Cultural Amnesia
Page 86
Carl Zuckmayer (1896–1977) was a German dramatist born in the Rhineland who later settled in Austria, where the first of his two best-known plays The Captain of Köpenick (1931) made him part of the social landscape. After the Anschluß in 1938 he immigrated to the United States, where he wrote the second best-known play, The Devil’s General (1946). Apart from these and other theatrical works, he also wrote poetry and two novels. At one time in the late thirties, before he reached the United States, he spent a brief period in England as a writer on Alexander Korda’s doomed production of I, Claudius. While the film spent a fortune getting nowhere, the refugee from Hitler witnessed three other tyrants in action at once: Korda, the director Josef “von” Sternberg, and the self-damagingly childish actor Charles Laughton. It was a demonstration of where temperamental despotism belongs: in the arts, not in politics. Zuckmayer’s most notable piece of ancillary writing, however, and perhaps his most resonant achievement, was the autobiography from which I quote below. Memoirs were the mainstream of what the émigré writers achieved, and much of what they recalled can reduce the reader to helpless grief. But Zuckmayer, perhaps because of an irrepressible good humour, remembered to say that the destruction of the old European culture could have been more complete. If all those who remained had behaved badly enough, there might have been less to long for. But most of them behaved quite well, thus allowing room to hope for mankind, even if also to regret all the more bitterly that their good character had not done much to stave off the oncoming disaster.
Most of our friends and acquaintances in theatre, film and literature, who had no personal persecution to fear and could remain in their country, stayed true to us, the exiled, and let us know in every possible way that between them and us there was no division. A few, a very few, turned out to be opportunists, delators and traitors.
—CARL ZUCKMAYER, Als wär’s ein Stück von mir, P. 387
THIS IS GENEROUSLY said, and it is a relief to know that it is said truly. Among those artists who, enjoying the dubious privilege of racial acceptability, were able to stay on in Nazi Germany if they wished, comparatively few took the opportunity to flourish. None of those could have guessed, before the battle of Stalingrad, that there would be a reckoning within their lifetimes. If they chose not to cooperate, it was a moral choice. The temptations were hard to resist, yet hardly anyone of real note succumbed. The playwright and Nobel laureate Gerhart Hauptmann agreed to speak well of the Nazis, but he did it because he was old; and even at the time he blamed his own cowardice. The case of the eminent actor-manager Gustav Gründgens, who was pleased enough to be patronized by Goering, is celebrated because it was rare, and the picture of him painted in Mephisto is far too dark: Klaus Mann had a mean streak. (Gründgens didn’t help his case by the way he defended himself after the war: his book was self-justificatory, without showing any awareness that the necessary prelude to explanation was an admission that justification was impossible.) Nevertheless there were those who could not resist a place on the gravy train. Zuckmayer knew most of them personally. The quoted passage is not all he has to say on the subject. Without abandoning the philanthropic restraint that marks his book of memoirs—its title, translatable as “As if It Was a Piece of Me,” is meant partly as a signal that the friendships of a lifetime helped to form him—the great man of the Weimar theatre goes on to give an example of what one of the opportunists managed to achieve.
His name was Arnolt Bronnen, and he was a friend of Brecht. Under Weimar, Bronnen’s socially conscious plays attained enough acclaim for the sceptical Anton Kuh to find them fatuous. When the Nazis came to power, Bronnen faced an abrupt demotion from his success, because his father was a Jewish schoolmaster who had married an Aryan woman. Luckily for him, Bronnen’s powers of dramatic invention served the purpose. He concocted a deposition by which his mother had betrayed her husband with an Aryan man, and therefore he, Bronnen, was ein rassenreiner Fehltritt: a racially pure false step. Having thus armed himself with the proper dispensation, Bronner was able to get along under the Nazis, although they did not forget that his plays had been a success under the Judenrepublik, their typically oafish nickname for the Weimar democracy. Off the hook but not yet on the bandwagon, Bronnen tried to improve his position by publishing anti-Semitic articles. His piece called “Cleaning Up the German Theatre” featured a would-be nifty flight of punning word play about Max Reinhardt: “Jetzt aber nicht mehr Reinhardt, sondern rein und hart!” (“But now no more Reinhardt: instead, clean and hard!” It loses something in translation, but there was never much to lose.) After the Nazis collapsed, Bronnen found another totalitarian bureaucracy to serve. He became an editor in East Germany. The function of an East German literary editor, it hardly needs saying, was to seek out fresh talent and make certain it did not get published.
