My Grandfather, Thomas Merton, Speaks Out About World War II

“One Sunday morning in the spring of 1932 I was hiking through the Rhine Valley. With a pack on my back I was wandering down a quiet country road among flowering apple orchards near Koblenz. Suddenly a car appeared and came down the road very fast. It was jammed with people. Almost before I had taken full notice of it, I realized it was coming straight at me and instinctively jumped into the ditch. The car passed in a cloud of leaflets and from the ditch I glimpsed its occupants, six or seven youths screaming and shaking their fists. They were Nazis, and it was election day. I was being invited to vote for Hitler, who was not yet in power. These were future officers in the SS. They vanished quickly. The road was once again perfectly silent and peaceful. But it was not the same road as before. It was now a road on which seven men had expressed their readiness to destroy me.

That was about the closest I ever really came to direct contact with Nazi violence in its overt form. What this novel is about is really something different. It is about the crisis of civilization in general, and the Germany it deals with is largely that of Bismarck and the Kaiser. It is the Germany that accepted Nazism. Nazism itself was beyond me!

The book was written in the summer of 1941, when I was teaching English at St. Bonaventure University. I wanted to enter the Trappists but had not yet managed to make up my mind about doing so. This novel is a kind of sardonic meditation on the world I which I then found myself: an attempt to define its predicament and my own place in it. That definition was necessarily personal. I do not claim to have gained full access to the whole myth of Europe and the West, only to my own myth. But as a child of two wars, my myth had to include that of Europe and of it falling apart: not to mention America and its own built-in absurdities.

Obviously this fantasy cannot be considered adequate statement about Nazism and the war. The death camps were not yet in operation. America was not yet involved. The things that were to come could, at best, be guessed at never have imagined the inhumanities that soon became not only possible but real. In the face of such things, this book could never have been written so lightly. Therefore the reader must remember that it was dreamed in 1941, and that its tone of divertisement marks it as a document of a past era.

What remains actual about it of course is this: the awareness that, though one may or may not escape from the Nazis, there is no evading the universal human crisis of which they were but one partial symptom.”

Abbey of Gethsemani – January 1968

Author's Preface

Thomas Merton

My Argument With the Gestapo