by Frank Tallis
“It is truly remarkable,” Rheinhardt continued, “how close we came to the perilous world of espionage and counterespionage; still, I am glad that we were not drawn in any further. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that I am grateful for von Bulow's vanity, grateful that he excluded us from the von Stoger investigation. Otherwise we might have strayed onto some very treacherous and dangerous ground. I must say, I am uncomfortable with that world—the world of spies—with its deceptions, double deceptions, feints, and ruses—its fatal lies. It is a world where nothing is as it seems, and nobody can be trusted.”
Liebermann stared into the flames and felt a stab of shame.
His friend was so much wiser than his modest exterior ever betrayed.
“Oskar,” Liebermann whispered, “I have a confession to make. Something has been weighing heavily on my conscience the whole evening.”
“Oh?” Rheinhardt's face filled with concern.
“I promised to get some tickets for the Zemlinsky concert next Saturday… but, what with one thing and another, it completely slipped my mind—and it's sold out.”
Rheinhardt laughed: a generous, booming laugh.
“God in heaven,” he cried. “Is that all? You had me worried! I thought you were going to say something of consequence!”
81
THE CLOCK MAKERS’ BALL was a grand affair and was attended by a diverse group of patrons. There were boulevardiers whose glazed eyes, ruddy cheeks, and uncertain feet declared that they were attending their second or even third ball of the evening. There were debutantes in radiant white, and various representatives of the imperial army: infantrymen in blue, artillerymen in chocolate-brown tunics and red collar flashes, and hussars—their short fur-trimmed and golden-braided coats slung casually over one shoulder. A distinguished gentleman with a mane of silvery curls who was surrounded by laughing ladies was identified very quickly as the Dutch ambassador, and it was rumoured that a striking woman wearing a glimmering peau de soie gown was a member of the Italian aristocracy.
As soon as Liebermann took Amelia into his arms, he was aware of a difference. She was more confident and followed his lead with less effort.
“Have you been to see Herr Janowsky for a lesson?” he asked.
“No,” she replied. “Although I still intend to, once my brother leaves.”
“Well, I have to say,” Liebermann remarked, “your dancing is much improved.”
“I think,” said Amelia, “that I understand—although ‘understand’ is not really the correct word—I think I now appreciate the value of your initial advice: to listen to the music with greater care. To…” She hesitated, and the ghost of a smile crossed her face. “Feel it?”
She was dressed in the same clothes that she had worn for the detectives’ ball: a skirted décolleté gown of green velvet. Yet she appeared to Liebermann more elegant than he remembered. As they passed beneath a massive crystal chandelier, the light fell on her pewter eyes and he experienced momentarily a sensation like falling. It was not the same feeling as a physical descent but something more profound.
“My brother seems to have made a friend,” said Amelia, and, once again, a fleeting smile illuminated her face.
Randall was talking to a dark-haired lady who was wearing an exquisite creation of red silk, black lace, and pearls. She was holding a feathered carnival mask on a long handle and made extravagant use of her free hand while speaking. Liebermann guessed that she was French.
Just before Randall slipped from view they saw him produce a rose from behind his back.
The orchestra was playing with sparkling virtuosity—a great, carousing, fortissimo waltz in which extraordinary liberties were being taken with meter. The melody was held back by the introduction of subtle hesitations, which made the music hover for the briefest moment before each reprieve of the principal theme.
Liebermann recalled a passage from von Saar's Marianne: a waltz could melt away years of repression, fanning flirtation into passion. The rapid motion, the relentless turning, the dizzy euphoria, the heat of a woman's back felt in the palm of one's hand…
Amelia looked up at him, and her eyes had never appeared more beautiful. He rediscovered the shock of when he had first noticed their inimitable color, neither blue nor gray but something in between: their depth enhanced by a darkening at the edges of each iris. Liebermann drew her closer, and his lips brushed the silver ribbons in her flaming hair.
The impetuous élan of the orchestra was contagious.
Is this the time?
He had asked himself this question before—on so many occasions.
Is this the time?
Suddenly the tension dissipated, and he whirled Amelia around with such enthusiasm that she briefly achieved flight.
“Dr. Liebermann?”
He laughed, and the vertical crease with which he had become so very familiar appeared on her forehead.
“What is it?” she asked.
How appropriate, thought Liebermann, that we are attending the clock makers’ ball.
There would be time enough…
Even if Nietzsche was right and there was such a thing as eternal recurrence and every man and woman was destined to revisit the lost opportunities of the past in perpetuity—he no longer cared. Psychoanalysis had taught him the importance of little things, and perhaps it was these little things that made human beings human: the mistakes, the blunders, the qualms, the petty vacillations and doubting. Liebermann understood—better than most—that there were hidden virtues in human frailty.
Yes, there was time enough: the promise of days and months and years to come.
Amelia was still looking at him quizzically—waiting for an answer. When it came, it was intellectually disingenuous but emotionally sincere. It felt right.
“There's no place like Vienna!” Liebermann cried. And, once again, Amelia's feet parted company with the ground.
