The Joy of Pain

by Richard H. Smith

  Salieri, mediocre by his own and others’ verdicts, suffers many humiliations as Mozart outperforms him at every opportunity, usually in front of others, who laugh along with Mozart. In one scene, Mozart is performing impromptu at a lavish costume party and imitates the style of well-known composers. Salieri, disguised and incognito behind a mask, is in the crowd and calls out for Mozart to do “Salieri.” Mozart proceeds to mock Salieri to the howling delight of the rest of the crowd. Salieri’s mortification shows through his mask when Mozart takes on the look of a Neanderthal and with slow deliberateness plods his way through a Salieri melody. He literally apes Salieri.

  The now-vengeful Salieri vows to undermine Mozart’s career and plan his death. The success of both efforts brings him intense schadenfreude. He decides to feign a liking for Mozart and becomes his apparent friend and supporter. His actual feelings are hostile and vengeful, fed by a sense of injustice that we, the viewers, can easily recognize as envy. He encourages Mozart to include a section of ballet in his opera, The Marriage of Figaro, despite his knowing that the Emperor Joseph II will object when he views its initial performance. He watches Joseph’s reaction as he views a rehearsal and anticipates with pleasure Joseph’s disapproval. This fails to happen because Joseph enjoys the piece, and Salieri’s hopes are dashed. But later, when the full production debuts, he receives a “miracle.” Although Salieri realizes that the opera is path-breaking in quality, he also knows that Joseph’s attention span is short. In the final number, Joseph yawns once, a signal that the opera will only have a few performances. This failure is a triumph for Salieri, and he smiles the smile of satisfying schadenfreude. Later, when Mozart’s magnificent Don Giovanni also suffers a short run, Salieri once again silently exults.

  Eventually, he pivots toward murder. “Before I leave this earth I will laugh at you,” he vows in secret, his whole being now fully poisoned by envy and a desire for revenge. Mozart is already physically weakened by overwork, made necessary by financial woes. Concealed by a mask, Salieri visits Mozart and offers him extra work composing an opera, hoping that this will direct Mozart to an early grave through physical exhaustion and illness. Mozart accepts the offer, and, as he works, Salieri watches for hopeful, happy signs of Mozart’s weakening physical condition. He is pleased to see Mozart almost delirious as he conducts an inaugural production of The Magic Flute. He is elated when Mozart collapses at the keyboard. He supervises bringing Mozart home and arranges a way to keep Mozart working by offering to record the notes as Mozart composes. He is gratified to see Mozart’s strength fade while he works to meet the deadline for the commission. Mozart does indeed die of exhaustion and illness—again, much to Salieri’s pleasure.

  The experience of Salieri may be unusual in certain respects. He is actually more aware of his envy than others who might reach a vengeful state propelled by fully repressed envy.34 Also, his anger is egged on by intentional humiliation from Mozart. Such deliberate humiliations enacted by the envied person may be rare in everyday experiences of envy; nonetheless, the film dramatizes the point that envy can lead to an extreme endpoint created by powerful tensions stirred up within the envying person. Invidious comparisons register in our emotional solar plexus. Usually, altering the pecking order is unrealistic—a reason why the emotion is so painful. The disadvantage remains a stubborn fixture, creating a persistent need to cope with inferiority, repugnant feelings of hostility—and frustrating resentment over being unfairly treated. This is mainly why the emotion can transmute itself into a private grievance no longer having the label of envy.35 Once transmuted, events can more easily trend toward a justified pleasure if the envied person suffers and even justify vengeful actions that bring about the suffering, also resulting in pleasure.

  This way of thinking about envy crosses over from the commonplace to something sinister. Common envy is often disturbing enough in its consequences, but the example of Salieri suggests that it can slope toward something uglier—toward a schadenfreude laced with malice and aggressive intent.

