Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  Golo Mann could have his weak moments. Too quick to understand Ernst Jünger’s flirtation with the idea of a powerfully rearmed Germany, he allowed the possibility of Jünger’s genuine detachment from the awfulness of Nazi reality, as if Jünger’s aesthetic refinement had been a part excuse for his political indifference. But the part excuse was wholly a defence mechanism. Jünger’s Tagebücher should have revealed to Golo Mann—otherwise the most acute of stylistic analysts, on top of his other virtues—that Jünger took refuge in the exquisite as a way of not thinking about the obvious. One is reminded of the indulgence Gitta Sereny extended to Albert Speer: she convicted him only of not wanting to know. But he did know. He always knew. To be civilized is not a hindrance to recognizing the barbaric. The hindrance is the barbaric within oneself. Jünger was wedded to the idea of a strong, militaristic Germany. The wedding made him slow to see what the Nazis were actually doing. Why Golo Mann should have been slow to see what Ernst Jünger was doing is another question. The answer might have had something to do with Golo Mann’s long passion for putting a liberal German intellectual tradition back together. He didn’t want to throw away an attractive fragment.

  It could have been that he just didn’t like the idea of denouncing a misfit bookworm. He had been one of those himself. The Manns were not a dysfunctional family, but they were a family of dysfunctional people, and the young Golo had been an oddball even among the Manns. There is a desperately touching passage in his memoirs Erinnerungen und Gedanken (1986) when he recollects, as if it were yesterday (and obviously he always felt as if it were), how he was shut out from some yodelling youth movement. He had an urge to fit in. When he volunteered for the crucial job of going back to Munich to save Thomas Mann’s compromising private diaries from the Nazis, he became indispensable at last. But his homosexuality always troubled him more than the same condition troubled his elder siblings, Klaus and Erika. Fractured character is probably what made him an artist among historians. Artists complete themselves in their works. Golo Mann’s works are not so much the expression of a complete personality as of a personality completing itself as it writes: he is working himself out before your eyes, the way artists do. With an internal scope to energize his view of the external world, he set the measure for all the liberal German historians to come. E. H. Gombrich’s irascible but useful complaint that his generation of assimilated Jews did not regard themselves as Jewish was already there in Golo’s writings, enshrined as a principle. (It should be noted that Golo and his siblings were only quarter Jews, which might have got them by; but their mother was a half Jew, which would surely have meant trouble; so he had reasons near home for pondering the matter as the Nazis came closer to assuming power.)

  By imposing a racial definition, Hitler did not reveal a reality: he created one, out of his own poisonous obsessions. Similarly, the pundits on the revisionist side of the Historikerstreit in the 1980s had already been discredited by what Golo Mann had written before they were ever heard from. Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber wanted to call Hitler’s wars of extermination inevitable because Hitler was only reacting to what the Soviet Union had already done. Golo Mann had established in advance that there was no such historical tendency except in retrospect. In retrospect, the reader of history is apt to wish that less history had been written, but we are unlikely to feel that when reading Golo Mann. Second only to Thomas in the Mann clan, Golo wrote even finer expository prose than his father. It is sad that Thomas Mann did not live long enough to see the full glory of his most loyal son, but perhaps he guessed that it would come. We are all allowed to predict the future: it is one of the imagination’s privileges. But predicting the past is a mischievous habit, and Golo Mann was the first to spot just how pervasive it was becoming, as historians presumed to impose upon events a baleful shape that had stolen into their minds: a shape that was a self-protective reaction to the events themselves—one more version of the small man’s revenge for helplessness.

  It was no belief: it was a crime committed because of bad literature.

  —GOLO MANN, Deutsche Geschichte 1919–1945, P. 138

  Golo Mann is the greatest German historian of the twentieth century by a long mile, but when he said this he gave a hostage to fortune. He was trying to say that the Holocaust didn’t have to happen. He was certainly right about the bad literature. Anti-Semitism was the claim to profundity of almost every literary halfwit in Germany during the years when Hitler, posing dramatically in front of a cheap mirror, was rehearsing his role as the man with the magnetic eyes.

  Unfortunately Golo Mann’s idea about the bad literature gave precursorial support to Daniel Goldhagen’s suggestion, forty years later, that a whole culture, saturated with what he called “eliminationist” anti-Semitism, had necessarily been bent on the annihilation of a race. Both opinions, Golo Mann’s and Goldhagen’s, need to be discounted; and Mann’s, unexpectedly enough, is more insidious than Goldhagen’s, which has the sole merit of refuting itself. Mann’s doesn’t. Some of the top Nazis can indeed be portrayed as opportunists who did not really believe their own doctrine. By the end, Himmler and Goering were both ready to do a deal to get out; Goebbels, though a dedicated fanatic at the last day, was merely hopping a bandwagon on the way in; and there is even a possibility that Heydrich’s hidden motive might have been to offset the rumours about own Jewish background by building up a sufficiently impressive record of eliminating everyone else with the same drawback. (A rumour was all it was, but he might have been able to imagine circumstances in which a rumour would have been all it needed to do him damage.) One question remains, however, and it is about Hitler. If Hitler’s anti-Semitism wasn’t a belief, what was it?

