My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  I listened to workers while sweeping the streets and working in the machine room: it was always, be it printed or spoken, from the mouths of the educated or the uneducated, the same clichés and the same tone. And even in the case of those who were the most persecuted victims and of necessity mortal enemies of National Socialism, even among the Jews, the LTI [lingua tertii imperii] was ubiquitous – in their conversations and letters, even in their books, insofar as they were still able to publish, it reigned supreme, as omnipotent as it was wretched, omnipotent indeed in its very poverty.

  As an assimilated Jew, Klemperer stands from the very first on the outside; what this language does, by building up an enormously strong sense of community, a we that cuts across all political and class distinctions, by embracing the most destitute of vagrants and the wealthiest families of upper-class society within the same overarching whole, which is to say Germany and Germanness, is to exclude Klemperer and the other Jews; the we does not include them, instead it expels them in just as many ways as it includes the others. The Jews become they. Jews with German-sounding forenames are compelled by the state to add a supplementary Jewish name, such as Israel or Sara, so that their Jewishness may be plain in all circumstances, the opposite being introduced for Germans, who are now forbidden to bear Jewish-sounding names. No German child was to be called Lea or Sara. When letters of the alphabet were to be made clear over the telephone, it was no longer permitted to say “D for David” – this was actually banned by the authorities in 1933. Before long, Jews were forced to wear the yellow Star of David with the word Jude in lettering reminiscent of Hebrew. The designation J appears in official documents; Klemperer writes that eventually the full word “Jew” occurs some sixty times in every tiny section of his ration card. They are singled out immediately through language. The name, the badge, the letter. The Germans become correspondingly more German; the names of the newborn shift toward the Germanic. Dieter, Detlev, Uwe, Margit, Ingrid, Uta are among those Klemperer notes in the birth announcements of a Dresden newspaper. Place names too are changed, the Slavic giving way to the more Germanic. In Pomerania 120 Slavic place-names, in Brandenburg 175, in Silesia 2,700, in Gumbinnen 1,146. Street names too are replaced, often with historical references. Klemperer comes across one such in Dresden, Tirmannstrasse, with the explanation underneath: “Magister Nikolaus Tirmann, Mayor, died 1437.”

  The German, the local and the historic, are cultivated in the language, which with the advent of new technologies and the total state is no longer either local or historic, as can be seen in slogans of the time, the modern and the medieval melting together in “Fallersleben, Site of the Volkswagen Plant” or “Nuremberg, City of the Reich Party Days.” The old suffix –gau is added to denote a province, Klemperer writes, harking back to ancient Germanic custom, border regions similarly being dubbed mark, as in Ostmark for Austria and Westmark for the Netherlands, thereby establishing connections to these countries that would later legitimize their invasion and occupation. All these changes are about creating identity. Klemperer stands outside this identity, though not entirely so, being married to an “Aryan” and thereby in principle assimilated, meaning his identity is with neither the we nor the they, and consequently he sees the formation of both clearly. The transformation of identity that the systematic, all-encompassing, all-pervading language of the Nazis establishes and reinforces day by day, week by week, month by month, impacts directly on his life.

  * * *

  In 1933 Klemperer was still a professor at the university. He tells of one of the staff there, Paula von B, an intelligent, good-natured woman “no longer in the first flush of youth,” assistant to a professor in the German department. She hailed from an officer’s family belonging to the old nobility, and Klemperer finds her obviously liberal and European, “despite the odd wistful reminiscence of the glorious Imperial era,” and nothing to suggest that politics is an issue for her. On the day of Hitler’s ascent to Reich chancellor he bumps into her in the corridor. Usually so serious, she is now suddenly cheerful with a youthful spring in her step.

  “You look radiant!” Klemperer says. “Has something good happened to you?”

  “Something very good!” she replies. “Do I really need to explain? I feel ten years younger, no, nineteen: I haven’t felt like this since 1914!”

