior Langyel. The scenery for this has cost six hundred marks. Mahsuch, the Jew, from the Dresden Bank, once more took the main role, and played it with excellent asiaticality. Personally, I find the advancement of these Nipponese people too far overestimated. It's a fact, I agree: that in forty years the Japanese have been able in the greatest way to make all the technical discoveries of Europe their own, and are, except for the United States, the only Great Power outside Europe. Will Japan, as Treitschke^{^lxiv} wrote, disappear once more like a comet, or will it, like its emblem, the sun, remain in the political heavens and become an England of East Asia?

The first blow has been struck, the Tsar has been deposed, Rasputin has been murdered,^{^lxv} English money from the hands of Sir William Buchanan,^{^lxvi} English Consul in St. Petersburg, has been helpful. England's Parliament was the first to grant its immediate recognition to the new Russian republic.

Just so that it does not go unforgotten: Baron von Bärwal, who recently escaped for a fourth time from the Upper Camp and was recaptured in a brothel. He got his fetters off with a file and escaped for a fifth time, until he was captured again, and is now the recipient of one-and-a-half years in jail. — Saeckelmann, the student from Munich, is now taking painting lessons with Herr von Beyerheim, and told us today, as an eye-witness to the events, on the first anniversary of the Camp massacre, and after we had said a quiet prayer for those who had been murdered: "Two years ago, when not all prisoners were so lethargic, [p. 248] they complained in vain to Madoc about the wretched food on wretched tinplate crockery. There was a table on the gallery where all the prisoners afflicted with illness ate their food. These were the first ones to throw their dinner-bowls into the hall; other tables followed. Then the large room filled up with soldiers, who blocked off all exits. The first shot was fired, then the second. Shouts and uproar began. As if on a signal, all the guards on duty, outside the hall as well, began to fire blindly into the huts and the tents. Many threw themselves out of the hall windows and fell wounded onto the terrace. In one tent, a man got a bullet in the brain, and sank down, another man got his bullet while he was hanging out the washing. The blood-bath continued, the soldiers thrust their bayonets into defenceless prisoners, wounded man lay everywhere — the Commandant was having his dinner when all this was going on; he lit up another cigar, then managed at last to come over to see what was happening. He tore one soldier's levelled rifle from his hands and bellowed out: "Stop that." The hospital was overflowing with dying and wounded men. And do you think that they relieved Madoc of his post? Not a bit of it: he is still Commandant to this very day. The American delegation took no notice of that, nor did Germany." Permission has been given for a few wreathes to be laid out today on the little, out-of-the-way cemetery.

A second blow has rained down upon us. Today is the 6th of April: it is two degrees below zero,^{^lxvii} and one icy blizzard after another is racing across sea and island. But an awful spasm clutched at my heart and the hearts of my companions, when it became known that the gigantic United States of America had declared war on Germany.^{^lxviii} When I think that my ancestor, Rose Standish,^{^lxix} [p. 249] landed with the Pilgrim Fathers aboard the Mayflower,^{^lxx} in order to found the yearned-for land of freedom beyond the ocean, and think on the other hand of the Prussian General von Steuben,^{^lxxi} one-time Adjutant to Frederick the Great, who fought alongside Washington for the liberation of that country from England's tyranny, then it is for me doubly difficult to understand how this freedom-loving nation has no moral compunction against joining forces with England, in order to place, at the most critical moment, a knife on the throat of Germany, beleaguered and heroically struggling for its own freedom as it is. They say that by doing this the otherwise unending progression of this great slaughter of the nations would be brought to a speedier end; but I say that an ensuing peace between victors and vanquished cannot be a just one — and then all sacrifices are for nothing. "No nation has as yet derived gladness from blood and plundering, the curse reverts horribly from the vanished back to the mighty victor, adorned though he be with wreaths of laurel." — However, the saddest thing is that Plato was right in saying that all wars arise only because of money, so that the large-scale capitalists, or those who wish to be such, must every now and then disturb the peace in order to fish for their catch in troubled waters. Nine-tenths of remaining humanity has, or had, in either case nothing, and still had to sacrifice the only thing they possess, their life. And it's the older people who are the greediest for gold; they risk not only their own soon-to-expire life, but lengthen it ruthlessly by using the blood of young men who have more ideals than they have.

