by Clive James
The anomaly may well have arisen from Berlin’s fondness for seeing history always in the context of ideas. For him, political propensities, up to and including the propensity for mass murder, arose out of the ideas leading up to them. He rarely considered that the ideas might have been preserved, and given lip service, only to serve the propensity. In ‘Soviet Russian Culture’ (1957) he correctly noted that under the Soviet Union the Russian intelligentsia had been reduced to ‘silence and total submission’, but he added a revealing sentence. ‘Mere intimidation, torture and murder should not have proved sufficient in a country which, we are always told, was not unused to just such methods and had nevertheless preserved a revolutionary underground alive for the better part of a century.’ Even at the time, when Khrushchev himself, who had been an energetic participant in the slaughter, had just finished pointing out that there had been nothing ‘mere’ about it, Berlin’s proposed continuity between the relatively selective barbarities of Tsarist absolutism and the Soviet Union’s unrestricted warfare against its own population should have struck him as a touch glib. There was, however, an even more revealing sentence to follow. ‘It is here that one must acknowledge that Stalin achieved this by his own original contributions to the art of government.’
Alas, Berlin was being only half ironic. One of the original contributions he specified was the Artificial Dialectic, a term he attributed to O. Utis. For security reasons, Berlin was as yet unable to reveal that ‘O. Utis’ had been a code-name for himself, when he was sending reports back from Moscow to London at about the same time that George Kennan, code-named ‘X’, was telling Washington why Containment was the only feasible policy. The notion of Containment had many fathers: nobody who had witnessed the Soviet Union’s homicidal activities in Poland could doubt its necessity. The notion of the Artificial Dialectic was all Berlin’s, and in retrospect it looks too sophisticated to be true. According to Berlin, Stalin’s rhythm of purge and relaxation had always been precisely calculated to maintain the system. One’s first objection would have to be that Stalin’s purge of Red Army officers on the very eve of Operation Barbarossa might have been calculated to bring the system to an end. But there is a wider objection: the theory makes Stalin a Soviet Mind, a thinker – and therefore a student of history, like Isaiah Berlin.
It seems doubtful. The mark of intellectuals is, or should be, their ability to reach conclusions that don’t suit their prejudices. However much Stalin read, he took nothing in that didn’t suit his disposition. Dossiers were brought in bundles to his desk that proved Hitler was about to invade him. Those who brought them ran the risk of getting shot. His mind was made up that there would be no invasion. When it happened, he collapsed into bed, giving his colleagues a chance to bump him off that they unforgivably let slip. His debacle convinced even him that he would have to listen to other voices if he wanted to win the war. Listening only to his own, as he usually preferred to do, he would have lost it in the first six months. In the use of his unlimited powers, Stalin was too irrational even to defend the most pressing interests of the regime he ruled. Just as Hitler, with Nazi Germany fighting for its life late in the war, went on diverting manpower and precious rolling stock into the self-imposed task of wiping out Jews, gypsies and homosexuals, so did Stalin, earlier in the war, when the Soviet Union was fighting for its life, go on diverting manpower and precious Studebaker trucks – sent to him by the Americans on convoys which he mentioned only when they were late – into the self-imposed task of resettling his own populations, with all the usual obscenities attendant on that pointless activity. The Soviet Union was an asylum with the most violent patient in charge. Berlin advised London that it was best dealt with by making no threats, and that it would probably last for as long as it liked. Kennan was closer to the mark when he advised Washington that its belligerence could be contained only with armed strength, but that its irrationality would set a term to its life. The terminus proved to be another forty-five years in coming, but it came. Berlin was not the only student who thought that the vast mechanism might go on maintaining itself indefinitely. I. F. Stone, with the credentials of an ex-Communist, argued persuasively that the security services were geared to keep their omnipotence in perpetuity. With even better credentials, the expelled sociologist Alexander Zinoviev wrote a series of closely reasoned essays – much more impressive, in retrospect, than his gigantic satirical novels – showing how the control mechanisms worked, and how the upsurge of dissident literature might even be one of them. Not just on the bien pensant Left, a considerable intellectual investment went into crediting the Soviet Union with unearthly powers of reasoning.
To do him credit, Berlin rejoiced when the expectation finally proved false. His essay ‘The Survival of the Russian Intelligentsia’, written in 1990, is practically a chorus from Fidelio: the prisoners emerge blinking from their cells into the light of day. But here again, there is a false note. ‘My impression was that what remained of the true intelligentsia was dying. In the course of the last two years I have discovered, to my great surprise and delight, that I was mistaken.’ Mistaken, he might have said, mainly in neglecting to note that what did not remain of the true intelligentsia was already dead ten times over. Going on to celebrate the vindication of his friend Andrei Sakharov, he sings this kaddish above his grave: ‘Nor was he alone. The survival of the entire culture to which he belonged, underneath the ashes and rubble of dreadful historical experience, appears to me a miraculous fact.’ More than miraculous, one would have thought: illusory. The entire culture survived? Tell it to Babel.
