* * *
The fact that his prose renders everything small is not to say that Hitler’s feelings in respect to the things he described were small, nor indeed that those things in themselves were small. Hitler’s talent lay elsewhere, he even underlines this several times in Mein Kampf, the inferiority of writing compared to the spoken word, which he so definitively held in his power and was so adept at exploiting to make his audiences feel what he felt or what he wanted them to feel. In this the mythologization of the essentially quotidian again comes into its own, and the exaltation of a real world in which work, fundamentally dull and monotonous and bleak, becomes heroic and hallowed, and where the past is repeatedly resurrected in parades with horses and medieval banners, in rites and oaths, grand works of architecture reminiscent of Antiquity, a sublime rendering of the present, a reconjuring of society, whose aesthetic elements were largely culled from the world of the military and war: uniforms, ensigns, parades, all unifying. The workers became worker-soldiers, schoolchildren became child-soldiers, sportsmen became athlete-soldiers, and what was unique about it all was that everyday reality was thereby elevated and made significant, not by its interpretation in art, by art’s selection of individual constituent parts within it, the world as read in the poem, as heard in music, as seen in the painting, but by the direct and unmediated reshaping and modeling of reality itself. Hitler turned Germany into a theater. What that theater expressed was cohesion, and through cohesion identity, and through identity authenticity. It was not a matter of invention, of constructing an identity by means of costumes, flags, and rallies, but rather of giving expression to something that had always been there, which modern society had held in check and diffused, and this is why so many of its elements came from history: something had been reestablished.
Nor was Hitler a fanatical, militaristic theater director enforcing his will on the people; the strings he played were genuine, the emotions he aroused were in everyone. Anyone who has seen footage of the rallies of Hitler’s Germany knows what feelings they evoke, the sheer might of the uniformed, I-less community, the strength of the collective, and oh, how one might long to be a part of such a we. Some of the images of the age express an almost savage beauty, the endless ranks of soldiers viewed at eye level, a sea of steel helmets extending into the beyond, totally symmetrical, the same human being repeated and repeated as if into infinity itself. Or the hush as Hitler walks the several hundred meters toward the burning flame beneath the monument to honor the fallen, surrounded by thousands of soldiers in rank, uniformed, helmeted, invulnerable. Everything he strove to awaken through the prose of Mein Kampf, and which in that context failed, is accomplished now in these human tableaux. An iron front of gray steel helmets rises before us, awakening the past from its slumbers, and yet they are in the present, they are immortal. As one soldier cries out during the Nuremberg rallies: They did not die! They live on in Germany!
Who would not wish to be a part of something greater than the self? Who would not wish to feel their life to be meaningful? Who would not wish to have something to die for?
* * *
The tranquillity, satiety, and calm that fills our lives, or with which we strive to infuse them, our foremost aim being satisfaction, a state in which hardly a cloud smudges the sky, is reminiscent of the life Stefan Zweig describes in his memoir The World of Yesterday, a life that came to such an abrupt end in those days of August 1914. The question we must ask is whether the war was caused by political circumstance and historic, societal factors, unthinkable in our own postwar societies, or whether it came about because of a release of certain forces that have always been present in man, a part of our makeup as human beings, present in every one of us, and which may be released again at any time from now. In that case the only thing we might say with certainty is that it will come in a different way, in a different form, because the form in which it came in 1914, and again in 1939, has now long since been identified and all conceivable outlets blocked. There will be no marching in the streets, no seas of steel helmets on the city squares. Yet in my mind, as I sit here in the spring, in a room in Glemmingebro outside Ystad, the sun pouring onto the greening landscape I have blotted from view by means of a travel rug so as to concentrate on my work, though not without interruption by the children, who run in and out of the house with the same eagerness and joy, the same urge to express themselves and their existence as I remember from my own childhood, while my mother is in the garden weeding the flower beds, Linda at the shop buying food for the Easter dinner, her brother hammering nails into the pent roof that collapsed under the weight of snow in the winter, her mother at work next to him trying to straighten a thick bush that also collapsed at the same time, I can feel a yearning for something else, and that yearning, I assume, must be felt by others too, because surely people of the same culture cannot be so different from one another that an emotion can exist in one person only? I don’t know what this yearning represents, but I do know that it does not involve any dissociation from what is here, from that which is mine and in which I live, that’s not it at all, there is nothing I despise about any of that, and I realize and understand the value of the unwavering regularity of this existence, and its necessity too. And yet, a yearning. For what?
