Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too

by Claire Berlinski

  The Russian anarchists, too, Mikhail Bakunin in particular, took their inspiration from the same movements; Bové explicitly recognizes his inheritance in this regard, describing himself as an anarchosyndicalist. (Anarcho-syndicalism, in France, gave rise to one of its oldest trade unions, the Confédération Générale du Travail, historically closely linked to the French Communist Party.)

  The passionate terror of malbouffe—well founded or not—is also no accident; it recalls the fanatic religious and ritualistic search for purity of the Middle Ages, ethnic purity included. The fear of poisoning was widespread among the millenarians, particularly during the Black Death, when it was concluded that some class of people—most likely the Jews—had introduced into the water supply a deadly concoction of spiders, frogs, and lizards. The Jews were thereupon massacred. (Of course it has also long been a common religious practice among Jews, as well as Muslims, to distinguish themselves from heathens by rejecting unclean food.) The apocalyptic predictions of environmental catastrophe date directly from this era as well, when millenarians confidently foretold the famine, pestilence, and plague that would wipe out sinners and renew the earth for its inheritance by the faithful.

  It is all there, and it is all very, very old.

  THE CLASSIC TROPE OF THE MILLENNIAL CULTS

  Nor is it any accident that Bové’s agenda includes the classic trope of the Christian millennial cults: the demonization of the Jew. This is the real meaning of his activism on behalf of the Palestinians, a classic example of the new European anti-Semitism, one characterized by the irrational and hysterical demonization of Israel.

  Now wait a moment, Bové’s apologists will surely interject. One can criticize Israel without being an anti-Semite. Yes, you can. But usually you won’t bother. Bové’s views on Israel are spelled out completely in an April 24, 2002, interview with Oumma, a popular franco-phone website devoted to issues of concern to Muslims.43 The Israeli conflict with the Palestinians, he says, is “a war of a criminal and colonial army against a defenseless civilian population. That exactly sums up the tragedy unfolding in the Palestinian territories.” He advocates a complete boycott of Israeli products and the severance of all cooperative ties between the European Union and Israel. “It is at once confusing and unbearable to see this country quietly violating international law, occupying, killing and destroying as long as it can, in all impunity!” He is no great fan of French Jews either: Their attitude is “deplorable,” their behavior, “dishonest.” For example, he notes,

  in Rodez, in Aveyron, the Christians mobilize themselves to denounce the massacres against the Palestinian population, they fast in the cathedral to denounce this injustice. The Muslim community also arrives in large numbers to express their support. Thus the communities join to denounce the evil. The representatives of the Jewish community who oppose the spirit of our activism work against this message of peace. But it is hardly astonishing, because their speech actually camouflages a disguised support for [Ariel] Sharon, a solidarity which, in view of the crimes of that government, seems intolerable to me.

  But if he does not find equally intolerable the support—disguised or otherwise—that French Muslims offer to Islamic governments, this surely is not because those regimes commit no crimes.

  Nowhere in the interview does he mention—even once— Palestinian suicide bombings. He frequently expressed admiration for Yasser Arafat, “a democratically elected leader,” as the hero of a legitimate national liberation movement, but nowhere in public has he mentioned the Israeli army’s discovery of documents, signed by Arafat, authorizing cash payments to the families of suicide bombers, or the money systematically funneled from the Palestinian Authority to groups such as the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which plans and executes these attacks. He has never commented on Arafat’s regular encomiums to the suicide bombers—“Oh God, give me martyrdom like this!”

  For a man who so deplores the brutal military occupation of faraway lands, Bové has missed a few easy calls. He has never appealed for a boycott of Chinese goods to protest China’s occupation and cultural genocide in Tibet, nor has he lobbied to sever European ties to India in protest of the occupation of Kashmir. (Given his preoccupation with international law and UN resolutions, this oversight is particularly curious.) Nor has he petitioned to rupture the EU’s ties to Russia to protest the occupation of Chechnya, even as the rubble that once was Grozny continues to bounce.

