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The Veterans. Schumacher is a crippled, wasted man with a long, bony face and metallic eyes. His right arm is gone, severed at the shoulder by a Russian machine-gun burst in World War I. His left leg is gone, his digestion is chaotic, his heart unpredictable—the inheritance, in part at least, of ten brutal years in Dachau. When he talks, his left hand flicks and darts and claws at the air, and his eyes, affected by years of Nazi beatings, roll and bulge in a way that gives a continually fanatical cast to words that often do border on fanaticism. He lives on cigarettes, barbiturates and coffee; he wears perpetual pain as casually as an undershirt. Partly paralyzed, he is often confined to bed for prolonged periods—as he was again last week.
The sixth child and only son of a Prussian civil servant, Kurt Schumacher was born in the town of Kulm on the Vistula. It is now a part of Poland—to Schumacher a constant reminder of Germany's dismemberment in two wars. He went into the Kaiser's army in the summer of 1914, but in less than six months his soldiering was over, his arm gone. In an army hospital, he taught himself in two weeks to write lefthanded. Disgusted with "the Kaiser's war," he turned to Socialism, read Marx and was impressed, read Lenin and disagreed (particularly with his contempt for democracy), earned his doctorate at the University of Münster. He rejected the Marxist notion of violent class revolution, embraced instead the doctrine of democratic evolution through parliamentary means. ". . . Marxism is no catechism for us," he said. "It is nevertheless the method to which we owe more than any other sociological method in the world." Unlike the ripsnorting old Sozis of the 1920s with their red caps and red scarves, the Schumacher Socialists of today have lost their enthusiasm for all-out nationalization of "all means of production, distribution and exchange" and advocate a more tepid Socialism like the Swedes and the British Laborites. They want some nationalization, some private ownership. They advocate something called Mitbestimmung (co-determination), which means giving workers the right to share with management in the operation of industry.
In the 1920s Schumacher, despite his missing arm, was a plump and healthy Socialist who enjoyed good food and the company of actresses, read detective stories as well as the turgid literature of Socialism, and liked to sit up late in a coffeehouse arguing politics. He early decided to remain a bachelor. "I am married to politics," he would say. From the beginning, he goaded Germany's older, more cautious Socialists. At the first weak rumblings of Naziism, in 1921, Schumacher organized young street fighters to combat the new evil, but the old Socialists would not get behind the movement.