I will watch with interest to see whether the Catholic Church, faced with the truth about poor little Otto Schimek, will decide that this is a failed martyr and quietly snuff out his cult. I hope not. Young Poles will not give him up, anyway. As a deserter rather than as a man who refused to commit an atrocity, he is still the patron of the ‘Freedom and Peace’ movement, a small Greenish opposition group which recently tried to demonstrate at his grave but was dispersed by police.
The meagre data about Schimek which remains, mostly letters to his family, show that he hated being a soldier and in particular disliked the duty to kill. He had been called up at the age of only 17. To his mother, he wrote: ‘I will aim away so as not to hit anyone. After all, they want to go home just like I do.’ For these views, he was bullied and mistreated until, finally and pathetically, he ran away in enemy territory.
It’s worth thinking about the pressures upon Schimek to conform. Fear, to begin with, of course: the ruthless punishment awaiting any soldier in the German army who disobeyed. But Schimek also stood up to the seductive thrust of Nazi ideology, inviting him to numb himself against the human identity of others classified not only as enemies of the Reich but as inferior subhumans, with no claim to arouse normal instincts of compassion or fraternity.
Finally, this boy without any resources of education or privilege resisted the temptation to ‘double’ himself. By this, I mean the practice of dividing the moral world into two: that of ‘home’ in which one remains guided by the conventional moral standards of one’s family, and the ‘soldiering world’ in which a new, second self acts in accordance with utterly different standards without any real sense of contradiction. This division was too much for Schimek. Whenever he aimed his rifle, he wondered first what his mother and sisters would say.
For his army companions, Schimek probably seemed a despicable weakling. With battalions of Schimeks, nobody wins a war. But it is also true that this boy remained a whole personality which the entire weight of Hitlerite tyranny and ideology could not split.
And perhaps the disappearance of the ‘martyr against atrocity’ element makes Otto Schimek more universal rather than less. Kisiel calls his desertion ‘a European gesture.’ He didn’t run away because he was Austrian, or because he admired Poland, or even – as far as one can see – because he was anti-Nazi, although he probably was.
He deserted because mass obedience and moral self-mutiliation in the name of the State made no sense to him. It is the Greens rather than the Church who have a claim to Schimek.
To shoot, you have to close one eye. Schimek couldn’t do this: both eyes stayed open. He said naively: ‘I’m not interested in war.’ I suspect that now, and only now, he will become a real hero of our time.
[1987
Remember Them in Song
It’s more than 41 years ago that an American sergeant blew the Kaiser’s head off. His battery had arrived on the outskirts of Koblenz, already so comprehensively mashed to bits that there was almost nothing vertical left to aim at. The exception was the gigantic monument to Emperor Wilhelm I, on the spit of land where the Moselle runs into the Rhine.
It was well over a hundred feet high, counting the equestrian statue of the Emperor on top. A few minutes later, it was considerably shorter. The head flew off (it now rests with a cross expression in the garden of a museum), and was followed by the body and the horse. All that remains is the pedestal, itself about the size of the British Museum, decorated with scowling eagles and stylised pythons in the neo-heathen manner that was popular in Germany at the end of last century.
I read the other day that the town of Koblenz is thinking of putting the Kaiser back. It would put the burghers back some £3 million to cast and erect a new statue. There are many Germans who have moral and aesthetic doubts, as well as worries about the cost. The plinth is ugly as it is, and would be uglier still with the statue on it. Politically, it stands for an age of noisy self-assertion and hubris which Germans prefer to forget.
I am grateful for that preference. All the same, the colossi of that period which survive are fascinating to me. They are actually so big that their ridiculous and sinister elements may seem to matter less. There is Hermann, conqueror of the Roman legions, glaring from his column over the treetops of the Teutoburger Forest. There is Kaiser Wilhelm I (again), towering above the road to Berlin at the Porta Westfalica, near Minden. There is the wreck of the Tannenberg Monument, now in Poland, where – so I’m told – the 10-ton heads of Prussian heroes lie with their broken noses pressed into the grass. And, best or – depending how you see it – worst of all, there is the memorial to the 1813 Battle of the Nations at Leipzig, the Völkerschlachtdenkmal.