President Wilson has 'invited' Holland, Sweden and Spain to declare war on Germany as well. But [p. 250] these strong-minded nations have not done so; however, instead of that, Cuba and Panama, the Negro State Liberia, Brazil and Bolivia, Guatemala and Chile felt themselves induced to follow the noble example of their official guardian. Now the rush is on to force Greece around to the same. Between Arras and Aisne the great spring Offensive has begun in the Champagne.

Herr von Beyerheim is completely distraught, his English wife keeps callously sending back to him the letters he writes to his children. He has shut his mind off to war and politics; and it doesn't much matter to me, either, who will be prime minister in this country, which party takes over the helm; who's going to win the elections in Australia; whether Russia and China remain republics; whether Serbia will be split up; or whether the Sultan territories will be restricted to Asia Minor. Dr. Schmidt also said he was not going to touch another newspaper. If he should be released in twenty years' time, and find the Berlin Palace transformed into a museum, he would then ask: "Has the Emperor sold his palace?" "Oh, I'm sorry, but the Emperor has been dead for ten years and Germany is a republic." "Is that so? I had no idea, I thought he was still on the throne; but in any case, perhaps you can tell me, where's the best place to get a meal?" All the same, this apathy is fake. — — —

Dr. Thompson,^{^lxxii} the Right Reverend Bishop of Sodor and Man — of Sodom and Gomorra, that's the title we give him — appeared in full ceremonial fig in the large hall, with the 'Mace-bearer' striding out in front of him, carrying the crozier. The Bishop himself was dressed in violet, white, red and black, with a long train flowing out behind him. Pastor Oltenbur from London was the third one to mount the platform, and laid his hands in humble demeanour on both knees. His son was recently [p. 251] interned here with us because he had refused to work in an English munitions factory. The bishop was a fine, old gentleman, snow-white hair, but with rosy skin and that angelic smile, which the English priests have so much at their disposal. The Commandant was sitting not far away from me, and visibly suppressed his normal predominance. Suddenly we had our photograph taken twice, so that this arrangement between High-Church and Army can appear with the usual commentary in all illustrated magazines. Just as it did many years ago in London. "The Good Deeds for the war prisoners (P.o.Ws.)", as our official designation has it, are all sham! The orchestra played the final chorus from Tannhäuser, Act III,^{^lxxiii} then the creed was reeled off, and the bishop rose to his feet and startled us all with his penetrating and booming voice, which we had not suspected to come from his frail physique. "What is man?" is the theme he took and varied like a fugue, and like a brilliant actor he underlined each word of thunder that clapped from him into the hall with the gestures of his fine, white, ring-adorned hands. Now and again he wove a joke into his oratory, and invited us to applaud it, then his expression once more became fierce and harsh, thereafter to fuse seamlessly once more into a seraphic smile. He asserted that Germany and England were two children, who were giving each other a beating, God, their Father, would be sure to intervene in due time, and he added — not exactly tactfully — that God, he hoped, would not do that so very soon. Stuttering, in bad English, the German pastor thanked the bishop "for his splendid words". The choir and the orchestra sang and played Die Himmel rühmen.^{^lxxiv} At the end, the Commandant rose to his feet, and humbly held the bishop's train as the bishop descended the steps from the platform. All this rigmarole belongs to English Cant, from Cantation,^{^lxxv} [p. 252] which is the name for the monotonously-grinding chanting and eternal eye-raising which belongs to the churches in England. Dr. Schmidt said the on Sundays the Englishman's Book of Accounts was his Bible; but on weekdays, his Bible was his Book of Accounts.

Everything in the Camp canteen has been sold out; the English lease-holders it's had up till now can go off and retire. The only thing to survive is pickled cabbage in tins, but even for that another lease-holder has been found.

Herr von Beyerheim was given twenty-eight eggs by Mrs Cunningham; for these he has to assess some paintings she'd like to sell.

It really is a 'bit thick': they've started blowing reveille again at half-past seven, and why? So that Herr Schulz and his cronies, who wish to grovel and make themselves liked by the Commandant, can get their breakfast on time before they go playing tennis. Because of this handful of tennis devotees, five hundred men are able to extend their imprisonment by thirty minutes day; at the end of three months that's already made up four full days, for us to live longer in consciousness of our wretched plight. Sadly, this waiting is a long empty silence, in which you make everything last. No letters for weeks and months!