Or more than a yearning it is perhaps a want. A feeling of something not being here. In the midst of life and the living, as if swathed in the chirping and wing-beating of all the birds building their nests nearby, beneath the sun, surrounded by vegetation in every direction, something is wanting.
* * *
Is the want in me?
Am I simply unable to grasp hold of my own time, my own place, to see it the way it is, the way it really is, to know that it is everything, and to be filled with joy by that knowledge? For an entire world opens up inside even the smallest plant one stoops to inspect, a living organism bound up with everything else that is living too, growing on the brink of the dizzying precipice of time at which we too stand. Is it my responsibility to validate that world, to fill it with value? Is that possible? Or is it empty, a simple, ongoing state of serial reproduction, copying itself and copying itself again, on and on into infinity? An emptiness that moreover is the foundation of our own biological reality, our life as human beings? If so, why do we imitate the emptiness of serial life in the culture we create? Should our culture not instead establish difference, which is the stuff of all worth, in which value resides and from which it is released, and thereby of all meaning? Does that meaning not exist? Or is it concealed? Concealed then by what means? Concealed by our social existence, whose differences exist in order to keep in place, not to set free, and which indeed keep us in place within our particular lives, our routine lives, from whose viewpoint the entire world dissolves and becomes the same?
But if this is so, where does the idea come from that it might ever be different? We don’t believe in God, which means God does not exist and never did. If this is so, then he existed only in our human minds, as a kind of existential tool, and what was necessary for that to be meaningful was that the insight of this instrumental aspect should not become conscious. It became so only when material reality was identified as instrumental, and from then on there was no turning back, since meaning precludes the deception of open eyes, faith is to know, and just as they knew that God was real, we know that God is not real. The link with the authentic, which resided in religious ecstasy, was broken because the authentic did not exist; ecstasy too, that fervent emotion of the human, was false, a delusion.
But the sun beats down, the grass grows, the heart pounds in its darkness.
* * *
“But the sun beats down, the grass grows, the heart pounds in its darkness.”
Why did I write those words?
Such language is hollow. It looks like the language of the Nazis. Yes, the sun is actually beating down, the grass is actually growing, the heart actually pounding in its darkness, but the factuality of these things is not what is significant about thei
r linguistic expression, what is significant is what that language evokes, that the sun, the grass, and the heart are in a way elevated, made to be something more than themselves, as if somehow they become bearers of actual reality. It is the same language that says civilization is detached from our basic urges, our sufferings and the brilliance of genius, whereas the sun, the grass, the blood are connected to the authentic, whose two great expressions are war and art, as Mann wrote in 1914.
This language is hollow, and it became the language of the Nazis, but is it untrue?
