Uncle Helmuth’s hatred is even purer downward, toward the “undisciplined riffraff” of the “proletarians.” Granted, they are poor and ought really to be his allies against their mutual “exploiters” and “slave drivers.” But Uncle Helmuth feels separated from them by a class barrier. He is an “academic”; he attended university (making sacrifices that he talks about like his wounds in WWI). Uncle Helmuth wears a collar and tie; he has a doctorate in engineering and is married to the second daughter of the late Lieutenant Colonel Subicz and Frau Lieutenant Colonel Subicz née von Jaentsch. This separates him everlastingly from the ignorant and dirty rabble in the back courtyards. And yet he has to admit to himself that, unlike him, this ragtag mob have no prejudices, are not ruled by fictions, and thus in many respects live more freely, happily, frivolously than he.

Since it is basically the envy of the unredeemed that makes Uncle Helmuth hate both upward and downward, one might think that he would see redemption in America. The United States appears to be a society that has succeeded in making social envy the driving element of the national dynamic. In a land where every shoeshine boy is a potential millionaire, one had better not treat him scornfully. And if his road to riches is a little longer than Mr. Rockefeller’s, then the distance serves his self-respect as a measure, even if he breaks down en route.

But no: Uncle Helmuth does not feel challenged by American competitiveness. He says too many “values” are lost in it. Americans are “uncultured materialists” with no respect for the “spiritual side of life” and its values—so bitterly hard for him, the eleventh son of a destitute Thuringian pastor, to secure.

In reality, Uncle Helmuth embodies the spirit of “uncritical social criticism,” as John calls it—and in this respect, he is a potential Nazi. Criticism, says John, was the intrinsic forte of the Nazi movement. In criticizing, the Nazis were always right. But, like the criticism voiced by the German National Socialists of that time, Uncle Helmuth’s is too general, too universal, and thus ultimately not maneuverable, an overcanvased ship. His criticism comes not from sober analysis but from resentment, from a general sulkiness about life, an ill humor that only imagines most of the insults and injuries that nourish him, and thus has no solid goal, no concrete object. Uncle Helmuth reacts instinctively against any stimulus that he views as characteristic of something opposing him. It may be a lady in sable or a whistling tramp, a speeding car, a silly advertising slogan on a poster, a kiss on some woman’s hand, a certain way of donning a hat—particularly anything testifying to a way of life that strikes him as freer, lighter, cheerier than his own, thereby putting his own in doubt.

And because he feels like a victim of a worldwide conspiracy against him, he stuffs everything possible into this hate: blame for the whole dreary monotony of his existence; the probable disappointment in his thwarted professional ambitions (he really wanted to go into research and not industry); his concern about the state of the world, which his newspaper makes him worry about every morning, reminding him how helpless he is, how much at the mercy of the powers working their influence therein. Perhaps he also tosses into this garbage can of his choleric emotions the sexual frustration of a man who has Aunt Hertha for a wife and in adjacent rooms Aunt Selma on one side and Cousin Wolfgang and me on the other, all as possible eavesdroppers; and certainly he adds his spiritualist notion that there is a true, non-earthly hierarchy of nearness to God, or rather farness from God, in which he occupies a totally different, much loftier rank, roughly at the level of Buddha or Madame Blavatsky, with no one realizing this at all . . .