Niederschoenfeld

Ernst Toller was a student and an idealist, blinded by the stars of Prussia's glory, who rushed into the fray as an officer in 1914. The grim horror of war, the comradeship of the trenches, the constructive revolt of 1918, drove him into the camp of revolutionary socialism.

Into the nightmare of the war burst Russia's Bolshevik Revolution, a new hope for Germany's war-worn, hungry millions. Soldiers, deserters, industrial workers, united in revolt. Toller emerged as President of the Bavarian Workers' Council, claiming sovereignty over South Germany.

Days of bloodshed—ruthless stamping out of revolution by the forerunners of the Gestapo under right-wing "Socialist" Noske—ended in the triumph of reaction. Toller was sentenced to indefinite imprisonment.

His six years in the prisons of the Weimar "democratic" republic were years of creation. Here he wrote his plays "Transfiguration" and "Masses and Man," for years popular with experimental drama groups ail over the world. Here, too, most of his poetry was written—looking back on the lost hopes of the past, and forward to the unfulfilled hopes of the future.

That was the faith of a socialist. In 1924 he was freed, but on the condition of exile—from his wife, his comrades, and his Germany. In his preface to this English edition he wrote: "What are the bitterness and humiliations that we had to suffer in comparison with the tortures inflicted on the prisoners of the Third Reich, prisoners whose only crime is their love of freedom and justice."

Overwhelmed by the triumph of Hitlerism, cut off from his German radical movement, broken and alone, Ernst Toller cut his throat in a New York garret in 1939.

Sing-Sing

Our second jailbird was himself an American: Ralph Chaplin, leader of the American "Wobblles" (the Industrial Workers of the World) and editor of their Journal "Solidarity." Wobbly influence was strong in Australasia in the days when Messrs. Semple and Fraser terrorised Waihi and the Wellington wharves. In America, right up till the 1920's, the I.W.W. had a firm foothold. Chaplin was in the thick of the struggles till he was jailed in 1917 for "conspiring to oppose the war." in that time he wrote such everpopular labour songs as "Solidarity Forever, for the Union makes us strong," and "One Big Industrial Union."

His 20-year sentence was, as. Professor Scott Nearing says in the Preface to "Bars and Shadows," not for opposing just the war. "Chaplin was guilty of the most serious social offence that a man can commit. While living in an old and shattered social order, he championed a new order of society. . . . Socrates and Jesus, for like offences, lost their lives."

So too, did Chaplin. For he did not live to see freedom again.

Those lines are a profession of faith. But the sharp touch of his personal sufferings, a man who loved living shut up in a cell, would have some effect on the hardest cynic of us all.

Mount Crawford

From America, we step home to New Zealand for a few remarks on Ormond Burton's outstanding book 'In Prison."

After the works of two romantic poets, it may seem prosaic, dull. But Burton's mind is none the less sensitive—more so, maybe, as his socialism is far less of a mass faith. Burton is a pacifist whose self-abnegation has been unequalled by that of any New Zealander. His book would embarrass do-good Christians, because it shames them.

Although it is, in essence, the story of his own imprisonment, his experiences and his reflections on them, "In Prison" is also a thesis on the New Zealand prison system. His general remarks are of permanent value—for example, his suggestion that male homosexuals "would probably be more likely to be reformed if they were put into a Girls' Borstal," and his comments on the comforting breadth and hospitality of the C. of E. as opposed to his (then) own Methodist Church.

Without malice, he attacks the whole basis of our prison system by a number of humanitarian and concrete suggestions for reform. But prisons themselves must surely be alien to Mr. Burton's own essentially anarchist concept of the Christian world. But maybe where his theories would leave no impression, the barb of his closing lines would bite deep. "New life would commence to flow again in the veins of the Church," he says, "if she once again were to feel the glow of generous passion for the sinful and the lost."

Burton brings Taller and Chaplin close to us, for he, too, was jailed for nothing more than his opinions. The brutality of German and American jails is still foreign in its intensity to New Zealand's—but in days of emergency regulations and security pimping, one wonders for how long more.

Pankrats

Last—perhaps greatest—of our four books is the diary of a Czech Communist resistance leader. "Notes from the Gallows" describes briefly, realistically, the life of Julius Fuchik from the time of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia (following the Munich sell-out) till just before his summary execution.

In her introduction, Mme. Fuchik tells how, in those terrible days under the iron heel, a Czech guard carried pencil and paper to Fuchik's cell in the Pankrats' prison, and smuggled the notes out sheet by sheet.

No one who has read this book can say he does not know what a Communist is, and I am not sure that anyone who hasn't read it can say that he does. It is a story of unparalleled bravery. It tells how a man who had devoted his life to the struggle of his people for socialism carried on that work under the terror of fascism; how he was arrested in the midst of his work; how he never flinched under torture, but went defiantly to death.

There is no word of boasting: he speaks of duty, and expects his comrades to behave as he does. There is no personal hate—he even speaks sympathetically of the brutal Gestapo who were mere tools of an evil machine. He describes how, while he was awaiting an interrogation, one hard-faced gunman threw him a cigarette . . . "Kind, very small and unimportant, and yet I shall never forget it."

His memories, his experiences, his summings-up that have no regrets—all open to us the heart of the Czech people. Fuchik felt and did what millions of his countrymen felt and did. He had worked tirelessly to bring Czechoslovakia to the road she was later to follow, but he was not to live to help lead her along it.

Partisan.