Theater of Cruelty

by Ian Buruma

  Kessler’s Germany, confounded with an erotic, aesthetic fantasy of Greece, was a place in his imagination. He knew it, too. Returning from Paris to Cologne in December 1908, he wrote how much he loved “the isolation of being abroad” but could not give up on Weimar and Berlin: “They are the background of my life, a sort of mythical background, approximately like ‘heaven’ for Christians.” And this, he believed, was worth fighting for in the Great War against the Western powers.

  Kessler’s descriptions of the war are extraordinary for their vividness and their typically Kesslerian romanticism. On the Russian campaign in 1915, he revels in the soldierly camaraderie, with cheerful young men wandering

  along this last border of life with light feet.… The air one breathes is like champagne, the light that one can still enjoy with young eyes. The Greek god of death, the beautiful, softly swinging youth prevails here, not the pathetic ugly skeleton.

  He reads an essay on the “inner transformation of Germany” and muses: “The ‘new man’ as the result of the transformation of Germany during the war. This mystical goal inspires me as well.” Contrast that to the “Jews, who sit in every village as numerous as lice.”

  Despite the champagne-like air, Kessler can still see the terror of war clearly. On the Russian front:

  The battle here must have been especially bitter. Many of the dead have half their skulls torn away, the face caved in; a lot of tall, good-looking lads from the Semenoff Guards Regiment.

  But he wants to believe in a German victory until the end, even speculating that in the face of American money, Germany has “the cunning of our Jews which I have deployed, plus our efficiency.”

  Imminent defeat leaves Kessler in a state of despair. But at least this allows him to take a more realistic view of the world. He writes that “the war has done more to uproot the old morality than a thousand Nietzsches.” He worries that “the entire European world has begun the ferment, all the anger from the trenches is rolling backward.” Viewing an exhibition in Zurich of paintings and woodcuts (Gaugain, Seurat, Kirchner), he can no longer see a way to bridge the gap between his aesthetic and his political ideals, which is expressed in one of the most revealing entries in his diary, on March 27, 1918:

  A huge gap yawns between this [artistic] order and the politicalmilitary one. I stand on both sides of the abyss, into which one gazes vertiginously. In the past there were bridges: religious, mystical, priestly-political. Today they have collapsed.

  The only way for a better world to emerge from the wreckage is “out of a new ideology that commands a general consent.” This new ideology would soon come in Germany, with devastating consequences, an ideology that owed much to ideas Kessler himself had championed, of race, youth, purity. The new age, leading up to the next world war, would be a grotesque version of Kessler’s dream of the vigorous, masculine, racial society. Kessler was utterly opposed to the Nazi ethos. But by then it was far too late.

  Kessler’s diaries should be read not only for the pleasure of the author’s always stimulating and often amusing company but because they contain a chilling lesson. Here was one of the most cultivated, cosmopolitan men of his time, an intellectual committed to European civilization who nonetheless endorsed ideas that contained the seeds of its near destruction. What does this tell us about our own age, when new notions are floating around about defending Western civilization against a foreign faith, notions that could turn out to be just as toxic? Cultural sophistication, alas, is no prophylactic against the allure of terrible ideas.

  1 Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1918–1937, edited and translated by Charles Kessler (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971). The introduction I wrote for the US edition (Grove, 2000) appeared in somewhat different form as “Dancing on a Wobbly Deck,” The New York Review of Books, April 27, 2000.

  2 Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880–1918, edited and translated by Laird M. Easton (Knopf, 2011).

  15

  THE BELIEVER

  NEAR THE END of his book Hitch-22, which is neither strictly a memoir nor quite a political essay but something in between, Christopher Hitchens informs the reader that he has, at long last, learned how to “think for oneself,” implying that he had failed to do so before reaching the riper side of middle age. This may not be the most dramatic way to conclude a life story. Still, thinking for oneself is always a good thing. And, he writes, “the ways in which the conclusion is arrived at may be interesting … just as it is always how people think that counts for much more than what they think.”

