China Learn

The circumstances of my youth, combined with the endless difficulties of my life with Virendranath in Germany, drove me almost to the verge of insanity. Twice I left him and sought rest and recovery in the Bavarian Alps, where I planned to continue my interrupted journey to India. Friends in London tried to secure a visa for me to enter India, but they failed because of my imprisonment in America in connection with the Indian exiles, my articles in the Indian press, and my association with Virendranath. My desire to live ebbed and I lay ill for nearly three years. For whole days I remained in a coma, unable to move or speak, longing only for oblivion. Nor could the best nerve specialists of Germany cure me. More than death I feared insanity, and the terror of this possibility haunted my very dreams. Once I attempted suicide, but succeeded only in injuring myself.

When all else failed, I was introduced to a woman nerve specialist, a former associate of Freud. An alienist in the Berlin courts, she was also connected with the University of Berlin. My psychoanalysis began, and continued torturously for two years. During this infinite suffering one image haunted my sleeping and my waking: I held a small Chinese vase in my outstretched palm and contemplated its beauty. A crack kept growing down the side, the vase broke, and the fragment rolled out of my outstretched palm. It seemed a symbol of my life. As I grew better, the image returned less often, yet seemed to hover, a menace, in the offering.

As my health returned, I began teaching English to university students and took up again the study of Indian history. I became a teacher in the English Seminar of the University of Berlin and, upon occasion, lectured before the seminar on Indian history. When plans were made for an English theater in Berlin, I coached actors and actresses, and in this way came into contact with the theatrical world. One of the friends I made here was TiIIa Durieux, who was so often cast in psychological studies. She was one of the strangest of German actresses, but quite learned, having one of the best libraries of anyone in her profession. In a way she became my teacher in literature, architecture, music, and the theater. We spent one summer together in Austria, where we attended the Mozart Festspiel in Salzburg, then wandered through Austria and southern Germany, visiting historic cities and old cathedrals.

As a kind of counterthrust against growing Communism, the Hitler movement was rising in Germany, but to most of us it seemed just another fad that would soon die. Since I had to earn my living and struggle for health, I was too burdened to study it closely. Once when Virendranath had come to Bavaria to induce me to return to him and we were on our way back to Berlin we paused in Munich to attend Wagner’s Ring. By chance one evening we followed a small crowd and found ourselves in a hall where Hitler was speaking. This event made so little impression on me that I recall nothing but Hitler’s frothy shouting.

As my health improved I decided to shoulder another burden: attendance at the university and study leading to the Ph.D. degree. I did not have the academic qualifications, but by a law under the German Republic men and women could produce research work which, if accepted, would entitle them to work for their degrees. I produced two works on Indian history which were published by two leading German historical magazines; one was the ZeiJ:schrift fur Geopolitik, official organ for the Institut fiir Geopolitik, of which Professor Karl Hanshofer was head. He had been a General in the World War, a military observer in Japan from the time of the Russo-Japanese W1.r onward, Then he had founded the institute. Since he had published my thesis, I made a special trip to his home in the Bavarian Alps and secured his sponsorship for my entrance to the university.

It has since become clear that Haushofer was one of the men who made Adolf Hitler. His institute was even then the concealed General Staff of German Imperialism. It was he and this General Staff that furnished Hitler with such demagogic ideas as BIut und Boden, and, though his wife was part Jewish, Haushofer was perhaps one of those who helped write Mein Kampf.

Why Haushofer sponsored me, a woman, even though he and his class preached the inferiority of women, I do not know. Perhaps it was because of my Asiatic connections. I had prefaced my published thesis with the assertion that the nation that ruled India was the master of Europe. Haushofer apparently wanted to keep in touch with Asiatics, but when he once invited Virendranath and me to his place, there was nothing warm or friendly in his manner. He was wooden - a silent, suspicious man.

I was admitted to Berlin University to study for my Ph.D., but after a short time I realized that it was hopeless. I lacked a foundation in science and mathematics and I failed to keep pace with the thirty or forty older men in my seminar. Most of these men were already teachers in the Gymnasiums, who had returned to the university to take their final degree. I had to earn my living while studying and could find no time to master the language.

