My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  Charisma, which resembles beauty in that it cannot be learned or acquired, no matter how much we might practice or train, transcends the simple dichotomy of the inner and outer I, as well as that of the biological and the cultural in the human sphere, and may possess such force as to occasionally cancel out all other categories, causing them to disintegrate completely.

  The charismatic human is truly unique, an individual who cannot be replicated, not because of his or her skills in argumentation but because of his or her presence alone, making plain the nonuniqueness, the ordinariness, of all others. So what kind of a value is charisma? And why are we so attracted by it? If a charismatic woman had been sitting next to the one talking about Adorno and de Beauvoir, and the other one, the one who was strikingly beautiful, all attention would have been on her, and not only all male attention, but all female attention too. Charisma is an unusual property, and what it consists of is almost impossible to say, and yet we recognize it instantly the moment we see it. If I see it in a woman, I desire her. If I see it in a man, I desire him too, in a comparable though not identical way, since what a charismatic man awakens in me is a wish to be there, in his presence, and to subordinate myself to him. There is an element of tenderness and affection in these feelings, there being an element in the charismatic, not of weakness, weakness is not the word, but vulnerability perhaps. The wish to be near, tenderness, affection, subordination; these are strong, direct emotions. But I cannot submit to them, cannot allow myself to want to be in the presence of a man as if I were in love with him, and I certainly cannot subordinate myself to him. Therefore I keep my distance, but not without observing the effect he has on everyone else in his presence, and in that I am consumed by jealousy, sometimes to unreasonable degrees, because I want to be him. This inner tussle goes on, I suppose, in the presence of all charismatic individuals, whether it is acknowledged or not. The charismatic I is so strong as to pose a threat to all other I’s in its presence, who must fight to keep themselves afloat, or else give in and become, well, what? A part of the stronger I’s we? A disciple, a follower, a yes-man. The aura of the charismatic individual contains an element of disinterest, of detached ease, an independence verging on the sovereign and somehow discouraging; to be seen or even liked by the charismatic individual is to be bestowed with favor, a gift with no ulterior motive, hugely covetable. Indeed the charismatic individual is free of the bonds of the social world, standing in a certain sense outside its domain, and this sense of boundlessness is what lends such force to their presence: the charismatic person is unrivaled.

  As with all other human properties, charisma occurs in different degrees; many possess some small amount, few an abundance, hardly anyone has nothing but. Jesus was an extraordinarily charismatic person, his presence was so overpowering it illuminates the Gospels, which were written a hundred years after his death, and has continued to dazzle through the centuries that have passed. He, and what happened to him, cannot fully be understood without taking this into consideration. People stopped what they were doing to follow him. Enormous crowds gathered to hear him speak. He could disperse an angry mob by his sheer presence. His favor is a blessing, his disfavor a punishment. He demands of his disciples that they leave their families and friends, their entire social spheres, to live with him. When his mother and brother come to see him he sends them away. He is angered by the most trivial matters, like when he curses the fig tree outside Jerusalem, causing it to wither, or when he storms into the temple courts and sends the money changers scattering in all directions. His inner darkness as he sits in the Garden of Gethsemane, the self-destructive urge he feels within him becoming ever stronger, weighing him down during the days of Easter in Jerusalem, where he does nothing to save himself but follows the path that has been mapped out for him until, maimed and mutilated, he expires on the cross. Perhaps he was the most charismatic person ever to live. Someone must have been. Certainly his charisma continues to shine through to us today, two thousand years after his death. And it is not theology that has kept it alive; on the contrary, for theology is anticharismatic by nature, being abstract.

  Nothing in Hitler’s life before he reached the age of thirty indicates that he possessed any such remarkable charisma. Quite the opposite, for the descriptions we have of him from this time, from the flophouse in Vienna and the front in Flanders, suggest he is an odd little man with a somewhat unpleasant air. Captain Karl Mayr saw him as a tired stray dog looking for a master. But this changed drastically from the moment he began speaking in public. From then on the descriptions seem almost to be of a different person altogether. Socially too he was transformed; Rosenberg, Hess, Streicher, and soon Goebbels, all were in awe of him and more than willing to subordinate themselves to him. Yet Hitler himself was unchanged, his character and personality remained the same throughout. It was as if it were the very crowds themselves that conjured forth in him what they found so appealing. Without the crowd he was a nobody, a lonely failure of a man with an unjustifiably high opinion of himself, but in front of the crowd, in its gaze, his loneliness turned to independence, and the unjustified became justified as if by some covenant: he gave the crowd what it wanted, his I, independent of the we, and the crowd in turn gave him what he wanted, its we, dependent on the I. They saw him, and were drawn toward him. That pull was also of an erotic nature, the tension between him and the crowd is plainly sexual, though not unambiguously so, for he stands there not in absolute masculinity, and without absolute strength, which would have been cold and autocratic and forbidding; no, he is feminine too, which is to say ambivalent, and it is in that unclarified space that the tension exists and interplay with the mass becomes possible. It feels personal to watch him.