  Like many people who count “Hitch” among their friends, I have watched with a certain degree of dismay how this lifelong champion of left-wing, anti-imperialist causes, this scourge of armed American hubris, this erstwhile booster of Vietcong and Sandinistas, this ex-Trot who delighted in calling his friends and allies “comrades,” ended up as a loud drummer boy for President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, a tub-thumper for neoconservatism, and a strident American patriot. Paul Wolfowitz, one of the prime movers behind the Iraq War, became his new comrade. Michael Chertoff, head of the Homeland Security Department under Bush, presided over his citizenship ceremony at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.1

  Ah, some will say, with a tolerant chuckle, how typical of Hitch the maverick, Hitch the contrarian: another day, another prank. It is indeed not always easy to take this consummate entertainer entirely seriously, but in this case I think one should. In fact, Hitch’s turn is not the move of a maverick. If eccentricity were all there was to it, his book would still have offered some of the amusement for which he is justly celebrated, but it would have no more relevance than that. Far from being a lone contrarian, however, Hitchens is a follower of a contemporary fashion of sorts. Quite a few former leftists, in Europe as well as the US, have joined the neo- and not so neo-conservatives in the belief that we are engaged in a war of civilizations, that September 11, 2001, is comparable to 1939, that “Islamofascism” is the Nazi threat of our time, and that our shared hour of peril will sort out the heroes from the cowards, the resisters from the collaborators.

  There was nothing inherently reprehensible about supporting the violent overthrow of Saddam Hussein, who was after all one of the world’s most monstrous dictators. In this respect, Hitchens had some good company: Adam Michnik, Václav Havel, Michael Ignatieff, to name but a few. It is in the denunciation of those who failed to share his enthusiasm for armed force that Hitchens sounds a little unhinged. He believes that the US State Department was guilty of “disloyalty.” For what? For warning about the consequences of not planning for the aftermath of war? He also claims that the US was subject to a “fantastic, gigantic international campaign of defamation and slander.” He mentions the movie director Oliver Stone, the late Reverend Jerry Falwell, and Gore Vidal. International campaign?

  Still, as Hitchens says, it is the “how” that should concern us, not only the “what.” And this is where the memoir is indeed of interest. George Orwell once wrote that he was born in the “lower-upper-middle class,” not grand by any means, better off and better educated than tradesmen, to be sure, but without the social cachet of people who might mix with ease in high metropolitan society. This is the class into which Hitchens was born too, but only just. His father, Commander Hitchens, was a disgruntled naval officer who’d had “a good war” but was retired against his will and reduced to making a modest living as an accountant at a rural school for boys. “The Commander” was a quiet drinker but by no means a bon viveur—quite the contrary, it seems. His conservatism was resentful, about the end of empire, the end of naval glory, the end of any glory. “We won the war—or did we?” was a staple of his conversation with fellow alte Kämpfer in the less fashionable pubs and golf courses of the English home counties.

  Hitchens professes to have much admired the Commander and his wartime exploits, such as sinking the German warship Scharnhorst in 1943: “Sending a Nazi convoy raider to the bottom is a be
tter day’s work than any I have ever done.” Perhaps the young Hitch really did think like that. It certainly informs his current enthusiasm for heroic gestures in the Middle East. But his greatest love was not expended on the Commander but on his mother, Yvonne, who would have wished to have been a bon viveur in metropolitan society but was stuck instead in small-town gentility with her peevish husband.

  She adored her son, and he clearly adored her. The chapter on his mother is, to my mind, by far the best in the book, because his feelings for her are expressed simply, without sentimentality, and above all without the need to make a point or clinch an argument. Watching a production of The Cherry Orchard one night in Oxford, Hitchens If Hitch had one mission in life it was to not be like one of those women.

  felt a pang of vicarious identification with the women who would never quite make it to the bright lights of the big city, and who couldn’t even count on the survival of their provincial idyll, either. Oh Yvonne, if there was any justice you should have had the opportunity to enjoy at least one of these, if not both.