  The less attention we pay to Hitler’s mysticism, the more we must pay to his practicality. In the days of the ugly birth of the SS, Hitler just wanted the new elite corps to be a bodyguard. It was Himmler who wanted the SS to be a new order of Germanic knights. At Wewelsburg, his castle in Westphalia, Himmler played King Arthur. Each of his twelve companions at the round table had a suite decorated differently: thoughts arise of Las Vegas and the Playboy Mansion West. Hitler thought all the mystical stuff was nonsense. His fanaticism was entirely on the practical level: what one might call, must call, a true belief. Unencumbered by any metaphysical junk apart from his deluded root perception into the Jewish origins of Bolshevism, Hitler’s convictions were unshakeable. Himmler’s, on the other hand, were flexible. The same man who talked sinister tripe about a Nordic peasant aristocracy in the east was ready to listen when the Sicherheitsdienst, after two years of intense research into the blindingly obvious, concluded that the extermination policies in Poland and Russia had defeated the political purpose. No doubt with a sinking feeling, Himmler saw the point. But there is no reason to suppose that Hitler didn’t see the point as well. He just didn’t let it impress him. For him, the exterminations were the political purpose. Self-defeating or not, mass murder was his belief. And he didn’t get it from bad literature. Most of the bad literature he read was by Karl May, inventor of a Western hero called Old Shatter-hand, who was deadly in pursuit of Indians and rattlesnakes, but not of Jews—a species thin on the ground among the cactus and the sagebrush. Any other literature, no matter how bad, Hitler only pretended to read. He probably didn’t even read the anti-Semitic pamphlets. What he did do was listen to their authors shouting racist filth. They shouted it because they believed it, and he got the idea immediately because it is not an idea. It’s a belief, and precedes its attendant ideas as the stomach ache precedes the vomit.

  HEINRICH MANN

  Heinrich Mann (1871–1950), four years older than Thomas Mann but doomed never to catch up, won few of the literary rewards that came the way of his world-famous younger brother. Heinrich’s voluminous fictional writings earned him a reputation as the German Zola but were rarely taken seriously as works of art. Though he was never less than a celebrity, he had to watch the laurels he would have liked for himself go to his less prolific but be
tter organized sibling. He did, however, achieve one thing uniquely his: he gave the world a universally appreciable mythical figure. His novel Professor Unrat (1904) featured a respectable schoolmaster who was lured to destruction by a seductive female creature of the demi-monde. Filmed in 1930 as The Blue Angel, the story made Marlene Dietrich a star and, through her, gave Heinrich Mann a purchase on the international popular psyche that Thomas Mann would never equal: Aschenbach, in Death in Venice, is for an intellectual audience, whereas Dietrich’s soubrette fatale works her destructive magic in all men’s minds to this very day. Critics who dismiss Heinrich as glibly prolific should be reminded that Thomas, though Heinrich’s slapdash facility dismayed him, was always generous enough to praise his brother’s talent when he saw signs of its coming into focus. Thomas’s main trouble with Heinrich was Heinrich’s erratic behaviour, which was only intermittently embarrassing when they were both still in Germany, but became a real problem when they were both in exile. Heinrich did not take easily to being a displaced person. In Europe he had enjoyed less prestige than Thomas but at least he was well-known. In America he was a nonentity. Whereas Thomas’s books became more famous than ever in translation, Heinrich’s got nowhere. He ran easily through the money that he borrowed from Thomas, drank heavily, and his unwise choice of mistress led to the kind of social awkwardness that Thomas—always conscious of his exalted position in the glittering refugee society of wartime Los Angeles—found threatening. Just because Thomas was snobbish, however, is no reason to suppose that Heinrich was some kind of wonderful free spirit. He was the kind of knockabout bore who makes things worse by apologizing for it. But perhaps his erratic sensibility gave him insight. At any rate, it was Heinrich, and not Thomas, who guessed as early as 1936 that the Nazis had an atrocity in mind beyond all reasonable imagining.

  The German Jews will be systematically annihilated, of that there can be no more doubt.

  —HEINRICH MANN, Die Deutschen und ihrer Juden, COLLECTED IN Politische Essays, P. 146.

  AS ALWAYS IN any German writings of the modern period, everything depends on the year. In 1936 there were very few intelligent people who wanted to believe that Heinrich Mann’s prediction was anything except an hysterical exaggeration. And indeed it was a guess; but what he guessed was the truth. He was able to do so by taking a general view of how the repressive laws had been applied with increasing severity. He deduced the destination from the momentum. Among the people who were already suffering so severely from those restrictions, there were not yet many who were ready to draw the same conclusion. Victor Klemperer’s diary from the same year provides an instructive comparison. Klemperer could guess things would get worse, but he didn’t yet see that the progressive turning of the screws could end only in death. There were Nazis who didn’t see it. The idea of resettling the remaining Jews on Madagascar or some similarly outlandish destination had not yet been abandoned. Historians who, for various reasons, would like to believe that the idea of extermination was hatched much later would never countenance 1936 as a year in which the threat could be realistically conceived of. In Joachim Fest’s biography of Hitler, the Holocaust is not precisely a side issue, but it would be fair to say that it is not presented as Hitler’s main initial aim. Once in London I met Fest at a launch party and mentioned this essay by Heinrich Mann. Fest said that he had never heard of it, and that he found it hard to believe it had been published in 1936.

