Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  Once again, what makes it funny is that there was something to it: just not enough. Before the war, Goebbels had indeed charmed the pants off many of the visiting Englishmen: he had long heart-to-hearts with the Duke of Windsor, Sir John Simon and Lord Halifax. Even Beaverbrook, later tiresomely active on Churchill’s behalf, had seemed to understand Germany’s sacred mission against Bolshevism. But Goebbels could never grasp that everything was transformed from the moment Churchill took office. The accommodating opinions of all these influential people either had ceased to matter or had changed, so that now, while they might all have been variously influential, they were united in having no power to favour Germany even if they had wanted to. Predictably, Goebbels’s interpretation of this otherwise unaccountable turn-up for the books was that a small, Jewish-inspired clique had taken over.

  On the question of the Jews, von Oven does his best to employ the soft pedal on the Minister’s behalf. Even in post-war Argentina, where Nazi refugees could voice their old opinions virtually unchecked, it was thought prudent to go easy on the mania. But a true mania has a way of seeping through any amount of reasoned argument, and so it proves here. Though von Oven’s post-war preface to the complete work assures us that he had never known anything about gas chambers or exterminations, in the body of the transcript the guileless amanuensis can’t hide even his own real opinions, so his master’s are bound to come out eventually. On October 3, 1943, von Oven delivers himself of the prediction that some of the Nazi hierarchs will soon start looking for alibis: “they will manufacture a connection with some resistance group, or they will pretend that they helped some Jew (etwa einen Juden) escape from Germany.” Now why should some Jew have wanted to do that? In volume 2 von Oven lets the Minister, in his role as Doctor of all the arts, rave on for three solid pages about the slyness with which the Jews pulled off the confidence trick called Modern Art, but von Oven is still careful to confine the discussion to aesthetic matters. On a later page, however, both he and the Minister stand revealed as fully aware of what has been going on. Goebbels “wonders” if Himmler, fine fellow though he is, might not have let the concentration camps (in German, Konzentrationslager, or KZ) get a little bit out of hand. Previously, says the Minister, one was able to assume that the conditions in the KZs, “though they might have been hard, were correct and humane. Hard work, strict discipline, but everything that a man should have: adequate food, medical care, even some entertainment.” The Minister goes on to lament, however, that under wartime conditions the KZs might have become a touch less entertaining than they used to be. “Just imagine how it would look if the camps in their present condition are discovered by the enemy!” In that case, predicts the Minister, even the German people will say no more about the blessings that Germany has enjoyed since 1933: blessings which have ensured that even during the war there has been “no unrest, no strikes, no uprisings, no rowdies, no Jews. . . .” At which point, there is no more game to give away.

  There is a kind of poetry to it: the poetry of evil, a destructive lunacy so fluent that it soars to the level of the creative, as if Mephistopheles, as well as appearing in Faust, had actually written it. Compared with Goebbels, Hitler himself was earthbound. With the aid of Albert Speer, Hitler conjured gargantuan visionary cities to be made real in brick and marble, but he would never have thought of a concentration camp that provided entertainment along with the adequate food. Goebbels really was some kind of artist, which is why he should interest us: even more than Speer, Goebbels was the Nazi who talked the talk of an intellectual. As for the way he walked the walk, in von Oven’s masterpiece the Minister’s bad foot goes largely unremarked. As we can tell from Goebbels’s diaries, it never went unremarked in the mind of the man on whom a cruel trick of birth had inflicted it. Byron’s bad foot, we are told, did not make him limp: but he might have felt as if it did. Goebbels’s bad foot never let him feel any other way. Only one thing could make him forget it. His measure of a suitably passionate mistress was how she could liberate him from that dreadful awareness. “I forgot my foot.” Goebbels, though always a family man, awarded himself an artist’s privileges with women, and his position of power ensured that he did not have to restrict himself to the demimonde—where, indeed, he got so involved with an actress that Hitler had to call a halt to the affair.

