Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  It is doubtful, however, if the wild girl’s pilgrim soul was ever tamed, even by time. One modern parallel that won’t work is to attribute to her a Jane Fonda–like anabasis from one mould of progressive conformity to the next. Ricarda was never a conventional spirit looking for the display case of a radical context: she was always a genuine solo act. Her opinions were entirely hers and often uncomfortable to even the most wide-ranging liberal hierophant, as if she had been some kind of clerical surrealist out to shock with decontextualized opinions instead of sliced eyeballs and soft watches. In June 1943 she recorded in writing her profound enjoyment of her first air raid. It was the same month that Hamburg was incinerated. Thoughts of doom and retribution would have been more suitable, but Ricarda could not repress her delight that the full-colour spectacular had come to a cinema near her. “Finally Jena has had a sensation.” In Berlin after the war she wandered the world of ruins—the Trümmerwelt—where it would have been permissible for the author of one of the most important books on the Thirty Years War to weep heavy tears for the downfall of a civilization. She loved it. Her aesthetic enthusiasm for the gutted buildings and heaped rubble was boundless. She was in her eighties at the time.

  And that was the time when she wrote her encomium to the suicidal young nobles of July. It would do us good to remember that the old lady had lived a long life as they had not, and that she had lived it with originality as they might never have done. They were exactly the kind of stiff-necked, tight-trousered cadets to whom she had once so enjoyed giving the runaround. If she could salute them, so should we. She was, after all, absolutely right on every point in the paragraph. The boys never had a chance. Even if the apprentices had managed to kill their sorcerer, they could not have saved Grossdeutschland, which was going down to unconditional surrender no matter who led it. But even if they had known in advance that a coup would not work, they would still have been right to try. Henning von Tresckow, who knew more about the Killing Hitler business than anybody, guessed that the July 1944 plot was doomed but said it should go ahead anyway. He could only have meant that he saw it as a ceremony: a moment of honour that would be remembered when there was nothing else to remember except shame.

  Ricarda was well aware that there were other and less charismatic people in the conspiracy apart from the glamorously uniformed Hochadel scions whose consciences had developed few notable doubts until military defeat became a certainty. There were obscure commoners who had seen through Hitler from the beginning. What she meant by nobility was the sacrificial spirit that joined, in this one instance, the beautiful young men from the Almanach de Gotha and the plodding minor bureaucrats from the local council. She could take such a large view of nobility because she was noble herself. One of the marks of the natural aristocrat is that the brain, the centre of rationality, does not become detached from the viscera, the seat of moral judgement. As a student of German history—and a reader of her book on romanticism will wonder if there was ever a better student—she was well placed to assess the condition her country was in during the Weimar Republic, and to understand the appeal that a strongman might have to those conservative forces who feared a Bolshevik insurrection beyond anything else. But she had only to see the Nazis in action to know exactly what they were, and when they invited her to join them she had only one answer to give. Millions of dead bodies later, those who equivocated were slow to mention her name. Their reluctance was understandable, and remains easy to share. Conscious that we, too, might have found no uncompromising path through a moral maze, we would all like to believe that there was no easy answer. And indeed there wasn’t. But there was a clear one. It was to tell the Nazis to go chase themselves.

  All it took was courage. But courage is hard to come by: as Ricarda’s rococo c.v. suggests, to have buckets of guts you need to be a little bit mad. Hence the discomfort which haunts any of us who write about the subject: the malaise comes from our self-doubt, and the self-doubt is the surest sign that the murderers in black uniforms are still with us. It is almost as disturbing that a woman like Ricarda Huch is still with us, but if we seek reassurance about human dignity instead of mere acceptance of human weakness, we must face up to her, and try to remember why Judas found it so hard to look into the face of Christ—not because of the divine serenity that was there, but because of the self-seeking calculation that was not.

  J

  Ernst Jünger

  ERNST JüNGER

  Ernst Jünger was born in Heidelberg in 1895 and reached maturity just in time to volunteer for service in World War I, during which his bravery won him the Pour le Mérite, Germany’s highest military decoration. After the war, his book In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel) launched him on a literary career that amounts to as big a problem for the student of twentieth-century humanism as Bertolt Brecht’s. In Jünger’s case, however, the problem came from the other direction. Jünger emerged from the trenches as a believer in national strength, which he thought threatened by liberal democracy. Though he never gave his full allegiance to the Nazis, he was glad to accept military rank in the Wehrmacht, and wrote approvingly about the invasion of France, in which he accompanied one of the forward units. After the plot against Hitler’s life in July 1944 he fell under suspicion, but his prestige and his Pour le Mérite made him untouchable. Never an active conspirator, he thought he was fulfilling his duty to civilized values merely by despising Hitler. The thought of killing him did not occur. In his post-war years, Jünger wrote contemptuously against the apparatchiks of the East German regime, who found it easy to condemn him for his right-wing track record, describing him in their official literary lexicon as “an especially dangerous exponent of West German militaristic and neofascist literature.” Having missed his first chance to identify a totalitarian enemy in good time, he didn’t miss the second. Demonstrating powers of compression and evocation that could pack a treatise into a paragraph, his two collections of linked short essays, Auf den Marmorklippen (On the Marble Cliffs) and Das abenteuerliche Herz (The Adventurous Heart), are the easiest introduction to his literary talent and political vision. The talent is unquestionable. The vision is quite otherwise. But when he finally realized what Hitler had done in pursuit of the same ideal of strength that he had himself cherished, even he was obliged to consider that his espousal of Darwin (the struggle for existence) and Nietzsche (the will to power) might have depended on some sort of liberal context for its rational expression. He died in 1998, his name much honoured, with good reason, and much in dispute, for a better one.