  “And you are telling me about it? You can say all this even though you can see, read, and hear how people who used to be close to you are being denounced, how books which you once respected are being condemned, how people are rejecting the very intellectual things that you used to – ”

  She interrupts him, alarmed, and yet lovingly, he writes:

  My dear Professor, I hadn’t expected you to overreact so nervously. You should take a couple of weeks’ holiday and not read any newspapers. You are allowing yourself to get upset at this moment, and allowing yourself to be distracted from what really matters by minor embarrassments and blemishes which can scarcely be avoided during periods of such radical change. In no time at all you will judge things quite differently. Can I come and visit the two of you sometime soon?

  With that, and a heartfelt “kind regards to your family,” she exits through the door “like a bouncy teenager,” Klemperer recounts. Over the following months he doesn’t see her, until one day she turns up at their place. As a German, she feels it her duty to make an open confession to her friends, she says, while hoping that she could still be considered a friend of theirs.

  “Duty as a German is not something you would have said in the past,” Klemperer interjects. “What has being German or non-German got to do with highly personal or universal human questions? Or do you want to discuss politics with us?”

  “Everything is related to the issue of being German or non-German,” she replies, “this is all that matters; you see that’s what I, what we all, have either learned from the Führer or rediscovered having forgotten it. He has brought us home again!”

  “And why are you telling us this?”

  “You must recognize, you must understand that I belong entirely to the Führer, but I don’t want you to think that as a result I have renounced my affection toward you.”

  “And how can these two feelings be reconciled? And what does the Führer say concerning your former boss Walzel, the teacher you admired so much? And how can you reconcile this with the humanitarianism of Lessing and all the others about whom you had essays written? And how … but it’s pointless asking any more questions.”

  In response to each sentence he utters she merely shakes her head and has tears in her eyes.

  “No, it really does seem to be pointless,” she says, “because everything you are asking is based on reason, and the accompanying feelings stem from bitterness about insignificant details.”

  “And what are my questions supposed to be based on if not reason? And what is significant?”

  “I’ve told you already: that we’ve really come home! It’s something you have to feel, and you must abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are experiencing at present … And our classical writers? I really don’t think they are at variance with him in any way, you just have to read them properly, Herder, for example, and in any case they would certainly have been convinced sooner or later!”

  “And where does this certainty come from?”

  “Where all certainties come from: faith. And if all this doesn’t mean anything to you, then – yes, then the Führer is right after all when he comes out against the…” Here Klemperer states that she just manages to swallow the word “Jews” before continuing: “… against the sterile intelligentsia. Because I believe in him, and I had to tell you that I believe in him.”

  “Well in that case, Fräulein von B, the best thing is to postpone our friendship and the discussion about faith indefinitely…”

  He sees her again five years later, in 1938, when opening the door of a bank where everyone inside was sta
nding stiffly erect each with an outstretched arm listening to a voice on the radio proclaiming the annexation of Austria to Germany. She was, he writes, in a state of total ecstasy, her eyes sparkling, not simply standing to attention like all the others, the rigidity of her posture and salute more like a rapturous convulsion. Later, he hears it reported with a chuckle that she is one of the Führer’s most devoted followers, though utterly harmless. The first woman, who gave him an apple, was ambivalent with regard to the Nazis, whereas the second, this assistant to Professor Walzel, was a true believer. Both were ordinary people, and both made Nazism possible in their own ways. Klemperer fails to understand them, seeing in Hitler only the yelling monomaniac, in Nazism an untenable constraint upon the human. It is what we see too. Yet clearly others must have seen something radically different which gave them hope and a belief in the future and aroused in them such fervor.