  That Bové singles out Israel, alone among these nations, suggests his suppressed premises. First, Israel is the world’s foremost pariah state and the most deserving object of any right-thinking activist’s opprobrium. Second, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is manifestly illegal and unjust, and the cause of Arab animus toward Israel, rather than its consequence. Third, no censure or blame for the Palestinians ’ misery is to be accorded the Palestinian Authority, or any other confrontation state in the Middle East. Fourth, when considering the occupation, there is no need to discuss, no less deplore, the unrelenting and indiscriminate Palestinian terror campaign, on Israeli soil, against Israeli civilians, that began directly after Yasser Arafat rejected an unprecedented Israeli offer for territorial compromise—one that, had it been implemented, would have brought an end to the occupation. These lead to suppressed premise five: It is right and proper for Israelis to be punished collectively for decisions made by their government—but the collective punishment of Palestinians is an abomination. Finally, six, Bové, who was neither elected nor appointed to the task of making foreign policy by an elected government, is doing the world a favor by inserting himself into the globe’s most volatile regional conflict. These unspoken premises range from the dubious to the false to the ludicrous.

  What can we call this selective and disproportionate animus toward Israel, the state of the Jews, but anti-Semitism? Let’s just cut to the chase: Bové, like all the great Christian heretics, simply finds Jews rather distasteful. All things considered, this is not much of a surprise.

  MON DIEU

  It is early September 2004, and I am in Perpignan, a small medieval town in the Pyrénées-Orientales. This is the heart of Bové country. I am there for the annual Visa pour l’image photojournalism festival. Every night, a slide show of the past year’s most newsworthy images is presented in the huge outdoor amphitheater. The photographs are unrelentingly depressing. We see pictures from Darfur of starving mothers with their children, sacks of bones, dying in their arms; refugees who have been raped, tortured, blinded, their last sight on earth that of Janjaweed militias killing their families. We see photographs from Beslan of parents wailing as they discover the bodies of their children. We see a teenage barbarian in Sierra Leone, triumphantly holding up the bloodied, severed head of his rival. The audience—hardened, streetwise photojournalists—watches without comment, applauding only photographs that display unusual technical achievement.

  Then we see a photo essay about the Wall—the barrier Israel is building between itself and the Palestinians. A few pictures of a concrete wall flash across the screen. That’s it, a wall, a big concrete wall like any other concrete wall. Ugly, sure. But compared with the images that preceded it, hardly shocking. Immediately, though, there is a low hissing in the audience, a collective sucking in of breath. “Mon Dieu,” says the Frenchman next to me in a grave, indignant voice. This wall, evidently, is the worst thing on the planet, the worst thing one can imagine seeing. The director of the festival narrates: Everyone, except the Americans, has condemned this wall. But the Israelis persist in their madness. He does not mention that since construction of the wall began, suicide bombings have declined by 90 percent.

  The previous day, sixteen Israelis had perished in a Palestinian suicide bombing in Beersheba—one of the few cities not yet protected by the wall. He does not mention this.

  UTOPIA

  They have all been much the same, the Bovés. They have all drawn their followers not from the lowest strata of society but from the insecure lower middle classes—u
rban artisans, journeymen, casual laborers. Particularly, they have drawn their following from the lower tier of the agricultural middle class, who, as a consequence of the growth of towns, had been rapidly losing social stature and wealth. They have all linked the economic anxieties of their followers with their spiritual ones. Their followers have always included society’s misfits, criminals, and troublemakers—the current Bové notes that his adherents come “from the extreme right to the extreme left, nationalists, anti-Americans, opportunists of all sorts.” 44 They have all been concerned with crops, they have all sought the redistribution of wealth, and they have all hated Jews. They have always appealed to the character described by Eric Hoffer as the true believer: “discontented yet not destitute,” electrified by “the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power.” 45 The goals of these movements were never modest: There was always a utopia in sight.

