Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  Unfortunately for the librettist, there is a problem with Henning himself. In the first winter of the Russia campaign, it became apparent that if there were no quick victory the German troops, stuck in place, would freeze. They had no warm clothing. Behind barbed wire, hundreds of thousands of Russian prisoners still had their felt boots and overcoats. It was decided—in clear defiance even of German military law, let alone of the Geneva Convention—that the Russian prisoners should be deprived of their warm clothing so that it could be given to the German troops. In their book Der Krieg der Generäle, Carl Dirks and Karl-Heinz Janssen show that one of the men who endorsed this sinister initiative was none other than Henning von Tresckow. Stealing the warm clothes must have seemed like common sense at the time. But it was common sense only in the context of the world that Hitler had created, and that was the very world that Henning had set himself against. Faced with this awkward information, one must struggle to remember that Henning had a long-term aim, which would have been impossible to achieve had he been removed from his staff post—and if he had refused to sign the order, he would probably have been removed straight away. Henning’s stature as a hero just about survives the struggle. But the opera becomes a casualty. A baritone aria on the theme of “Let the Russians freeze first” would make a mess of Act One.

  LEON TROTSKY

  After being murdered at Stalin’s orders, Lev Davidovich Bron-stein, alias Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), lived on for decades as the unassailable hero of aesthetically minded progressives who wished to persuade themselves that there could be a vegetarian version of communism. Trotsky could write, orate, loved women, and presented enough of a threat to the established Soviet power structure (admittedly showing signs of rigidity by then) that it should want to track him down to his hiding place in Mexico and rub him out. It followed, or seemed to follow, that Trotsky must have embodied a more human version of the historic force that sacrificed innocent people to egalitarian principle: a version that would sacrifice fewer of them, in a nicer way. Alas, it followed only if the facts were left out. It was true that Trotsky, in those romantic early days in Paris, was a more attractive adornment to the café than Lenin. In the Rotonde, where Modigliani settled his bill with drawings and paintings when he lost at craps, Lenin could at least defend “socialist realism” against Vlaminck, whereas Trotsky couldn’t even get a job as an artist’s model (too small). But the Russian Civil War that turned Trotsky into one of the century’s most effective amateur generals also unleashed his capacities as a mass murderer. The sailors at Kronstadt, proclaiming their right to opinions of their own about the Revolution, were massacred on his order. In the vast crime called the collectivization of agriculture, Trotsky’s only criticism of Stalin was that the campaign should have been planned more like a battle. The only thing true about Trotsky’s legend as some kind of lyrical humanist was that he was indeed unrealistic enough to think that the secretarial duties could safely be left to Stalin. His intolerance of being bored undid him. But his ideas of excitement went rather beyond making love to Frida Kahlo, and at this distance there are no excuses left for students who find him inspiring. Trotsky’s idea of permanent revolution will always be attractive to the kind of romantic who believes that he is being oppressed by global capitalism when he maxes out his credit card. But the idea was already a dead loss before Trotsky was driven into exile in 1929. He lost the struggle against Stalin not because he was less ruthless, but because he was less wily.

  Under a totalitarian regime it is the apparatus that implements the dictatorship. But if my hirelings are occupying all the key posts in the apparatus, how is it that Stalin is in the Kremlin and I am in exile?