From the outside, the thing looks as if a stone Zeppelin had half-buried itself in the earth. Inside, the eye slowly gets used to the darkness of the great vault until one makes out the masks of barbarian warriors brooding far overhead. It is very cold, but that’s not why the hair begins to prickle on the spine. Two lines return, from Brecht: ‘… the womb is fertile yet – From whence THAT crept.’
Why so big? Partly it’s a deliberate violating of ‘civilised’ scale, another aspect of the taste which insisted on pagan motifs – Aztec, Nordic, anything as long as it was huge, cruel and non-Christian. But partly, of course, it’s bluff. These are the expressions of a ‘late nation’ not quite confident that it is as tough as it pretends to be. Almost all these monsters, including the ziggurat-pedestal at Koblenz, belong to the period between German unification as an Empire in 1871 and the outbreak of war in 1914.
The further away you get from the reality of war, the bigger the monuments get. The Soviet Union shows this wonderfully. Its war memorials were never small. But in recent years, as the Great Patriotic War dwindles into the past, there has been a mad inflation of scale. There is ‘Motherland,’ the statue on the Mamaev Hill at Volgograd, whose visitors are proportionately the size of ladybirds. It would take a fire-ladder even to reach the ‘Motherland’ small toe. Or there is the plan – now I believe under criticism – to remove a whole hill on the outskirts of Moscow to build a war monument which would make the Arc de Triomphe look like a keyhole.
The Great Patriotic War is now an official cult of a rather late-Roman kind, the temples of Jupiter growing taller as personal feeling or faith grows slighter. These are monuments to State power rather than to the individual dead. They resemble the mausoleum which still glowers over the Romanian steppe at Adamclisi, built after Trajan’s victory over the Dacians to remind the conquered of the strength of Rome.
Infinitely more touching are local war memorials. In their classic period, between about 1870 and the 1920s, they not only convey real grief but often tell a great deal about popular culture. In France, naked women can be seen pressing the weary poilu to their breasts. In Britain, absolutely literal soldiers of stone or bronze display every piling-swivel, pouch-buckle and puttee-eyelace of weapons and equipment, as if the loss of one detail would begin the slow betrayal of forgetting those who died.
In Germany, the memorials of the First World War are often highly stylised, almost Expressionist: patterns of helmeted heads and shouldered rifles in relief. Here grief is made communal. ‘Eternal Fatherland, for love of Thee not one too many fell….’
I hate those words. But there is genuine sorrow in them, as well as blind nationalism. I hate them less, anyway, than the revolting half-jest inscribed on the back of the Machine-Gun Corps memorial in London at Hyde Park Corner, now on a traffic island which – perhaps fortunately – is hard to reach. It is a text: I Samuel 18.7. It reads: ‘Saul hath slain his thousands, but David his ten thousands.’
The Russians, I suppose, will carry on their competition of gigantism until they have built a monument which is actually visible to the naked eye from the moon. (Incidentally, the Great Wall of China is not: that was a piece of Cultural Revolution hype.) But in the West, this sort of thing is out of fashion. Victory columns, triumphal arches, even statues have come to seem ‘inap
propriate’ – that primmest of words. Instead, there is the discretion of the Vietnam memorial in Washington, where the names of the American dead float in dark reflections of sky and trees. Grown uncertain of one another’s private thoughts, we hesitate to inflict one symbolised ‘view’ on the public.
There is a puzzle here. Print and television now obsessively mark every public or personal anniversary. Yet the gravestone is vanishing: I would guess that most of those who die in Britain this year will have no solid memorial. People, I am sure, still wish to remember. But between old ways of keeping memory and new ones not yet chosen, there is a gap.
Music remains. Old soldiers in Germany gather and sing: ‘Ich hat’ einen Kameraden …,’ which some democrats suspect as militaristic but which I find deeply touching – no politics, no nonsense, just mourning for dead friends.
And it’s not just a soldier’s song, anyway. German miners sing it too, when they meet in their black uniforms and black-plumed shakos to commemorate workmates who have perished. Most miners would rather be remembered in a song. A monument marking a colliery disaster which essayed any rhetoric about sacrifice would be obscene.
Of all memorials, I would choose the lament for Donald Ban MacCrimmon. Nobody is sure who composed it. For this sort of pipe music, it is unusually long and highly abstract. Its infinity of variations and grace-notes slowly develop their interlace until it seems that every hour in the life of this man – not an important person, killed in an almost accidental scuffle at Moy Hall after the battle of Culloden – is caught and recorded in one of these minute sparkles and sprays of sound. Not in basalt or bronze, but invisibly, impassively, in the air itself, the days alive of Donald Ban MacCrimmon are preserved for ever.
[1987
Sources
The following pieces first appeared in the Observer, whose permission to reproduce we gratefully acknowledge:
Chords of Identity in a Minor Key; The Nostalgia Game; ‘Tell the Children …’; The Lost World of Small-Town England; Dead Houses; Settlers and Natives; Caring Colonists; Intelligentsia Wanted; The Spreading Slime; Dracula in Britain; Greater Privilege Hath No Man…; The English Riot; Enforcing ‘Culture’; Stonehenge and its Power Struggles; The Means of Grace, the Hope of Glory; Secret Passions of the British; A Spectator Sport; Policing the Market-Place; Druids; Mr Gladstone the Land Raider; Gladstone’s Defeat and Our Loss; Telling Sid; The Case for a Bill of Rights; The No-Go Area; A Dumb-Bell World; Thatcher’s Dream; The Great Cash-In; Capital; The Land and the People; A Scottish Temple; Coals in the Bath, Sun on the Brain; Journalists Behind the Wire; Tiring the Romans; Axel’s Castles; The Cost of Bitburg; The Shadows Over France’s Feast; Greek Civil War – Rambo-Style; The Strange Death of the Peasantry; Apartheid in Europe; Toads, Journalists, Cats and Policemen; Frontiers; Gorbachov’s Gift; Changing Partners; The Polish Ghosts; Piłsudski, or How to Ignore Defeat; 1956 How Poland Got Away With It; Requiem for an Old Piano Banger; Invisible Men; The Berlin Wall as Holy Monster; Why Burning People Is Always Wrong; ‘You Lose Freedom by Fighting for It’; Suffering Writing; The Unsung Heroes of Chernobyl; Russian Mist; Dream of Escape. Bad Dreams; Picts; Brothers; Nations on Parade; F3080; Exiles; Terrorists; Alive and Well; Spies; Witness; Critics; Media Heroes; Tempers; Sex; Precision; Pity, Love and the Accident of Birth; The Good Soldier Schimek; Remember Them in Song Not Stone.
The English Bourgeoisie first appeared in Bananas, 1976.
‘Don’t Be Afraid – and Don’t Steal? was an Inaugural Lecture at the SNP Annual National Conference, Dunoon, September 1986, and is reproduced courtesy of SNP Publications Department.
Scottish Contradictions was a lecture at the Dunblane Consultation of the Church of Scotland 1976.
Last Leader, Traitors and Diaries first appeared in the London Review of Books.
Ancient Britons and the Republican Dream first appeared in The Political Quarterly, Vol. 57 no. 3, whose kind permission to reprint the essay is gratefully acknowledged.
The ‘Bildung’ of Barbie and The Death Doctors first appeared in The New York Review of Books, and are reproduced here courtesy of the New York Review.
1 This was written in 1976: these quoted prices have only an archaeological interest.
1 It has been pointed out to me that linguists now reject this. The etymology of ‘London’ remains unknown.
1 ‘London Reviews’ (Chatto and Windus, London, 1985).
2 P. Wright, On Living in an Old Country’ (Verso, London, 1985).
3 L. Siedentop, ‘The Strange Life of a Liberal England’, The Times Literary Supplement, September 1985.
4 L. Siedentop, ‘The Impotence of the British Middle Classes’, The Spectator, 30 December, 1978.
5 ‘On Living in an Old Country’, op. cit.
1 Pantheon, 1983.
1 Hamish Hamilton, London, 1983.
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