Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  Finally, someone has to make a start. We only said and wrote what many people think. They just don’t dare to express it.

  —SOPHIE SCHOLL AT THE WHITE ROSE TRIAL IN MUNICH, QUOTED BY RICHARD HANSER IN Deutschland zuliebe (FOR THE SAKE OF GERMANY), P. 15

  SHE DIDN’T STAND a chance anyway. The mere fact that the reliably fanatical Roland Freisler had been sent to preside over the court sealed her doom. But once again in her young life she was bearing witness, and to such effect that even the clinically insane Freisler was momentarily rendered speechless. When he got his breath back, he used it to remind her of his mission, which was to render her speechless permanently. Sophie Scholl was guillotined by the Nazis at Stadelheim prison in Munich on February 22, 1943, at five o’clock in the afternoon. She was twenty-one years old. In life she had been reserved with strangers but full of fun with those she loved. Without being especially pretty she had radiated a moral beauty that left even her Gestapo interrogators self-consciously shuffling their papers, for once in their benighted lives hoping that the job of killing someone might pass to someone else. If there can be any such thing as a perfect person beyond Jesus Christ and his immediate family, Sophie Scholl was it.

  Sophie’s brother Hans, the leader of the little resistance group that called itself the White Rose, was already pretty much of a paragon. The Scholl family weren’t Jewish and Hans could have had a glittering career as a Nazi. He even looked the part: with a face whose measurements fitted the Aryan ideal to the millimetre, he was a page from the sketchbook of Arno Breker. Yet in spite of a standard Third Reich education, including membership in the Hitler Youth, Hans figured out for himself that the regime whose era he had been born into was an abomination. By the time he reached this dangerous conclusion, armed insurrection was out of the question. A few Wehrmacht officers were the only people with guns who didn’t think that Hitler ruled by divine right. Any effective opposition was going to have to come from them. The only means of resistance open to Hans and his like-minded fellow students was to hold secret meetings, write down their opinions and spread them surreptitiously around under the noses of innumerable snoops. There were a few adults in the White Rose, but mainly they were just a bunch of kids. They could never hope to do much more than circulate their skimpy pamphlets. Long before the end, Hans had guessed that even to do so little was bound to mean his death. He died with an unflinching fortitude that would have been exemplary if the Nazis had let anyone except his executioners watch. Plans by the Munich party office to have the young conspirators publicly hanged in the courtyard of their university had been scrapped on orders from Berlin, doubtless for fear that a show of courage might be catching. Philip II of Spain had once taken a similar decision when he heard from the Low Countries about heretics delivering defiant speeches from the stake. He issued orders that they should be drowned in secret. The brains in the Wilhelmstrasse were thinking along the same lines.

  You would have thought to be as good as Hans Scholl was as good as you could get. He did what he did through no compulsion except an inner imperative, in the full knowledge that he would perish horribly if he were caught. Yet if moral integrity can be conceived of as a competition, Sophie left even Hans behind. Hans tried to keep her ignorant of what he was up to but when she found out she insisted on joining in. Throughout her interrogation, the Gestapo offered her a choice that they did not extend to her brother. They told her that if she recanted she would be allowed to live. She turned them down, and walked without a tremor to the blade. The chief executioner later testified that he had never seen anyone die so bravely as Sophie Scholl. Not a whimper of fear, not a sigh of regret for the beautiful life she might have led. She just glanced up at the steel, put her head down, and she was gone. Is that you? No, and it isn’t me either.

  She was probably a saint. Certainly she was noble in her behaviour beyond any standard that we, in normal life, would feel bound to attain or even comfortable to encounter. Yet the world would undoubtedly be a better place if Sophie Scholl were a household name like Anne Frank, another miraculous young woman from the same period. In addition to an image of how life can be affirmed by a helpless victim, we would have an image of how life can be affirmed by someone who didn’t have to be a victim at all, but chose to be one because others were. At present, Sophie’s story is not widely known outside the country of her birth: a big light to hide under a bushel. The recent movie about her has so far not, like Downfall, resonated beyond Germany. A Hollywood movie about her life would make her world-famous, but until recently it was difficult to think of an actress who might be given the starring role. Then Natalie Portman came along. At this point I will seem to digress: but I hope to make a connection later on.