  —LEON TROTSKY, QUOTED BY DMITRI VOLKOGONOV IN Stalin, P. 303

  TROTSKY WAS GOOD at sarcasm. His journalism written in Mexican exile would have been enough reason on its own for Stalin to nominate him as a target. Pro-Soviet credulity among Western intellectuals was usually proof against logic, but Trotsky had rhetoric: a more penetrating weapon. If Stalin’s emissary had not managed to smash Trotsky’s head in, there might have been more such jokes to make the Moscow show trials sound less convincing. From that viewpoint, Trotsky’s murder was not only horrifying, it was untimely. Treachery made it possible, and the subject is still surrounded with a miasma of bad faith. Pablo Neruda was instrumental in smoothing the assassin’s path but never wrote a poem on the subject: something to remember when reading the thousands of ecstatic love poems he did write. They are full of wine and roses but no ice axe is ever mentioned. Admirers of Neruda don’t seem to mind. The same capacity for tacit endorsement is shown by Trotsky’s admirers, who even today persist in seeing him as some sort of liberal democrat; or, if not as that, then as a true champion of the working class; or anyway, and at the very worst, as one of those large-hearted Old Bolsheviks who might have made the Soviet Union some kind of successfully egalitarian society had they prevailed. But when it became clear that the campaign for the collectivization of agriculture would involve a massacre of the peasantry, Trotsky’s only objection was that the campaign was not sufficiently “militarized.” He meant that the peasants weren’t being massacred fast enough.

  Trotsky had previously shown the same enthusiastic spirit when leading the attack on the rebellious sailors of Kronstadt, and Orlando Figes’s book A People’s Tragedy proves all too thoroughly that Trotsky’s talent for mass murder was already well developed during the Civil War. We can dignify his ruthlessness with the name of realism if we like, but the question abides of just how realistic his ruthlessness would have been if he had won a power struggle against Stalin and stayed on to rule the Soviet Union. As things turned out, there never was a power struggle. Trotsky wasn’t interested in the hard, secretarial grind of running the show: leave that to Stalin. But—an important but—Trotsky yielded no points to Stalin in the matter of dealing with anybody who dared to contradict. It was a trick they both inherited from Lenin. Golo Mann said it went back all the way to Marx. Croce quoted Mazzini’s observation that Marx had more anger in his heart than love, and that his whole temperament was geared to domination. We can still see it today, even when totalitarianism is no longer a thing for states, but only for religious fanatics. It is the trick of meeting contradiction by silencing whoever offers it. Trotsky’s undoubted fluency as a polemical journalist does not mean that he wouldn’t rather have had a gun in his hand. The humanist makes a big mistake in supposing that a literary talent automatically ameliorates the aggressive instinct. Osama bin Laden has several of Trotsky’s characteristics. According to students of Arabic, he commands his native language with vibrant fluency, giving a thrilling sense of its historic depth; he can lead a simple life and make it look enviably stylish, as if asceticism were a luxury; and above all, he can inspire the young to dedicate their lives to an ideal. If the ideals of the caliphate tend to become more elusive on close examination, so did the ideals of communism: but they needed to be incarnated for that very reason. Trotsky lived on after Stalin, and to some extent is still alive today, not because young people want the world he wanted: a phantasm that not even he could define. What they want is to be him.

  KARL TSCHUPPIK

  Karl Tschuppik (1876–1937) was an historian whose major books were famous in post–World War I Vienna, along with his personal charm and a particularly sardonic version of Jewish coffee-house wit. His biographies of Franz Joseph and Maria Theresa attracted attention beyond the country (Franz Joseph I: The Downfall of an Empire appeared in America in 1930) and there was also a biography of Ludendorff that examined the role of German militarism in leading the Austro-Hungarian Empire to its collapse. Along with his prestige as a scholar, however, Tschuppik exemplified the dubious gifts of his friend Peter Altenberg at living from hand to mouth. A Café Herrenhof habitué by daylight, Tschuppik managed, like the journalist Anton Kuh, to secure a night-time billet in the luxurious Hotel Bristol, but whereas Kuh paid little, Tschuppik paid almost nothing. The manager regarded it as an honour
to have him on the premises. In partial recompense, Tschuppik would conduct long philosophical dialogues with the doorman. Erika and Klaus Mann, who mentioned Tschuppik (too briefly, alas) in their indispensable memoir of the emigration Escape to Life, said that they loved to visit him when they were in the city. As a man of the left, Tschuppik assumed that the erosion of democracy in Austria after 1932 could only be the prelude to Nazism, and warned that his country would soon “again wade through rivers of blood.” He was lucky enough to die a year before the Anschluß: lucky because, like Kuh, he had been an early analyst of Hitler’s oratorical style, and the Nazis had a long memory for that branch of literary criticism. His admirer Joseph Roth said, “Our friend Tschuppik chose the right time to die. . . . When he did, it was clear to me that everything was lost.”

