The novel Anton Sittinger, now published for the first time in English, is set in rural Bavaria during the Weimar Republic and conveys the strong sense of time and place typical of the author. Yet it deals with a universal themes from a class perspective. Oskar Maria Graf looks on with dismay at the attitudes of the contemporary middle classes that enabled Hitler to come to power. Here is the key passage from midway through the novel that expresses Graf’s perspective:
“There are thousands upon thousands of people like Sittinger in every country. Their number is legion. All the cleverness and cunning, all the faithlessness and wretchedness of a declining class is united in them. From time to time they are called ‘you’ and ‘me’. Yet no one will believe that he is one of them. He would feel ashamed of himself and so he ridicules them with contempt. He does not know that this contempt is directed at him, too. They seem harmless, and their poisonous egoism always presents itself as conservative. They are the crudest and most frightful nihilists under the sun. We have to reckon with them politically if we want to change the world, but we must never give in to the delusion that they are useful for achieving a better future. They are not even a catalyst for change in the present, only the past, and therefore the most unassailable gravediggers of any equitable social order. They instinctively hate the socially disadvantaged, the workers and the poor, and their malicious hatred turns into the most irreconcilable hostility as soon as they realise that they would have something to lose in a social revolution. That is why real democracy is an abomination to them. That is why they are so eccentrically conservative, so utterly reactionary and mostly monarchist. They only follow dictatorship if they think that their habits and their possessions will remain untouched. Broadly class-based militants, who already inhabit the future with their ideas, their convictions and their concerns, must lose all compassion for them. For this class of people is at best fertiliser for the period of transition, nothing more.”
RedLines 