  It is important to keep the hostile, potentially violent endpoint in mind. It is the difference between laughing over the seemingly benign joke and the willingness to stand happily by while another person suffers—or worse, to be responsible for perpetrating the harm. Generally, social norms keep hostile actions at bay. But because envy can be such an ugly, yet also a righteous feeling, and because owning up to it threatens the self-esteem of the envying person, its transmutation into a more palatable emotion, such as pure indignation and resentment, is a frequent outcome. Again, once transmuted and relabeled, the envying person need no longer wait in frustrated anticipation for a misfortune. Transmuted, this passivity can take a holiday, even a permanent vacation. A more certain virtuousness replaces shame and provides a license for something more active. Now, the envying person might take action to bring the misfortune about.

  The progression from finding a bad thing amusing to wishing that it happens, and from anticipating it to engineering the deed, is difficult to unpack given the complicated motives that drive the change. Envy, I think, motivates in ways that deceive both the self and others, creating its own opportunities, manufacturing its own clever justifications, energized by the pain of the emotion and masked by its relabeling. This is the evil eye of envy, so feared in most cultures. The envied person is now the voodoo doll, vulnerable to attack. And so, Salieri is more easily able to take action against Mozart because he largely sees his decision as revenge against injustice.

  In Richard Russo’s novel Bridge of Sighs,36 the narrator, currently in his 60s, looks back with improved understanding and describes a boyhood event in which he caused the injury of a friend, Bobby, whom he both liked and envied. On Saturday mornings during one summer, they would go with the narrator’s dad when he delivered milk in his truck. They would play at “surfing” in the back of a truck, a game that meant balancing on milk crates as the truck navigated through the streets. The trick was to stay balanced on the crate even as the truck took turns. Bobby was better at the game, as he was at most things, and this created mixed feelings and desires in the narrator. Although he liked Bobby, even loved him in a way, this did not prevent envy and its attending hostile leanings from taking hold. I think Russo captures perfectly how envy-triggered aggression can happen, and it is well worth quoting in full:

  [A]s the summer wore on I became troubled by the knowledge that part of me was waiting for, indeed looking forward to, my friend getting hurt. It had, of course, nothing to do with him and everything to do with my own cowardice and jealousy. The jealous part had to do, I think, with my understanding that Bobby’s bravery meant he was having more fun, something that my own cowardly bailing out had robbed me of. Each week I told myself I’d be braver, that this Saturday I wouldn’t reach out and hold on for safety. I’d surrender control and be flung about, laughing and full of joyous abandon. But every outing was the same as the last, and when the moment came, I grabbed on. Gradually, since wishing for courage didn’t work, I began wishing for something else entirely. I never wanted Bobby to be seriously injured, of course. That would have meant the end of everything. But I did wish that just once he’d be hurt bad enough to cry, which would lessen the gulf I perceived between him and me.

  And so our milk-truck surfing ended the only way it could. I didn’t actually see Bobby break his wrist when he was flung against the side of the truck. I heard the bone snap, though. What saved me from suffering the same fate was my cowardice. I’d seen the curve coming and at the last second reached out and grabbed one of the tied-off milk crates. Bobby, taken by surprise, went flying.37

  For a few minutes after the event occurred, they sat quietly beside each other in the back of the truck while the narrator’s father drove them home. Bobby broke the silence and said, “You didn’t call the turn.”38 These words clarified the initial ambiguity of what had happened and why it had happened. His failure to warn of the curve was by hidden inclination, needing a sober accusation to let the mo
tive break the surface. He wanted the accident to happen because of his envy, and, when it happened, part of him was happy over it. This was the essential truth of the matter, made clear once the narrator matured.

  There is a sense that schadenfreude, when linked with envy, often exists in a kind of fantasy world of frustrated anticipation and privately articulated hopes for misfortune. During moments allowing for reflection, the wished-for misfortune, perhaps in fine detail, takes shape. Primed by mere imagination, the real thing, if it ever happens, is an extraordinary bolt out of the blue. When we have taken no role in the misfortune, if luck grants us this outcome, it is a thing of beauty. We can be free of any guilt that might arise.