  So it is with charisma, it becomes instantly personal. Watching a charismatic performer like Elvis in footage that might be forty years old, the way he relates to us feels personal, not because of his charm, or his sex appeal, or his good looks, or his body language, but because of his charisma, his unique presence, for which we can feel a kind of solicitude, and from which we could allow almost any indiscretion if we happened to be in its proximity. But those feelings might be peculiar to me alone, and other people might react less emotionally to watching Elvis in a forty-year-old TV show, because I had exactly the same feelings in relation to my father, seeing the same synthesis of remoteness and vulnerability in him, his unapproachability being so immense given that we occupied the same modest living space in the house on Tybakken all those years ago. But yes, there was something almost awkward about him that in the midst of all his forceful severity, so dislocated from my own existence, seemed to be asking for solicitude. I suppose I wanted to accommodate him in that, so it occurs to me now, though I have no idea how I would have reacted if any such thing had ever happened. But either it is the case that the state of subservience in which I existed at that time, that happy subordination, has meant that these feelings well up in me all too easily whenever I encounter the disinterested, independent type of person who is quite inaccessible, but who also exudes the opposite and thereby instills in me some sort of hope of community, of favor and blessing, or else I’m simply trained to see it like that, and am especially aware of it.

  * * *

  The summer has come. Warm streets outside the apartment, green parks, lightly dressed people. All winter and spring I’ve been getting up at three and four o’clock in the morning to write so I’d be finished in time for summer. I’ve promised Linda this, that the summer will belong to the family. Last summer we booked a holiday in Corsica, but Linda was ill and we couldn’t go. I’ve always wanted to go to Corsica, so we booked again in the spring. The plan was to go away as soon as the novel was done. Now it looks like it’s not going to work. But the holiday is paid for and they’re going without me, taking Linda’s mother instead.

  I’m listening to Midlake, The Courage of Others, I’ve listened to it every day for months, and the last time I drove out to the house and listened to it in the car, the mood
of Kubizek’s book spread through me like a memory, as if it all stemmed from my own life. In a way it does, the books I’ve read are as inseparable a part of my history as everything that’s ever happened to me. Hitler’s Mein Kampf is no exception. It’s different from all the other books I’ve read. I’m not sure why, but it stands out. Kubizek’s memoir, in which Hitler is the main character, does not. In that book Hitler is seen from the outside and is an ordinary young man, albeit extremely serious and unusually strong-willed.

  When Hitler writes himself, appearing in his own right, the reconciling aspect of Kubizek’s viewpoint is gone. There is a consistent pettiness throughout Mein Kampf, a complete lack of the grandeur we have come to expect of literature, philosophy, and art, where the deepest and sincerest, often hard-won insight is forgiveness for everyone, the recognition of the human in us all, the absolute equality of others with ourselves. There is no such universality in Hitler’s book, in which everything gushes through his mind to be manipulated at his own convenience according to whatever emotions are awakened in him, and in which not a single face occurs, in the sense of any unique person, rather the mere representative of a type, a political standpoint or a public role, apart from his own. But if we lift our gaze, if we elevate ourselves to where the particular characteristics of others can no longer be differentiated, Mein Kampf is a book in two volumes published in 1924 and 1928 respectively, written by a man born into the lower middle class in a monarchy on the verge of dissolution due to major internal tensions of both ethnic and cultural nature as well as staggeringly huge social problems, where the old values, the slow-paced bourgeois world with all its little securities so vividly described by Zweig, stood in sharp contrast to the explosively increasing poverty among the lower classes, which the book’s author, whose faith in others must have been small to start with, as is often the case with children who have been ill treated, and whose belief in meaning and justice in life must have been undermined by the deaths of first his brother, then his mother, not only saw with his own eyes but also came to experience himself. He cannot have felt that he owed anyone anything. Grace, forgiveness, understanding, sympathy cannot have been part of his repertoire. A generous person would have been able to express himself from there too, but the author of this particular book was not a generous person, he was embittered, vindictive, conceited, and, when eventually he had the chance, callous and without mercy. But even in that he fell short, unlike Homer’s or Shakespeare’s or Snorre’s heroes, who can be callous and without mercy and still display greatness; in that too he was petty and grudging. But for this very reason Mein Kampf does still express something significant, for while it was written by a certain man of a certain character, it is also pervaded by the time in which that man lived, and the problems of that time, and the fact that he never raises himself above his own person and his own time, being so small-minded and unyielding that he fails even to see the possibilities, means that all that is base and bad about that time gushes through the book as it gushes through him. He is indeed the little man writing about the great age.

