Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  We all belonged to the same category marked down for absolute destruction. The astonishing thing is not that so many of us went to concentration camps or died there, but that some of us survived. Caution did not help. Only chance could save you.

  —NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM, Hope Abandoned, P. 67

  “ONLY CHANCE COULD save you” is the best thing ever said about life under state terror, and it took Nadezhda Mandelstam to say it so directly, bravely and unforgettably. Max Hayward chose the English titles well for his magnificent translations of her two great books. Hope Against Hope is about a gradual, reluctant but inexorable realization that despair is the only thing left to feel: it is the book of a process. Hope Abandoned is about what despair is like when even the memory of an alternative has been dispelled: the book of a result. The second book’s subject is spiritual desolation as a way of life. Several times, in the course of the text, Nadezhda proclaims her fear that the very idea of normality has gone from the world. “I shall not live to see the future, but I am haunted by the fear that it may be only a slightly modified version of the past.” The memory of what happened can’t even be passed on without ruining the lives of those called upon to understand. “If any brave young fellow with no experience of these things feels inclined to laugh at me,” she writes, “I invite him back into the era we lived through, and I guarantee that he will need to taste only a hundredth part what we endured to wake up in the night in a cold sweat, ready to do anything to save his skin the next morning.” Well, none of us brave young fellows back there in the comfortable West of the late 1960s and early 1970s felt inclined to laugh at her. Schopenhauer had said that a man is in a condition of despair when he thinks a thing will happen because he wants it not to, and that what he wishes can never be. Nadezhda had provided two books to show how that felt. As such, they were key chapters in the new bible that the twentieth century had written for us. In a bible it is not astonishing that some of the gospels should sound like each other and seem to tell the same story. In Primo Levi’s books, the theme is often struck that the only real story about the Nazi extermination camps was the common fate of those who were obliterated: the story of the survivors was too atypical to be edifying, and to dwell on it could only lead to the heresy that Levi called Survivalism and damned as a perversion. Survival had nothing to do with anything except chance: there was no philosophy to be extracted from it, and certainly no guide to behaviour. In Russian instead of Italian, Nadezhda said exactly the same thing about life under Stalin: Only chance could save you.

  It was the dubious distinction of the Soviet Union to create, for the remnants of the old Russian intelligentsia, conditions by which they could experience, in what passed for ordinary civilian life, the same uncertainties and terrors as the victims who would later be propelled into Nazi Germany’s concentrated universe. The main difference was that in Nazi Europe the victims knew from the start who they were, and eventually came to know that they were doomed. In the Soviet Union, the bourgeois elements could not even be certain that they were marked down for death. Like Kafka’s victims in the Strafkolonie, they were in a perpetual state of trying to imagine what their crime might be. Was it to have read books? Was it to have red hair? Was it (the cruellest form of fear) to have submitted too eagerly? Other versions of the same story came out of China, North Korea, Romania, Albania, Cambodia. The same story came out of the Rome of Tiberius, but the twentieth century gave something new to history when societies nominally dedicated to human betterment created a climate of universal fear. In that respect, the Communist despotisms left even Hitler’s Germany looking like a throwback. Hitler was hell on earth, but at least he never promised heaven: not to his victims, at any rate. It’s the disappointment of what happened in the new Russia that Nadezhda captures and distils into an elixir. There were some mighty thinkers about the true nature of the Soviet incubus: Yevgeny Zamyatin, Boris Souvarine, Victor Kravchenko, Evgenia Ginzburg, Varlan Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Roy Medvedev and Aleksandr Zinoviev are only a few of them. Generally, however, the artists, if they lived long enough to speak, spoke better than the philosophers. But it was Nadezhda’s distinction to speak better than the artists. With no lyrical world in which to find refuge, she commanded a prose more potent even than her husband’s poetry, and perhaps that made her the greatest artist of all. She found the means to express how an unprecedented historic experiment had changed the texture even of emotion.