Zuckmayer was even better acquainted with Hanns Johst, a mediocre man of letters who ranked as a big noise among the Nazi literati. (Johst, not Goering, was the original author of the crack about reaching for his revolver when he heard the word “culture”: an instructive example of a clever remark floating upwards until it attaches itself to someone sufficiently famous.) But Zuckmayer correctly spotted that Bronnen was the more interesting moral case. Accusing your own mother of adultery to save your skin is creativity of a kind so special it can almost be called a talent. Our challenge, however, is to convince ourselves that we would not have done something similar: perhaps a less shameless version, but equally self-serving. And the self-serving action becomes easier on the conscience if we can persuade ourselves we are serving our art, which would be impoverished without us. This process of mental deception seems to have proved especially prevalent among the musicians. Perhaps the writers, confined as they were to words, were quicker to spot it when they were telling themselves lies. Musicians could tell themselves that their art was not affected by the world of ideas. The conscience of Herbert von Karajan seems to have been unaffected, either then or later, by his Nazi party membership, which he applied for voluntarily, on the grounds that he needed it to get ahead. The unblushing readiness of the rising young soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf to sing for the Nazi hierarchs (her luxurious apartment had previously belonged to a Jewish conductor forced into exile) makes us doubly grateful for the memory of Marlene Dietrich, who could not sing from the operatic repertoire but had at least seen the nightmare coming, and made her attitude clear from an early date. As an Aryan, she could have gone home to Germany had she wished: but she never did until Hitler was defeated. Zuckmayer’s point, however, is even more encouraging: most of those who stayed behaved with honour.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) is a fitting name to introduce the coda of this book, because his life, work, exile and self-inflicted death combine to sum up so much of what has gone before, which is really the story of the will to achievement in the face of all the conditions for despair. Zweig’s own achievements are nowadays ofen patronized: a bad mistake, in my view. Largely because of his highly schooled but apparently effortless gift for a clear prose narrative, he attained, while he lived, immense popularity not just in the German-speaking countries but in the world entire, and he is still paying the penalty for it. Except in France, where his major works are never out of print, it is usually safer to call him second-rate. Safer, but not sound. Most of his poems, plays and stories have faded, but his accumulated historical and cultural studies, whether in essay or monograph form, remain a body of achievement almost too impressive to take in. Born into Vienna’s golden age, he took the idea of cultural cosmopolitanism to heart, and looked for its seeds in the past, in a series of individual studies that form a richly endowed humanist gallery, in which the first and still the most impressive portrait is his monograph Erasmus. Such names as Goethe, Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche, Rilke, Herzl, Freud, Schnitzler, Mahler, Bruno Walter and Joseph Roth might have been expected to attract Zweig’s attention, but he also wrote a whole book on Balzac, as well as valuable essays on Dante, Montaigne, Ch
ateaubriand, Sainte-Beuve, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Renan, Rodin, Busoni, Toscanini, Rimbaud, James Joyce and many more. Full-sized books on Marie-Antoinette, Mary Stuart and Magellan were international best-sellers. For beginners who can read some German, his collection Begegnungen mit Menschen, Büchern, Städten (Meetings with People, Books and Cities) is probably the best place to start, and they will be reading much more German afterwards. His Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday) is—it bears saying again—the best single memoir of Old Vienna by any of the city’s native artists, although George Clare’s Last Waltz in Vienna will always be the book to read first. A lustrous picture book, Stefan Zweig, came out in German in 1993, and in French the following year. Its dazzling pages prove that he got some of his immense archive of documents and photographs away to safety. His magnificent library in Salzburg, alas, was burned by the Nazis in 1938. They knew exactly what he represented, even if some literary critics still don’t. Stefan Zweig was the incarnation of humanism, so when he finally took his own life it was a persuasive indication that the thing we value so highly can stay alive only in a liberal context.