  Things like that belong to the style of the times.

  —ERNST JüNGER, Kaukasische Aufzeichnungen (CAUCASIAN NOTES)

  WHEN IT COMES to a great offence, a phrase like “the style of the times” can be self-serving, because it removes the obligation to place blame. Even before Hitler launched Germany on a catastrophic war, Jünger should have been able to assess the toxicity of the Nazis by the intellectual quality of some of the people who were trying to get beyond their reach. In retrospect, his phrase “the style of the times” enrols itself among many euphemisms that served to sanitize the effects of the Nazi impact even on the learned professions. Jünger, as an Aryan, was safe from that impact. He should have cared more about what happened to those less privileged. A learned man himself, Jünger knew all their names: even the names of the minor figures, the spear carriers and walk-ons. In the late 1930s, in a race for a foreign chair of philology, the obscure Victor Klemperer was beaten to a safe seat in Ankara by the illustrious Erich Auerbach. If Klemperer had secured the prize instead, and got away to safety, it is unlikely that he would have written anything with the bold scope of Auerbach’s Mimesis. We should not romanticize Klemperer because of what he went through: millions did. But we are compelled to admire him for what he made of it. Compared to Auerbach, Klemperer was a plodder. Fated to stay where he was, however, he was granted the dubious reward of experiencing from close up what the Nazis did to the German language: an instructive, if disheartening, phi
lological field. Some of Klemperer’s conclusions are loosely distributed through his indispensable two-volume diary, published in English as I Shall Bear Witness and To the Bitter End. But most are tightly contained in a separate book assembled after the war out of the notes he somehow managed to make and keep during it: LTI. (The initials stand for Lingua tertii imperii—Language of the Third Empire—a bitter scholarly pun.) As a Jew in the Third Empire, Klemperer was allowed no new books or newspapers. He wasn’t even allowed to listen to the radio. But he picked up the new usages at second hand. Reading his analysis, we can only conclude that the Nazis wrecked the language they had usurped. They wrecked it with euphemism: they spoke and wrote the officialese of slaughter.

  But we should not delude ourselves that an Aryan non-Nazi, no matter how exalted his intellect, could exercise the privilege of remaining uninfected. Ernst Jünger is a case in point: perhaps the case in point, because he was incomparably the most gifted writer to remain on the scene. In his wartime diaries, the strange usage isolated in my opening quotation keeps on cropping up. It centres on a single word. The word is Zeitstil: “the style of the times.” In early December 1942 we find Jünger visiting the Russian front. He hears about dreadful things happening to Russian prisoners. First of all he convinces himself that the prisoners are partisans, and can thus expect no quarter. When this thesis starts to look shaky, he convinces himself of something else: that both sides are behaving dreadfully, and it all belongs to “the style of the times.” Later on in the same month, he hears from a general (the generals were always at home to Jünger, whose prestige was immense) that the Jews are being slaughtered. Jünger’s reaction is: “The old chivalry is dead: wars from now on will be waged by technologists.” Once again, it is the style of the times. And so it was, but not in the way he meant it.

  Jünger had lent his literary gift to the idea of German militaristic renewal. Until the news about the extermination camps was finally and unmistakably read to him by a German general in 1943, no amount of horrifying truth could induce him fully to admit that he had made a mistake. His way out of such an admission was to blame the style of the times: i.e., to console himself with the belief that everyone was at it, led back to barbarism by the modern spirit of technology. The style of the times was a powerfully useful idea. It didn’t even need to be put into words. It could be put into silence. In his elegant, learned and finally disgraceful Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, published in 1948, T. S. Eliot simply declined to admit that the Holocaust might be a pertinent topic in a discussion of what had happened to Europe. Closer to the scene but equally untouched, Eliot’s admirer and colleague Ernst Robert Curtius achieved a similar feat of inattention. If pressed on the point, both savants would have blamed the new technological order: the style of the times. But there was no such thing as the style of the times, except in the sense that they themselves personified: a style of not concerning themselves with the catastrophic results of a political emphasis they had been given ample opportunity to recognize as the first and most deadly enemy of the humanist culture they claimed to represent. The humble Victor Klemperer, if they had been forcibly reminded of his name, would have been dismissed as small beer by both of them. Ernst Jünger would have behaved better. To give him the respect he has coming, he finally realized that the massacre of the Jews could not be wished away. But he never quite gave up on the airy notion that the style of the times was to blame for things like that.

