Source: The Comrade, December 1902 issue, Vol. 2 No. 3.
Transcription and Markup: Bill Wright for marxists.org, April, 2023.
My career on this globe began in Prussia in 1864, the year of the war with Denmark. When I made my first tottering steps, the war with Austria broke out in 1866. And when I had just opened my first primer, the Franco-German war in 1870-71 swept me away to France. The strongest impressions conveyed to my young mind during these first six years were martial music and the marching of troops; tumultuous cheering amid the sobbing of mothers, wives and sweethearts; carnage, burning homes, and crumbling walls; the roar of victorious exultation mingled with groans, prayers, and curses of wounded and dying; mangled corpses in fertile fields trampled down in the fullness of the harvest. Add to these impressions the effect of a pronounced military environment for the next six years. Intensify this by byzantine and severely patriotic training, supplemented on the spiritual side by “religious mysticism and devotion.” Season this formula with German fairy tales, ancient mythology, Robinson Crusoe, Cooper’s and Marryatt’s Indian and sea stories, together with the usual college course of a German “Gymnasium,” and you have the sum total of the intellectual equipment with which I started out to solve the riddles of life and my relation to society.
I was practically on the dead level of equality, occupied by the average patriotic and religious fanatic who is ever ready to sacrifice his life on the altar of devotion to royalty, fatherland, or dogma — for the benefit of the devotees of Mammon to whom royalty, patriotism, and religion are simply so many cloaks of respectability to cover the bald covetousness of their alleged civilizing activity.
This comatose state of mind was luckily offset by alert physical senses. Whatever may be said of the stunting qualities of bourgeois instruction, the ruling class certainly bestowed great care on the development of the body. True, their “mens sana in corpore sano” was only an axiom, not a fact. For “mens sana” meant to them a mind that would use manly prowess for the benefit of commercial supremacy, even to the point of killing others in peace or war for private profit.
Thanks to the careful training of my physical senses, the capitalist environment quickly sent a flood of reflexes to my mind on which it began gradually to react; feebly at first and with many relapses into its stupid bourgeois prejudice, but ever more readily and more objectively.
First of all, my eyes were forced to see scenes that had none of the beauty, harmony, prosperity and bliss which should have reigned according to the current theories. I saw some of the former heroes, now heroes no longer when they were not needed, standing on the street corners with their grindorgans, tottering about on wooden legs, broken in body and soul by diseases contracted on the field of glory and soliciting alms. They were objects of pity and contempt. I saw others, demoted with brilliant stars and gaudy sashes, riding on prancing steeds or in resplendent carriages. And they were objects of universal admiration. Still I remembered that they had all been cheered when marching against the enemy and scoring victory after victory. Riddle number one which my mind set about to solve.
The next reflection, still arising out of the memories of my childhood years, was suggested by my dearly beloved Bible. Thou shalt not kill! was a thousand year old commandment. Yet in this world created by an allwise and omnipotent Being, slaughter seemed to be the main purpose of all living creatures. More curious still, I had seen soldiers carrying the Bible in their knapsacks, alongside of the cartridges for killing the enemy and of the whiskey bottle, the contents of which goaded them into murder. And most curious of all, I had heard ministers and priests imploring their Creator to assist them in slaying the enemy. Riddle number two which proved far more difficult to solve than number one. When I had finally solved it, after years of the most excruciating mental struggles, I stood on the brink of nervous prostration, in spite of all physical training. The Bible had become an object of horror to me, and for many years I could not think of it without cursing it for the fearful tortures which it had caused me and others. Only when the materialist conception of history began to dawn on me, I again drew the Bible forth from its dusty hiding place. Though discarded as a spiritual guide, it became a treasure grove for the student of human history.
The completion of my college course placed me face to face with riddle number three: the struggle for existence. In solving this, I also found the solution of riddles number one and two. It was not long before I found that a college training was rather a heavy handicap for a young man without means and without a social pull. I was drafted into the great army of the unemployed before I had done a stroke of useful work. Society had trained me for intellectual tasks, but had failed to provide for employment.
At this stage, Robinson Crusoe, Leatherstocking, and Midshipman Easy asserted themselves. One fine morning, I found myself as deckhand in the forecastle of a German Lloyd steamer bound for New York. In the following years, the lessons of the class struggle unfolded themselves on several trips around the world on board of German, Spanish and American sailing vessels. One fact stood out in bold relief as the result of this seafaring life — that human nature is found at its best in the lower strata of human society. Three shipwrecks were especially instructive in this respect. The first one cast me ashore in the Philippine Islands. After I had vainly appealed to the representatives of civilization for assistance, I found brotherly sympathy, tender care, and boundless hospitality among the lowest class of Tagalos, with whom I spent two years of the happiest time of my life. The second shipwreck threw me on the shores of China and resulted in similar experiences. The third and last wreck cost me my own vessel through the carelessness and treachery of my first mate. Only the devotion of a sixty year old sailor and a young man from the slums saved us all from a watery grave in the icy waves of the North Sea.
The next touches were put to my education for Socialism by the German navy and army. I had learned the truth of economic determinism and of the class struggle without knowing these terms. But I still clung to the illusion of patriotism. The drillmasters of Billy the Versatile cured me of that. The class line in all its brutal nakedness became visible to me. The tyrannical and insolent arrogance of the demigods with shoulder straps roused my spirit of independence to its climax. An affront, a blow, a courtmartial, closed my military career and fixed in my mind one aim — the abolition of the ruling class.
A short post graduate course at the Berlin University showed me the rottenness of the intellectual elite of Germany. At the same time it pointed the way to the execution of my aim. A stray copy of “Vorwærts,” a few Socialist campaign leaflets, and a number of conversations with Socialist students revealed to me the fact that I had several millions of allies. Marx’s “Capital,” the “Communist Manifesto,” and some more copies of “Vorwærts” did the rest.
I stood at the outlet of the maze of bourgeois philosophy and stepped into the light of a new world movement. The fearful waste of bourgeois training and its shocking cruelty were clearly exposed. The world is moving toward co-operation and freedom, and bourgeois teaching had been trying to lead me there by way of individualism and mental imprisonment. It was like going from New York to Chicago by way of the Atlantic Ocean, the Trans-Siberian railroad and Alaska. If our whole training had been in the direction of economic evolution, what a waste of mental and bodily energy might have been spared to me! The wish to destroy the ruling class gave way to the desire to build the new comrade world and make possible for others what had been denied to me. With all thoughts of revenge gone, I stepped into the ranks of the cosmopolitan army that is destined to create the conditions on which alone can be built the temple of freedom and brotherhood.
Yours fraternally,
Ernest Untermann.
Last updated on 8 April 2023