  * * *

  Mein Kampf received terrible reviews. It was totally destroyed wherever it was given attention. The Frankfurter Zeitung, under the headline END OF THE ROAD FOR HITLER, called it political suicide. One Berlin newspaper expressed doubts as to the author’s mental stability, according to Ryback. And the Bayerische Vaterland dubbed the book Sein Krampf (“His Cramp”). Hitler’s book was ridiculed in many circles. In his memoir Stefan Zweig writes that hardly anyone read it, and the few who did refused to take it seriously because it was so poorly written.

  Hitler himself was proud of his book, handing out signed copies to all and sundry and sending a copy to his family in Austria, although he had not been in touch with them since well before the war. The terms of his prison sentence included a ban on public speaking that prevented him from engaging in political activities, and on his release he rented a cottage in the Alps and began work on a second volume, Mein Kampf II. Completed in the summer of 1926, the book was ignored by the newspapers and a year after publication it had sold only some seven hundred copies. But Hitler carried on writing. Following Mein Kampf, which had been put out by a small-scale local publishing house with only limited distribution, he contacted the publishers Elsa and Otto Bruckmann, presumably because the book he was now planning to write was not intended to be political but to deal with his time at the front, much in the style of Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel, a book he admired. Jünger had sent him a copy with the inscription “To the national Führer Adolf Hitler,” and the volume is full of Hitler’s underlinings. Ryback, who saw it, writes that what Hitler was interested in, judging by his marginalia, were the emotional and spiritual aspects of the war rather than more descriptive passages detailing concrete events, though with two exceptions, both concerned with moments in which sensory impressions become so fierce as to make everything shimmer, all sound vanishing at once. In a letter to Jünger, Hitler wrote, “I have read all your writings. In them I have come to value one of the few powerful conveyors of the frontline experience.” In August 1927, in a letter to her husband concerning Hitler, Elsa Bruckmann writes that “he is already reflecting on the form of his war book, and says it is becoming more vivid and alive in him.” In December a date is fixed for publication the following spring. But Hitler never delivered the manuscript, and it was never found. Most probably it was burned in the spring of 1945 along with all the other private documents Hitler ordered his adjutant to collect and destroy. Ryback, however, unearthed a manuscript intended as a third volume of Mein Kampf, kept in a safe on premises belonging to the Eher Verlag in Munich and handed over to the Americans after the war by an employee. Unfinished and running to 324 pages, it was presumably written in the summer of 1928, when Hitler was thirty-three years old, as political events in Germany were gathering pace and he and his National Socialist party were moving in on the epicenter of power. While the first volume of Mein Kampf dealt with Hitler’s life up to his joining the German Workers’ Party, and the second concerned the party itself and its history, the unpublished third volume focuses according to Ryback on Germany’s place in history. After 1928 Hitler seems to have given up writing completely, and his image of himself as a writer, which must still have been very much intact during the four years he spent producing two published books and two manuscripts, with ambitions in one of the latter of going beyond the political, was eclipsed by his political involvement, at the same time as he began to recognize his limitations in the field. Reportedly he once complained to his personal solicitor, Hans Frank, praising Mussolini for his splendid mastery of Italian in speech and writing, while regretting that he himself was incapable of matching him in German. “I just cannot keep my thoughts together when I am writing,” he remarked, according to Ryback. And again to Frank, on another occasion: “If I had had any idea in 1924 that I would have become Reich Chancellor, I never would have written the book.”