Rebecca West On the Germans

Excerpt from Black Lamb and Grey Falcon:

Rebecca West and her husband travel by train to Zagreb. It is 1937. Europe teeters, teeters. The train is full of primarily Germans, on their way to vacation on the Adriatic coast. This is what I mean when I say this is not just a book about politics. She observes human behavior, she watches closely, she picks up on every signal – and then makes huge assumptions based on her observations. Like many of us do, only she happens to be a brilliant writer, and also – pretty much all of her predictions made ended up coming true, the woman was amazingly prescient. It was during this traveling-with-the-Germans-on-the-train section that the book really kicked in for me.

I got up and went out into the corridor. It was disconcerting to be rushing through the night with this carriageful of unhappy muddlers, who were so nice and so incomprehensible, and apparently doomed to disaster of a kind so special that it was impossible for anybody not of their blood to imagine how it could be averted. Their helplessness was the greater because they had plainly a special talent for obedience. In the routine level of commerce and industry they must have known a success which must have made their failure in all other phases of their being embittering and strange. Now that capitalism was passing into a decadent phase, and many of the grooves along which they had rolled so happily were worn down to nothing, they were broken and beaten, and their ability to choose the broad outlines of their daily lives, to make political decisions, was now less than it had been originally. It was inevitable that the children of such muddlers, who would themselves be muddlers, would support any system which offered them new opportunities for profitable obedience, which would pattern society with new grooves in place of the old, and would never be warned by any instinct of competence and self-preservation if that system was leading to universal disaster. I tried to tell myself that these people in the carriage were not of importance, and were not typical, but I knew that I lied. These were exactly like all Aryan Germans I had ever known; and there were sixty millions of them in the middle of Europe.