  As pleasing as a misfortune might be to witness when the envied suffer, the sad rub (for the rest of us) is that people who are envied tend not to suffer. They have it better. We are the ones who suffer. Whatever our dreams may be, they are living them.39 But as envy goes underground, feelings of injustice and outrage can overtake envy in its manifest form, providing a foundation for unimpeachable, justified action—in the form of a kind of revenge and its dark thrills.

  This is not a process to trifle with. In the next chapter, I take this transmutation of envy into righteous revenge to its furthest extreme and ask whether it might help explain the extreme, brutish treatment of the Jews by the Nazis.

  CHAPTER 10

  DARK PLEASURES UNLEASHED

  There were many Jews who did not show the necessary restraint and who stood out more and more in public life, so that they actually invited certain comparisons because of their numbers and the position they controlled in contrast to the German people.

  —HERMANN GÖRING1

  One does not have to speculate about this link between envy and anti-Semitism in the Nazi mind; it can be confirmed and documented empirically by reading Hitler’s many envious comments about Jews.

  —JAMES GILLIGAN2

  [T]he Jew is a money-getter; and in getting his money he is a very serious obstruction to less capable neighbors who are on the same quest. I think that that is the trouble.

  —MARK TWAIN3

  Perhaps most instances of schadenfreude are harmless, on a par with the pleasures of light gossip. Even when the feeling is linked with envy, there’s little need to wag the finger. Envy and schadenfreude are also such natural emotions that alarm about their mingled frequency is unrealistic. And yet we must be mindful that envy can motivate, without full awareness, the engineering of misfortune—and its anticipated pleasures. This takes us into troubling moral territory. In this chapter, I chart a dark example of this, a kind of outer moral limit: the Nazi persecution and murder of the Jews. How was it that so many Germans were able to engage in the systematic, pitiless, often pleasing to observe mistreatment and ultimate killing of over six million Jews? Of course, the answer to the question is complex and multilayered, and the scholarship on this question is correspondingly vast.4 Addressing the question can seem to raise even more questions, taking one further away from understanding. Almost any attempt to explain the horrors of the Holocaust can seem inadequate to the task, oversimplified, and futile—like looking into a hideous kaleidoscope that changes and mutates with each viewing. With these far from trivial caveats in mind, in this chapter, I explore the role that envy may have played in these horrors.

  Envy of the Jews—how could this be? The innumerable instances of prejudice and harm occurring before the period of the Holocaust in Germany, when it reached a heretofore unimaginable crest in the Nazi atrocities, suggest a group to be pitied rather than envied. Only a group held in vicious contempt could cause such brutish treatment. How could Jews be the spur for strong envy if they are also linked with negative stereotypes suggesting inferiority, another common theme in their history? Coinciding with these stereotypes were the contrasting beliefs of Aryan racial superiority that the Nazis promulgated. To explain these seeming contradictions, let’s first take a close look at the evolution of anti-Semitism in the obsessed spearhead of the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler. Did Hitler envy the Jews and, if so, did this envy contribute to his hatred—and pleasure at their systematic persecution and elimination?

  ADOLF HITLER AND THE EVOLUTION OF A LETHAL ANTI-SEMITE

  Mein Kampf, the autobiographical screed and political manifesto Hitler wrote in the early 1920s, is a good place to start when looking for clues about the role of envy in Hitler’s hatred of the Jews.5 Some of the details of his account undoubtedly misrepresent how his ideas actually evolved, but the book still provides a revealing vantage point for understanding his thinking.