We were asked to visit Herr Caserta. Oh, how dark it looked in his den in 'R. hut', which he shares with three others, one of whom is called Fick;^{^lxxvi} the other called Niedergesäss,^{^lxxvii} and is a prompter in the Camp theatre. Stockings were drying on strings, indeterminable odours flooded out to meet us. Caserta himself looked sad in his torn woollen jacket, and with a fur hat on his bald head. He made us coffee (in Alexandra Palace he still made it as though it were a sacred rite!) and was even eating his midday meal, which consisted of one herring. We sat down [p. 253] on the bunk and Herr Niedergesäss recounted half in tears that he had received four letters, one after the other; in the first one it said that his brother had received the Iron Cross First Class, in the second was the news that his brother had fallen in battle, the third told him that his mother had died of grief over this, the fourth informed him that his youngest brother had also fallen in battle. There's no end to this outer and inner misery!

The production staged by the German Theatre in Douglas to mark its fiftieth performance was Felix Philippi's Das grosse Licht^{^lxxviii}, its expensive scenery was once more paid for by Mahsuch, the wealthy Jew; in exchange for this, Mahsuch took the main role, the painter, who in the play is rival to the oafish guildsman architect for the building of the cathedral. Wernickel, too, from the German Bank in London was good as the cathedral organist. In the way of literary sustenance, which becomes richer and richer the fewer things there are to eat, I made my entrée out of the following Ullstein books: Die Treppe^{^lxxix} by Viktor von Kohlenegg (1915), Eine Frau wie du^{^lxxx} by Ida Boy-Ed (1913); my main course came from Alphonse Daudet's Die Könige in Exil,^{^lxxxi} and my dessert was Der Herr Intendant^{^lxxxii} by Fedor von Zobeltitz (1900), after which I indulged in Marc Aurels Selbstbetrachtungen^{^lxxxiii} and Die Briefe Maria Theresias,^{^lxxxiv} as choice spirituous liquors. For my nightcap, I took Eugène Scribe's Glas Wasser,^{^lxxxv} and rounding off, as mocha, Das Bild des Königs.^{^lxxxvi} This is about a young girl who has fallen in love with the portrait of Louis XIV; she comes to Versailles, and is boundlessly disappointed when she sees the King as an old man strutting past in the park on the arm of an elderly Marquise Maintenon; the girl collapses in a faint behind a yew-tree hedge and into the arms of a young duke. That's the old story of ideal and reality. Just now I heard a knock, I thought it was a spiritualist sign; but no, a mouse had entered the trap we had set up; another example of imagination and reality. [p. 254]

But I have busied myself with more serious reading material, such as Schottische Könige^{^lxxxvii} by Sir Archibald Dunbar, and the history of the Rosenkrieg.^{^lxxxviii} From the latter, I discovered once more that English policy against its neighbours was, even in the Middle Ages, the wiliest in Europe. Murder, devious imprisonment, bad faith and trickery alternated with each other, and the history of their royalty is the bloodiest of all times. Schooled in a tradition such as this, one can scarcely be surprised that the whole performance has repeated itself in the greatest of style in modern times. The only thing is that a feudal nobility raging in blind fury has been taken over by the rule of rapacious merchants, who as 'militant servants of Jehovah' are allowed to use every means at their disposal to achieve the 'good outcome', to wit, the conquest of the heathens, or more plainly speaking, the appropriation of all the riches of the world, which Jehovah and his 'legitimate son, Christ' has promised them in trust as the 'true chosen people'.

A splendid May Day in nature! Melting away into purple streaks, the sun had risen up into a blue-steel sky.