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK: Hannah Black, Clare Alexander, Nick Austin, and Steve Mathews—once again—for invaluable editorial and critical assistance; Paul Taunton, Jennifer Rodriguez, and Bara MacNeill for their assistance in preparing the U.S. edition. Professor Ignaz Hammerer and Dr W. Etschmann (Militärgeschichtliche Forschungsabteilung des Heeresgeschichtlichen Museum) for information concerning Austrian military academies; Mirko Herzog (Technisches Museum Wien) for erudite answers with respect to the media and postal services in turn-of-the-century Vienna; Professor Thomas Olechowski (University of Vienna) for advising me on press censorship under the Habsburg monarchy and recommending the Arbeiter-Zeitung for the puposes of my plot; Clive Baldwin for alerting me to the existence of Erzsébet Báthory; Luitgaard Hammerer for acting as my unpaid translator, research assistant, and city guide in Vienna (and for finding out about the employment of specialist pastry cooks in Demel); Simon Dalgleish for checking my German and correcting several linguistic errors; and Nicola Fox for continuing to put up with it all.
Saint Florian's military school owes an enormous debt to the oberrealschule described in Musil s The Confusions of Young Torless. I have unashamedly raided this masterpiece for useful detail, atmosphere, specific settings, and even the odd character. Other books that were informative on the subject of education in fin de siècle Vienna were Arthur Schnitzler's My Youth in Vienna and The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig. Quotations from Nietzsche are mostly from A Nietz sche Reader (selected and translated with an introduction by R. J. Hollingdale). Translations of songs were by William Mann, Lionel Salter, and Richard Stokes. Studie U was a real document—and is referred to in chapter four (“Politics and Powers”) of Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture by John Lukacs. Descriptions of “Venice in Vienna” were based on photographs in Blickfänge einer Reise nach Wien published by the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien.
Information on the history of the inkblot test (before Rorschach) can be found in “The Origins of Inkblots” by John T R. Richardson, an article published in The Psychologist in June 2004. Biog
raphical details on Justinus Kerner can be found inThe Discovery of the Unconscious, by Henri F. Ellenberger. Frau Becker's dream is based on case material reported by Freud in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, lecture 7. The opening of Freud's university lecture is a transcription of lecture 20 from the same work. Freud's episode of jealousy is exactly as described by Ernest Jones in The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. The description of Mahler's “funny walk” and leg movements can be found in Gustav Mahler: Letters to His Wife (edited by Henry-Louis de La Grange and Günther Weiss in collaboration with Knud Martner). Randall Lyd gate's description of Toltec civilization is taken from The Myths of Mexico and Peru by Lewis Spence, published in 1913 by George C. Harrap and Co. The absinthe ritual (as performed by Trezska Novak) is described in Barnaby Conrad's Absinthe: History in a Bottle. The Erotes—translated into English as Affairs of the Heart— was once attributed to Lucian but is now thought to be the work of an unknown author referred to as Pseudo-Lucian. I took a few liberties with my interpretation of what Pseudo-Lucian wrote—but Herr Sommer's fundamental arguments based on this work are accurate. Liebermann's advice to Amelia Lyd gate on waltzing is adapted from a description of the waltz that can be found at http://www.vienneseball.org.
Frank Tallis
London, 2007
THE INSPIRATION FOR ONE BOOK often comes from reading another—and for Fatal Lies that other book was The Confusions of Young Torless by Robert Musil (1880-1942). It is not particularly well-known among English and American readers, but it is regarded as a classic in Austria and Germany.
Musil was born in Klagenfurt and attended military school from the age of eleven but eventually decided on a career in engineering. After a short stint writing technical papers, he resumed his studies in Berlin, where his subjects were philosophy and psychology. The Confusions of Young Torless was completed in 1905, several years before he was awarded his doctorate.
Musil's most celebrated work is the monumental The Man Without Qualities—still unfinished at the time of his death. It is often linked with James Joyce's Ulysees and Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and together these three books are said to represent the apogee of twentieth-century modernist fiction.
As you might expect, The Man Without Qualities is not an easy read; however, The Confusions of Young Torless is very accessible. It is fewer than two hundred pages long, is set in a military academy (just like the one Musil attended), and catalogues the psychological development of a young man as he struggles to make sense of a world in which bullying and ritual humiliation are commonplace. Musil's novel is much more ambitious than it first appears. It is a chilling exploration of the origins of fascism.
At one point, a bully provides a justification for violence that owes a debt to Friedrich Nietszche (1844-1900), the philosopher who suggested that the Übermensch or superman, does not respect moral constraints. The idea of making a new morality—beyond conventional notions of good and evil—was one endorsed by the Nazi party for obvious reasons. The conceptual leap required to construe genocide as a reasonable goal is a very considerable one and required new intellectual tools that Nietszche unwittingly provided.
