My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  Kubin also left his mark on literature, publishing a single novel, The Other Side, in 1908. The novel tells of an imaginary realm, a city called Pearl, inhabited by some sixty-five thousand souls, located deep in eastern Uzbekistan, separated from the rest of the world by a vast wall and governed by a godlike figure by the name of Patera. The city’s inhabitants have come from all corners of the world, many from sanitoriums and health resorts, particularly sensitive individuals full of mad ideas, hyperreligious, obsessed with reading or gambling, neurasthenics and hysterics; to all intents and purposes homeless, these people have entered into the world of the imagination, of which the city is a physical, tangible manifestation. But the presence of Patera, who rules with an iron fist, makes this dream kingdom more of a sinister underworld, a kingdom of the dead devoid of all hope rather than a haven for the escapist.

  Kubin wrote his novel following the death of his father, and the father’s presence in the name – Patera so closely resembling pater – and the omnipotence of that figure, while remaining so elusive, is of course an image of paternal authority. It is not surprising that Kafka held Kubin in high esteem and was influenced by his work; the dreamlike otherworldliness of his universe, the impenetrability of bureaucractic process, its incessant deferments and adjournments, so vague and slippery and unassailable, and the authority of the father figure, are of course all important themes in Kafka.

  Kafka was six years younger than Kubin and six years older than Hitler, but Prague belonged within the same empire, and as a native speaker of German Kafka related to the same culture as both Kubin and Hitler. He refers to Kubin several times in his diaries. On September 26, 1911, for instance, he writes of Kubin’s meeting with Hamsun.

  The artist Kubin recommends Regulin as a laxative, a powdered seaweed that swells up in the bowels, shakes them up, is thus effective mechanically in contrast to the unhealthy chemical effect of other laxatives which just tear through the excrement and leave it hanging on the walls of the bowels. He met Hamsun at Langen. He (Hamsun) grins mockingly for no reason. During the conversation, without interrupting it, he put one foot on his knee, took a large pair of scissors from the table, and trimmed the frayed edges of his trousers. Shabbily dressed, with one or so rather expensive details, his tie, for example. Stories about an artist’s pension in Munich where painters and veterinaries lived (the latters’s school was in the neighborhood) and where they acted in such a debauched way that the windows of the house across the way, from which a good view could be had, were rented out. In order to satisfy these spectators, one of the residents in the pension would sometimes jump up on the windowsill in the posture of a monkey and spoon his soup out of the pot. A manufacturer of fraudulent antiques who got the worn effect by means of buckshot and who said of a table: “Now we must drink coffee on it three more times, then it can be shipped off to the Innsbruck Museum.” Kubin himself: very strong, but somewhat monotonous facial expression, he describes the most varied things with the same movement of muscles. Looks different in age, size, and strength according to whether he is sitting, standing, wearing just a suit, or an overcoat.

  Kafka read both Kubin and Hamsun, who met each other in Munich in the company of Hamsun’s publisher Langen, probably in 1896. Kubin met Jünger and corresponded with him for a decade, while Hamsun met Hitler in 1943, penning his infamous obituary of him in May 1945. Of these figures, Hamsun hailed from the lowest social rank and from the very periphery of Europe, and belonged moreover to the previous generation, whereas of the others, all of whom were of the same generation and belonged to the same language area, Hitler was from the lowest social rank, with Kubin next above him, then Kafka, then Jünger, who as the son of a factory owner hailed from society’s upper echelons. When it came to that generation’s overriding experience, the First World War, Hitler and Jünger had served at the front in the German army, Hitler as a corporal and orderly, Jünger as a lieutenant in the infantry, whereas Kafka and Kubin were both exempt from service. When the Nazis were elected into the Reichstag, Hitler offered Jünger a seat in the parliament, which he declined. Hitler, Jünger, Kubin, and Hamsun were right-wing radicals, a fact that influenced their writings to various degrees, whereas Kafka kept himself well out of politics, well out of the sphere of the ideological, this being obvious in his diaries, which reveal him to be as near-dissolved in the trivialities of the quotidian as to quote Kubin’s reference to “laxatives which just tear through the excrement and leave it hanging on the walls of the bowels,” something neither Hitler, Jünger, Kubin, nor Hamsun could ever have put to paper. That ease within unease, the proximity to his own life in its truest nature, from where everything, even the most imaginative of events, issues, makes his writings much more valid beyond his time than both Jünger’s and Kubin’s, though perhaps not Hamsun’s, whom he admired. In character and temperament Hitler and Hamsun were not unlike each other, and are similar particularly in their being self-made and in the grandiosity of their self-images, though Hamsun, who rose from quite impossible beginnings, was a much more sympathetic social being and an incomparably greater artistic talent. When he met Hitler, a couple of years before the latter’s downfall, he saw him as his equal and treated him as any other person he respected, without trepidation or fear, which to Hitler was an affront, only Göring was permitted to challenge him and never without being subjected to his wrath, albeit always forgiven, and Hitler was enraged by the time Hamsun left. Hamsun was from the generation of Hitler’s father and was quite as stubborn and authoritarian, so it is hardly odd that Hitler should become so enraged. Kafka, Hitler, and Kubin all struggled with the authority of their fathers, they were loners, tormented to a greater or lesser extent by the fear of contact and, each in his own way, by inhibitions relating to women. Moreover, for all their individuality, all three belonged to the same cultural type. Psychology is also epochal, the mind too has its directions of style, which change through the years.

  * * *

  Hitler was a resident of the Vienna hostel for three years. That he stayed there so long does not mean he found it pleasant; the moment he reached the age of twenty-four and received the final installment of his father’s inheritance he went into town, bought himself new clothes, collected his scant possessions, and boarded a train for Munich. The resoluteness of his actions would seem to indicate that he had considered the matter for some time and decided that as soon as he got the money he would leave the city which he would gradually come to despise as if it were the very source of his ill fortune. Traveling with him on the train, which he presumably hoped was going to take him to a new and more prosperous life in the country he loved, at the same time as allowing him to avoid an imminent call-up to the Austrian army, was an acquaintance from the hostel, Rudolf Häusler, a nineteen-year-old who shared Hitler’s interest in art, a kind of Kubizek Junior he could lecture and impress, and whose parents, which is to say his mother, took a liking to him. They rented a room together in Munich, in the house of the Popp family, where Hitler registered as an “architectural painter.”

  There he carried on the life he had lived in Vienna: as soon as his inheritance was spent he began to paint again, wandering the beer halls in the evenings to sell his canvases. Häusler moved out after a few months, leaving Hitler to a life on his own; on the occasions he was invited to supper with the Popp family he declined. In Toland’s account, Frau Popp found him an “Austrian charmer,” though something of an enigma too: “You couldn’t tell what he was thinking,” she would later state. Nor could she recall Hitler ever receiving visitors in his room. He would paint in the daytime and read at nights. Frau Popp asked him once what his books had to do with painting, to which he replied, “Dear Frau Popp, does anyone know what is and what isn’t likely to be of use to him in life?”

  He lived like this for a year in Munich and then the war broke out. Hitler joined up the same day and was sent to the trenches on the French front, where he would remain for four years.

  It changed everything.
r />   * * *

  One of the most famous images of Hitler is from those same days in the summer of 1914. He is in the midst of a great crowd on Munich’s Odeonsplatz, beaming a huge smile, one of thousands who have gathered there following the declaration of war on August 2, his face recognized and enlarged in the 1930s after he became Reich chancellor of Germany, but at the time utterly anonymous. A young man wearing a white shirt and dark suit, lifting his hat in the air, hair parted at the side, cheekbones pronounced, sporting a thick black moustache, eyes plainly gleaming with elation. It is a very suggestive photograph, for he is merely one of the crowd, a face among thousands, a fate among thousands, full of the collective zeal that swept through the cities, towns, and villages of Europe in that summer of 1914. To himself, naturally, he was everything, immersed in his life and destiny, a twenty-five-year-old semi-artist with no family and no friends, living in Munich with no direction but with an inner fire now ignited, fed by the fuel of high politics which had so interested him since early youth and by the declaration of war that so unexpectedly provides him and every other member of his generation with the opportunity to act in accordance with the ideals and dreams they have felt so fiercely from as far back as childhood and which bourgeois society, centered as it was around preservation and security, business and commerce, had until then denied them.

  The European summer of 1914 was exceptionally balmy, an area of high pressure lingering over the continent for months. Under blue skies and a blazing sun the forests lay “dark and profuse in their tender green,” writes Stefan Zweig, who found himself in the small town of Baden outside Vienna when news of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria filtered through. The impression he gives is of carefree abandon. What the war that now lies ahead will bring, no one yet knows, and even if they did, even if they had sensed that it would proceed with such destructive force as to wipe out almost an entire generation of European men, the darkness in which the future lay shrouded would not have endured more than fleetingly in the lethargic, time-steeped tranquillity that emanated from all things: the leafy trees that lined the rivers, the undulating green fields, the cool brick of the village churches, whose lazy bells laid their acoustic cloaks over the old houses, the way Marcel Proust describes life in the French countryside in a book that came out the year before. Ruminating cattle and sheep, horse-drawn carts, the smoke of steam locomotives billowing into the sky. The smell of warm earth and warm grass, the tart, dry taste of cold white wine or the bitter-sweet of cool ale sipped under the parasols of a hotel patio or in the shade of a leafy tree at the side of a road. The dust of the road, the dark currents of the river which sweeps under the bridge, the silvery glimpses of darting fish. The way the summer connects itself to all previous summers, the body and weight of repetition exuded by the landscape, its structures and people in the social domain, making any radical upheaval so hard if not impossible to imagine, though it lies but weeks ahead.

  Stefan Zweig leaves Baden and travels to Le Coq, a small seaside resort on the Belgian North Sea coast. People are just as carefree there, he writes; they doze on the beach and soak up the sun, they bathe in the sea, the children fly kites, young people dance on the dykes in the evenings. He moves on to visit a friend, the painter Verhaeren, tension mounts, the threat of war ever growing.

  At once an icy wind of fear blew over the beach and swept it bare. People by the thousands left the hotels and stormed the trains, and even the most optimistic began to pack their bags with speed.

  Austria declares war on Serbia, Zweig is on the last train into Germany. On the German side of the border the train suddenly comes to a halt in the darkness. The edgy passengers peer through the windows and see cargo trains passing one after another; beneath the tarpaulins they glimpse the ominous outlines of cannon. Zweig goes on:

  The next morning I was in Austria. In every station placards had been put up announcing general mobilization. The trains were filled with fresh recruits, banners were flying, music sounded, and in Vienna I found the entire city in a tumult. The first shock at the news of war – the war that no one, people or government had wanted – the war which had slipped, much against their will, out of the clumsy hands of the diplomats who had been bluffing and toying with it, had suddenly been transformed into enthusiasm. There were parades in the street, flags, ribbons, and music burst forth everywhere, young recruits were marching triumpantly, their faces lighting up at the cheering – they, the John Does and Richard Roes who usually go unnoticed and uncelebrated.

  And to be truthful, I must acknowledge that there was a majestic, rapturous, and even seductive something in this first outbreak of the people from which one could escape only with difficulty. And in spite of all my hatred and aversion for war, I should not like to have missed the memory of those first days. As never before, thousands and hundreds of thousands felt what they should have felt in peacetime, that they belonged together.

  That Zweig, a pacifist all his life, would not have wanted to miss the sense of togetherness that pervaded those first days of August 1914 is telling indeed of the force with which the war swept through the land. Adolf Hitler was not the only one to lift his hat in joy, eyes gleaming, when the declaration came. The enthusiasm was all over Europe, the war was welcomed and celebrated by almost all. The Swedish historian of ideas Svante Nordin, who in his book The Philosophers’ War examines the stance of the intellectual community in respect to the war and its outbreak, notes Sigmund Freud’s words of July 26 in Vienna: “… for the first time for thirty years I feel myself an Austrian and feel like giving this not very hopeful Empire another chance. Morale everywhere is excellent.”

  * * *

  On July 27, the British ambassador in Vienna reported: “This country has gone wild at the prospect of war with Serbia, and its postponement or prevention would undoubtedly be a great disappointment.”

  The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, ten years older than Hitler, also a native of Austria-Hungary, applauded the war’s outbreak:

  For the first time I see you rising,

  hearsaid, remote, incredible War God

  The otherwise levelheaded and unsentimental Thomas Mann, fourteen years Hitler’s senior, wrote the following of those same days some six months later:

  War! It was purification, liberation that we experienced, and an enormous hope … It set the hearts of poets aflame … How should the artist, the soldier in the artist, not have praised God for the collapse of a world of peace that he had his fill, so completely his fill of?

  Kafka too got carried away. Though on the day of the war’s outbreak his diary notes matter-of-factly, “Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon,” four days later he writes, “I discover in myself nothing but pettiness, indecision, envy, and hatred against those who are fighting and whom I passionately wish everything ill,” then, in a letter to Felice seven months later, “In addition, I mostly suffer from the war because I myself am taking no part.”

  * * *

  Of course, not everyone was as enthusiastic about the war. Kafka’s friend Max Brod, five years Hitler’s senior, reflecting on the war’s outbreak, despaired at the apolitical indifference that had allowed it to catch them unawares:

  War to us was simply a crazy idea, of a piece with, say, the perpetual motion machine or the fountain of youth … We were a spoiled generation, spoiled by nearly fifty years of peace that had made us lose sight of mankind’s worst scourge. No one with any self-esteem ever got involved in politics. Arguments about Wagner’s music, about the foundations of Judaism and Christianity, about Impressionist painting and the like seemed infinitely more important … And now, overnight, peace had suddenly collapsed. We were quite simply stupid … not even pacifists, because pacifism at least presupposes a notion of there being such a thing as war, and of the need to fight against it.

  This indifference was widespread, not least in academic circles, where an intellectual such as Martin Heidegger, born in the same year as Hitler and Wittgens
tein, making him twenty-five years old when the war broke out, carried on regardless, immersed in debates about nominalism in medieval philosophy.

  One of his student friends, Ludwig Marcuse, described the mood at the university in Freiburg during those days in July 1914 in the following way, as cited by Safranski in his Heidegger biography:

  Toward the end of July I encountered one of my most respectable seminar colleagues, Helmuth Falkenfeld, on Goethestrasse. He said despairingly, “Have you heard what’s happened?” I said, full of contempt and resignedly, “I know, Sarajaevo.” He said, “Not that, tomorrow Rickert’s seminar is canceled.” I said, alarmed, “Is he sick?” He said, “No, because of the threatening war.” I said, “What’s the seminar got to do with the war?” He shrugged sadly.

  Falkenfeld, Safranski writes, is sent to the front only weeks later, from where he sends Marcuse a letter:

  I continue to be all right, even though the battle in which I participated on October 30 nearly deafened my ears with the roar of twenty-four artillery batteries. Nevertheless … I still believe that the third Kantian antonomy is more important than this whole world war and that war is to philosophy as sensuality is to reason. I simply do not believe that the events of this material world can, even in the least degree, touch upon our transcendental components, and I will not believe it even if a French shell fragment were to tear into my empirical body. Long live transcendental philosophy.

  This indifference toward politics, however, is not the same as that recalled and condemned by Max Brod. Brod was deeply involved in the cultural life of the day and simply dismissed politics as unimportant without thereby turning his back on the world. The apathy of these students was altogether more ideological, they saw philosophy as the antithesis of life in society, a space in which the authentic revealed itself beneath the veneer of the social, outside history. According to George L. Mosse in his book The Crisis of German Ideology, academic milieux produced intellectuals “whose ideal was to view the world sub specie aeternitatis,” which is to say from the perspective of eternity, Schopenhauer’s motto. “Their concern was hardly with mundane, day-to-day affairs,” Mosse writes.