  Even the incandescently gifted Anna Akhmatova, with whom Nadezhda had always been involved in intimate bonds of passion, jealousy and respect, never quite grew out of the romantic nature that helped to make her one of the most justly loved of the modern Russian poets. In her poem “Requiem,” Akhmatova encapsulated the anguish of millions of devastated women when she wrote “husband dead, son in jail: pray for me.” But a romantic she remained, still believing in the imaginative validity of a love affair beyond time. In Hope Abandoned, Nadezhda was able to say firmly that her friend was mistaken. Love affairs beyond time were impossible to take seriously when violent separations in the present had become the stuff of reality. With real life so disturbed, the nature of romanticism had been changed. In the new reality, all love affairs were beyond time.

  It is important not to reach conclusions too quickly about whom she means by “we” and “us.” An unreconstructed Stalinist, if we can suppose there were such a thing left, might say that she was identifying the class enemy. Quite early in the regime’s career of permanent house cleaning—certainly no later than Lunacharsky’s crackdown on the avant-garde in 1929—anyone stemming from the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia was automatically enrolled along with remnants of the bourgeoisie in the classification of “class enemy.” Variations of the Sicilian Vespers multiplied. Civilized articulacy was as deadly a giveaway as soft hands. (In a development that eerily echoed Shakespeare’s scenes about Jack Cade, the Proletkult Komsomols were able to identify a victim’s ability to defend himself verbally as certain evidence of guilt.) Eventually any kind of knowledge that had been acquired under the old order was enough to mark down its possessor. Just as Pol Pot’s teenage myrmidons assailed anyone who wore spectacles, so the Soviet “organs” discovered that even a knowledge of engineering was a threat to state security. (Solzhenitsyn, it will be recalled, was especially poignant about the fate of the engineers.) Any field of study with its own objective criteria was thought to be inherently subversive. Given time, Stalin would probably have applied the Lysenko principle to every scientific field. To this day, scholars puzzle over the reasons for Stalin’s purging the Red Army of its best generals in the crucial years leading up to June 1941, but the answer might lie close to hand. The fact that military knowledge—strategy, tactics and logistics—was a field of data and principles verifiable independently of ideology might have been more than enough to invite his hatred. In attacking his own army, of course, Stalin came close to demolishing the whole Soviet enterprise. But at the centre of the totalitarian mentality is the fear that the internal enemy might go unapprehended. Luis Buñuel gives a poetically condensed rendition of this truth in his Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, when the chief of police, who has slept like a baby while dreaming of prisoners being tortured, wakes screaming and sweating when he dreams that one of them escapes.

  A totalitarian regime’s progressively expanding concept of the enemy is the thing to bear in mind when Nadezhda seems to be identifying herself as part of a class. She is really identifying herself as part of a category, and the category includes anyone who might offer a threat to the regime’s monolithic authority—which means anyone capable of independent moral judgement. She does not go so far as to propose the possibility of independent moral behaviour: not even a hero can actively dissent if the penalty for recalcitrance is the suffering of loved ones. But she does believe that there is such a thing as independent moral judgement, a quality in perfect polarity with the regime, which can’t tolerate the existence of independent moral judgement, and indeed has come int
o being specifically so as to eliminate all such values.

  Throughout her two books, Nadezhda looks for comfort to those whose memories go back to the pre-revolutionary past. But her originality lies in her slowly dawning realization that decency is a human quality which can exist independently of social origins. Without that realization, she would never have been able to formulate the great, ringing message of her books, an unprecedented mixture of the poetic and the prophetic—the message that the truth will be born again of its own accord. She didn’t live to see it happen: so the whole idea was an act of faith. Finally her inspiring contention is unverifiable, because when, after the nightmare was at last over, the truth was indeed reborn, it was hard to imagine that such a renaissance could have occurred without books like hers in the background. But there weren’t many books like hers, and although it will always be useful to examine how the agents of change received their education in elementary benevolence, it might be just as valuable to consider her two main principles in the full range of their combined implications. One principle was that the forces of unreasoning inhumanity had won an overwhelming victory with effects more devastating than we could possibly imagine. The other principle was that reason and humanity would return. The first was an observation; the second was a guess; and it was the inconsolable bravery of the observation that made the guess into a song of love.