  It seems no coincidence that Paula von B should compare the spring days of 1933 with the summer days of 1914, the enthusiasm in Germany for Hitler’s coming to power being so reminiscent of the tide of emotion that washed across the land at the outbreak of the war. In his biography of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, Rüdiger Safranski describes the buoyant mood in academia during those months, when even Jews allowed themselves to be carried away. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, in a lecture given in 1933, opined that the National Socialist revolution represented Germany striving to realize Hölderlin’s vision. And in Kiel, Safranski reports, Felix Jacoby begins a lecture on Horace in the summer of 1933 with the following words:

  As a Jew I find myself in a difficult position. But as a historian I have long learned not to view historical events from a private perspective. I have voted for Adolf Hitler since 1927 and I am happy that in the year of the National Rising I am allowed to lecture on Augustus. Because Augustus is the only figure in world history that may be compared to Adolf Hitler.

  This was after the boycott of Jewish businesses that came into effect on April 1 that year, and after the dismissal of Jewish public employees on April 7, Safranski notes. Heidegger, who along with Wittgenstein was among the most prominent and significant philosophers of the century, became a Nazi himself, a fully fledged member of the NSDAP. What he and others saw in National Socialism, and in Hitler, was a political movement that penetrated the membrane of politics, reaching in to the authentic, the deepest seat of all that was human, the locus of emotions, community, truth, and morality, far beyond administration, bureaucracy, and day-to-day pragmatics, and so very much greater. Heidegger had described public life as the antithesis of the authentic in his concept of das Man (often rendered as the “they”), the inauthentic being who expressed the mean, where individual modes were regulated and to a certain extent subsumed by the others. He referred to this as “the dictatorship” of das Man.

  In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the “they” [das Man] is unfolded. We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from “the great mass” as they shrink back; we find “shocking” what they find shocking. The “they,” which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness …

  Distantiality, averageness, and leveling down, as ways of Being for the “they,” constitute what we know as “publicness.” Publicness proximally controls every way in which the world and Dasein get interpreted, and it is always right – not because there is some distinctive and primary relationship-of-Being in which it is related to “Things,” or because it avails itself of some transparency on the part of Dasein which it has explicitly appropriated, but because it is insensitive to every difference of level and of genuineness and thus never gets to “the heart of the matter.” By publicness everything gets obscured, and what has thus been covered up gets passed off as something familiar and accessible to everybody.

  The dictatorship of das Man sanctions and reduces the unique, who become trivialized to such a level as to become amenable to commentary by all, though in a form beyond recognition, radically deconstructed, diluted, and essentially without quality. In mass society, through the mass media that atunes itself to the mean, this happens every day. From such a perspective, the business of politics, whose players pursue their own agendas and lobby according to personal interest, at the same time as leveling down to das Man, allowing nothing to remain unique or unexampled, is the very arena of the inauthentic. Heidegger’s existentialism, in which the state of being, in its true and authentic form, is construed as something beyond language, moreover, one must assume, inaccessible to language and rational thought, approaches mysticism, standing at the vedbande, the forest fringe, to use Olav Nygard’s expression, which is to say at the fringe of the holy. Our being in the world is something we grasp with our rational minds, but the rational mind comprehends by representation, and the sense of being we grasp this way is thus a simulation. The moods we feel, always a part of us, are another fundamental way in which we relate to the world. We do not know where they come from or what they mean, only that they are always there. They are given to us, as our existence is given to us. In such a system, speech, or logos, is neither language nor reason, Heidegger’s Norwegian translator Lars Holm-Hansen writes, but the articulation of what is understandable, that which is possible to understand. Speech is not the same as language, but is the foundation of language. Language is a representation of what is already articulated in speech. Speech also suggests listening, and that we may also refrain from speech. In these instances we are quite beyond the rational. Moods, silence, listening, all that cannot be articulated by language but nonetheless is present in speech, the speech of being. Here, in this extra-rational space, in the realm of our moods and emotions, in the borderland of religion and mystical ecstasy, far, far removed from the newspapers and their self-important political editorials, fashion shows, cabarets, and sporting events, was where Heidegger came together with Nazism. True being against untrue being. The nonlinguistic expression of feelings against linguistic rationality.