  Things could be more discreetly managed among the upper orders, with the usual proviso that too much discretion tended to stifle the action. During an official visit to Nuremberg, the Minister drove out to the countryside to take lunch with the Gräfin Faber-Castell, an accomplished, gracious twenty-six-year-old beauty who clad herself in a dirndl for the occasion. After the war the Faber-Castell firm was still making most of the pencils produced in Germany; in Australia as a schoolboy I had a whole box of them in various grades, and very fine pencils they were. (In Solzhenitsyn’s long narrative poem Prussian Nights, the invading Russian soldiers marvel at the perfection of the Faber-Castell pencils: the very kind of reaction to Western goods that Stalin was afraid of, and obviated retroactively by purging his victorious army, nicely calculating how long a stretch in the Gulag it would take to forget a centrally heated house or a flush toilet that worked.) As pioneering participants in the post-war Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), the Faber-Castell dynasty saw no reason to change the firm’s name, and indeed they hadn’t done anything. They had just made pencils; and made Goebbels welcome. After lunch, there was a cultural interlude. When the Gräfin played and sang Lieder, her illustrious visitor joined her at the piano for a four-handed, two-voiced recital. If not a passionate physical relationship, it was certainly a passionate spiritual one. She was his upper-class muse and point of solace: the same supporting role that was played for Goethe by Anna Amalia, Herzogin von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, a parallel that Goebbels would have been well equipped to draw. The Gräfin Faber-Castell’s exalted name crops up repeatedly as the end approaches. It was already approaching on the day of that cosy little combined lunch and Lieder concert. It was June 6, 1944.

  After D-day Goebbels gave up smoking, probably because he was on a psychological high. He really did think, or said he thought, that the chances of working a political master stroke were going up as the military situation deteriorated. By July 1, however, he was smoking again. We have to admit the possibility that his mind was working at two levels. He was the pre-eminent Nazi advocate of Total War (he was surely right that if he had been allowed to institute it earlier, Germany would have done better) but he was also a realist; although we should always remember that he was a realist in a surreal world, the madhouse he had helped to create. There was a significant development on June 11, 1944: von Oven’s help was required in a comprehensive reordering of the Doctor’s personal library. All the standard party literature was thrown out and the remaining books were arranged purely according to literary standards (nach literarisches Maßtäben). There is something touching about that. Goebbels wasn’t getting out of the Nazi party. He thought that the Nazi party would be eternal, even if it were reduced to two members, him and Hitler. But he seems to have decided that all this ideological junk had nothing to do with the real thing. He might have also been trying to get back to his essential, untainted self, all unaware—or perhaps only almost unaware—that the taint was his essential self. Nevertheless there had been a day when, as a young student, he had it all before him. It was a day when he had respected his Jewish professors, saw a literary future for himself, and had not taken the Nazis seriously. A day before he met Hitler. Perhaps now, with the roof falling in, he hankered for the lost past, at a level he could not examine. But the reordering of his books did the examining for him. A man’s relationship with his books tells you a lot about him, and in the case of a man like Goebbels we should pay close attention, because a crucial early choice he made was one that continually faces any of us who read at all. He chose a life of action, and his life would have been different if he had not. It could be said that the lives of millions of innocent people would hav
e been different too, but there we should be equally alert to the danger of optimism. The only thing different might have been that he would have had a job like von Oven’s. He might have been merely reporting on the insanity instead of helping to create it, but the insanity would still have been there. Hitler wouldn’t have needed to find someone else. Someone else would have found him. When absolute power is on offer, talent fights to get in.

  The Nazis had no tragedies: they caused tragedies for other people. In tragedy there must be a fall from high degree, or at least from the level of common humanity: and the Nazis had nothing to fall from. The tower they built was subterranean. But we can sympathize with their children. Near the end of the second volume Frau Goebbels speaks; and when she speaks, laughter dies. It is the April 22, 1945, and the Russians are already in the U-bahn tunnels under Berlin. She tells von Oven that she and her husband have already said goodbye to life. They had lived for Nazi Germany and would die with it. “But what I can’t wish away is the destiny of the children. Certainly my reason tells me that I can’t leave them to a future in which they, as our children, will be defenceless before the Jewish revenge. But when I see them play around our feet, I just can’t reconcile myself to the idea of killing them.”

