54. Émile Zola To The Youth

Zola's personality seems to grow with every day that passes before us. It is as if we are only now coming to understand him fully. His fanatical sense of truth has often disturbed us in his artistic creations. Now that this fanaticism for truth has led him to bold, heroic action in a purely human cause, we can only have feelings of unreserved approval and admiration. What he has striven for decades as an artist, to bring the pure, naked truth to victory: he now sets himself this task in a matter that he believes to be distorted by lies, slander, cowardice, vanity and miserable prejudice. Whatever one thinks of the unfortunate captain on Devil's Island, the way in which Émile Zola takes up his cause will always be one of the most remarkable phenomena of our time.

As an admirable man of action, Zola has been living out his life before us for weeks. Every detail we hear about him digs deep into our hearts. Every word he speaks in the trial that is being held against him is the expression of a great man. The fact that he is unhelpful in verbal speech and finds it difficult to find the words to express the grave feelings that live in his soul fits wonderfully with the image of the great personality.

I have before me the letter he recently addressed to the youth of France. This letter is a document of our time. It does not have any particularly great truths to say to young people. There is only one subtle thing that distinguishes Zola's sentences from the things that any number of freedom and equality enthusiasts could also address to young people. But this something is an infinity. It is the emotional content of a personality that emanates all the ideas that separate us from past times as the deepest content of its own soul.

I can imagine sober judges who find only liberal everyday phrases in Zola's Letter to Youth (it was published in translation by Hugo Steinitz, Berlin SW.). They do not know how to read between the lines. Between the lines are the feelings, which are the most valuable thing about the letter.

I can remember smiling when I heard the words in some demagogue's speech: "O youth, O youth, remember the sufferings your fathers endured, the terrible battles in which they had to win in order to conquer the freedom you enjoy today. If you feel free today, if you can go and come as you please, express your thoughts through the press, have an opinion and express it publicly, you owe it all to the intelligence and blood of your fathers. You young men, you were not born under tyranny, you do not know what it means to feel the foot of the ruler on your neck every morning when you wake up, you have not had to flee from the sword of a dictator, from the false scales of bad justice." That something of which I have spoken makes these sentences seem monumental to me.

There seems to be a very deep meaning in the sentence: if two people say the same thing, it is not the same thing.

We live in a time that is rich in contradictions. To feel these contradictions, we Germans don't have to look at the French first. There are also enough phenomena in our own ranks to make us blush.

What is called "youth" is not even the worst. The confusion is greatest among men who are now in their thirties. There are those who think they are modern, who are not ashamed to express their sympathies for reactionary ideas. We can hear such moderns in their prime agreeing with the tendencies of Junker cliques; and from their mouths we must hear that the liberal ideas of our century are a childhood disease of our time. How "wisely" such men do not often speak of the "abstract" idea of freedom, which is supposed to contradict what they proclaim to be a real necessity of the state.

It is outrageous when the feeling for simple, banal justice is lost because the necessity of the state is supposed to demand that this feeling should not be given free rein! Above all state necessity stands humanity, which must become its right. I have to smile at the journalistic statesmen who say: "The French courts have spoken about Captain Dreyfus, and we Germans have no part in it; what would we say if the French wanted to sit in judgment over a verdict that was handed down in our country in the external forms of justice!"

Zola made the most serious accusation against the sentence passed on Captain Dreyfus. A crime

He called this verdict a crime. He branded the people who brought about this verdict as criminals. He is being accused of it. Whether he is right or wrong can depend on nothing other than how one thinks about the guilt or innocence of Alfred Dreyfus. But this must not be mentioned at all during the trial of Zola. State necessity forbids talking about Dreyfus. I have no words to express the feelings I have about this fact.

Where will we end up if we continue to develop in this direction?

How convincing, how clear, how plausible Zola's words sound to the unbiased sensibility: "An officer has been condemned and no one thinks of doubting the good faith of his judges. They have condemned him to the best of their judgment on the basis of evidence which they considered reliable. Then one day, first one and then several doubts arise. These people finally come to the conclusion that one piece of evidence, the most important, or at least the only piece of evidence on which the judges are known to have relied, has been falsely attributed to the convicted defendant, and that even this piece of evidence undoubtedly comes from the hand of someone else. They name this other person, and he is accused by the prisoner's brother, as his duty required. In this way they force a new trial to begin before they proceed to bring about the revision of the first one, which must take place on the basis of a conviction in the other trial." How mysterious, not to use another word, the spectre of state necessity appears in comparison with this unambiguous speech!

Zola says: "The thing is this: a false judgment has gone out into the world; conscientious men have been won over, have joined forces, are devoting themselves to the cause with ever greater zeal and are risking their fortunes and their lives just so that justice may be done!"

But the journalistic statesmen say: "The French government is not obliged to initiate a retrial against the will of the majority of the population because Dreyfus has been convicted once according to the rules in force in his country". It is not for a newspaper writer to state that it is the custom in all countries to proceed with treason trials in a similar way to the way in which the Dreyfus case was handled in France. It is better for him to characterize the repugnance of such a custom.

However, what am I talking about the voluntary tugs of statesmanlike insight! As a representative of a magazine that is supposed to serve the development of freedom, I would rather send my heartfelt greetings to the great artist who today, before the barriers of the court, serves all that is pious to true progress in the most fearless way.