Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  As well as the most spooky and unsettling, the most misleading thing about this State was that on the very evening of the burning of the synagogues, an event which brought the Eastern Europe of the Middle Ages into the Germany of the twentieth century, everywhere in the cities of our country festively clad people went to operetta, theatres and symphony halls, and that, six hours after the deportation wagons left the station platforms of Berlin, the trains for the seaside left also.

  —WOLF JOBST SIEDLER, Behauptungen, P. 72

  MOST OF SIEDLER’S books have been published under his own class-act imprint. I have a collection of his lavishly illustrated and finely printed monographs about architecture in Berlin and the Mark Brandenburg, and about how that architecture was restored or further wrecked—usually the latter, wherever the Communists were in charge—after the war. On the left of the right, Siedler is a very civilized, quietly persuasive voice. One of his most seductive themes is the idea that the Nazis were the militant arm of bourgeois taste: that they never really radicalized a comfortable, well-stuffed patrimony, but instead co-opted it for their purposes. Care for the end phase of the bourgeois era, he says at one point, doesn’t really contradict the law of tyranny: it expresses it. There is something in what he says. Though there was plenty of very bad, very kitsch Nazi plastic art—much more than Siedler can be bothered to contend with—there was never very much specifically Nazi literature, and it would probably have been swept aside if it had ever existed. As things were, Germany had no Vilfredo Pareto, Georges-Eugène Sorel, Charles Maurras or Giovanni Gentile. As an approved literary pet of the Nazi regime, the dud scribe Hans-Friedrich Blunck thought that an enthusiasm for Fascism might threaten a diversion of National Socialism in the direction of un-German intellectualism. Blunck was not alone among Nazi thinkers in finding Fascism dangerously novel and far too concerned with the brain.

  The more cultivated among the Nazis proved their cultivation by knowing the traditional names: minus, of course, the names of Jews. When a production of a Mozart opera came to occupied Poland, the soundtrack of the newsreel celebrated the occasion thus: Auch so, auf tanzenden Füssen, kam Deutschland in dieses Land. (“Even so, on dancing feet, Germany came to this land.”) No mention of the Stukas and Panzers: it would have spoiled the mood. Siedler is unbeatable in his evocation of the regime’s anti-modern, thatched tone. He practically makes you taste the cream cakes that were Hitler’s fast food of choice. But Siedler’s final effect is to overstate his case by underplaying the facts. Perhaps because he thinks that everybody else has already done it, he doesn’t make enough of the enormous, raucous, radically perverted creativity represented by the Nazi system of Führer worship and mass murder. There was nothing normal, snug or unchallenging about the filth coming out of the radios and the loudspeakers. The instantly disgusting Der Stürmer was on sale at street corners, not in cellophane packets on top shelves. By putting such an emphasis on the bourgeois normality of the Nazi period, Siedler retroactively creates an ambience in which an intelligent man might be lulled into thinking that things were not so abnormal after all. It was certainly the message that a man like Albert Speer wanted to hear. In 1973 at his villa in Berlin-Dahlem, Siedler, in his role as publisher, hosted a launch party for Joachim Fest’s biography of Hitler. Speer was the guest of honour. Marcel Reich-Ranicki was invited without being told that Speer would be present. In Mein Leben (p. 482) Reich-Ranicki records how Speer, to establish an atmosphere of chummy colloquy, gestured at Fest’s black-bound 1,200-page book where it lay on a table and said: “He would have been pleased.” Reich-Ranicki went home, and his friendship with Siedler was never the same again.

  Speer was also a social hit at his own launch parties, especially in London; and probably for the same reason: reassurance. His suavely barbered poise helped to persuade civilized people that on the Nazi question there might have been no clear choice. Perhaps we all would have fallen for it, especially if there were a few men in well-cut suits like him around. That was the lazy assumption that the post-war Speer counted on. But it was also the assumption that the Nazis counted on: none of the good, dependable things in life have changed, you can have your nationalist dream and eat your cream cakes too. Siedler has done us a service by bringing out the cosiness that the Nazis offered the middle class in return for its quiescence. He could have done more to bring out the Nazis’ cleverness in offering the lower orders, set free to climb by the radical social programmes, a point of aspiration that would recompense them for any horrors they might have to endure or inflict: membership of the middle class. But what he scarcely brings out at all is that nobody with half a brain, whether the brain was bourgeois or plebeian, could have failed to notice for five minutes that the whole Nazi state was a raving madhouse.