  There have been many other Bovés, of course: The pseudo-Baldwin of Flanders, the pseudo-Frederick, the pseudo-Dionysus, Erigena, John Hus, Konrad Schmid, Eudo, Henry of Lausanne, Arnold of Brescia. There were Swabian preachers and Perugian hermits; there were Bovés among the revolutionary flagellants, the Heretics of the Free Spirit, the Taborites, the Hussites, the Utraquists, the Lollards, and the Waldensians. “Ask the rector,” as H. L. Mencken counseled, “to lend you any good book on comparative religion; you will find them all listed. They were gods of the highest dignity—gods of civilized peoples— worshipped and believed in by millions. All were omnipotent, omniscient and immortal.”46

  And all are dead—but Bové lives.

  CHAPTER 8

  BLACK-MARKET NATIONALISM: I HATE

  Denk’ ich an Deutschland in der Nacht

  Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht . . .31

  —HEINRICH HEINE

  LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, EUROPEANS long to feel that they are among their own people—and that indeed their people are a splendid people, a grand and noble people unique unto the world. But nowhere is this entirely human impulse viewed with more suspicion now than in Europe, and nowhere is it viewed with suspicion for better reason.

  Profound instincts, when repressed, become sublimated. Like the religious instinct, the instinct to nationalism, when formally denied, will re-emerge in curious black-market forms. Nowhere in Europe has nationalism led to greater catastrophe than Germany, and nowhere has it been more ruthlessly suppressed, thank God. But it has not been eradicated: it cannot be.

  In the case of Rammstein—purveyors of fine black-market nationalism to the German public—it has returned this time as farce rather than tragedy, but it has nonetheless returned, and this is a warning: It is still there, it has never died, and we may expect to hear more from it in the future, particularly as the social and economic pressures on Europe mount.

  Rammstein—the name is a made-up word meaning, more or less, “ramming stone”—is a popular German band. Very popular. Rammstein released its first album, Herzeleid, in 1995. Within days, it topped the German charts. It stayed in the number one position for five weeks, then remained in the top ten for two years, an unrivaled achievement in Germany’s notoriously fickle pop music market. Their next album, Sehnsucht, was more successful still: the best-selling album in Germany from the day of its release, it immediately went double-platinum. In 1998, their video Engel was awarded an Echo, the German equivalent of a Grammy. In the same year, VIVA, a mainstream German television station more or less like MTV, awarded Rammstein its prize trophy, the Comet, effectively declaring the band the preeminent ambassadors of German popular music. The year 1999 brought Rammstein another Echo for Sehnsucht. Their album Mutter, released in March 2001, immediately sold a million copies, bringing their total album sales over the 4-million mark. Their album Reise, Reise, released in November 2004, surpassed all of their previous sales records. With Reise, Reise, Rammstein became the best-selling German-language band in history. Rammstein, in other words, is not a fringe phenomenon.

  Let’s read Rammstein’s lyrics.32

  ** Rammstein’s name, and this song, allude to the U.S. Air Force base Ramstein, in West Germany, where 69 people were killed and some 500 more injured (most of them burned), when three jets collided above the crowd at an air show on August 28, 1988.

  Here are few more lyrics, from which I have deleted only repetitive passages:

  The lyrics of “Der Meister” are particularly suggestive. Paul Celan’s biographer, John Felstiner, notes that the word Meister in German “can designate God, Christ, rabbi, teacher, champion, captain, owner, guildsman, master of arts or theology, labor-camp overseer, musical maestro, ‘master’ race, not to mention Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and Wagner’s Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which carries overtones of the 1935 Nuremberg racial laws.”1

  We see in Celan the same association, through this word, of German masters, music, and mercilessness. Consider this passage from Celan’s “Death Fugue”:

  Rammstein’s lyrics are not comparable in brilliance and mastery to the poetry of Celan, of course, but their preoccupations are strikingly similar. Celan, a Romanian Jew, was raised in a German-speaking household. In 1942, his parents were deported to labor camps in the Ukraine. The Germans declared his mother unfit for work and shot her in the neck. His father swiftly perished of typhus. Celan himself was interned for eighteen months in a Nazi labor camp. He drowned himself in the Seine in 1970. It is certainly remarkable that the most popular band in contemporary Germany finds itself drawn to the same themes and imagery as Celan. Of course, there is a difference: Celan speaks with the voice of the master’s quarry, whereas Rammstein speaks with the voice of his emissaries. Celan, moreover, laments these associations. Rammstein celebrates them.