I sat alone on the Camp meadow, beneath an oak-tree, which was showing its first green; horses were grazing nearby, an assuring image. Far away, Herr Rist and Herr Tieme were walking back and forth, and most certainly talking about the battle raging near Arras. A barren tedium all around. The grass did not move, the crickets had forgotten their chirping, and only a needle-sharp buzzing in the air, where flies, some steel-blue and some shining like gold, were moving up and down. Now and again a butterfly fluttered past. — I was lost in thoughts and entwined myself [p. 255] in all manner of thoughts; I pondered on the possible purposiveness in the fate of an individual, and of everything I had already consciously experienced in joys and sufferings — and I suddenly felt myself as old as the ages. I imagined how fine it would be to live somewhere completely away from the here and now, to put one's mental collection of experiences in order at leisure, and to enjoy them, and to skirt away thus in a direction passing to the side of the brute impressions of sensuous nature, as well the inner ones, which have grown into parables. Multiplicity condenses to unity, the laws of nature show themselves no longer to be of bronze, but melt before the inner law, and we move from an era of time and finiteness into a sphere of the imponderable. I had duly fallen asleep. Awoken by von Br., who was looking for me, I went back to our hut, where Dr. Mieter, the former monk and the future dramatist, was sitting in conversation with Caserta and Herr von Beyerheim. Dr. Mieter had completed a letter, conveying to the Swiss Envoy, who had now taken over from the Americans as our representative nation, all complaints about our Commandant. 'How can that be of any success', Dr. Mieter cried out, and at the same time thrust his hand through his wild mane, 'if at the same time Dr. Westen is about to send off a letter, saying that everything in the Camp is fine and dandy? And why is he doing that? Because as head of the hospital, nobody will be allowed to say anything against the boozing sessions he holds over there. Please tell me: how can anything be achieved in the face of such disunity?' Then Caserta chipped in, somebody wanted to take his weaving loom away from him, which he had taken so much trouble to build for himself; it wasn't the English, but somebody he couldn't pay back what he owed them until he had earned himself enough money by weaving cloth. However, his lender, he said, now wanted to do the dirty on him and to use the loom himself for his own business dealings. Isn't it sad, how nasty incidents are getting more and more out of hand in the Camp? [p. 256]

Every day at meal times there is squabbling on the eighty tables, and that occurs even if a hungry man takes only one gram more food than he is entitled to. Today I even had my own bread ration stolen before I got down to the table. Probably taken by Herr Kinacke. Fat people need more nutrition than thin ones, and big ones more than small; sick ones more than healthy ones, but no rationing takes any account of that. Chaps with very little money sell off food that has been sent to them, or which they have collected together, in order to buy themselves cigarettes with what they get. Nothing edible ever reaches us any more from Germany; only Mr Cunningham's poisonous alcohol fountain continues to flow merrily, but it's very dear, and so thinned down that it produces the very worst of effects on our empty stomachs. The stewards and waiters no longer want money any more, instead they ask for food and tobacco — and the world tonnage goes down rapidly. — Professor Werdow's says he read in a letter that Germany already has over a hundred U-boats, whereas in 1914 was reported to have only twelve.

ii The German Berliner Tageblatt, 12-editions a week, illustrated Democratic newspaper, founded in 1872 by Rudolf Mosse, editor-in-chief from 1906 and during the First World War period the editor was Theodore Wolff.

iii A reference to Seine englische Frau by Rudolf Stratz (Stuttgart & Berlin; J.G. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger 2nd to 25th impression, 1913). Extremely popular, and translated into English by A.C. Curtis as His English wife, published by Edward Arnold (London), 1st-3rd edition, 1915.

xix jeunesse dorée (French 'golden youth'): originally a description of the bourgeois young men of France, who came forward at the end of the Reign of Terror (27 July 1794) as violent opponents of the Jacobins. The term has since been used to describe the rich pleasure-seeking young men of a major city.

xxi Marie Dolores Rosanna Gilbert, Countess of Landsfeld (1821-1861), better known by her stage name of Lola Montez, was an Irish dancer, actress and courtesan, who became mistress of King Ludwig I of Bavaria.

xxii Dunbar-Kalckreuth's actual date of birth was 20 December 1888. In September 1916, therefore, he was 27 years of age, 28 on December 20 1916, and not 30 until December 20 1918 (when the War would be at an end). In August 1914, while still in St. Leonard's-on-Sea (p. 25, above) he had falsely given his date of birth as December 1898; which in September 1916 would have made him 17 years of age (as he pretended to be).