But impatience is out of place. Berlin was right enough about the Soviet Union to help ensure that, in Britain at any rate, those who were entirely wrong could not have it all their own way. It could have been, however, that Britain was simply better prepared to take a realistic view than, say, France. It was Berlin’s French equivalent, Raymond Aron, who published, in 1955, the single most penetrating analysis of Communist ideology, The Opium of the Intellectuals. But Aron’s message was lost on the gauchiste intelligentsia, which continues to this day to behave as if all the atrocities added up to something respectable. Le livre noir du communisme, a new Book of the Dead which counts the innocent victims in their many millions, was reviewed in France as if it had been written by the Plans division at Langley, Virginia. Another philosopher who, like Berlin, graduated to political history, Jean-François Revel, in his L’obsession anti-americaine, has done a convincing job of tracing fashionable anti-Americanism to this long-lingering reluctance to accept the facts about the new world order that was supposed to replace the depredations of capitalism with something beneficial. (The more chic Bernard-Henri Levy, recently in the news for taking the same line on this point, is really piggybacking on an effort that Revel has been putting in for decades.) But is it really a reluctance? Following the rule that we should put the best possible construction on the motives of our opponents, perhaps we should consider the possibility that the facts have been accepted, but can’t be fully faced, because the cost of reconstructing a world view would be too painful. Berlin’s own – much lesser, but still striking – shyness on the matter suggests this might be so. His view of history depended on the assumption that large-scale events, however terrible, came about as a result of minds deliberating. He would have had to rethink his position altogether if he were to admit the possibility that there could be large-scale events into which minds didn’t enter. So there might have been inertia to go with the revulsion. But there can be no doubt about the revulsion. Berlin was a man of feeling. Those giant totals of dead on the page – lines of zeros like strings of bubbles – might look meaningless to the insensitive. But to the sensitive they can be devastating. They mean too much.
Which brings us to the European empire of Nazi Germany, where so many of the bubbles represented Berlin’s fellow Jews. There could have been several reasons why Berlin said so little. He called it ‘the most fearful genocide in history’, but beyond that he offered no illu
mination, as if the subject were too dark to admit light. The first reason might have been that he didn’t know what to say. Thomas Mann – not a Jew but married to a half-Jew, and prominent on Heydrich’s personal list of illustrious absentees with Jewish sympathies who should be dealt with promptly if they ever returned to Germany – started broadcasting from America as early as 1942 about what he knew the Nazis were up to in the East. (He didn’t need access to the Ultra decrypts to get the facts: they were in the Swiss newspapers.) But after the war, when the full statistics of the Holocaust came out, his reaction was to work on The Confessions of Felix Krull. Berlin, too, probably knew all about it from an early date, but perhaps he found himself equally short of adequate things to say when the full magnitude of the horror was revealed. One of the revelations was that both of his grandfathers had been murdered immediately when the Nazis occupied Riga in 1941. He barely mentioned it, and the best explanation is that he was traumatized, and that the trauma was intensified to a paralysis by the realization – imagination overload – that the extinguished multitudes were his grandfathers multiplied by millions.
Another reason could have been that other people did the job, notably Raul Hilberger and Martin Gilbert, and that anything he had to add would have been rhetoric. (He said this to Ignatieff, who might have been slower to report that Berlin ‘actively despised the Holocaust industry’. The Holocaust industry has never produced as much toxic waste as the Holocaust Denial industry, and if there are too many books, too few of them have reached even Vienna, let alone Cairo and Riyadh.) Yet another reason might have been guilt for one of the two roles he had played in wartime Washington with relation to Zionism. A Zionist himself, he was a personal friend of Weizmann. Berlin used his connections to smooth Weizmann’s path to Roosevelt and a possible endorsement for the Zionist cause. But as an emissary of Britain’s Ministry of Information, Berlin was also obliged – unless he resigned – to promote his government’s official line on Palestine, based on the infamous White Paper that denied refugee Jews entry to what was, for many of them, the only possible sanctuary from Hitler. It couldn’t have been long before Berlin realized that this made him party to a crime. Ever the diplomat, Berlin sided with Weizmann in the conviction that a Jewish entity of some kind would eventually emerge after the British had been talked into modifying their mandate – sided, that is, against David Ben Gurion, who thought that the Jewish state would have to be established unilaterally, if necessary with resort to force. Berlin always thought that reason might prevail in the matter. (In a letter written home in 1943, we find him opining that the cause would be best promoted ‘by means of private conversations on the part of sensible persons’.) Ben Gurion knew better: or, if you like, worse.
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Born to a concerted Arab attack, the State of Israel grew up in the middle of a war, which has not yet ended. For the rest of his life, Berlin remained committed to Israel, although he was always careful not to offer advice from outside, in case it was thought patronizing. Ignatieff records that Berlin felt guilty about not having said anything publicly in favour of Peace Now. It was a pity he didn’t, because the emphasis that Peace Now places on giving up the Occupied Territories is a potent argument for the only possible means by which Israel can preserve itself as a democracy. Berlin’s agreement would have been useful to the young soldiers: long on bravery, they were short of clout. But generally, throughout Israel’s short and threatened history, Berlin seems to have had the right opinions, even when he didn’t voice them in public, and the Israelis valued him as a star of the diaspora, the Jewish equivalent of a Righteous Gentile. In 1979 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize as a mark of respect. To actually live in Jerusalem, however, was never part of his plans. At one time or another Ben Gurion, Abba Eban and Teddy Kolleck all asked him to move there. He preferred Oxford. He already had his sanctuary. But of course he had always had his sanctuary. He was a Jew who had never needed to make it to the new home. His guilt must have been tremendous for the many who had needed to, and didn’t. To where they went, there was no boat: only a train.
