But Haas did register certain aspects of the Indian freedom struggle: Indian antipathy to the British, anti-British propaganda, political boycott, and when, in a conversation, Bhavnani, his boss, coolly suggested that just as Haas hated Hitler, so too, Indians hated the British, Haas ended the passage with the comment 'Das war alles' (LW 264). Of course that was not all that could be said. Haas did mention that Indian soldiers were fighting the Japanese and that Gandhi reportedly spent sleepless nights at the thought of bombs over London. But the complex relation between the Indian contribution to the anti-Fascist struggle and the struggle for independence also explained Haas' ambivalences. 'Whatever we say about free India - and naturally we are on its side - at that time the white official was the last hope of the desperate Indian. He wasn't corrupt like the village headman, the village policeman. . .. This was the only "authority" that the rural Indian knew in daily life.' (LW 215)

The problem for the contemporary reader may lie in the parentheses used by Haes; in the need to assure the reader that though, in humanistic terms, one has to support the desire of a country to be independent, there is, nevertheless, sufficient evidence to reclaim for the colonial power that measure of impartial justice which the native power structure lacked. This is a point of view which is perfectly consistent with many liberal European (and often also Indian) positions towards the anti-colonial struggles and the process of decolonization. Haas wrote about India with a sense of urgency and troubled empathy. Perhaps the stylized cultural bracket he used to link cultural myths of Prague and India brings out this aspect clearly:

The biennale in Venice, which Haas visited as a press correspondent, also gave him the opportunity to visit Padua where the sepulchre of St. Antony is situated. Indian readers will sympathize with the story he communicated. Apparently all one's wishes are fulfilled when one touches the marble of the sepulchre. Haas joined the chain of pilgrims and wished for a journey to India, the country of his childhood dreams. (Cf. nr 11, chapter 'notes and references')

He could not have known then that he would spend almost eight years there and that it would become a country he would, as he wrote 'love with an ache' (NR 88). The gesture of a non-verbal epiphany is re-affirmed in his reaction to the news of Gandhi's assassination and these lines may perhaps be the closest approximation of his wish to articulate his Indian experience: 'Mahatma Gandhi, the great holy man of India was dead. I sat beside the radio in London and I knew suddenly that I would never understand this country, not the country and not its people. But I could love it. I still love it today. Perhaps this love is a higher kind of understanding which however cannot be expressed in words' (LW 267).