  A lot of people must have sat there with their fingers frozen in the popcorn as they watched the then thirteen-year-old Natalie Portman in Leon (known as The Professional in the United States) and thought this girl isn’t just good, she’s good. Apart from the happy accident of her enchanting looks, what she emanated was something much more rare: natural moral stature. It could be said that a movie like Leon had to get its natural moral stature from somewhere. But who cared, when the man with the flak emplacement under his raincoat was taking out the sleazeballs a bunch at a time? While Leon, the taciturn French terminator weirdly resident in New York (How did he score his green card? Did he marry Andie MacDowell?), wordlessly massacred swarms of heavies, the audience, including myself, chuckled its endorsement in the dark. In those days, undimmed by the shadow of recent events, apocalyptic body counts in the streets of New York were popular film fare. Yet I can remember being disturbed by, even a bit disappointed by, the fact that little Natalie Portman was there to complicate the story—the nice way of saying she spoiled the fun. Usually I enjoy movies about loner hit men using wit, guile and lovingly maintained ordnance to wipe out creepy people who deserve to die. Value free? Tant pis. I even enjoyed the original French version of Nikita, which was just about as value free as the genre can get. In Nikita, the hit person of the title didn’t even know whether her targets deserved to be iced or not. She was just an instrument, a curvy part of her own gun. I still had a whale of a time.

  I’m not even sure if movies like that are bad for me. Clearly my pleasure in them taps into the same current of fantasy by which, finding thieves in my apartment, I ensure that they do not leave alive. In reality, if I found thieves in my apartment they would probably leave with everything of value I possessed. But in my imagination I suddenly remember that old souvenir Japanese ceremonial sword stashed behind the partition between my bedroom and the en suite bathroom. Having begged for permission with a craven mien superbly feigned, I slink off to take a leak and come back as Toshiro Mifune in Sanjuro, scaring the daylights out of them before I even take a swing. What follows is a whirlwind multiplication of the strict Sharia penalty for theft. An idle reverie no doubt, yet without such fancies I would feel even more helpless about the way the world is going. Like all those young Chinese suit-wearing lower-echelon businessmen scattered through the world who dote on the omnipotence of some kick-boxing ham actor and thus brighten lives in which they are at the mercy of their own mobile telephones, we need these dreams to live, or we think we do. What was so bothersome about Natalie Portman’s mere presence in Leon was that it set another standard, one which is no dream at all. It’s a reality; the reality of uncompromising goodness; the unreal reality we find it worrying to hear about, because it would be so hard to live with. Embodying sensitive decency in a role which asked her to be mad keen about guns and to bare her tiny midriff to the ambiguous gaze of a mature imported assassin with a bad shave, she certainly made the film more interesting than it might have been, but a touch of quease was hard to wish away. What’s a girl like you doing in a joint like this?

  She did it again—or at any rate she did it again for me—in Beautiful Girls, a movie I knew nothing about when I first happened to switch it on during some long plane ride. I missed the opening titles and at first di
dn’t realize that the perfect little dream girl was Natalie Portman again. It’s a good film. I own a video of it nowadays, and I still find it hard to watch any of it without watching it all. But there can be no doubt that her scenes stand right out of the picture. In some respects they are designed to. For one thing, they’re written that way. Everywhere else in the picture, everyone talks the standard, scabrous demotic of any movie about a gang of young American friends growing older, from Diner through The Big Chill to forever. Beautiful Girls is an especially deep reservoir for that kind of talk. I love it: it always was the quality of the slang that made me envious of America. But Natalie Portman’s character, Marty, talks another language entirely. Marty (when she tells Timothy Hutton her name, you have to be my age to think no, you’re not Marty—Ernest Borgnine is Marty) talks the mandarin dialect of a J. D. Salinger Wise Child. “I just happen to be the tallest girl in my class.” Where have we heard that proud precocity before? Of course: it’s the upper-crust young English girl in the title story of For Esme with Love and Squalor, the one who heals the war-ravaged American soldier’s soul with the benevolent rays of her crystal spirit.