xxiii This report seems to have been inspired by an intended attack on Liverpool on the night of 31 Jan/1 Feb 1916 by nine Naval Zeppelins. These, however, lost their way and bombed towns in the Midlands instead. (Web)

xxviii The Greek myth refers to the fifty daughters of Danaus, King of Argos. They married the fifty sons of Ægyptus, and all but Hypermnestra, wife of Lynceus, at the command of their father murdered their husbands on their wedding night. They were punished in Hades by having to draw water everlastingly in sieves from a deep well [Brewer, p. 217].

xxix Sisyphus: A legendary king of Corinth, crafty and avaricious. His task in the world of the shades is to roll a huge stone up a hill till it reaches the top: as the stone constantly rolls back his work is incessant: hence 'a labour of Sisyphus' or 'Sisyphean toil' is an endless, heart-breaking job [Brewer, p. 1004].

xxxviii Es braust ein Ruf wie Donnerhall (wie Schwertgeklirr und Wasserprall) begins the first verse of Die Wacht am Rhein 'The Watch [= Guard] on the Rhine', a German patriotic song by Max Schneckenburg (lyrics, 1840) and Karl Wilhelm (music, 1854); lampooned in British music-halls in 1914 as: 'When we've wound up the Watch on the Rhine, How we'll sing, how we'll sing "Auld Lang Syne!" You and I "Hurrah! we'll cry, Ev'ry thing will be Potsdam fine, When we've wound up the Watch on the Rhine.' (Revue: Business as Usual, London Hippodrome, November 1914.)

xxxix Dunbar-Kalckreuth adds the footnote in German (p. 234, fn.1): "Needless to say the following year's Christmas was also celebrated on the damned bloody Isle of Man. Note of 24 December 1917".

xliv Albion: (OED) "Britain considered as treacherous in international affairs (In print in English language sources, 1838ff, the phrase in French, Perfide Albion, is dated by some to the French Revolution (1793)). Albion (Classical Latin AlbiOn) denotes (OED) "the island of Britain. Later the nation of Britain or England". Dunbar-Kalckreuth's reference to Maria Stuart (1542-87) would seem to be anachronistic.

lii Henry Cyril Paget, 5th Marquis of Anglesey (1875-1905): 'became known for squandering his inheritance on a lavish social life and accumulating massive debts. In 1904 he was declared bankrupt, and died in 1905, aged 29.' A possible homosexual. (Wiki)

lxix Rose Standish (1585-1621) née Hanley, married Myles Standish 1610 in England and sailed with him on the Mayflower. She died on 29 January 1621, at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Nothing is known of any children she might have had. She is listed as having been born at "Ellanane, Isle of Man, Lancashire".

lxx The Mayflower left Plymouth, England, on 6 September 1620 and arrived in America at the end of December 1620. Its passengers were the first Puritan settlers in New England. They founded Plymouth, which was later incorporated into Massachusetts.

lxxv Cant (OED) 'Affected or unusual use of religious or pietistic phraseology; language (or action) implying the pretended assumption of goodness or piety; first recorded use 1709.' Derived from Cantation 'Incantation'.

lxxvi Fick means 'fuck' in modern slang German, but it is also a family name, common in the north-west of Germany, where it has nothing to do with the slang form, but is a derivative of the personal name Frederick.

lxxvii Niedergesäss: family name from the district Glogau, now in south-western Poland. The element Gesäss in modern German means 'buttocks', but in medieval German (as here) the meaning was 'settlement, village'. Dunbar-Kalckreuth makes a play on this.

lxxxviii 'War of the Roses'.

Background

The departure of the over 45's for repatriation took place on the 3rd February 1917 - a party of some 70 left from Douglas destined for Stratford and repatriation by Dutch steamer from the Medway ports. However the German U-boat threat to sink every vessel, mentioned by Dunbar in the following diary entry, saw the Duch vessels removed from service in January 1917 and thus having no immediate mechanism to transfer the internees to Germany they were moved from Stratford to Alexandra Palace on the 14th March where most remained until the 14th February 1918. Stratford, no longer useful as a transit camp closed, the very few subsequent repatriations in 1917 would be in small parties from Alexandra Palace until new arrangements were agreed with the German Government using Boston as departure port.




Any comments, errors or omissions gratefully received The Editor © G Newton , 2019