  It is written with love and criticism.

  —KARL TSCHUPPIK, FROM THE INTRODUCTION TO HIS Franz Joseph: Der Untergang eines Reiches

  LARGELY FORGOTTEN NOW, like its author, Karl Tschuppik’s book about the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is beautiful even to look at. I read it in the library of Castolovice, the Sternberg castle in Bohemia, and there I had to leave it, because the books still belong to the state. It would have been a discourtesy to my hostess if I had asked to borrow it. The request would have put her in the position of allowing a national treasure to leave the country. Besides, the lovely setting of the old library was where the book belonged. Bound in brushed yellow linen, clearly printed on good paper, it was a product of Avalun Verlag, one of the publishing houses that once flourished in Hellerau bei Dresden. In my own library, some of my most cherished books were printed in Dresden at that same time: the twenties were a great period for fine printing of popular books. Wolfgang Jess Verlag turned out a full set of thin-paper volumes devoted to the nineteenth century scholar of the Renaissance Ferdinand Gregorovius—a set that I managed to reassemble after breathless discoveries in second-hand bookshops all over the world. At Castolovice the Tschuppik book stopped my breath in the same way. It brought back Dresden as if the bombs had imploded and gone back into the sky. It was the reintegration of two successive lost eras: the post–World War I efflorescence of German-speaking pre-Nazi culture, and, before that, the old Austro-Hungarian Empire whose last glories it examined mit Liebe und Kritik—with love and criticism.

  Though Tschuppik was a committed democrat and no pushover for the erstwhile social order, his love for the old k.u.k. society saturates the book. It reminds you less of Schnitzler, who guessed that the phosphorescence meant decay, than of Joseph Roth, whose nostalgia was incurable. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was, after all, not quite an empire like the others. It had conquered no foreign territories. It integrated several Central European countries without subjugating their populations. Ethnic minorities had reason to be grateful for its rule. Many of their intellectuals had the good sense to be grateful at the time, and Tschuppik, looking back on what had been a modus vivendi if not a grand harmony, was well justified in expressing a passion deeper than mere affection. But his criticism is equally all-pervasive. Tschuppik doesn’t gloss over how different things would have had to be for the outcome to be otherwise. To begin with, there would have had to have been no great war. A war was bound to bring the empire down, yet Franz Joseph’s deluded army of adminstrators walked straight into it. Their one excuse is that they walked in their sleep. Graf Stefan Titza was the only hero in the cabinet. He alone warned against what a war would do. When the day was upon them, however, even he came round. Va banque: the brave cry of the already bankrupt.

  On the same weekend, in the same library, I worked through the two imposing volumes of Metternich’s Denkwürdigkeiten (Things Worth Thinking About), published in Munich in 1921, more than sixty years after the master diplomat’s death. Once again the modern typeface had the scrupulous clarity that marked the era. (It was not until 1933 that the fussy old black-letter typefaces returned, as part of the general cultural throwback by which the Nazis presumed to give the very look of thought an air of the Gothic: and even then they returned only to Germany. The Austrians kept their modern typefaces until the last day.) Metternich’s prose is as neat as the type in which it is set. If Henry Kissinger, who has always seemed to like the idea of being styled our modern Metternich, could express himself like his role model he would be better equipped to defend his actions. For any liberal democrat, Metternich’s own actions still need plenty of defending, but there was nothing wrong with his prose style. Metternich tied his powers of decision to his clarity of language. Here is a passage I translated into my notebook:

  I have always thought that the most important business for a statesman is the care with which he keeps a strict eye on the difference between things which he builds within himself and things imposed on him by the spirit of party during the course of time, and to keep them just as strictly separated. The most fruitful means for carrying out this business lies in the care to fix words to the things they are called on to signify, and hold them fast (vol. 2, p. 466).