  When the time came, she managed it. It probably never dawned on her that her innocent children were following at least one and a half million other innocent children into the same poisoned oblivion, and for the same reason—no reason. (Once again, incidentally, von Oven forgets to explain why the Jews should have wanted revenge. Had something bad happened?) In all the literature about the Nazis, there is nothing quite like Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende to tell you that the whole vast historical disaster was a figment of the imagination. If only we could return the dead to life and the tortured to health, we would be able to see it as a comic extravaganza. Goebbels was the limping, shrieking embodiment of the whole thing. He was not a fool. In many respects he was very clever. He even had creative powers. But his creative powers were all at the service of Hitler’s destructive powers. So everything the most eloquent of the Nazis said was a joke. If the joke had all happened within his study—if the Doctor had remained what he was, a dreaming student walled in by books—the laughter would never end, and we might even sympathize. The way things turned out, the most we can do is try to understand. As for Wilfred von Oven, his long post-war career provided evidence that a Nazi past could count as a sort of qualification if you could hang in long enough. In Argentina he was prominent in the circle around Hitler’s favourite Stuka pilot Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the bunch who always knew where Eichmann was. Having never been deprived of his German citizenship, von Oven went back to Europe as often as he liked, and as late as 1998 he was loudly active in Belgium with an outfit dedicated to winning back separate nationhood for the Walloons. For his fellow agitators, his curriculum vitae, going all the way back to service with the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War, was a powerful indicator that he knew what he was talking about. And on top of all that, he had known Goebbels personally!

  WITOLD GOMBROWICZ

  In Poland between the wars, Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969) became a successful writer of a recognizable type, principally because of his surrealist novel Ferdyduke (1938). After he went into exile in Argentina, however, he gradually transmuted into a type of writer that we are only now starting to recognize: the writer who doesn’t write in established forms, but just writes, and who, not belonging anywhere, makes everywhere belong to him. When Poland ceased to suffer under the Nazis, Gombrowicz declined the opportunity to go home and see it suffer under the Communists. In the many volumes of his Journal, Varia, correspondence and memoirs (all available in French, but only some, alas, in English) he worked out a position by which he himself was Poland, and the detailed description of his flight from artistic form was the only art-form to which he felt responsible. On this latter point he differed from his fellow Polish-speaking exile Czeslaw Milosz, who practised all the literary art-forms as if they were one. In his long final phase, Gombrowicz practised none of them, and wrote about how he didn’t. But the way he wrote, in a prose teeming with observed detail and subversive perceptions, was a continual fascination, and went on being so after his death: volumes of his casual-seeming writings continued to appear, and his widow, Rita, became the curator of his reputation as it rose inexorably to fame. At his death he was called “the most unknown of all celebrated writers.” Two decades later, in the year that the Berlin Wall came down, the first uncensored edition of his complete writings finally appeared in Poland. His country had come home to its most obdurate world citizen.

  I find that any self-respecting artist must be, and in more than one sense of the term, an émigré.

  —WITOLD GOMBROWICZ, Varia, VOL. 1, P. 203

  “ EVERYONE,” SAID DR. JOHNSON, “has a lurking wish to appear considerable in his native place.” If he had been blessed with clairvoyance, he might have added: “Everyone except Witold Gombrowicz.” Having spent most of his writing life in exile, Gombrowicz was under some compulsion to judge the experience vital to his cast of mind: but he seems not to have been faking. He might possibly have gone back to Communist Poland if its literary authorities had not been so stupid as to attack him before he got there instead of afterwards. In his Journal Paris-Berlin we find him merely nervous about going back. He is not yet refusing to. But things worked out as they always did, with one of Poland’s most talented writers confirmed in his course of having as little as possible to do with Poland and its immediate concerns. It seems fair to say that he liked it better that way. He wasn’t just making the best of a bad job. Over the course of a writing life spent far from home, he took the opportunity to examine just how closely a national writer must be connected to his nation. In Journal I he asked: is the life of an exile really more fragmentary? In Journal II he said that the more you are yourself, the more you will express your nationality—with the implication that it was easier to express it if you were free of nationalist pressures. In Nazi Germany, he had noticed, the citizens had become less typically German, less authentic. (It should be said that in the writings of Gombrowicz the frequently employed word “authentic” has an authenticity that it never has in the context of Sartre’s existentialism, where it essentially means having the chutzpah to do what it takes so that you may suit yourself—not quite the same thing as being true to yourself.) In Journal II Gombrowicz said: “I want to be only Gombrowicz”: i.e., a country all by himself. He could see the attendant danger: “mon moi gonfle”—my self inflates. “Because the trivial concerns oneself, one fails to see it might be boring.” But in the end, he said in Testament, to lose one’s country is a release. In Empson’s famous poem, the companion piece to the line “It seemed the best thing to be up and go” is “The heart of standing is you cannot fly.” If Gombrowicz had not been able to fly, he would probably have ended up dead. But it is not impossible, just difficult, to imagine him choosing a quiet life from the start, and writing his diary in secret. It is impossible, however, to imagine him not leaving home if given the choice. The idea he spent his life refining—that art was its own kingdom—was an idea that he was born with.