  GOLO MANN

  Golo Mann (1909–1994), modern Germany’s greatest historian, was the third child of its greatest modern novelist, Thomas Mann. After making a shaky start as the unbeloved son outshone by his brilliant siblings Klaus and Erika, the awkward Golo rose gradually to his later status as the family’s scholastically most distinguished representative. Some of his historical works were written in the American exile that began in 1940, but by 1952 he was back in Germany for a succession of professorships and for the composition of his major books. Wallenstein, widely proclaimed as his masterpiece, is a hard read in the original and not much easier in English, but his monumental (a thousand pages plus) Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts has the pace of a thriller and is easily seen to be the finest history of modern Germany. A separately published extract from it, Deutsche Geschichte 1919–1945, is probably the best single introduction to Germany’s twentieth-century tragedy, and an ideal book from which to start learning to read German. His memoir Erinnerungen und Gedanken (Memories and Thoughts) has the story of his youth and mental development under the Weimar Republic. As so often with the great historians, Golo Mann is perhaps best approached through his ancillary writings, where his opinions are highlighted. The volumes of essays Geschichte und Geschichten and Wir alle sind, was wir gelesen (We Are All What We Read) show his capacity to get a book’s worth of reflections into an article. His detailed trouncing of A. J. P. Taylor’s chic views about the purportedly inevitable nature of Nazi foreign policy is a valuable instance of a serious political engagement knocking the stuffing out of a fad. If one writer could represent the recovery of liberal thought in Germany after World War II, it would be Golo Mann.

  To attribute foreseeable necessity to the catastrophe of Germany and the European Jews would be to give it a meaning that it didn’t have. There is an unseemly optimism in such an assumption. In the history of mankind there is more that is spontaneous, wilful, unreasonable and senseless than our conceit allows.

  —GOLO MANN, Geschichte und Geschichten, P. 170

  THROUGHOUT HIS distinguished career as an historian, Golo Mann tried to warn us against the consequences of attributing inevitability to what happened in Germany when he was growing up. This paragraph is one among many statements of that theme. What makes it especially notable is the way it traces a bad intellectual habit to a psychological propensity. Optimism, cocksureness, Professor Hindsight, call it what you like: there is a disposition of personality that likes to impose itself on the past and turn it into a self-serving cartoon. One becomes a seer in the safest possible way: retroactively. One predicts the past as a dead certainty. Golo Mann, who had been there when it happened, always remembered the uncertainty. According to him, the Weimar Republic didn’t have to collapse: after it did, to say that it had to was yet another way of undermining it—sabotage after the fact. Similarly, the Jews didn’t have to die, or even have to be classified as Jews. The classification was Hitler’s idea, as was the massacre: the second thing following with awful logic from the first. But the first could have stayed in his sick mind, and he could have stayed out of power. If even one of the main factors had been subtracted from the Weimar equation—the inflation, the Depression, the unemployment—then out of power he would have stayed, to haunt the back alleys of lunatic fringe politics where he belonged. Facing the possibilities that were real even though they did not happen, Golo Mann found the most resonant and lasting application of his principle that the surest way to deprive an historical event of its significance is to abdicate from the task of tracing it back to its origins, which will be the more distant the more the event seems like ineluctable fate. And in that long chain of circumstances, anything could have been different.