  K

  Franz Kafka

  John Keats

  Leszek Kolakowski

  Alexandra Kollontai

  Heda Margolius Kovaly

  Karl Kraus

  FRANZ KAFKA

  Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 and died in Berlin in 1924. In his brief four decades alive he created a body of work that has influenced almost everything written since: not even James Joyce had such an impact. Kafka was trained as a lawyer and was first employed in Prague’s Workers’ Accident Insurance Institution. This experience probably laid the foundations for his evocation of bureaucracy and the plight of the individual caught up in the remorseless logic of an irrational system. ( J. P. Stern’s short book about Kafka is predicated on the view that Kafka’s supposedly fantastic vision was largely an account of reality; and it is a measure of the unsettling power generated by Kafka’s magic spell that Stern’s view is commonly regarded as wilfully paradoxical.) As a Jew, Kafka also had first-hand knowledge from birth of how it felt to be faced with exclusions and unpassable tests with ever-changing rules. But his vision of state terror lay deep in a psychology personal to him. Since the Nazi era need never have happened, to say that he prophesied it is actually a belittlement of his creative achievement, and only one step up from saying that he caused the whole thing. But nobody could now read The Trial without thinking of the Soviet show trials, or the short works Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony without thinking of death camps. The novels for which he is now most famous—The Trial, The Castle and Amerika—were all published posthumously, against Kafka’s wishes that they should be destroyed. (Often derided as a giftless and interfering parasite on Kafka, his friend Max Brod was in fact responsible for ignoring Kafka’s instructions, preserving his books, and thus giving us the genius that we know today.) Kafka’s very order for the immolation of his work could have been missed by the keepers of The Castle, a book which has been usefully defined as a Pilgrim’s Progress whose pilgrim does not progress. Beginners reading in English can place sufficient trust in the translations by Edwin and Willa Muir to be sure that they will get something vital from reading Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and The Castle. But just how Kafka should ideally be translated remains a question, best tackled by Milan Kundera in the relevant sections of his Testaments Betrayed. Philip Roth is another important novelist who writes illuminatingly about Kafka. Writings on the subject by scholars and critics are without number, but perhaps the best single short essay is by George Steiner, collected in Louis Kronenberg’s indispensable Brief Lives: A Biographical Companion to the Arts. The best way to approach Kafka, however, is probably just to plunge into The Castle and get lost. Getting lost and staying lost is the whole idea of the book, and a matchless symbol for how, according to Kafka, we really feel underneath, when we momentarily convince ourselves that we know what’s going on, while still suspecting that the momentary conviction might be part of the deception.

  How short life must be, if something so fragile can last a lifetime.

  —KAFKA

  KAFKA WAS TALKING about a young woman’s body. Along with the anguish, there is an unmanning tenderness in the statement, and the tenderness should be remembered when we consider what a tangle the whole business of sex was for Kafka, who never quite got away from the idea that the consummation of sexual desire, if it should ever happen, would be Schmutz—something dirty. We need to remind ourselves that a man can be in that condition and still find inspiration in desire. If that had not been so for Kafka, he would never have said this. Anything Kafka said gained so much weight in the light of events that it is hard to extract it from history. Here is one thing he said, however, that has its true setting in eternity. History tells us that many of the pretty female bodies on which he helplessly doted were consumed by fire before their time. Eternity tells us that he would have been right anyway, even if the disaster had never happened. The heavenly expression before us will last only as long as a life.

  “Just so long,” as Louis MacNeice put it, “but long enough.” Desire can be repressed to the point of extinction, but it is still the wellspring. As we saw when discussing Peter Altenberg, there is nothing “only” about it. Nietzsche said that sexuality saturates the consciousness all the way to the top. In European literature, ever since the poetry of courtly love first codified the visione amorosa, the identification of desire and revelation has been common currency. We can think of Wagner’s emphasis on redemption as an attempt to separate the flower from its roots, but he could have had no such aim if he had not fel
t the connection as a fact. If the fact is a myth, it is a myth that all cultivated mankind shares, so it is a fact anyway. When we stumble across another literature in which the fact is lacking, we tend to find that literature perverted rather than primitive. Our assumption is that the whole idea was there from the beginning, one of the first things in the mind, perhaps even before religion: primordial. We might even think that civilization began at that point, when the individual was first seen to embody the universal. It brought endless trouble: when Menelaus and Paris both burned for Helen, Troy burned with them, and Pascal was making a powerful point when he suggested that history might have turned out differently if Cleopatra’s nose had been a different length. Men have always been fools for beauty. But without being bowled over in the first place, they would never have begun to be wise. Sex, the most powerful instinct, generates the most closely focused attention: so that we see, in the desired other, the proof that creation is a miracle. Men who see the proof ten times at every pedestrian crossing are no doubt foolish, but men who see it only in their own shaving mirrors are generally agreed to be suffering from a case of arrested development.