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Party, and thenthen there was a long deliberation with regard to
the answers to be made.
Terrible, terrible! This was club life of the worst manner and sort.
Was I to join this organization?
Next, new memberships were discussed; in other words, my
capture was taken up.
I now began to ask questionsbut, aside from a few directives,
there was nothing, no program, no leaflet, no printed matter at
all, no membership cards, not even a miserable rubber stamp,
only obvious good faith and good intentions.
I had stopped smiling, for what was this if not a typical sign of
the complete helplessness and total despair of all existing parties,
their programs, their purposes, and their activity? The thing that
drove these few young people to activity that was outwardly so
absurd was only the emanation of their inner voice, which more
instinctively than consciously showed them that all parties up till
then were suited neither for raising up the German nation nor for
curing its inner wounds. I quickly read the typed 'directives' and
in them I saw more seeking than knowledge. Much was vague or
unclear, much was missing, but nothing was present which could
not have passed as a sign of a struggling realization.
I knew what these men felt: it was the longing for a new
movement which should be more than a party in the previous
sense of the wold.
That evening when I returned to the barracks I had formed my
judgment of this association.
I was facing the hardest question of my life: should I join or
should I decline?
Reason could advise me only to decline, but my feeling left me
no rest, and as often as I tried to remember the absurdity of this
whole club, my feeling argued for it.
I was restless in the days that followed.
I began to ponder back and forth. I had long been resolved to
engage in political activity; that this could be done only in a new
movement was likewise clear to me, only the impetus to act had
hitherto been lacking. I am not one of those people who begin
something today and lay it down tomorrow, if possible taking up
something else again. This very conviction among others was the
main reason why it was so hard for me to make up my mind to
join such a new organization. I knew that for me a decision
would be for good, with no turning back. For me it was no
passing game but grim earnest. Even then I had an instinctive
revulsion toward men who start everything and never carry
anything out These jacksofalltrades were loathsome to me. I
regarded the activity of such people as worse than doing nothing.
And this way of thinking constituted one of the main reasons
why I could not make up my mind as easily as some others do to
found a cause which either had to become everything or else
would do better not to exist at all.
Fate itself now seemed to give me a hint. I should never have
gone into one of the existing large parties, and later on I shall go
into the reasons for this more closely. This absurd little
organization with its few members seemed to me to possess the
one advantage that it had not frozen into an 'organization,' but left
the individual an opportunity for real personal activity. Here it
was still possible to work, and the smaller the movement, the
more readily it could be put into the proper form. Here the
content, the goal, and the road could still be determined, which in
the existing great parties was impossible from the outset.
The longer I tried to think it over, the more the conviction grew
in me that through just such a little movement the rise of the
nation could some day be organized, but never through the
political parliamentary parties which clung far too greatly to the
old conceptions or even shared in the profits of the new regime.
For it was a new philosophy and not a new election slogan that
had to be proclaimed.
Truly a very grave decisionto begin transforming this intention
into reality!
What prerequisites did I myself bring to this task?
That I was poor and without means seemed to me the most
bearable part of it, but it was harder that I was numbered among
the nameless, that I was one of the millions whom chance
permits to live or summons out of existence without even their
closest neighbors condescending to take any notice of it. In
addition, there was the difficulty which inevitably arose from my
lack of schooling.
The so called 'intelligentsia' always looks down with a really
limitless condescension on anyone who has not been dragged
through the obligatory schools and had the necessary knowledge
pumped into him. The question has never been: What are the
man's abilities? but: What has he learned? To these 'educated'
people the biggest emptyhead, if he is wrapped in enough
diplomas, is worth more than the brightest boy who happens to
lack these costly envelopes. And so it was easy for me to imagine
how this ' educated ' world would confront me, and in this I erred
only in so far as even then I still regarded people as better than in
cold reality they for the most part unfortunately are. As they are,
to be sure, the exceptions, as everywhere else, shine all the more
brightly. Thereby, however, I learned always to distinguish
between the eternal students and the men of real ability.
After two days of agonized pondering and reflection, I finally
came to the conviction that I had to take this step.
It was the most decisive resolve of my life. From here there was
and could be no turning back.
And so I registered as a member of the German Workers' Party
and received a provisional membership card with the number 7.
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