  Looking back on Fest’s books, it might seem strange to suggest that he soft-pedalled the Holocaust. Fest’s picture of Heydrich in Das Gesicht des Dritten Reiches (The Face of the Third Reich) remains the most penetrating we have, and in his study of the July 1944 plot against Hitler’s life, Staatsstreich (Coup d’état), he pays proper tribute to the twenty or so conspirators who told the Gestapo that revulsion against the treatment of the Jews was their main reason for getting into it. Nevertheless, over the broad span of his writings, Fest’s concern with the Nazis’ most defining crime has an oddly soft focus. In the case of his Hitler biography, the soft focus can only be called damaging, and it is hard to see how his hefty book, apart from its chronological completeness, is much superior, for its psychological insight, to Konrad Heiden’s pioneering work (Hitler: Das Leben eines Diktators) published in the same year as Heinrich Mann’s essay, 1936. Hugh Trevor-Roper, among post-war historians the first in the field with his The Last Days of Hitler, was necessarily unarmed with the subsequent scholarship but still got closer to the nub of the matter. (In 2002 Fest reprised Trevor-Roper’s crepuscular theme with his short book Untergang, which had some nice maps of the bunker: but I saw no reason to think that Trevor-Roper’s pioneering study of the man cowering inside it had been replaced.) Coming after Trevor-Roper, Alan Bullock did the first full-length biography that mattered, and it continues to matter most. Bullock reprised his theme with the relevant portions of his stereoscopic Hitler and Stalin, but students should not excuse themselves from reading his first monograph: one of the essential books of the modern world. J. P. Stern’s short book of 1975 (Hitler: The Führer and the People) offers useful sidelines, but he stands on Bullock’s shoulders. Ian Kershaw’s recent two-volume effort has not really replaced Bullock, who packed longer judgement into a shorter distance. Though simplicity of heart must always present the danger of obfuscation, there is an even greater danger in too much finesse. While their foul subject was fresh, the first post-war English historians, in early before the smoke had cleared, smelt the Devil. They were right. The lasting merit of Heinrich Mann’s prescient statement is that it disarms the defence mechanism by which—even today, and looking back—we would rather classify murderously threatening language as mere rhetoric. As the historians’ picture of Hitler becomes more and more elaborate, there is a greater and greater tendency to suppose that his lethality grew upon him in the course of events. But it caused the events.

  MICHAEL MANN

  Michael Mann (b. 1943) is a director famous mainly for giving his films, no matter how violent their subject matter, a soothingly diffused and pastel look, as if their contentedly vacationing audience were wearing sunglasses even at night. Though Mann had already made movies before he became executive producer of the globally successful Miami Vice, it was for the brushed and powdered episodes of that television series that he first achieved the full development of his characteristic look, which made a hero out of Don Johnson’s tailor and turned Florida into an advertisement for itself. Like most film directors with an early history of earning their keep in television, Mann was obliged, however, to learn that the look of the thing came second to the story. (One of his first jobs in show business was writing scripts for Starsky and Hutch.) As a consequence, his feature films, pretty as they are to look at, are invariably made coherent by a strong narrative line, and not just by their tasteful mise en scène. Manhunter, for example, is by far the best plotted of the Hannibal Lecter movies, and would be recalled now as the benchmark for the franchise if it had not been sunk in advance by the comparative anonymity of its leading actor. (Later on—“ironically,” as they say in Hollywood—the film’s obscure leading man William Petersen became, as the face of CSI, one of the most recognizable actors on Earth.) The look of movies helps to form the stock imaginative patterns of the world, and to that extent the director often really is the formative influence. This remains true even though, in the main production centre, there is scarcely such a thing as a successful commercial movie which is not a collaborative venture controlled by a studio that can fire anybody concerned, the director included. Just as the atmospherics of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner now affect the appearance—and even, through the music of Vangelis, the soundtrack—of any movie made anywhere whose subject is the future, so do the atmospherics of Michael Mann’s Heat affect the look of any movie made about crime: other directors, whether working out of the United States, Latin America, Europe or Hong Kong, either go with him, towards glamour, or go against him, towards grunge, but they always have his look in mind. What concerns me
here, however, is not what happens to the pictures, but to the words. By definition, they are not in a universally appreciable language. But are they in English either? The answer has large implications, especially for international politics. If the troops who come to bring you freedom can’t understand even each other, you had better hope that they know what is meant by a white flag.

  Let’s violate his ass right now.

  —MICHAEL MANN AND OTHERS, Heat

  THE INFORMER IS being unforthcoming. The informer is on parole. Hard-driving police captain Al Pacino and his faithful sidekick grow impatient. The sidekick suggests to Pacino that they punish the uncooperative informer by arresting him for violating his parole. “Let’s violate his ass.” That’s the way the sidekick says it. Did you get it straight away? Confess.