  Yvonne’s end owed more to Strindberg than to Chekhov. She broke away from the Commander and took up with an ex-vicar of the Church of England, who had renounced his faith and replaced it with devotion, shared by Yvonne, to the Maharishi Yogi. Together they left for Greece, without saying goodbye to anyone, and were found dead sometime later in a seedy hotel in Athens. Perhaps because they felt that life had failed them, they had decided to die together. Hitchens was devastated. The account of his trip to Athens, at the grisly height of the military junta, is simple, poignant, personal, and sounds right.

  This, however, is not the end of Yvonne’s story. Years later, in 1987, Hitchens’s grandmother revealed that her daughter had harbored a secret. She, grandmother Hickman, also known as “Dodo,” was Jewish. Perhaps Yvonne was afraid that this information might not have gone down well at the Commander’s golf clubs. Her son, however, was rather pleased by the news. Hitchens’s great friend Martin Amis declared: “Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.” Quite why having a Jewish grandmother should provoke envy is not made entirely clear. But Hitchens, following strict rabbinical rules, feels that he qualifies as “a member of the tribe.” He then revives the old-fashioned notion that Jews have special “characteristics,” which interestingly coincide with ones he accords to himself: cosmopolitanism of the rootless kind, sensitivity to the suffering of others, devotion to secularism, even a penchant for Marxism. I’m not sure who is being flattered more: Hitch or the Jews.

  Long before he was aware of having inherited Jewish characteristics, politics entered his life. Hitchens was educated at a respectable private institution, named the Leys School, in Cambridge. Politics at this establishment for the lower-upper and upper-middle classes were suitably Tory. Hitchens quite enjoyed his school days and gives an amusing, even appreciative account of them. It was then, however, in the mid-1960s, that the “exotic name” of Vietnam began to dominate the evening news. He was shocked by what he heard about this war, and when the British government refused to withhold support for “the amazingly coarse and thuggish-looking president who was prosecuting it,” he, Christopher Hitchens, began “to experience a furious disillusionment with ‘conventional’ politics.” He continues: “A bit young to be so cynical and so superior, you may think. My reply is that you should fucking well have been there, and felt it for yourself.”

  To which one might well reply: Been where? Cambridge? And why the sudden hectoring tone? Clearly, even then, doubt would never get a look in once a cause was adopted. With his brother, Peter, who is now a rather ferocious conservative journalist of some note in England, Hitchens went off to demonstrate against the war in Trafalgar Square, donning “the universal symbol of peace” on his lapel with “its broken cross or imploring-outstretched-arm logo.” Here, too, a pattern was set. I did not know Hitchens in those days, but ever since I met him in London in the 1980s, I’ve never seen him without a badge in his lapel for one cause or another.

  Protesting against the Vietnam War was not a bad thing to do, of course. But still sticking to the business of how rather than what Hitchens thinks, the peculiar tone of self-righteousness, combined with a parochial point of view, even when the causes concern faraway, even exotic countries, is distinctive. After leaving the Leys School, he enrolled as an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford. Introduced to the ideas of Leon Trotsky by Peter, Hitchens joined a tiny group of revolutionaries named the International Socialists, or IS. Peter, by all accounts, was the hard man, the enforcer of the right ideological line. Hitchens was too much of a hedonist to be a truly convincing hard man. He was prone to flirtation with, among other gentlemen, a college warden with an eye for pretty boys, who would invite him to the more exclusive Oxford high tables.2

  IS had about one hundred members but, Hitchens writes, had “an influence well beyond our size.” The reason for this, it seems, was that “we were the only ones to see 1968 coming: I mean really coming.” Again the self-referential choice of words is remarkable. Not the students in Prague, Paris, Mexico City, or Tokyo, not even the Red Guards in Beijing—no, it was the members of the International Socialists at Oxford who really read the times.