In Fatal Lies, I named the headmaster of the military academy Eichmann, in order to raise the spectre of Adolf Eichmann—the Nazi who proposed “the final solution to the Jewish question.” It was Eichmann who inspired Hannah Arendt to coin a phrase that has since found its way into numerous works of history and social commentary: “the banality of evil.”
Arendt attended the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 and was amazed by his ordinariness. He was more like a petty functionary than a monster. He had become totally preoccupied by the organizational problems and technical details of genocide, at the expense of any moral concerns. He was a simple man who was just obeying orders. Arendt responded poetically, asserting that Eichmann demonstrated the “fearsome, word-and-thought defying banality of evil.”
During WWII, “normal” German citizens—when in uniform— were able to commit appalling acts of violence. This phenomenon was so perplexing to postwar social psychologists that they conducted numerous experiments in order to elucidate the factors and processes that might transform teachers, accountants, and doctors into mass murderers. This tradition began with Solomon Asch s studies of conformity, continued through Stanley Milgram's studies of obedience—and culminated with Philip Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment. Collectively, this body of work yielded results that were entirely consistent with Arendt's notion of “the banality of evil.” It seemed that ordinary experimental subjects could be persuaded to inflict pain on others with remarkable ease. Under the right circumstances, almost anyone can become a monster.
This conclusion became received wisdom in the social psychology literature, and was seen as such for more than thirty years; however, in a recent article that appeared in The Psychologist (published by the British Psychological Society), Professor S. Alexander Haslam and Professor Stephen D. Reicher have raised significant questions concerning the legitimacy of this long-held view.
It is a surprising fact that Hannah Arendt never saw the end of Eichmann's trial. If she had, her conclusions would have been very different. Early on, Eichmann made efforts to present himself as an innocent “pen-pusher”—only doing his job. But in due course, the mask began to slip, revealing a Nazi ideologue and committed anti-Semite. He appeared, to later observers, as an individual who'd set about his work with visionary zeal and who was proud of his “achievements.”
Eichmann and his fellow Nazis were capable of atrocities not because they were ordinary decent folk in uniforms but because they believed passionately in their cause.
Recently, a number of revisionist books have been published highlighting this point. In addition, the validity of the classic experimental studies of conformity and obedience—which supported the banality-of-evil hypothesis—have since been challenged on several counts (including methodological weaknesses). Professors Haslam and Reicher assert:
…from Stanford, as from the obedience studies, it is not valid to conclude that people mindlessly and helplessly succumb to brutality. Rather both studies (and also the historical evidence) suggest that brutality occurs when people identify strongly with, brutal group that have a brutal ideology.
According to this new view, people commit atrocities because they believe what they are doing is right. Ordinary people are not closet monsters after all; however, they can become monsters if they subscribe to certain beliefs. Today, social psychologists should no longer be asking the question: How is it that ordinary people can be persuaded to do terrible things? A better question would be: What are the factors that cause ordinary people to identify with brutal belief systems? In the modern world, the answer to this question is needed with some urgency.
The wide appeal of fundamentalist ideologies—of which national socialism is an example—reveals a flaw in our intellectual and emotional apparatus. The world is a complex place, and we yearn for the comforting solidity of absolute truths. Freud posited that human beings have an infantile wish to experience again the certainty of parental declarations, the tidy polarities of good and bad, wrong and right. Such answers keep the chaos at bay—the complexities of reality, our insignificance, and our likely appointment with oblivion.
The first of our existential crises probably coincides with the onset of adolescence—a fact that provides us with a further reason to admire Robert Musil. He sets The Confusions of Young Torless in a military academy—not only to exploit the obvious resonances relating to nationalism and war, but also because such institutions are full of adolescents. Brutality is one of the things that human beings employ to make the world a simpler place—and the generation of Austrians depicted in Musil s masterpiece chose to simplify the world with devastating consequences.
Frank Tallis
London, 2008
“Questioning the Banality of Evil.” S. Alexander Haslam and Stephen D. Reicher. In The Psychologist, vol. 21, no. 1, January
2008. Published by the British Psychological Society.
“Introduction.” J. M. Coetzee. In The Confusions of Young Torless (2001) by Robert Musil. London: Penguin Harmondsworth.
The Death of Sigmund Freud: Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism (2007). Mark Edmundson. London: Bloomsbury
FRANK TALLIS is a practicing clinical psychologist and an expert in obsessional states. He is the author of A Death in Vienna, Vienna Blood, and Fatal Lies, as well as seven nonfiction books on psychology and two previous novels, Killing Time and Sensing Others. He is the recipient of a Writers’ Award from the Arts Council England and the New London Writers Award from the London Arts Board. A Death in Vienna was short-listed for the 2005 Crime Writers’ Association Historical Dagger Award. Tallis lives in London.
Fatal Lies is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead,
is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Frank Tallis
Dossier copyright © 2009 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
MORTALIS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in the United Kingdom by Arrow Books,
an imprint of The Random House Group, Ltd., in 2008.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Tallis, Frank.
Fatal lies : a novel / Frank Tallis.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-795-2
1. Liebermann, Max (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Psychoanalysts—Fiction.