  MANÈS SPERBER

  Manès Sperber (1903–1984) was psychologist, philosopher, epic novelist and fascinated eyewitness to both of the main twentieth-century European tidal waves, which collided right in front of his eyes. Like Sartre’s Road to Freedom novels, Sperber’s fictional trilogy, Like a Tear in the Ocean, can be read as a saga of the politically engaged conscience, but Sperber’s enduring testimony as a writer is another trilogy, the set of autobiographical books that record his own story directly, without benefit—or anyway with less benefit—of imaginative reconstruction. Non-fiction in the truest sense, Sperber’s autobiography makes a point of shirking nothing about the author’s initial Communist convictions and the long and bitter business of disillusionment. Born in Galicia, Sperber first picked his political side in Vienna, and was an active Communist organizer when he moved to Berlin in 1927, by which time the Communists and Nazis were already fighting it out in the streets. Doubts about Stalin had set in even before he transferred to Paris, but they did not reach fever pitch until news came through of the Moscow trials. Even as late as 1939, however, Sperber was still writing articles in which he called Nazism an extension of capitalism: he developed that view to the point of explaining the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact as proof that the two totalitarianisms had both become forms of “state capitalism” at root. A tenuous position, but by that time nobody was listening anyway, because events had outrun theories. Lucky enough to be granted domicile in Switzerland, Sperber emerged after the war as one of the most prominent analysts of a period he had been very lucky to get through unhurt by one or the other of the popular forces dedicated to destroying all notions of the liberal democracy which he himself never quite got round to taking seriously. The three books of autobiography, collectively called All das Vergangene (usually translated as All Our Yesterdays), are Die Wasserträger Gottes, Die vergebliche Warnung and Bis man mir Scherben auf die Augen legt. They can be found in English translation, called, respectively, God’s Water-Carriers, The Unheeded Warning and Until My Eyes Are Closed with Shards. In the original language, in paperback, they can be handily carried as pocket books. The complete work can be confidently recommended as a guide to the times. Above all it gives disturbing credibility to the view that so many serious young people of Sperber’s age had no choice except to decide that democracy was doomed.

  A bad conscience, an ineradicable feeling of responsibility for the crimes committed in the name of Germany, could be found only among men and women who had always been opponents of Nazism and had suffered from its rule. These, the guiltless, had overcome either late or never their shame for what had happened.

  —MANÈS SPERBER, Bis man mir Scherben auf die Augen legt (Until My Eyes Are Closed with Shards), P. 260

  THE QUICKEST WAY to praise the inexhaustibly unfolding wisdom of Manès Sperber’s three-volume intellectual autobiography All das Vergangene (All Our Yesterdays) would be to say that almost every moral judgement in it is as good as this. At this point he is talking about the Germans he was meeting in the French zone of occupation after World War II, where the German Communists were playing the same cynical game as in the American zone. (The game was “cynical” even if the anti-Communists said it was: one of the easiest points t
o forget when reading about European politics in the aftermath of World War II.) The German Communists, denying all vestige of their real allegiance, were masquerading as democrats in order to persuade the occupation authorities that the Social Democrats were the enemies of civil order. In the French zone the tactic succeeded to the extent that an Antifaschistischen Kampfbund (Anti-Fascist Battlegroup) was set up, whose cover remained unblown until 1948. (In the Russian zone there was no need for pussyfooting, and the Social Democrats could be sent straight to Buchenwald, which was kept open for business specifically to accommodate them.) Sperber was an adept at working out what was really going on because he had known the Communist Party from the inside. It was not until very late in the 1930s that he started making the break. There is a telling confessional passage early in Bis man mir Scherben auf die Augen legt (a better translation would be Until They Put the Pennies on My Eyes) in which he lays bare, through bitter hindsight, the psychological mechanism that enabled him to predict in June 1934 how the massacre of the SA leadership in the “Röhm purge” would strengthen Hitler’s position rather than weaken it. As a Communist, Sperber was obliged to debate the point with his comrades. As always, they were certain that the Nazis had overreached themselves and would shortly disappear from history.

  Unusually blessed with realistic insight, Sperber guessed that such confidence was moonshine. But while doing his best to convince his comrades that the opposite was true, he never once brought forward the example that weighed on him and from which he shrank with a reflex of fear—namely, the way Stalin’s elimination of the left social revolutionaries, the worker-opposition and the Trotskyists had bolstered his dominance. Sperber wrote his intellectual autobiography near the end of his life. The great psychologist was at last ready to ponder the mental subterfuge by which, long ago, he had failed to admit even to himself the significance of what he already knew. The news about the brutalities of Soviet rule had been reaching the socialist movements in Europe—and especially the Germans—since the 1920s. Sperber had known all about it. But he was not yet ready to think about it. The third volume of his fascinating experiment in self-examination is especially useful for showing us how intelligence can work to defeat itself for as long as any kind of grip is maintained on the wrong end of the stick. If he had been more dense, he might have found fewer mental tricks with which to go on convincing himself that his faith had never been misplaced.