Paul Celan’s poem was a response to that language, which had destroyed the entire culture. It did not first arise in Mein Kampf, but was gathered and concentrated there and through the author of that book disseminated into an entire society with the aim of turning it completely on its head. Everything that language brought with it we have since discarded. All thoughts of the hallowed, all thoughts of the authentic have been eliminated from our minds. We live our lives surrounded by commercial goods, and spend great swathes of our waking hours in front of screens. We conceal death as best we can. What do we do if out of all this a yearning arises for something else? A more real reality, a more authentic life? Such a yearning would be founded on false precepts because all life is quite as authentic, and the hallowed is a notion belonging to life, not life itself. Yearning toward reality, yearning toward authenticity expresses nothing other than the yearning for meaning, and meaning arises out of cohesion, in the way we are connected to one another and our surroundings. This is the reason I write, trying to explore the connections of which I am a part, and when I feel the pull of the authentic, it becomes another connection I feel compelled to explore. That war and art are related, as Mann wrote in 1914 though of course later dissociated himself from, is something I am convinced of, since both seek the very extremity of existence, which is death, against the backdrop of which life gleams radiant, suddenly precious and inalienable, which is to say meaningful. I have always felt this in art, a powerful sense of meaning, almost always in paintings of the period from the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, though seldom in modern art, albeit with some shining exceptions, the paintings of Anselm Kiefer, for instance, to which I have always felt a strong sense of connection. But then four years ago, on a trip to Venice, it was as if all of this suddenly fell apart. I was looking at the paintings at the Accademia and found them “saying” nothing to me, as if somehow they belonged to a room outside the one in which I existed. What applied there did not apply here. This felt strange, for death is death, life is life, man is man regardless of culture, was that not how it was supposed to be? We had hurried through the exhibition rooms, the children impatient, though Vanja noted the forbidding gruesomeness of all the skulls, the rearing horses and crucified figures, and when we came out and had found a place to sit at a quiet café with a view of the lagoon, and were drinking our Sprite with ice, I was struck by the thought that what those paintings represented, in their age and beauty, which for so many years I had held so highly and striven in so many ways toward, its allure seeming to me to be not merely necessary, but absolutely vital, was perhaps, when everything boiled down, without worth. Suddenly it felt like a burden we bore, a kind of shadow that had fallen upon us, dead and cold. The beauty of the paintings was the beauty of death, the insight they awoke in us was in what was dead and nothing else.
The same day I saw something utterly sublime and quite different to anything else on that trip. I was out with John in the area surrounding the apartment in which we were staying, walking through the narrow, dark, and damp passages where little bags of rubbish with knots tied in their tops had been left outside every door and clothes had been hung out to dry on washing lines that ran up above between the houses, it was late afternoon and we were approaching the square facing the lagoon where the vaporettos came in, when an enormous ship suddenly appeared above the rooftops, gliding slowly away. We emerged onto the square, from where the sea opened out and the very special light that is always in Venice, under cloud or sun, in autumn as well as in spring and summer, made everything, the walls and roofs of the buildings, the paving stones and the surface of the water, shimmer.
The ship was indeed gigantic, towering above the city, passengers milling on all its decks. A loudspeaker voice blared out tourist information, and the air was a glitter of flashing cameras. Something welled inside me. A shiver ran down my spine.
“Look, John,” I said, crouching down beside him. He smiled and nodded, and pointed to one of the many pigeons strutting about the square. “Dah!” he said. I rose to my feet again, looking up once more at the vessel, which was now just far enough away for me to be unable to pick out the features of the faces that filled the decks, all I could see was a blur of human figures and the camera flashes momentarily lighting it all up, and then I turned the stroller around and headed back through the passage to a tiny café where John had a bread roll and I had an espresso.
* * *
Why did the sight of a cruise ship send a shiver down my spine? What was it that made me think it so sublime?