  A more charming (though for some readers perhaps rather cloying) by-product of this concentration on small bands of loyal comrades is Hitchens’s near adulation of his friends, all famous in their own right. Martin Amis, James Fenton, and Salman Rushdie merit chapters of their own. So does Edward Said, but he fell out of favor after September 11, as did Gore Vidal, whose gushing blurb on the back cover of the book has been crossed out. I’m not sure whether the fondly recalled examples of Amis’s linguistic brilliance do his best friend any favors. Calling the men at a grand black-tie ball “Tuxed fucks” is mildly amusing, but a sign of “genius at this sort of thing” it surely is not. In any case, these tributes are clearly heartfelt.

  Perhaps a tendency toward adulation and loathing comes naturally with the weakness for great causes. Politicians and people Hitchens disapproves of are never simply mentioned by name; it is always the “habitual and professional liar Clinton,” “the pious born-again creep Jimmy Carter,” Nixon’s “indescribably loathsome deputy Henry Kissinger,” the “subhuman character” Jorge Videla,3 and so on. What this suggests is that to Hitchens politics is essentially a matter of character. Politicians do bad things, because they are bad men. The idea that good men can do terrible things (even for good reasons), and bad men good things, does not enter into this particular moral universe.

  By the same token, people Hitchens admires are “moral titans,” such as the Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James. Not only was James a moral titan but he was blessed with a “wonderfully sonorous voice.” He also had “legendary success with women (all of it gallant and consensual, unlike that of some other masters of the platform).” This is a dig at President Clinton, whom Hitchens habitually calls a “rapist.” Why he should know how James, or indeed Clinton, behaved in the sack isn’t explained. But bad sexual habits are clearly a sign of bad politics. For many years Gore Vidal was a “comrade,” worshiped by Hitchens as much as Rushdie et al. But now that he has taken the wrong line on Iraq and September 11, we have to be told that Vidal “always liked to boast that he has never knowingly or intentionally gratified any of his partners.” Well, that puts paid to him. Hitchens reassures us four pages later that whatever followed from his own meeting with Amis, it “was the most heterosexual relationship that one young man could conceivably have with another.” Good for Hitchens and Amis.

  Another typical word in Hitchens’s lexicon is “intoxication.” This can literally mean drunk. But that is not what Hitchens means. Writing about his early political awakening, when he shared with his fellow International Socialists a “consciousness of rectitude,” he claims:

  If you have never yourself had the experience of feeling that you are yoked to the great steam engine of history, then allow me to inform you that the conviction is a very intoxicatin
g one.

  This must be true. When Hitchens became a journalist for the New Statesman, after graduating from Oxford, he adopted a pleasing kind of double life, part reporter, part revolutionary activist, imagining how he might help an IRA terrorist hide from the law. He found this double life “more than just figuratively intoxicating.” One can only assume that intoxication again played a part when he took the view that yoking himself to George W. Bush’s war was to hitch a ride on the great steam engine of history.

  The trouble with intoxication, figurative or not, is that it stands in the way of reason. It simplifies things too much, as does seeing the world in terms of heroes and villains. Or, indeed, the dogmatic notion that all religion is bad, and secularism is always on the right side of history. One of the weaknesses of the chapter on Hitchens’s journalistic exploits in Poland, Portugal, Argentina, and other places is that he never seems to be anywhere for very long or meet anyone who is not either a hero, someone very famous, or a villain. One longs to hear the voice of an ordinary Pole, Argentinian, Kurd, or Iraqi. Instead we get Adam Michnik, Jorge Luis Borges, Ahmed Chalabi, all interesting people but rather exceptional ones. One misses all areas of gray, all sense and variety of how life is lived by most people.

  Leni Riefenstahl performing her dance Dream Blossom at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin, 1923

  Werner Herzog filming Dieter Dengler for the film Little Dieter Needs to Fly, 1997

  Members of the 72nd Shinbu Squadron at the Bansei Air Base, Japan, May 26, 1945, the day before they committed suicide in kamikaze attacks

  US soldiers advancing through the streets of Zweibrücken, Germany, March 1945