Orwell’s reportages from March to November 1945 are collected in the volume “Travel through Ruins”. He was a war correspondent for the Allies in Germany and documented the defeat of the National Socialists at close quarters. In addition, the volume published by Beck contains three of his articles on Germany from 1940, 1943 and 1945. These texts are still very exciting today, as they describe the situation at the end of the Second World War without prejudice and clairvoyantly.
Many of Orwell’s predictions have proven to be accurate – for example, that the Soviet Union and the United States will dominate world politics as great powers. As early as 1940 he recognized in his review of “Mein Kampf” that Hitler had to be taken at his word and that he would wage war against Russia. In addition, by receiving Thomas Mann, he impressively works out what made the Nazis so attractive: total commitment, the eternal vacation from the self, for which one is also ready for self-destruction.
Today, Islamism holds a similar fascination with some young people. Orwell makes another very apt remark, which one would like to write in the studbook of some progressives even today: “A socialist who catches his children with tin soldiers is mostly outraged, but he is also unable to come up with a substitute for the toy: tin pacifists work somehow not.”
In “Vengeance is Sour”, he describes an encounter with a young Jewish officer. In early 1945 the “young Jew” led Orwell through a hangar full of imprisoned SS officers. He kicks one of the prisoners in the already “deformed”, “hideously swollen” ankle. Insults him as a pig: “I wondered whether the young Jew actually got any real satisfaction from the fact that he enjoyed power here,” writes Orwell. “I came to the conclusion that he did not really enjoy it, but only – like a suitor in a brothel, a boy with his first cigar or a tourist in a picture gallery – trying to convince him that he was enjoying the situation and behaving as he intended when he was helpless. “
He continues: “It is absurd to reproach a German or Austrian Jew when he wants to get back at the Nazis. Heaven only knows the bills the young man had to settle. Probably his whole family had been wiped out. And…” Even if his kick was arbitrary, it was a minor thing compared to the crimes of the Hitler regime.But what this scene and some of the other things I saw in Germany made clear to me was the fact that the whole idea of revenge and Punishment is just a childish daydream. Strictly speaking, there is no vengeance at all. Vengeance is something you imagine while you are passed out and because you are passed out. As soon as the feeling of powerlessness is over, that desire also disappears. “
George Orwell: Journey through Ruins. Reports through Germany and Austria in 1945. With an afterword by Volker Ullrich. Translated from English by Lutz-W. Wolff. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2021. 111 pages, 16 euros.
It is one of the most interesting observations of the tape – whether its conclusions are correct depends heavily on the disposition of the victim. Anyone who is basically a peace-loving person will no longer be able to draw satisfaction from it at the moment in which he has total power to take revenge. Those who, for their part, have a warlike understanding of the world, possibly already.
Orwell, however, was correct in his assessment that the idea of revenge does not work on a national level either. A deindustrialized, maximally weakened Germany, as it was sometimes demanded from the ranks of the Allies – especially in France – would not have been a sustainable model for Europe.
Because he’s in the series of articles for the Observer Accompanied by the last days of the war, there are redundancies that sometimes tire a little when you read the texts in book form in one go – for which they were not originally intended. For example his remarks on the so-called “displaced persons”, the millions of former forced laborers who were wandering around Europe at the time.
Incidentally, he never mentions the concentration camp inmates in this context. As in general the extermination of the European Jews, apart from the revenge passage, is left out. The epilogue tells a little too much of what was previously in the articles. One would have wished for more condensation, background information and reflection. But Orwell’s reports of the end of the war are worth reading, especially because they are unmistakably a skeptic of ideology.
The author clearly speaks of an ideology skeptic
Orwell had renounced communist orthodoxy after his experience in the Spanish Civil War, and in the final phase of World War II he now experienced the ravages of fascist totalitarianism. Here writes someone who unmistakably still sympathizes with certain socialist ideas and believes in the value of individual life, but has abused the former and found the latter despised a million times over.
“Animal Farm”, already completed at the time but still unpublished, has occasionally earned him the reputation of being a communist hater. But when you do your articles for the Observer reading, one does not have the impression of meeting a renegade who is blind in the right eye. His tone of voice is much more devoid of illusions, without hatred, but not without compassion. It was only from this perspective that a novel like “1984” could come into being.
The reports and essays compiled in this volume suggest that the experience as a war correspondent shaped it. Today, surrounded by the ideological battles of the twenty-first century, one sometimes wishes for more participating observers like Orwell.