In classical aesthetics the sublime lay in the beholding of something that rocked the very foundations of the beholder on account of its magnificent or unfamiliar nature. A volcanic eruption, a sinking ship, a tall and rugged mountain, an event, a state of affairs, or an entity before which the beholder has a distinct sense of feeling small or inconsequential. Beauty, synonymous as far back as Antiquity with proportion and harmony, which is to say something within the scope of human control, was incorporated into the notion of the sublime in the Romantic age, perhaps because the idea of the divine had ceased to be a fulcrum of human existence, something all concepts, all human thinking issued from or strove toward. But the sublime and the divine are two different things, the revelation of nature’s alienness is different from the revelation of the nearness of the divine, since the nearness of the divine makes conspicuous not only remoteness, not only the gruesome, nagging realization of nature’s blindness and inhumanity, but also the opposite, a promise of cohesion and belonging. A we. The divine, or the holy, indicates the boundaries of this we, at the same time as it accords it meaning, not individually but as a collective, a whole. And the nature of the revelation must also have been radically different, for the experience of the divine or the holy was of something transcending an otherwise regular reality, and one can imagine how terrible and fearful that must have been. To stand before an almighty creation that is neither human nor animal, a creation that conceals itself and yet is present where you stand. Rudolf Otto wrote that religious emotion can fill the soul with almost insane force and endeavored to describe the numinous in all its various phases. The sweeping, tide-like moods of tranquil worship that can pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away, the soul resuming its more profane, everyday, nonreligious mode. The strong, sudden ebullitions of personal piety from the depths of the soul, with spasms and convulsions, leading to the strangest excitements, frenzy, transport, ecstasy. It may sink to almost grisly horror and shuddering. The numinous has its crude and barbaric antecedents, Otto states, which may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. “It may become the hushed trembling and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of – whom or what?”
When I read Rudolf Otto or Mircea Eliade, both of whom circle around the experience of the divine or the holy, in order to gain an understanding of that experience and to define it, and when I read the writings of Christian mysticism or the Church Fathers, pervaded as they are with the rapture of religious excitement, I find myself confronted by something utterly alien to me, which does not occur at all in my life or in the world around me, other than the occasional glimpse offered by TV into some ecstatic religious movement. This weakens an otherwise fundamental conviction of mine that says the emotional life of the human is constant, that the feelings that stream through us have always streamed through all hu
man beings, and that this is the reason why it makes sense for us to consider even the oldest works of art, or to read even the oldest texts of literature. To be human has forever been the same, I tell myself, quite independently of the ways in which our cultures have evolved. But the kinds of experience that were once the most important of all, meditations on God and the divine, holy rituals and cults, visions and raptures occurring in lives wholly devoted to God and the divine mystery, this resolve to seek meaning, this fervor, with all its spectra of intuitions, moods, and emotions, is no longer sought or, if it is, then only on the peripheries of society, outside our field of vision, perhaps occasionally evoked in respect to some odd and obsolete phenomenon in TV entertainment: So, you’re a monk? What’s it like not having sex? When we closed the door on religion, we closed the door on something inside ourselves as well. Not only did the holy vanish from our lives, all the powerful emotions associated with it vanished too. The idea of the sublime is a faint echo of our experience of the holy, without the mystery. The yearning and the melancholy expressed in Romantic art is a yearning back to this, a mourning of its loss. This at least is how I interpret my own attraction to the Romantic in art, the short yet intense bursts of emotion it can discharge in my soul, the sudden swell of joy and grief that can arch up inside me like a sky if I happen to encounter something unexpected or something commonplace in an unexpected way. A cruise ship thick with people, an industrial landscape mantled by snow, the red sun that illuminates it through a curtain of mist. An old man in blue overalls tossing a cardboard box onto a bonfire, this too in a landscape of snow in which all is still apart from the old man’s movements, with which I am so familiar, he being my mother’s father, and the fire’s cautiously flickering flame. The flame, the fire, what else is this but something opening into the world? Something that occurs is here and then gone? Always and yet never the same. When I see the image in my mind’s eye I am transported there, and with all my being I become aware not only of my own existence, but of my own self. For a brief moment it floods my consciousness, and in those few moments I am quite oblivious to my own problems, the things I have done or need to do, the people I know, have known or will know in the future, and everything that connects me to the social world is gone. For five seconds, perhaps, or ten, maybe even for as long as thirty seconds, I exist in that state, in the midst of the world, watching a bonfire burn and a man step back from it in a soundless, snow-covered landscape, and then it is gone, the magic broken, and everything is as it was before, me included.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 72