With whom have we not spent heart-warming hours there, looking out from the terrace over the beautiful and peaceful landscape, without suspecting that exactly opposite, on the mountain of Berchtesgaden, a man sat who would one day destroy it all?
—STEFAN ZWEIG, Die Welt von Gestern, P. 396
“HEART-WARMING HOURS” sound less corny in German: herzliche Stunden. Zweig had a house in Salzburg, and from the terrace he could see across the border into Germany, to the heights on which the exterminating angel perched, gathering its strength. If Hitler had looked in the other direction, he would have seen, on Zweig’s terrace, everything he was determined to annihilate, and not just because it was Jewish. There were plenty of gentiles who came to see Zweig. But they were all infected with Kulturbolschewismus, the deadly international disease that presumed to live in a world of its own: the disease that Hitler, in his role as hygienist, had a Pasteur-like mission to eradicate. Everyone who mattered in the European cultural world knew Zweig. It was one of his gifts. He believed in the sociability of the civilized. In the long run it was a belief that might have helped to kill him. When he committed suicide in Brazil in 1942, he already knew that the Nazis weren’t going to win the war. But the Nazis had already won their war against the gathering on the terrace.
The question remains of whether Zweig had valued that gathering too much. Never a man for being alone in the café, he had staked everything on the artistic community and the mutual consideration which he supposed to prevail automatically within it. The artistic community, not his worldwide popularity, was the context of his success. When Hitler destroyed that success, Zweig quoted Grillparzer’s line about walking alive in the funeral procession behind his own corpse. Zweig had no notion that the Nazi assault on the idea of an artistic community was not unique. As late as the year of his death, he was still saying that there was “no second example” of such murderous irrationality. Though he had once been on a train ride with the Bolshevik cultural commissar Lunacharsky to visit Tolstoy’s old estate at Yasnaya Polyana, Zweig knew little of what had been going on in the Soviet Union, where the artistic community of Petersburg that had gone on flourishing between 1917 and 1929—a confluence of talent to match any gathering on his terrace—had been obliterated as a matter of policy. (The crackdown was announced by Lunacharsky himself, the erstwhile bohemian chosen by Stalin to put out the lights of bohemia.) To the bitter end, Zweig believed that the natural state of affairs between exponents of the humanities was one of affectionate respect: a professional solidarity.
He would have been horrified to find that Thomas Mann thought of him as a mediocrity. It would have been one horror too much; but, unlike the other horrors, it had not been invented by Hitler out of thin air. That Mann had uttered such an opinion was the simple truth. But we should not put too sinister a construction on a snide remark. Mann was never at ease with the idea that some other German writer might sell more books than he did in the world market. The natural state of affairs between exponents of the humanities is one of tension, suspicion, rivalry and, all too often, enmity. Only a catastrophe can bring about, among its survivors, any degree of the automatic mutual regard that Zweig dreamed of so fondly. A great deal of creativity arises from conflict between the creators, and it tends to be annulled when they are driven to make peace by supervening circumstances. Colin Thubron, who can read Mandarin, noted the blandness that prevailed in the literary aftermath of China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s: when dissent had been alive, the dissenters had dissented among themselves. It is a misconception to think that the emigration from Germany produced nothing—the memoirs alone constitute a whole library of substantial German literature—but equally it would be a misconception to think that the émigrés achieved even a tiny fraction of what they would have achieved had they been left free to quarrel. (They quarrelled anyway, but on a drastically reduced scale: unable to disagree about Hitler, they could disagree only about Stalin.)