  Randall Jarrell had a phrase that exactly jibed with Salinger’s diagnosis of the sick place in the American dream: “a sad heart at the supermarket.” Salinger’s pot of balm for the sad heart was the elevated chatter of the pre-teen, pre-sex alpha-nymph, unearthly in her potential understanding, limited only by her lack of experience, desperate to grow up. Faced with her bewitching purity, the damaged veteran, himself too holy for this world, has only two courses of action: to accept his karma with renewed humility or to blow his brains out. In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Seymour Glass chose the second path. Though there are cynics who think he did it from remorse after exposing his penis underwater to his angelic interlocutor, it seems far more likely that Salinger’s version of the Dalai Lama offed himself because, after meeting the incarnated Godhead, he had nowhere else to go. The bananafish wasn’t a euphemism, it was a mantra. Similarly with Marty: her upmarket vocal articulation while she mashes snow with her tiny gloves is a guarantee of her heavenly credentials. Her snowballs are pills to purge melancholy. She’s a script-conference pitch dressed up as a pixie.

  After meeting Marty, the sapped, self-doubting Will (“You’ve really got to chill, Will,” trills Marty cutely) can at last face up to the life in which his dreams of being a great jazz piano player won’t come true. He’ll still be the saddest heart at the supermarket, but he’ll be a good citizen. Marty’s barely pubescent love for him, and the vision of her that he will take away, are his consolation prize, a wish fulfilment pure and simple. Or rather, not so pure and by no means simple: a bill of spiritual goods, a high-tab product marketable to every small-town dilettante who wants to convince himself that he has been sent into the world to suffer for his sensibility. But if that’s the kind of vision we need in order to be better than we are, then Natalie Portman is the girl to embody it. The thoughtfulness of her screen presence—you practically hear those little wheels turning—can raise an average part to the mental level of the heroic. In the years to come she is doubtless destined to make many serious movies look profound and many that are shallow look serious. Her function, and perhaps her fate, will be to sanctify anything they hand her. At best (at their best, because it will always be her best) she will turn a well-written role into a poetic epiphany, as in Closer. At worst she will breathe life into bathos, although not, we hope, into any more than three stipulated Star Wars prequels, of which the first, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, wasted her gift with such casual indifference that I would not see the second if I were paid. Even in that tongue-tied clunker, as she visibly struggled with the unrewarding role of Amidala, Queen of Naboo, the Bad Hair Planet, she almost managed to humanize what looked like the central character in the first all-zombie production of Turandot.

  In addition to her talent, Natalie Portman has another conspicuous qualification for playing Sophie Scholl. As far as one can tell from reading her print interviews, Natalie is leading a good life—an important requirement for pretending to be a good person. She has already played Anne Frank on Broadway. Better than a career move, her taking of the role was a testament to her fundamental seriousness, and to the unflashy professionalism of the people around her. The gifted girl seems to have sensible parents: there is no Culkin factor. As a college student, she emulates Brooke Shields and Jodie Foster in her admirable determination to have a life of the mind beyond the exiguous parameters of the entertainment industry. Apart from the mad hairstylists of Naboo, no professional freaks have so far succeeded in sidetracking her very far down their sinister alley. For too many of her magazine-cover photo shoots she has been caked with makeup, but probably her parents weren’t to blame. Photographers can be persuasive. (Whatever Annie Leibovitz was thinking of when she rouged and lipsticked Natalie’s defenceless face for Vanity Fair, it reminded me of how Brooke Shields was dressed and lit by Louis Malle for Pretty Baby, his justly neglected movie about a New Orleans whorehouse.) The frozen poses are against Natalie’s nature. When she talks, you can hear her thirst for learning, as if that were her only passion. As our sad Babylon of a Western world goes, the kid is still a virgin.

  Yes, if a Hollywood movie about Sophie Scholl gets made for the international market, it has to be with Natalie Portman. Myself, I kind of hope it never happens, and not because I distrust Hollywood per se. The place has come a long way since the era when it could guarantee to miss the point. In the bad old days, it wouldn’t have been hard to imagine the first preview when the cards came in negative about how Sophie’s story ends. (“We can’t snuff the muffin. It’s a reshoot, people.”) But that couldn’t happen now. At worst you would get the smoothest, most literate possible rearrangement of the recalcitrant historical facts, always in the name of pressing home the dramatic point. In reality, Sophie and the nice boy she loved—he was a fellow conspirator—never slept together. In the movie they would have to at least do a bit of heavy petting: you know, to show what she’s going to miss by this crazy choice of hers? Pity we can’t call it Sophie’s Choice, but there it is. And we can’t have her dying before the boys do, the way it actually happened. The prison officers took mercy on her and killed her first because they knew from experience that waiting was the worst part. Merciful Nazi prison officers? It’s confusing, like those Gestapo heavies who don’t even do any torturing because the kids spilled everything as soon as they were sure there was nobody still free out there that they had to protect. A lot of script points to iron out, but it can all be done with a clear conscience as long as the main point is left intact: the girl dies.

