Ernst Toller

505 Sovereign Apartments

205 Washington Avenue

Santa Monica, California.

To the National Congress

of the League of American Writers

New York.

Dear Friends: –

I thank you for the kind invitation to attend the National Congress of the League of American Writers. Unfortunately circumstances make it impossible for me to come to New York just now. May I therefore be permitted to convey my very sincere wishes in writing together with the assurance that I am following the work of the congress with deep interest.

There was a time when a line was drawn between an artistic and a human mission, but we have none of this demarcation, Writing for us is not merely form and style, it is character. In other words the moral conception of writing has for us once more assumed a central significance. We know that we are moved not so much by beauty as by necessity. We know that it is our task to embody this necessity in our writing in order to free reality from it. We recognize that this necessity is of two kinds: the necessity which life imposes upon us – that of death as an inevitable fate, and the other, futile necessity which is but the consequence of our social structure.

The events of the past decades and particularly of the past years have brought the conviction to every thinking writer that he no longer may remain shut away in his ivory tower, for decades the ideal of the artist.

The fate of society is indissolubly connected with the fate of literature. It is not enough to emphasize one’s devotion to freedom and justice in general terms.

A writer must face concrete situations and declare himself positively for or against them. He must recognize his enemy and study his enemy’s methods, for otherwise he is incapable of forming or fighting him.

We call a physician who lacks all knowledge of the human organism and yet has the audacity to treat such organism, a quack doctor, why should we not call a writer who touches upon social problems in novels or in plays, although he has no clear conception of society, a quack writer? He, who wants to be a teacher must first be a student. Otherwise he cannot influence the development of his nation and all humanity.

To-day the world is facing the battle between two great powers: fascism and democracy, the latter in its political and economic form.

Fascism makes of the writer a slave of the Dictator. His work is not supposed to serve humanism, it must justify the stupid fictions of the Dictator; it is a part of the material armament programme; it must deepen the delusion and blindness of the people and must play the accompaniment “on the lyre” to every act of barbarism. Literature loses its dignity and the writer commits that greatest of all intellectual crimes “the sin against the spirit”.

It redounds to the German writers’ honor that the best among them defied the deadly threats of Hitler. Men like Erich Mühsam preferred a terrible death to acquiescence. Men like Carl von Ossietzky in spite of years of torture cannot be induced to betray the idea which he serves. A man like Ludwig Renn after years of incarceration in Nazi prisons has embraced the cause of the freedom of Spain and to-day is fighting in the ranks of Spanish Loyalists. Outstanding authors such as Thomas and Heinrich Mann share the fate of voluntary exile with dozens of German authors, who on foreign shores serve that Germany which the world once knew and revered.

Hitler knows the magic power of the word and he uses that power in the form of lies. But he trembles before the might of truth. That is the reason why to-day the works of the great German humanists, such as Goethe and Lessing are being “cleansed”. But not even Hitler can prevent spontaneous outbursts of applause by the people of Berlin when on the occasion of a recent performance of Schiller’s “Don Carlos” the noble call for freedom of thought was sounded.

Fascism is the foe of every bright and just future. It is our common enemy. Fascism is threatening not only the people who live under it, it threatens the fate of all peoples, as the flagrant example of Spain shows. The responsibility of the modern writer grows from day to day. It is his mission to proclaim truth in spite of all hostilities. Courage alone leads to truth.

If we believe in the power of the word – and we do believe in it – then we have only to choose between two possibilities: we can either be hammer or anvil.

If we do not help reason to win the battle we ourselves shall be the victims of unreason.

Let us be indefatigable in our fight against the confusion of mind which is fostered cunningly and deliberately day by day by the poisoners of public opinion who call themselves Ministers of Propaganda and Enlightenment. With intellectual dishonesty they misuse every word. From the vocabulary of humanism they steal the noblest words and usurp them for the prosecution of thought and faith, for discrimination of peoples and races. Let us reveal this treachery of the word, let us help to form a public judgment which condemns and eliminates these machinations.

But we are only able to create such a public judgment if we live in intimate touch with the feeling and longing of the people. Peoples are like trees, they grow, breathe and develop. If our ears were fine enough they could hear the throb of the people’s hearts.

To-day we are pursued in Nazi-Germany and every other fascist country. We do not know where the hunt may begin to-morrow. There is only one thing to do: stand firm by your convictions. Have courage. Affirm yourself in every word, in every deed. Vanquish fear which humiliates and discourages you.

We free German writers love Germany and we hate Hitler. We hate him, because he has taught us to hate. Hitler is not Germany! And our love for Germany is not blind. We think as did Carl Schurz, one of the “Forty-eighters” whom the power of tyrants drove from Germany to the United States: “My country when right, keep it right, when wrong, set it right.“

Ernst Toller.