  Nobody got closer than Gombrowicz to making the idea of the “world citizen” seem exalted, the ideal condition that we should all seek, the only way that a mind can come home. But it is important to remember that he had only lost his country: he never forgot it. Poland is one of his constant themes—more so than Argentina, his land of exile—and he continually defines himself in relation to it. “I want to be only Gombrowicz” is transmuted into various versions of “I am Poland”: pretty much the way de Gaulle felt about France, Stravinsky about Russia or Thomas Mann about Germany. The surest guarantee of Gombrowicz’s deep feelings about his country is that he went on writing in its language. Under their various titles, the journals, which amount to his masterpiece, were written in Polish, not Spanish. We owe it to the French publishing house Christian Bourgois Editeur that the Polish was translat
ed into French. Year after year in the late eighties and early nineties—the years when the East was coming back from the dead—I would stop in at the Polish bookshop on Boulevard St. Germain to see if there was a new volume of Gombrowicz. There almost always was. It was a pity that the same did not happen in London or New York. The complete Gombrowicz journals are still not available in English. Thus we pay the penalty for the too-long lingering policy of publishing in an expensive hardback edition first. The French, publishing directly in paperback, found an out-of-the-way writer like Gombrowicz a less suicidal commercial proposition. After all, they had at least one customer they could be sure of. Gombrowicz would have liked the idea of an Australian resident in London looking forward to a trip to Paris so that he could buy the latest book of a Pole resident in Buenos Aires, take it to a café, gather together his rudimentary French, and start construing the text line by line, with much note-taking in the endpapers after copious use of the dictionary. The spectacle would probably not have inspired Gombrowicz to large approving statements along the lines of Vargas Llosa’s cosmopolitanismo vital. But Gombrowicz might have been pleased by the evidence that the individual personality is at the centre of the art, and gets through.

  It is isn’t easy to make someone who hasn’t experienced it understand what it feels like, this martyrdom of being judged, devalued, disqualified, and misrepresented by journalists writing in haste who are bored by reading and who, for that matter, hardly ever read anything anyway.

  —WITOLD GOMBROWICZ, Varia, VOL. 1, P. 105

  He was making the classic complaint of those who would rather be famous than not, but find fame an instrument too blunt to leave their refined views uninjured. As a man without a country, Gombrowicz was good copy for international style-section journalists, and he admitted the advantages of the accruing prestige even as he deplored the psychological effects of being hailed by the uncomprehending. He brought the theme to a nodal point in Journal II, with a disquisition on “le sex-appeal des messieurs d’un certain âge.” Perhaps indulging in wishful thinking—although in his own case the wishful thought seems to have often come true—he said that a man no longer young, but with a certain lustre for his achievements, will soon find the second factor outweighing the first in the matter of attracting youthful admirers. One might as well lie back and enjoy it. The thing to do, he added, is to enjoy it without believing it. Gombrowicz thought that Thomas Mann did believe it, and that the result was “a complacent dignity . . . parading in its cardinal purple.” Calling Mann an old cocotte, Gombrowicz couldn’t let his victim go, and those pages of the second Journal in which he toys with Mann’s reputation can be recommended as a paradigm example of one great literary exile getting on another’s case.