  Safranski describes the mood as follows:

  There were overwhelming demonstrations of the new community spirit, mass oaths under floodlit cupolas, bonfires on the mountains, and the Führer’s speeches on the radio – people would assemble, festively attired, in public places to listen to them, in the great halls of the universities and in taverns. There was choral singing in the churches in honor of the Nazi seizure of power. General-superintendent Otto Dibelius, in his sermon in Saint Nicholas’s church on March 21, 1933, the Day of Potsdam, said: “Through north and south, through east and west, there marches a new will to a German state, a yearning, to quote Trietschke, no longer ‘to be deprived of one of the most noble sensations in a man’s life,’ that of the enthusiastic pride in his own state.” The atmosphere of those days is difficult to describe, writes Sebastian Haffner, who experienced it himself. It formed the real power base of the new führer state. “It was – there is no other way of putting it – a widespread feeling of deliverance, of liberation from democracy.”

  We can gain some sense of this aspect of the Third Reich – the popular demonstrations, the torchlit parades, the songs, the sense of community, all of which were unconditional joys to anyone who participated – by watching Riefenstahl’s films of the Nuremberg Rally the following year, 1934, where all these elements are present. The spectacle is staged, but its content far eclipses the fact, because emotions are stronger than all analyses, and here the emotions are set free. This is not politics, but something beyond. And it is something good.

  The philosopher Jaspers visited Heidegger in his office in May 1933, describing their meeting as follows, in Safranski’s account:

  Heidegger himself seemed to have changed. Straight away on his arrival there arose an atmosphere dividing us. National Socialism had become an intoxication of the people. I went to Heidegger’s room to welcome him. “It’s just l
ike 1914…” I began, intending to continue: “again this deceptive mass intoxication,” but when I saw Heidegger radiantly agreeing with my first words, the rest stuck in my throat … Face-to-face with Heidegger himself gripped by that intoxication I failed. I did not tell him that he was on the wrong road. I no longer trusted his transformed nature at all. I felt a threat to myself in view of the violence in which Heidegger now participated.

  The yearning for simplicity proved quite as vigorous in Heidegger as in his contemporaries, Hitler and Wittgenstein, but whereas the latter drew a boundary as to what could truthfully be said by means of language, construing this in terms of mathematical quality, Heidegger found his own truth on the other side of that boundary, that which could not be spoken. Speaking in Tübingen on November 30, 1933, Heidegger said the following, once again according to Safranski:

  To be primitive means to stand, from an inner urge and drive, at the point where things begin to be primitive, to be driven by internal forces. Just because the new student is primitive, he has a calling to implement the new demand for knowledge.

  In National Socialism, philosophy and politics come together at a point outside the language and beyond the rational, where all complexity ceases, though not all depth. It can be seen as such: the rational and objective, analysis and argument, associated with the written word, moves horizontally, between people, is always external to them, always between them, always in motion, in networks of overwhelming complexity and of such scale as to correct and mold the I, and this to an infinitely greater degree than it may be corrected and molded by the I; whereas emotion and mood, associated with speech, the tangible presence of the one in the face of the other, are vertical in nature, associated with the biological and ultimately with death, but also with all else that is biological and mortal, in ways that cannot be predicated, but merely sensed: we are alone, we are one and one, but in the voice, always concrete, always bound up with a particular human in a particular place, our solitude is overcome, this is the promise it brings with it, and in that voice, in its final consequence, death too is overcome. All flags and banners, symbols and rituals are directed, wordlessly, toward this. A torch burning in darkness can make a soul shiver, the cheer of a crowd send it into transports of elation, and in that instance it is the elation of existing and belonging it recognizes and reacts to. Oh, we all know this, it is the heart beating and the blood rushing, it is life and the world, the rivers, the forests, the plains, the wind in the trees. What can the rational mind do that could ever measure up to this? The difference between a poem and the hundred different analyses of a poem, this is what I am talking about. Or as Hitler said, speaking in Potsdam on March 21, 1933: