I wrote:
How clear everything is in hindsight. How there is no way, no effort you can make, to see the pattern that underlies appearances when you are stuck in the middle of it. Because the blind spot covers the center of insight and recognition.
I headed out to the coastal promenade and looked out across the Pacific Ocean, where the islands of Japan were floating, far beyond the horizon. I looked for a long time at a big family of African-Americans enjoying themselves in the water, how the women gathered their skirts and ran into the gentle waves again and again, accompanied by delighted screams from the children, I could not get enough of that boy, maybe ten years old, beside himself with joy, hopping and dancing and squealing. We don’t have that, I thought, envious. Self-control is a kind of domination too, just over oneself.
From the Santa Monica Pier I had before my eyes the full curve of Malibu Bay, the soft green odorless sea with its white fringe of foam, the ocher-colored sand, the white row of houses in the foreground, the dark green hills farther back, and finally, carefully set apart in a different color, the sharp mountain range jutting up in the background. And up above, unbelievably, flawlessly blue, the sky.
It hurt. Everything hurt. It had come to that point again. Alone and full of fear, I saw on TV the crash of the Israeli plane into two Amsterdam skyscrapers. Peter Gutman knocked on the door; he had seen it too. We didn’t want to talk so we sat there together and watched a movie about an important English art historian whom Peter Gutman knew about and who, we now learned, had been a Soviet spy (and a homosexual). Her Majesty the Queen had even honored him with an audience once, in which the conversation turned to propriety and morality, and the scholar had spoken in impressive, moving formulations—moving for anyone who knew his situation. But then, of course, his cover was blown, he admitted everything, they promised to protect him but then broke their promise and threw him to a public lusting for blood and destroyed his life. To the extent that it wasn’t he himself who had destroyed his life; that was a fair objection. It was almost unbearable to see him on-screen in person at the end, an old, broken man, and to watch him respond to the intrusive questions with which they pressured him.
I don’t have the stomach for that, I said, and I turned off the TV. I have that reaction a bit too often these days, by the way, I said to Peter Gutman, and I realize it’s just a phase I’m in, or the times are in, or maybe it’s that the brutality of the times and my oversensitive taste are colliding again, but I turn off the TV or look away when enormous crowds level their curses in Allah’s name against us, the whites, or when men in white protective suits collect the dead birds from the Baltic coast. The fact that some—no: most—of it could have been predicted is no consolation. Maybe I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong anymore. What’s good and what’s evil. I catch myself feeling pity for the wrong people if I see them as having lost.
Better that than no pity at all, Peter Gutman said. And anyway, excuse me, which of us is the Christian here? If someone strikes you on the right cheek, who’s the one supposed to turn him your other one? You move within the core of your system of values, Madame. Don’t forget.
And you? An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth?
We didn’t have a Bible at home. In any language. We were three brothers. Our parents rarely told us not to do something, and almost never made us do anything, except follow certain rules of behavior so that we wouldn’t give ourselves away as German on the street. And when boys in school called me a Nazi, I never said anything at home. That was our prime directive: Protect Mother. My father? He practically didn’t speak at all after going into exile. He came home at night from his hard, badly paid factory job, we ate, and not much by the way. Then the dishes were cleared and my father spread his books out on the table and got to work on his elaborations of nineteenth-century German literature. He never published a word. I don’t think there could possibly be another human being for whom it meant more to be German and who was more deeply disappointed, hurt, and embittered when the Germans kicked him out. I wasn’t born yet when the family, already poor enough, had to find their way in a foreign country, and in those circumstances, after the war had started, you can imagine how my parents welcomed a third child.
Silence. Then I said: Do you have a tape recording that runs in your head night and day too?
Oh dear Lord, Peter Gutman said. I’m a champion at that. If you only knew what goes round and round in my head like a broken record, day and night.
Well, what, Monsieur? If one may ask.
You know, always the same thing. That year after year I never accomplish anything except to systematically waste my life. What do you say to that?
Maybe you and I can agree that rhetorical questions do not require an answer.
Okay, okay. As you probably know, I’m almost fifty, Peter Gutman said.
Which I hope we’ll celebrate with a good bottle of California wine.
And I’m in limbo like a twenty-year-old. I haven’t made a life for myself. Not married. No children, even though I want children. No long-term relationship with a woman, not even a professional career worth mentioning.
Objection, Your Honor.
Come on. Okay, yes! I’ve been obsessed with my philosopher for twenty years, I pore over his every move, no matter how obscure, even though he himself left behind nothing but fragments. I ask you, do we really need much familarity with Herr Freud to find it neurotic, this unquenchable need to express myself through another, to take refuge behind another person? A person who crushes me. Who has burrowed his way inside me, the same way I’ve burrowed into him, we are inextricably tangled together. I can’t get rid of him and he, perversely, prevents me from finishing the book about him in which I want to find both immortality and the grave.
How. How does he prevent you?
I’ve thought about that for a long time. I think it’s his perfection. The fact that he left behind nothing but fragments is precisely the sign of his search for perfection. He would have seen a complete text as a lie, because it presupposes a complete world. Nothing would have seemed worse to him. And so what made me decide to write my book about someone who never worked his thoughts and insights into a system and never published a book in his lifetime? Wasn’t that presumptuous of me? Even more since his basic thought is that our culture will never recover from its deepest fall. We are living in end times.
That was the first time Peter Gutman talked to me at length about his philosopher.
I also asked him that night if it was really true that he had never had a deep relationship with a woman.
No, I have, he said. Just then he was in the deepest relationship with a woman you could imagine. But also the most pointless, as both of them had known from the beginning. She would never leave her husband and children. They had decided just two weeks ago not to call each other anymore. And now he was terribly depressed, had severe panic attacks, and woke up every morning with a feeling of terror.
You didn’t let it show, I said.
I’ve had lots of practice at not letting things show, since I was very young. And now, good night, Madame. Don’t brood. That’s some good advice from a professional brooder.
He left. I cried. He would never want to know why. Everyone who got close to him and wanted to stay close to him had to abide by a tacit agreement not to force open the understatement in operation. I realized that I had fulfilled this requirement against my will up until that point. It couldn’t continue like that. I decided that I had to, very carefully, even lovingly, scratch away at the armor he had intentionally built up around himself over the years. You thought you had a man standing in front of you but it was really just armor.
* * *
I picked up my copy of Thomas Mann’s diaries. Ever since I had driven up to his house with a group of other scholars—1550 San Remo Drive, Pacific Palisades, where by the way there was no plaque about the famous first resident of the house whose entrance we crowded around—and had followed his afte
rnoon walk down to Ocean Park, I read his diaries with even greater interest. I came across the place where he wrote, in his notes for his 1949 Goethe speech:
Nevertheless, if we take into account certain intimate confessions like that in his letter to Frau von Stein at the time of his winter journey to the Harz Mountains: “How deeply I fell in love again, on this dark train, with the class of people they call ‘lower’ but who are surely highest before God…”; if we also take into account what he says in Hermann and Dorothea about the inspiring freedom and higher—“higher”!—equality, and the fact that he thoroughly familiarized himself with the theories of the French socialist Saint Simon shortly before the end of his life; then we arrive at strange questions. I am not absolutely certain—it is just a suspicion, but I want to express it—whether Goethe today would be directing his gaze more toward Russia than toward America. I immediately counter this suspicion with Goethe’s rejection of despotism. But it is well known that this aversion broke down when he was faced with the phenomenon of Napoleon, and who knows what it might break down in the face of today. The question, after all, is how the act of losing oneself in a crowd of people following well-ordered rules—which was, if not his ideal, then at least his vision—could play out in any circumstances other than under the control of a state and a certain despotism. His bright spirit certainly did not labor under any illusions about the fact that more and more would happen under the new social relations involving the “government-free sphere” that liberalism insists on, and I would not be surprised if he was occupied, even back then, with the question of whether freedom of learning and art might not be better preserved in a state that is not itself the instrument of private interests than in one that depends upon private interests.
Who still asks such questions today? Who would dare to speak them out loud?
Now, more than a decade and a half later, I read similar questions in some newspapers, brought to the surface by a CRISIS that is actually the collapse I was anticipating in a more distant future. Still, the collapse of the banking system, which is in turn the lifeblood of an economic system we are suddenly allowed to call “capitalism” again, is being attributed as much as possible to psychological causes: individual bankers’ and executives’ unquenchable lust for money. Yesterday I heard that a group of neurological researchers has apparently discovered a gene that is responsible for the greed for money and possessions, through a complicated system of rewards in the brain, so that anyone in the clutches of this gene can do almost nothing to overcome his wild, selfish spirit of enterprise. The way to solve the problem, they said, would be to intersperse bearers of the greed gene with other personnel, accountant types, in the leadership of certain businesses.
What would John and Judy have said about the socioeconomic conditions today, if they could have predicted them at the time? We were sitting in our café on Seventeenth Street again, where we had a regular table and knew the menu and each ordered our favorite salad. The bright-eyed young black waitress knew us and smiled when we came in, which was nice.
John had picked me up. We were going to drive out with Judy for an evening with her friends who had invited me to visit them, most of them members of the “second generation.” We would have to postpone our discussion of Thomas Mann, John said. I said that there was another fact almost precisely as interesting as this astonishing passage, and that is the fact that Mann left it out of the final version of his Goethe speech. Maybe he was right not to expose himself to the predictable criticisms, I said. “Communism” would have been the least of the accusations. Did John and Judy know about the scandal around Mann’s tour of Germany in 1949? No. In America, they said, Communism was a rotting corpse, deader than dead. Even though hysterical anti-Communism raged just below the surface.
