Appendix 7 1939 Ter Braak’s Journal 1939 The Hague, September 3 Day war is declared. For the first time in my life I feel the urge to keep a journal. Since Hitler’s blackmailing of Poland, style is the furthest thing from my mind. No desire to write even; typing is less “literary.” Mood for the past few days: changing by the hour. Fear, indifference, fury, shame. One feeling trumps them all: stay alive until Hitler hangs. This without the slightest feeling of revenge. I don’t hate that man. I don’t even despise him. But he has to go, and we can take it from there. Up to now, my one belief, however irrational: that this is going to happen, somehow. Once this belief is shattered, so is the last reason to go on living. Feeling of shame, especially about the last six years. As v. L. asserted: the cowardice of those who did not dare confront Hitler these past six years. Every other cowardice (fear of bombs, etc.), I deem forgivable and normal, but for this cowardice Europe will pay with blood. Utter lack of imagination on the part of the average person to grasp that a country can be led by criminals and psychopaths. The man in power is a “gentle- man”: old slave morality, the lower orders accept the ruler as a “gentleman,” even in the face of the vilest acts to the contrary. Radio: immediately prior to Chamberlain’s declaration of war that may well decide Europe’s fate for years to come, a woman speaks about canned vegetables; segment from an opera. As Chamberlain speaks, other stations broadcast concerts. All of the chaos of “public opinion” concentrated in this symbol of our middleclass culture. Curi- ous as to how this radio chaos will play out as we switch to a “war economy.” Concerts as the bombs fly? Why not? Life after all must go on. Yesterday, at Oscar Wilde, mo- mentarily seized by this sensation: we must become inured to war crimes as quickly as possible, and in the meantime hoard every “human” sentiment, lest we squander it before we really need it. The question remains whether this is possible. … Rushing from one radio set to another, but only with friends: v. L., v. Cr. The feeling that we are conspiring in front of the radio. Neutrality: this feeling of relief, shame and insecurity. Relief: others will take care of this unpleasant sordid little business for us. Shame: they are also doing the job for us, and for now we merely look on. Insecurity: do we have a “right” to look on, will some deity not decide to embroil us because it is our business, too? Mobilization: soldiers in schools sniggering at the “girls.” War seems to arouse the erotic in these men. The exact opposite with me. War would turn me into a deperson- alized, ascetic being. Feelings — some — go out to “real” things: A. [Ant, Ter Braak’s © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004426627_080 Ter Braak’s Journal 1939 259 wife], friends, culture. That all this would no longer exist can make me terribly sad, not to say strangely rebellious. Against what? We have no right to anything after Europe gave Hitler the green light by treating him with kid gloves. … From the moment the war broke out, I am European, English, French (with all the shame of a person who looks at things from afar), but without the conviction that they “have right on their side.” They have nothing on their side but the air in which one can live, behind which — undoubtedly — lurks the social revolution. This war has but one idea: we are fighting for a minimum. More we can’t really ask for. I am convinced, though, that soldiers in the line of fire would find little comfort in a minimum. We are going to have to lay it on thick. Excitement: now it is war. Warm, calm and listless weather. We are finding that we had imagined the explosion rather more dramatically. Perhaps it is such in the coun- tries at war, but it is also possible that it is only now that it is beginning to dawn on us that we’ve been living in a state of war for at least three years. It’s difficult to think that anything has changed until the bombs start falling. Different from 1914. Another difference (one of the few hopeful phenomena): there is no powerful war psychosis, not even in Germany, which has been massaged for six years (and maybe that’s why not). It may still come. … Sometimes an unerring feeling that I am destined to survive the impending filth. At other times the feeling that this feeling is the worst and loveliest of self- deceptions. … Weird thought: that future generations will look back on the September days of 1939 as we do on 1914: as the outcome of a logical chain of events, that had to happen in this or that way because the relations were such and such. For us right now there is nothing but a black hole of speculation. All we know is that Hitler’s regime has to come to end — or it will be the end of us. The confidence with which some people (Schwarzschild, Erika Mann) talk about the certainty of the final victory leaves me skeptical. My confidence inheres solely in the conviction that life in Europe would be impossible without it; yes, in the final analysis still irrational, but I can’t think ahead: the other possibility, a Hitler victory, is damned. Dominant factor in my makeup: cowardice by nature; cowardice fortified by my intelligence, and only kept in check by the idea that I possibly am no more cowardly than others: fatalism. … September 4 Woke up without realizing that there was a war on … airplanes over our country.… To- day a letter from Gr. [Greshoff] from Cape Town. The last one? I would want to survive this war if only to spend half a year with him looking out over the blue ocean. For the rest I have no other desire, but that already is a lot at a time like this. Worried about .