The train takes us to the best reason. Apart from his epic visions of domination and destruction, Hitler had few ideas on his mind. As a consequence, Nazi Germany gave the historian of ideas little to talk about. In The Proper Study of Mankind, the two essays grouped under the heading ‘Romanticism and Nationalism in the Modern Age’ stop well short of Hitler’s rise to power, as well they might, because Hitler was truly interested only in the power. The German right-wing intellectuals had already discovered this to their embarrassment while he was still a long way from the Reichstag. In 1922 a bunch of them called the June Club invited him to address one of their meetings. Their idea was that they would treat him to their combined scholarly wisdom before he spoke. He made it clear that he wasn’t interested in what they had to say, and used the time gained to speak longer, boring some of them into the floor but convincing others that they had been wasting their lives: brutality, that was the thing. (He had the same effect on Goebbels, a proud bookworm before he met his action hero.) Even the anti-Semites found him incurious about the subtleties of their philosophy, as indeed he was, because for him anti-Semitism was a passion, not an argument. Though various ideological dingbats were allowed to pursue their researches on the government payroll, the Nazi regime reflected Hitler’s hatred of ideas in all of its departments. Hitler admired Mussolini personally and copied his methods along with Stalin’s. But Hitler and most of the other top Nazis thought that Fascism as a philosophy was a waste of time: too many intellectuals.
Hitler rigorously divided action from thought. Thought had to be under the control of action, not vice versa. The action came from his propensities, which were psychotic from the start. Almost all of his early successes depended on initiatives so bizarre that nobody sane could anticipate them. After the Battle of Britain had been lost, his second big failure, in Russia, came about mainly because he preferred to maltreat people who had suffered under Stalin rather than enlist their aid. Making territory he had already conquered ungovernable was no sane way to conquer more of it. Even Himmler could work that out, but Hitler didn’t listen. He couldn’t, because it involved conciliation, which was a true idea, as opposed to mass murder, which was an expression of emotion. Though it is tempting to believe that Hitler, after absorbing a few nutty anti-Semitic pamphlets in Vienna, read nothing except Karl May’s western sagas about Old Shatterhand, the truth is somewhat different. He fancied himself as a philosopher and could drop the names that backed up the claim. In that unintentionally comic masterpiece Monologe in Führerhauptquartier 1941–1944, we can find him, on 19 May 1944, telling his nodding audience that throughout the Great War he had carried the full five volumes of Schopenhauer everywhere he went. Since he got the Iron Cross as a runner in the trenches, he must have been running with a handicap. But there is no reason to doubt he carried them, or even that he read them. Nor, however, is there any reason to believe that he critically weighed a single word. Like Stalin, he sought in texts nothing but pretexts for his actions. To bring ideas under scrutiny was not his purpose.
Since it was Berlin’s, we have a right to ask how well he did it. The first answer has to be that he did it very well. Though a worthy assemblage of his more heavyweight efforts, The Proper Study of Mankind is a bit misleading about how delightful he could be; and as so often happens with writers on serious topics, it is when he is at his most entertaining that he is most informative. He didn’t really write all that brilliantly. Most of his prose pieces were transcripts of his talk boiled down from draft to draft, which is not the same process as the ab initio concentration necessary to yield a cogently nuanced text that reads like speech. He himself called his talk ‘an avalanche’, and he seems to have had little gift for the aphorism. That might have been one of the secrets for his continuing success at glamorous dinner tables. With his salon-wise wife Aline to manage his diary, he went on dining out until he had to be carried. Dr Johnson, in his own old age, to
ld Boswell that he wasn’t much invited anymore, because his unanswerable sallies silenced the table. Berlin was careful not to make the company feel stupid. On the night I saw him in action, he engaged in a tremendous competition with the political journalist Frank Johnson to name and evoke, with sound effects, every second-rate opera in the world. They were at each other like Joe Louis and Jersey Joe Walcott, to hilarious effect: titled ladies were spitting pheasant. At his best, he could get the same sparkling treasure into his writings. To take just one compilation, Against the Current: there is wealth of incidental truth in it. ‘Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx and the Search for Identity’ is the ideal introduction to both men and makes you wonder how they would have got on. (Not very well, probably: we learn that Marx called Lassalle ‘the Jewish nigger’.) ‘The “Naïveté” of Verdi’ is a classic restatement of Schiller’s principle of the difference between the naïve and the sentimental: saturated with Berlin’s infectious love of music, it should be on the first-year course of every student in the country. Best of all, there is the essay about Montesquieu, which comes in handy when we try to give the second answer.