  Golo Mann’s first book, published in 1947, was a treatise on the diplomat Friedrich von Gentz, the man whose claim to fame was that he was not as famous as Metternich. An historian’s first book is characteristically rich in themes that will occupy him for the rest of his career, but part of the richness usually comes from their entanglement: he knows what he thinks, but tries to say it all at once. Golo Mann’s book on Gentz is unusual for what can only be called a precocious maturity. To some extent this was imposed on him: because of the political disruptions in his early life, he was already in his late thirties when he began to publish. Undoubtedly his limpid view came from what he had experienced in the time of the Weimar Republic, and not from what he had read about the time of Metternich. He called the pre-revolutionary period before 1848 a hopeful time. People were full of ideas about how life could be more free and more just. Aber diese Ideen hatten zu ihrer Verwirklichung durchaus nicht der Revolution bedurft. But these ideas didn’t need a revolution to make them real. This is still a key sentence; and was, at the time he first wrote it, a marker put down for the view of history he would unfold throughout his books, culminating in his masterpiece—which, in my view, is not his Wallenstein (1971) but his Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (1958). Without question Wallenstein is a mighty book. Its true worth is hard to assess in English because Golo Mann’s prose style, when he wrote the book, was at its most dense and therefore at its least susceptible to being translated with decent respect for its unfaltering rhythm. Like his father Thomas, Golo Mann was accustomed to writing a sentence at the full length allowable by German grammar. Like any other language with arbitrary genders, German permits far longer flights of unambiguous coherence than English. The translator of Wallenstein fatally attempted to translate block-long sentences without breaking them up. The result is a meal of nougat, with molasses to wash it down.

  But even in the original, where the style is merely condensed, Wallenstein suffers from its inclusiveness: the points are buried in documentary detail, and in the effort to isolate and remember them you feel that your enemy is the book itself. Deutsche Geschichte isn’t like that. Memorable from paragraph to paragraph, the book sends you back to itself before you have finished it, just for the enjoyment of seeing complexity put so clearly. Deutsche Geschichte was one of the books from which I taught myself German, and we always have an immoderate affection for the books that brought us into another language. But since I first read it right through with dictionary to hand, I have re-read it twice from cover to cover, and am always using various bits of it as starting points for opening up a specific topic. At its height, Golo Mann’s prose approaches the ideal of the continuous aphorism: you find yourself learning it like poetry. In the fascicle marked Deutsche Geschichte 1919–1945 his analysis of the Weimar Republic’s permanent crisis centres on a single formulation. He says that the split between capital and labour was at
the centre of politics—the centre from which “the public was indeed governed, but always in a divisive manner.” That was the fissure Hitler got in through, like a plague rat through a crack. Not that Golo Mann found the collapse of the Weimar Republic inevitable. There were many times it could have consolidated itself, if circumstances had not conspired against it. In an essay collected in Gecshichte und Geschichten (1963), he excoriated A. J. P. Taylor for Taylor’s pernicious certitude on the subject. Taylor said that from the viewpoint of foreign policy the advent of the Nazis meant a return to political realism from the previous liberal dreamland. Golo Mann knew that the liberal dreamland had contained all the real hopes, and that Hitler’s political realities were lethal fantasies.

  In his Zeiten und Figuren (Times and Figures) (1979), Golo Mann expounded his key concept of Offenheit nach der Zukunft hin—openness to the future. He didn’t just mean it as a desirable trait of personality but as a necessary qualification for the historian. By an effort of the imagination, the historian must put himself back into a present where the future has not yet happened, even though he is looking back at it through the past. If a narrator knows the future of his hero, he, the narrator, “is bound to tinge even the simplest narrative with irony.” Succumbing too easily to the ironic mode is a cheap way of being Tacitus. The true high worth of Tacitus depended on his being always aware that tragic events had been the result of accidents and bad decisions, and the depth of the tragedy lay in the fact that the accidents need not have happened and the decisions might have been good. In a predetermined world there would be no tragedy, only fate. With his revered Tacitus as an example, Golo Mann was able to form the view that fatalism and frivolity were closely allied: to be serious about history, you had seriously to believe that things might have been otherwise.