  And that’s where the dream movie falls apart, because if Natalie Portman plays the role, the girl won’t die. Natalie will go on after the end of the movie with her career enhanced as a great actress, whereas Sophie Scholl’s career as an obscure yet remarkable human being really did come to an end. The Fallbeil (even its name sounds remorseless—the falling axe) hit her in the neck, and that was the end of her. Her lovely parable of a life went as far as that cold moment and no further. It’s a fault inherent in the movies that they can’t show such a thing. The performer takes over from the real person, and walks away. For just that reason, popular, star-led movies, no matter how good they are, are a bad way of teaching history, and you don’t have to be an oaf to get impatient when they try to. Most of us, when sitting in the dark at the multiplex, would rather be entertained than instructed. Instruction is for the art house. If every tent-pole movie we saw gave us the full complexity of existence, we’d be living twice. My own ration for a movie like Gods and Monsters, Lone Star or Breaking the Waves is about three a year. And it seems cruel to say so, but if Emily Watson, playing the central figure of Breaking the Waves, had been more famous, we would have found the story easier to take, and thus harder to assess at its true high worth. The same would be true if Natalie Portman were to play Sophie Scholl. Simply because it would be she saying them
, her lines of dialogue would get into the common interchange of civilized speech, and eventually into literature. But part of the sad truth about Sophie Scholl is that nobody remembers a thing she said, and in her last few minutes alive she said nothing at all. If she had said something, the man who bore witness to her bravery would have remembered it.

  WOLF JOBST SIEDLER

  Wolf Jobst Siedler (b. 1926) would be a fair choice for the title of Most Civilized Man in Post-War Germany. In 1943 both he and Ernst Jünger’s son were sea cadets when they were caught making sceptical remarks about the future of the Nazi regime. At the personal intervention of Dönitz their lives were saved, but Siedler spent nine months locked up before he was drafted as a Luftwaffenhilfer—a dogsbody in a flak battalion. After the war he studied sociology, philosophy and history at the Free University of Berlin before spending ten years as a literary journalist. He then rose to an influential position in publishing with the houses of Ullstein and Propylaen, before, in 1980, starting his own house. Siedler Verlag became such a successful property that the Bertelsmann conglomerate eventually bought it, but Siedler continued in place as the most high-toned publisher in Germany. His own writings helped his glossy image. There was a series of beautifully produced picture books about the foundations and fate of the architectural heritage. (The picture book with long, well-informed captions can be a delicious form in the right hands, which his were.) But his most valuable contribution has always been as an essayist. He wrote a whole series of essays emphasizing the cleverness of the Nazis in leaving the high bourgeoisie able to feel that nothing much had changed. Some of Siedler’s critics on the left thought that he had underestimated the anti-Semitism of the cultivated class before the Nazis came to power, and overestimated its ignorance afterwards. But Siedler’s immense learning and faultless taste—best sampled in his volume of selected essays Behauptungen (Opinions)—gave his views weight. As the publisher of the historian Joachim Fest, Siedler can perhaps be held accountable for aiding and abetting Fest’s effect of displacing the Holocaust as a central theme in Nazi history. When it comes to the case of Albert Speer, however, there is no “perhaps” about it. There can be no doubt that Siedler aided and abetted Speer’s post-war campaign of selfrehabilitiation. As Speer’s publisher, he attended on Speer as one civilized man attending on another, and Speer’s pose as a man who never really knew what the Nazis were doing to the Jews was given extra plausibility by his being so welcome in Siedler’s ambience. Siedler’s credentials to play host look impressive. From his student years onward he was decorated with all the favours of post-war democratic German culture, right down to the signed presentation copies of Ernst Jünger’s books and the fond letters from Thomas Mann. Persuading us that even the unthinkable can be finessed from the centre of our attention and normalized as a source of growth, his finely judged tone of voice gives comfort. But we should be cautious when we spot comfort creeping into the historic memory: if it climbs the wall like a stain, it could be a sign that the truth is being drowned.