After a brief struggle I gave up my long-cherished plan. The classes which I conducted in the English Seminar of the University resembled those automatic devices that pick up approaching sounds at a great distance. In them, liberals, Socialists, Communists, and Nazis defended their ideas with passion. Almost every class had at least one or more corps students, with dueling scars across their cheeks, who openly attacked the Republic, workers, Communists, Socialists, liberals, and Jews. One corps student once proclaimed to the class that degeneracy under the Republic was demonstrated even by the fact that Germans were forced to study under a foreign woman who wore her hair short and smoked cigarettes.

At this time I joined a group of Republican, Socialist, and Communist physicians trying to establish the first state birth-eontrol clinic in Berlin. Margaret Sanger financed our first research branch and soon afterwards the Government took over the clinics and established branches in many cities. They continued until the Nazis came to power, after which women were ordered back to the bedroom. A German woman Communist doctor and I once got into a debate with her husband, a Communist physician in the Public Health Service, because he argued that if men could be conscripted to fight, women could be conscripted to breed. His attitude was no different from that of my Nazi students who sent a grievance committee to the head of the English Seminar of the University because my class had debated the question of birth-control.

The bitter fruits of defeat in war were eaten hourly by the German people and nourished only hatred for their conquerors. Month by month I saw people die of slow hunger and watched funeral processions enter and leave the little church on my street. One day in December 1923 I found a man, a shoemaker from the French-occupied Ruhr district, dying of hunger in the street near our house. He carried a dirty, ragged baby in his arms. A group of women gathered, each undertaking to do something for him, while I cared for the baby until the city welfare bureau could take it.

In the corner grocery I often observed gaunt workers payout their week’s wages, billions of paper marks, for a couple of loaves of bread, some potatoes, and margarine. Meat and fruit were beyond their reach. There was no sugar, only saccharine, and even this they could not afford. Families sought foreign boarders in order to get foreign currency, and decent foreigners were filled with shame. During this period I met American bankers and industrialists, among them a representative of General Motors, who regarded German poverty and helplessness as a gold mine for foreign investments: they could command very high rates of interest. What political guarantees they demanded against revolution I never knew, but they most certainly were demanded. The Nazis later came to power on such guarantees and with their help.

The Nazi movement was growing, loudly voicing revolutionary social ideas stolen from the Socialists and Communists, and utilizing the despair of the people and the Versailles Treaty with a masterly hand. With their coffers filled from mysterious sources, they were challenging Socialists and Communists and making a tremendous bid for power. But because they were still relatively weak, they revived a murder fraternity of the Middle Ages, the Fememord. Members of this group moved about at night, murdering tradeunion leaders, Socialists and Communists, Jews, and professors who had enough integrity to defend the Republic. From the foreign bankers I heard no protests at such outrages; they talked only of “Communist violence.”

Despite all their fierce talk, the Germans were still an orderly and disciplined people. Too disciplined, in fact. It was a Russian Communist who said that the German workers would revolt only if the Reichstag passed a law giving them permission. When the mounted police once charged a workers’ demonstration in the Lustgarten in Berlin, the people who fled along the walks did not even step on the grass.

As an illustration of the servility of German womanhood, I recall the case of a woman from whom Viren and I rented rooms. She made a living for herself, her husband, and their son, but her husband beat her regularly, and once injured her so seriously that she nearly died. Viren and I took the case to police headquarters, but were informed that the police could not interfere in family affairs unless the wife was killed; in that case they could arrest the husband for murder.

It was the political confusion and inertia of the German people that left ajar the gates of the state and allowed the Nazis to move in. This attitude spread most rapidly during that era of heart-destroying insecurity; it grew out of hunger, despair, and political abuse until millions were willing to put their minds to sleep and follow anyone who promised them food, shelter, and peace. Of course, along with food, shelter, and temporary peace the Nazis assumed the right to feed the minds of the people. When the German people accepted this, they surrendered the one thing that separates man from beast - the responsibility of thinking for himself. When I visited Germany a number of years later, I heard people say with pride: “Hitler thinks for me.”