  Arthur Koestler’s horrifying personal experience in Spain—loyalty to the independent left almost got him killed by the Stalinists—was a big influence on Sperber’s eventual reappraisal of his own historic expectations. Before its publication in 1940, Koestler showed Sperber the manuscript of Darkness at Noon. Sperber was convinced by the book’s central idea that a figure like the Old Bolshevik Bukharin could have made such absurd confessions at the 1938 show trials only out of duty to the Communist ideal. This notion remained popular among ex-Communists until the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, when Khrushchev convincingly pointed out what should always have been obvious: that the confessions had been obtained by torture. (“Beat, beat, beat!” shouted Khrushchev, who knew all about it, because he had actually done it.) Sperber analyses the process by which those who had held the illusions were so reluctant to be disillusioned completely. “Many years had still to go by after our break with so-called Marxism-Leninism before we were finally free from all illusions and from many picture-book imaginings [Bilderbuchvorstellungen] that despite everything we almost unconsciously, and anyway without willing it, had held on to” (p. 172). One of the picture-book imaginings had been the consoling notion that a bloodstained old ideologue like Bukharin, with his perpetrator’s knowledge of monstrosity on the grand scale, might have been some kind of idealist despite all. Even the hard-bitten Koestler—one of the first to realize, and to say, that communism was the god that failed—had cherished that pious wish at some level. The pious wish had helped to give Darkness at Noon some of its complexity and force, but it was nonsense. The secret of the show trials was that there was no secret—they were an exercise in unlimited violence.

  Another reason for Sperber’s slowness to accept this might have been his temperament. For Sperber, “absolute negativity” was a horror (ein Greuel), a death in life, a forecast of extinction (p. 185). In one of Sperber’s novels, a Yugoslav partisan refuses to believe that cruelty is deeper than sympathy, or more real than love or even than the need for justice. Sperber was simply—or rather, not simply, but firmly—a lover of life: a pretty generous reaction when you consider the range and determination of the forces that were always conspiring to bring about his death. He escaped the scythe, but plenty of people he knew and loved did not, and he saw them go. No survivor’s writing could be further than his from the cheap consolations of ordinary uplift. His tone is “positive,” but the affirmation has been hard won. The strength comes from the admission and examination of weakness. Without aligning himself with the perpetrators—which would be another indulgence—he can plausibly suggest that most of them got into a life of crime because they were human, and were therefore unable, on the occasions when it mattered most, to face the truth even when it was staring them in the face. He can suggest that from his own self-knowledge, but only because he has the rare gift of being honest about how his mind once worked: often too slowly, and always far more wisely after the event than before. The only point he misses is the one still missed by reformed Communists all over the world. What about all those liberal democrats who never fell for the voodoo in the first place, and will their tormented shades ever be offered an apology for being called social fascists while they were alive?

  When a woman asked me, at an evening meeting a few days later, how I could have presented an opinion that was so obviously contrary to likelihood, I defended my conviction aggressively. But I read in the eyes of this woman that she did not believe me, and I was so struck by it that I remember that evening, and that scene, exactly, even today.

  —MANÈS SPERBER, Die vergebliche Warnung (THE UNHEEDED WARNING), P. 182

  The evening meeting in 1931 took place a few days after Sperber had spoken publicly in a debate following the first Berlin screening of the Soviet film The Way to Life. The film, famous at the time, purported to show that the Soviet problem of homeless children (the besprisorny) was over, because they were all being re-educated in special schools to lead a useful life: they went into the school as wastrels and came out as scholars, heroes of labour, future leaders. Sperber was not long back from his first trip to Moscow, where, in a single square near his hotel, he had seen dozens of homeless children sleeping rough, with nothing but an asphalt-melting oven to keep them warm. At the time, Sperber managed to convince himself that these must be the last of the homeless children still on the loose, because it would have been easy for the government to sweep them out of sight. They were still there only because there were so few of them, and they would soon be sent to the special schools. (Sperber had been taken to see a special school, where he swallowed the assurance that it was only one of many: the old Potemkin village trick worked again.) A Russian psychologist at the psychological conference he had been attending tried to convince him that the government’s promises on the subject had not been fulfilled, and that the same was true for every other promise in the first Five Year Plan. She could back up this argument with the evidence of her own life. As an academic of rank she had been allotted barely enough living space and nourishment to maintain a decent existence. Sperber rationalized all her objections, even though she was the woman on the spot. Even as early as 1931, he was well capable of seeing that the Soviet leadership was lying, especially about Stalin’s benevolence. But he still thought that without the Party’s leadership there could be no chance of rescuing Germany from the obscenities of unemployment and the coming collapse of capitalism. It bothered him that the Soviet Union seemed to be suffering from shortages and privations even worse than those haunting his homeland, but he wanted to believe the Soviet Union had a futur
e, whereas Germany was dying in the grip of its past. So he understood the sardonic objections of his Russian friend without taking them in.