  On its face, Hitler’s narrative is not about his envy. He tries to convince readers that he came to believe that the Jews were a depraved race of people and that his lasting feelings were a blend of disgust and intense contempt—seemingly devoid of envy. Hitler claimed to be drawn toward this anti-Semitism against his will. His inner struggle (his “kampf”) was long and disturbing, and, as he stated, “only after months of battle between my reason and my sentiments did my reason begin to emerge victorious.”6 Initially, he had been horrified by accounts of religious persecution of Jews in prior centuries. Even when he first moved to Vienna, he rejected the “sharp” tone of the Viennese anti-Semitic press. He thought it “unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great nation” and he “was oppressed by the memory of certain occurrences in the Middle Ages.”7 In fact, he noted that envy may have partly explained these reactions in others.8 Other people might have been motivated out of envy but surely not himself—or so he would want us to conclude. Did he protest too much and so reveal the opposite?

  His early descriptions of his learning about Jews provide illuminating evidence of his envy. What is it about Jews that would make one envy them? For starters, one would have to notice them, and, interestingly, as a young man in Linz, Hitler claimed to be barely aware of their presence. The small number of Jews in Linz were so “Europeanized” and “human” that he “even took them for Germans.”9 However, after moving to Vienna, he did start noticing Jews. He began seeing Jews everywhere, and this disturbed him. And it was not only that they seemed to be everywhere; Hitler also perceived their having a powerful influence. From these twin perceptions, his envy may have been pricked.

  In his book Envy: The Seven Deadly Sins, Joseph Epstein suggests the strong links between envy and Nazi anti-Semitism, and, as an example, he gives a characterization of the Vienna close to Hitler’s day:

  Consider these rough statistics from Vienna of 1936, a city that was 90 percent Catholic and 9 percent Jewish: Jews accounted for 60 percent of the city’s lawyers, more than half its physicians, more than 90 percent of its advertising executives, and 123 of its 174 newspaper editors. And this is not to mention the prominent places Jews held in banking, retailing, and intellectual and artistic life.10

  Wouldn’t these kinds of statistics in Vienna and other cities in Austria and Germany make hollow the claims of Jewish inferiority and Aryan superiority? These facts would have likely had invidious effects on anyone craving beliefs in Aryan superiority. Indeed, Hitler became preoccupied with the pervasive influence Jews appeared to have despite their small number.

  I now began to examine carefully the names of all the creators of unclean products in public artistic life. … The fact that nine tenths of all literary filth, artistic trash, and theatrical idiocy can be set to the account of a people, constituting hardly one hundredth all the country’s inhabitants, could simply not be talked away; it was the plain truth.11

  As he perceived their disproportional influence, he also transformed his view of Jews from one based on religious distinctions to one of race and, furthermore, a race having vile and pernicious characteristics. He encountered Jews in their distinctive caftans and side locks and began sensing something foreign rather than native. He would wonder: “Is this a German?” He still claimed to be troubled by the anti-Semitic pamphlets and their atrocious accusations. They seemed so unscientific and shameful, and he feared that he would be commit
ting an injustice to believe them. But the Jews’ essential and degenerate separateness took complete hold on his perceptions:

  Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity.12

  Having separated Jews from other people, Germans most importantly, he bristled at the notion that Jews could label themselves the “Chosen People.” He recognized their powerful influence, a fact incompatible with inferiority and likely to spur envy. However, he focused on those perceived attributes of Jews that inspired his contempt and would have clouded recognition of his envy. Jews were parasitic, immoral Zionists. Any outward condemning of Zionism by a Jew was a back-stabbing smoke screen for a favoring of Jewish rather than German interests. All their activities, whether “in the press, art, literature, and the theatre” exuded an outward and inward repulsiveness; they were “germ-carriers of the worse sort.”13 And there was no aspect of cultural life without the degenerate influence of Jews.14

  The transformation into a committed anti-Semite completed itself when Hitler linked Jews with political causes having Marxist elements. Here as well, he perceived their disproportionate influence. But, once again, he seemed to blunt the invidious effects implicit in this perception by focusing on the seditious threat these Jews posed to Germany. This threat was especially true in the press, which he saw as dominated by disloyal, treacherous Jews. Here is a characteristic sample of Hitler’s thinking: