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104 THE SALARIED MASSES
formality of such thought, its dubious neutrality and its purely external
relationship to literature, would have become the unions better than
the shallow optimism with which they greeted its blessings. The Tag des
Buches is not merely no token of spiritual advancement, it is a greater
obstacle to it than the consumption of penny shockers, which are by no
means as pernicious as they would like to make young people believe.
At all events, their black-and-white effects are worth more than the
idylls that are cultivated right in the middle of the GdA Yearbook for
German salary-earners. The latest yearbook starts off:
Beloved and esteemed contemporary, in the present yearbook for 1929 you
will once again find a section 'For Reflective Moments' - but this time I
particularly want to draw your attention to it, since it contains a little sketch
entitled 'Hands that Sow' by the writer Max Jungnickel. Here the writer tells
of an old peasant custom. While ploughing, the farmer let� his little fouryear-old
daughter scatter the first golden grains of seed-com on to the soil.
The child walks over the ploughed clods and, with her tiny hand, clumsily
throws the grains over the fresh soil!' Is that not worth reflecting upon?
What would indeed be worth reflecting upon is how one can get to the
spiri tual front instead of letting oneself be foddered on staple goods in
the rear. So long as the employee unions do not manage to free
themselves from certain prejudices adhering since the nineteenth
century to a popular socialism that for a long while has not been
confined purely to the socialist parties, the danger exists that the
advocates of social progress will rub shoulders with unenlightened
provincials, whose spiritual character is more bourgeois than the
bourgeois avant-garde; in other words, they will scarcely be able to
pursue their aims really wholeheartedly. Nor do the aims themselves
remain unaffected by this.
Sport, free weekends and hiking - despite their neutrality, which allows
them to be used for differing power objectives - impart a dignity to
purely vital urges that does not fully accord with the hierarchy of values
installed by the trade unions' economic programme. By seizing hold of
these vital expressions, the employee unions sometimes more or less
fall victim to the powers vested in them - an irresolution that is just as
characteristic of their lack of definite knowledge as is their trust in the
possibility of supplying cultural contents as it were from outside. In
conversation with me, one works-council member defends rowing
because it brings people into contact with Nature; and an article in
the Jugend-f'Uhrer (information for the leaders of trade-union youth