Letters from Prison (1936)

Book Review from the June 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

Letter from Prison by Ernst Toller (Bodley Head 12s. 6d.)

Bodley Head has just issued a translation of Toller's "Letters from Prison.” The price (12s. 6d.) puts it outside private working-class reading, but it is well worth a determined effort to get it placed in the Public Library.

Anyone who saw Hinkemann produced at a theatre, unhampered by the personal prejudices of a Censor, who gaily approves the giggles of the highbrow sweet maiden at the adventures of Homer in “The Country Wife,” but severely frowns on the topic of actual castration resulting from the Great War, will recognise the merit of the writer as a dramatic artist and, what is more, one acutely sensitive to the tragedy inevitably attaching to Poverty. Drinking to its bitterest dregs the cup of humiliation, rope in hand, the curtain falls on one of the very few great tragic working-class figures in dramatic art.

Toller served five years in prison for the part he played in the abortive Kurt Eisner rising in Bavaria in 1919. Property, scared at even a remote possibility of challenge to its privileges, revealed as usual the imminent Beast concealed beneath the gaudy robes of Church and State. For a taste: A sergeant-major, ordered by his lieutenant to shoot 32 sailors then in gaol,' replied (on his own evidence, p. 341): “With the greatest pleasure.” A bishop exclaims (p. 69): “Hosannah! I welcome you, blessed flogging, rod of Love.” Lest there should be misunderstanding, it was not the Bishop who was flogged. Incidentally, our Soapy Sams manage these things better. The Hungarian bishop should sit at the feet of the Rev. J. R. C. Forrest, who suavely wraps up the same sentiment in “The exercise of force and punishment is a divinely given authority, without which the Church could not carry on” (Oxford Evangelical Conference, April 16th).

Interesting sidelights are thrown on current politics. "A member of the Communist Party was not allowed to talk with us of the Independent S.D. Party” (p. 160). He had received orders to be "very proud and stiff” to fellow "Reds” in gaol. An amusing account is given of the way in which he failed to live up to the rôle decreed for him. Who said "United Front”?

Five years of hell offers an explanation for sentimental passages whose excision would have strengthened the book. For instance, Toller puts on a pedestal the little woman (doing time for killing her child) who appeared at a window in a neighbouring block in the prison, “in order to make men happy for a few seconds” in the extreme limit of undress uniform. Motives are sometimes obscure in the sex line.

The worst part of the volume is a footling preface by the translator, Ellis Roberts, who introduces Toller as a “good left-wing Socialist.”

“Letters from Prison” is but one more justification of the policy of the S.P.G.B. expressed tersely in Clause 6 of our Declaration of Principles : "The working class must organise consciously for the conquest of the powers of Government.” We can only regret the awful waste, the pitiable suffering, the subsequent disheartening of the working class resulting from sporadic outbursts, doomed to failure.

Reginald

Reformers and Revolutionaries (1995)

Theatre Review from the October 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Machine Wreckers by Ernst Toller, National Theatre, Cottlesloe

Socialists are likely to find The Machine Wreckers, a play about the English Luddites, of interest—though they may be surprised to discover that its author was a German expressionist playwright, Ernst Toller, most of whose plays were written whilst he was in prison.

Toller was associated with an attempt to set up a Soviet-style republic in Bavaria at the end of the First World War, and when this failed he was sentenced to five years for treason. Whilst in prison he read widely. As he wrote in his biography:

"I read Marx, Engels, Lassalle, Bakunin, Mehring, Luxemburg, the Webbs . . . In my prison cell I discovered socialism, and for the first time I saw clearly the true structure of society today, the conditions that make war inevitable, the terrible perversity of the law that allows the masses to go hungry while a few go rich, the true relationship between labour and capital, the historical significance of the working class" (I Was A German, translated by Edward Crankshaw, 1934).

Toller had clearly read Lord Byron's passionate speech against the Frame-Work Bill (1812), which made the breaking of machine-frames, used in the textile industry, a hanging offence. The Machine Wreckers begins with an imaginary exchange in which Byron's humanity is set against Lord Castlereagh's Statesman's voice. Quoting Malthus Castlereagh chillingly argue that since the miseries of plague, war and family are "God-ordained":

"The more the infant ranks are thinned by Death
The better for our children and our land."

Toller shows us what such sentiments meant for working-class life in Nottingham in the early years of the nineteenth century. But more than this he examines working class responses to the introduction of machines and the dehumanising excesses of early capitalism. Should the workers die with the rebellious John Wibley who wants to destroy the machines, or the revolutionary Jimmy Cobbett who asks, "what if you laboured to produce for all, and not for Mammon—for service, not for gain?", and imagines a world in which the machine is "no more your enemy but your helper."

Writing about The Machine Wreckers Toller is clear that the clash between reformers and revolutionaries is at the heart of the play, and perhaps significantly it is the reformer Wibley who engineers the death of Cobbett by conspiring with the factory owners.

The play works best when it shows, in naturalistic fashion, the monstrous slavery and poverty which were the lot of many workers in the early nineteenth century. At this level, as one newspaper critic has it, the play shocks and grips. Ironically, the expressionistic devices—a blindman lead by a deaf mute, the character of Old Reaper supposedly representing suffering humanity seeking God, and the attack of the off-stage machine all stroboscopic light and hissing steam—dilute the impact and make the play seem dated and often pedestrian.

The playing is unambiguously first class and if some of the author's stylistic devices—here faithfully reproduced by the director—are a source of weakness, the blazing vitality of the dialogue (particularly the exchange between Cobbett and the factory owner), the continuing relevance of most of the major themes, and the entirely appropriate rage which Toller clearly feels when depicting the grim reality of working-class life, make this a compelling piece of political theatre.

Michael Gill

See also:

Lord Byron and the Luddites