  But that doesn’t get the vigour of his rhythm. He was an old man, but his prose was a stripling. Wittgenstein recommended the poetry of Mörike, in which, he said, the word does not exceed the thing. Metternich had reached the same conclusion long before. Some of his other conclusions, however, were not just conservative, they were reactionary, and therefore inadequate to facts he already knew. Try this:

  If the name of God, and the powers instituted by His divine decisions, are dragged into the mud, then the Revolution is already prepared. In the castles of the King, in the salons and boudoirs of certain cities, the Revolution had already happened while the mass of the people were still getting ready for it (vol. 2, p. 71).

  He switches from the present tense to the past because he is switching from the general case to the particular instance: the French Revolution. The particular instance is the part that he brings alive, with a touch for rhythm that any translation is bound to miss: “. . . war die Revolution schon vorbei, während sie bei der Masse des Volkes erst vorbereitet würde.” It is always dangerous to praise sonic effects in a language not one’s own: they might be cruder than one thinks. But surely vorbei and vorbereitet are deliberately linked in order to help the second part of the sentence launch itself from the first. A clear idea is expressed with verve. But the idea was wrong, or at least not exhaustively right. England’s George III and his government, for example, were godly institutions; they were dragged in the mud with great thoroughness, not least by the pitiless caricatures of Gillray; and there was no revolution. (To make certain that there wouldn’t be, in the next reign potential subversives were sent to Botany Bay, on the assumption that they and their progeny would never be heard from again.) Further back, the palace of Louis XIV was haunted by irreverent wit that felt no need to whisper: everyone knew that Louis abandoned a successful campaign in the Low Countries because Madame de Maintenon had burst into tears, and nobody forbore to say so. There was no revolution: not then. The revolution had indeed to be prepared, but it was prepared among the people, or anyway outside the palace. Lafayette was turned from duty by what he met in the streets, not by what he had heard in the corridors of Versailles or the Tuileries. Metternich had good cause to fear revolution: he had spent his life dealing with its consequences. But irreverent remarks had not been the cause of it, and he must have known that to be true. He just didn’t like wit. There is a marvellous passage in which he tips his hand. To quote it is to quote a quotation, because he put the thought together from his reading.

  Talleyrand rightly says: “L’esprit sert à tout et ne mène à rien.” For Madame de Staël, her fame was a kind of power. The longer I live, the more I treat that power with mistrust (vol. 2, p. 166).

  For the French, l’esprit is a wide-ranging term, but wit is at the core of it. Talleyrand is probably saying that verbal brilliance can be applied to anything but leads to nothing. It was the right proposition for Metternich to agree with: the man of concrete decisions had heard to
o much talk. But his contempt for Madame de Staël is a giveaway. She had an insight into power, having seen the frailties of the men who wielded it. On the day that Napoleon sent her into exile across Lake Geneva, she told her journal the lasting truth about her persecutor. She said that Napoleon possessed such an all-embracing talent that there was nothing he could not do, except understand the behaviour of a man of honour. Today she would have said woman of honour, but the most famous of all the first feminists—the first Germaine—was restricted by her inherited language. She was not, however, restricted in her thoughts, and Metternich was mistrustful of exactly that. She incarnated the only permanent revolution that counts: that of the critical intellect. Even today, her example can lead men of order to huff and puff. Vladimir Nabokov, in his long, detailed and half-crazed commentary on Eugene Onegin, dismissed her with a wave of his fastidious patrician hand. He forgot to say that Pushkin himself thought the world of her. But Pushkin was tuned to the feminine. He could see the strutting hypocrisy on the bastions of the state.