  Here’s one more Rammstein song for good measure:

  In both form and imagery, Rammstein’s lyrics have a distinct history in German poetry. The source is the Neue Sachlichkeit—new concreteness, or New Realism—of the 1920s, of which Georg Trakl is the best-known exponent. These poets aimed to represent reality in concrete images, and their reality, as it happened, revolved around a preoccupation with blood and smashed faces. Trakl’s influence is particularly obvious in the band’s preoccupation with gore and despair. Consider these lines from Trakl’s “De Profundis”:

  There are odd parallels between Trakl’s life and that of Rammstein’s lead singer and lyricist, Till Lindemann. Trakl was a full-blown drug addict, as Lindemann is said to be. Rumors that Trakl had carried on an incestuous affair with his sister pursued him throughout his life, and Lindemann is also quite intrigued by incest. Photographs of Trakl, taken just before his death in 1914, and Lindemann show a spooky similarity.

  Rammstein’s lyrics also have something in common with the notorious Morgue cycle of Gottfried Benn, the Berlin venereal disease specialist who pledged his allegiance to the Nazi Party until it expelled him for perversion. See, for example, Verse IV, “Nigger Bride”:

  But while Benn is the passive observer of his early poems, the members of Rammstein clearly envision themselves doing the bashing, defiling, and knifing.

  Their imagery is suggestive as well of postwar German Expressionist paintings—those of Otto Dix, in particular, who having spent four years in the trenches had a fine pictorial feel for what things looked like after an exchange of artillery. Songs by Rammstein with sadomasochistic sexual themes, such as “Mein Teil”—an homage to the German cannibal Armin Meiwes, who in 2002 shared a final meal with his willing victim of the man’s severed, flambéed penis—would not have been out of place in Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer, a newspaper even many Nazis found excessive in its pornographic obsessions and sensationalism.

  At roughly the time “The Master” was topping the German charts, this song, by the Spice Girls, was the number one song on the British charts:

  WANNABE

  Yo, I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want

  So tell me what you w
ant, what you really really want

  I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want

  So tell me what you want, what you really really want

  I wanna (huh), I wanna (huh), I wanna (huh), I wanna (huh)

  I wanna really really really wanna zigazig ah

  These cheerful imbeciles, clearly, are quite unlike Rammstein in their existential preoccupations.33 I won’t bother you with examples of the French and Italian chart toppers of the late 1990s. Trust me, they’re nothing like Rammstein. (They’re nothing like music either.)

  INHERITORS OF THE GERMAN MUSICAL TRADITION

  Next, let’s listen to Rammstein. Much of it can be downloaded from the Internet. Initiates should begin with the song “Reise, Reise,” played at top volume. Push your subwoofers to the limit. That is the way it is meant to be appreciated.

  Formed in 1993, Rammstein comprises six working-class musicians, all born and raised behind the Berlin Wall: vocalist Lindemann, keyboardist Flake Lorenz, drummer Christoph Schneider, bassist Oliver Riedel, and guitarists Paul Landers and Richard Kruspe-Bernstein.34 Their music is extremely sophisticated and superbly orchestrated. They blend metal, industrial, techno, and classical musical techniques, employing a vast range of sound effects—studio-distorted guitars, sampled ghostly wailing, Arabic choirs, melodic whistling, string arrangements, chanting crowds of thousands, the sound of marching jackboots, and a full symphony orchestra. The orchestra is one of Germany’s best, led by a completely professional conductor.