John said that his long-lost cousin living on Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin was now starting to be interested in Communism again. Not GDR Communism, of course, that wasn’t what he meant. He meant the same rational Communism that they, John and Judy, meant too. Oh you dear things! I said, and I thought: Now, that is a big topic, and in treading that terrain we wore down the soles of our shoes and then the soles of our feet too. I thought I could see their eyes, especially John’s, shine with the same naiveté that we all must have had in our eyes once. At some point the light would go out in his too.
In the car, Judy explained to me that in her view the descendants of the murdered Jews and the descendants of the Germans who had perpetrated or witnessed the crimes had something in common: Their parents had refused to talk with them about the past. I protested: But it’s totally different. In fact, they’re exact opposites! Keeping silent about crimes you committed or not being able to talk to your children about the atrocities and humiliations to which you were subjected. They both insisted that these two kinds of silence, so opposite in content, created similar patterns in the relationships between parents and children.
We were driving through a nice neighborhood I had never been to, and we stopped in front of a middle-class house on a side street, climbed a short flight of stairs, and arrived at an apartment with all the lights on, furnished like the apartment of a West German lawyer or headmaster, where people of various ages were crowded into the room. A delicate blonde in her mid-fifties, the host, came up to us and said, in German: My name is Ruth. Welcome. And added in English: I was a hidden child.
The sentence hit me hard. I understood immediately what it meant: a child who had been hidden away from the Germans. It was a dreadful story, one of the many I would hear. When I think back to that evening, I see one person after another coming up to me, glass in hand, and softly talking to me. I saw in their eyes, more than once, the absurd hope that a miracle might occur, somehow, the abyss their life had plummeted into might somehow close, and the never-ending pain might somehow get at least a little easier to bear, if someone shared this pain with them. No, not “someone”: a German. Most of them had never been to Germany or—the older ones—never been back to Germany. I was silent. There was nothing to say, nothing to explain, no way to make up for anything. There was nothing to put right—nothing would ever be “right” again.
What about Germany today? The question was inevitable and I was inwardly prepared for it. I remember I tried hard to stay objective. The fall of the Wall. Yes. A historical event that—I hesitated to admit it—was not expected or intended by the demonstrators themselves. I quoted the phrases on banners, phrases that had wilted meanwhile. The euphoria of the transitional period. I didn’t want to disappoint the people here, who expected to hear that everyone was happy in unified Germany. No, there was nothing in their newspapers about disappointments. Nothing about losses. It would have seemed petty for me to talk about them here.
But then there was a lawyer who apparently had German clients. He knew that thousands of former property owners who had lived in West Germany a long time and received compensation for their losses were demanding their land and houses back, where East Germans had often been living for decades, believing in good faith that they had legally, properly bought or had use of the property. That’s true, I said, and had no choice but to bring up the legal doctrine of “restitution rather than compensation.” John was incensed. No one here knew anything about that! Just imagine that happening in another country! I tried to explain that the former owners and their heirs insisted on their claims with the best conscience in the world, because private property was for them one of the highest possible values you could aspire to.
And for you? someone asked. The East Germans? I said we had accustomed ourselves to not considering private property so sacred, and even when we rejected the GDR, many East Germans subscribed to the opinion that the common good should take precedence over profit.
I quietly said to John that these different relationships to property were probably at the root of the “division in the mind” that everyone was always describing. John said: You must not be the only ones seeing your way of life called into question—the West Germans must feel
their own ways of thinking about things under attack too. I thought that was a point well worth thinking about.
What was really important for the guests that evening was something else: There was right-wing violence against asylum seekers in the news, especially in eastern Germany. Could I explain that? I half-heartedly tried to explain the circumstances that gave rise to such violence, with many circumlocutions. I saw that no one was convinced.
At the end of the evening, two young people came up to me, a couple: he a German, she an American Jew. They wanted advice. They were planning to emigrate to Germany, where he had the prospect of a good job as a chemist, but now they were wondering if it was irresponsible to take their child to that country. I was horrified. Was I from some barbaric land you couldn’t justifiably bring children to? I told them their information was definitely one-sided, and I for one would be happy if they came, but I couldn’t decide for them. I evaded the question.
Ruth drove me home. I could tell that she wanted to talk and I didn’t know if I wanted to hear what she had to say: Ruth’s father, a German Jew who spoke perfect French, was able to flee to Alsace in 1933 with his family and pass as a Frenchman. When the Germans invaded, they had no place to hide. To save at least the child, they put Ruth in a nunnery. No one suspected a Jew in the little blond girl. For months she was a hidden child, abandoned by her parents. And that’s what I remained, Ruth said, as we drove down the freeway through a city that was never dark, never slept—even after my parents found a way out for all of us and came to get me. She had stayed a hidden child to this day. Could I imagine what that was like? She had finally stopped blaming and accusing her mother: stopped telling her that she, Ruth, would never have given away her child, under any circumstances. I said nothing.
City of Angels: or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud / A Novel Page 12