In my time, in both London and New York, there have certainly been gatherings on the terrace; and in Melbourne and Sydney they become more frequent and impressive by the year; but the herzliche Stunden can never for long be counted on as a sustaining context. Thomas Mann, a tougher nut in every way than Zweig, noted how in the Vienna of Brahms it was remarkable how the musicians, united only in their mutual suspicion, jealously protected their individuality. (The omniscient Fitelberg, one of Mann’s best shots at the figure of the cultural ominivore, says it in Doktor Faustus: “Wolf, Brahms and Bruckner lived for years on end in the same city, namely Vienna, avoided one another the whole time, and none of them, as far as I know, ever met one of the others.”) The same applies to the Paris of the great painters. Today their masterpieces hang together in the same galleries. We can find our ideal Paris in New York, Chicago, Moscow and Petersburg. While they were painting, in the real Paris, they would cross the boulevard to avoid each other. For understandable reasons, Zweig wished the world otherwise; but in that respect his World of Yesterday was a never-never land. He was always looking for concrete, tangible realizations of a coherence that can exist nowhere except in the spirit. His celebrated collection of autograph manuscripts, which was in display in the Salzburg house, brought the great artists of the past together: another gathering on the terrace. Typically, upon arrival in his last new country, Zweig wrote a book about it: Brasilien, Land der Zukunft (Brazil, Land of the Future). Quoting freely from the Portuguese, the book is a stunning tribute to his powers of almost instantaneous assimilation. But it also testifies to his corrosive grief. He tries to persuade himself that a land without a past might be a new start for civilization. The real theme, however, has all to do with what he has lost. In Rio de Janeiro the terrace was almost empty, and in Petrópolis, where he took his own life, there was no terrace at all. I have been there, and seen it; and it can be a beautiful place, when the purple quaresmas bloom against the green forest; but it isn’t long before you starve for company.
And I realized that for any man, much of the best of his personal freedom would be limited and distorted by photographic publicity.
—STEFAN ZWEIG, Die Welt von Gestern, P. 371
This was an early perception of how the destructive effects of fame in the twentieth century were spreading even to the world of art. Zweig knew more about success than any other serious writer of his time. No stranger to press scrapbooks and photo albums, he documented himself with care. He was always a mighty archivist. But he saw the danger, and might well, had he chosen to live, have chosen the next stage to fame: reclusion. (He could never have done without illustrious company, but might have been quite good at scaring them all to silence.) If he could have seen forward in time, he would have well understood the course taken by Thomas Pynchon and J. D. Salinger. He would have been an appreciative student of the minimax approach to the requirements of publicity, by which the star says just enough t
o keep the mill turning. Nowadays, everyone knows that fame must be managed, or it will do the managing. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, in Der doppelte Boden, says that Heine was condemned to world fame. The “condemned” is the modern word, but Zweig would have seen its force. Even earlier, Proust had foreseen that there would be a desirable status beyond being well-known, in which one was known only by those that fame did not impress. In Sodome et Gomorrhe he noted that the true stars of le monde—by which he meant high society—are tired of appearing in it. Zweig never got tired of it, while it was still a society. He enjoyed his stellar status, but his good heart made him slow to grasp that his very celebrity was one of the reasons the Nazis wanted him dead. The idea that the German-speaking culture was being so prominently represented by a Jew made them angry: a sign that Nazi ideology had only a tangential relationship with nationalism.
We are a lost generation, who will never see a united Europe again.
—STEFAN ZWEIG, QUOTED BY ERWIN RIEGER IN Stefan Zweig, P. 112
The term “lost generation” had already been launched by Gertrude Stein. Zweig merely put it to a more appropriate use. Nobody was trying to kill Hemingway and Fitzgerald except the manufacturers of what W. C. Fields called spirituous fermenti. Zweig’s generation was up against a more formidable enemy. Nevertheless his suicide in January 1942 will always be a bit of a mystery. It seems not quite to fit the circumstances: with America in the war, the Nazis no longer looked like winning, and there was no reason to think that he would not have resumed his glittering international position when the war was over. But we could be dealing with a disposition of mind. Despite his success and his huge range of prominent friends, he had been on the verge of despair for most of his life. As the date of this quotation shows, he already felt that way while the Weimar Republic was still in one piece. He had felt that way at the end of World War I. He had wanted a depoliticized world, and it was obvious that the war had had the opposite effect: it had shattered the foundations of society, but it had also reinforced politics to the point where nobody was exempt. By 1928, when Germany was enjoying an economic recovery which might have perpetuated the Weimar Republic if the Depression had not sealed democracy’s fate, Zweig had reasons to modify his pessimism. But it deepened, because the political divisions in Europe were deepening too. From the start of his waking life, Zweig had staked everything on the concept of a coherent European humanist heritage. After the Nazis got in, there was nowhere for his pessimism to go except further into despair.