This Is Where We Came In
Page 12
By the end of the novel, as a result of Diederich’s machinations, old Buck is ravaged in body and spirit, humiliated and ignored. There is nothing comic about it. This, Mann shows us, is what tyranny, pettiness, and demagoguery can do to intelligence, generosity, and justice. Just as Diederich’s rise in the reflected glory of his emperor is charted with fine, classic inevitability, so are Buck’s downfall and disgrace charted. Together their intersecting paths show a schizophrenic Germany, enlightened but bedeviled.
Alas, there is little hope to be had from the next generation. Wolfgang Buck is a lost soul in the Germany depicted, careening to self-destruction. He has neither the conviction nor the energy nor the selflessness of his father. A thoroughgoing modern spirit, he has only insight. From his mouth come the most prophetic and frightening words of all, during a discussion with Diederich about the emperor’s magnetism:
“What matters personally to each of us is not that we should really change the world very much, but that we should create in ourselves a sense of life, and a feeling that we are causing changes. That only requires talent, and the Emperor has plenty.”
Diederich is horrified but Wolfgang persists: the emperor is a deliberately created and projected personality, he argues, useful for keeping people’s minds off issues like bread and work. He further asks,
“I suppose you do not know whom history will designate as the representative type of this era?”
“The Emperor,” said Diederich.
“No,” Buck replied. “The actor.”
Naturally this quip has a particular tang for American readers, who have within recent memory been subjected to an actor as president. But beyond that irony vibrates the cool, canny voice of Machiavelli, drifted north. In the tradition of astute and enduring political thinkers, Mann has predicted the most insidious public development of our time, the substitution of image for character, and the pervasive falsity it generates.
Through audacity and exaggeration, this amazing novel induces terror and recognition. The pleasures it offers are not delicate but boldly startling, like expressionist painting. Since my taste usually runs to the more subtle, I have wondered why I recall it so often, with a shiver. I think it must be the author’s integrity, which animates the sordid events with passion, like blessed light breaking through smog. It is the work of an artist in despair over the history of his country and its future, a man with immense powers of expression and vision, wringing the truth out of his besieged spirit to warn the world. The force of his honesty, and its cost, are irresistible.
They should be, at any rate. As we all know, the world didn’t listen. Heinrich Mann lived obscurely in Hollywood, growing weaker and dependent on his brother. In 1949 he received many invitations to return to Germany (the Soviet sector), where his work was well known; he was promised honor as well as financial security. But he hesitated. And in 1950, in California, he died. Today everyone knows the work of Thomas Mann, self-styled “nonpolitical man.”
Letters from Robben Island
My brother,
I cannot write this to my wife, who worries enough already. You must see the authorities about my health. The headaches persist, my vision is blurred, I fear something serious. I was in hospital, Cape Town, for tests, but they gave me no results and after three days sent me back to the cell. I can’t lift the stones so there are beatings and spare diet punishment, which leave me weaker. Tell them my condition, ask lawyer to get treatment. Otherwise I’ll die in here for sure and I must not because the children need me. Greetings to your wife and our parents. Help me, brother, my last hope, before it’s too late, my words blur even as
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In 2006, on a trip to South Africa, I visited Robben Island, where during the years of apartheid political prisoners were held in wretched conditions and assaulted regularly by their white guards. Robben Island is a half hour’s boat ride from Cape Town. You buy tickets at a booth, like a tourist embarking on a pleasure excursion. I felt uncomfortable visiting this once dreadful place as a tourist, but that was the only way to see it. I needn’t have felt uncomfortable: the people around me were doing the same thing I was. Maybe my feeling was shame, a more private emotion. After we docked at Robben Island, which appeared flat, desolate, and sere, like a desert island of lore,
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we were ushered onto buses that took us over dirt roads to the main building, a low, sand-colored structure; there we were divided into groups. Each group was assigned a guide, who was a former political prisoner.
The guide described in detail what life as a political prisoner was like: the food, the clothing, the work, the physical abuse. He said the prisoners tried to educate the white guards, who were ignorant and bigoted, and they also educated new prisoners, having resolved that their time in prison should as far as possible be useful. Regarding education, the prisoners’ motto was “each one teach one.” Our guide was remarkable for his lack of acrimony about his ten-year imprisonment. He said he’d
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come out not enraged, as I would have expected, but convinced that only education and political action would change conditions in South Africa.
Much as I was stunned and horrified by what I saw and heard, what pierced me most deeply was the restriction on the prisoners’ letters, perhaps because I am accustomed to measuring and scrutinizing my written words. The letters prisoners wrote were limited to 120 words, including the salutation and conclusion. Any extra words were cut by the censors, literally with a scissors. Often they cut material that was innocuous, either out of spite or an excess of suspicion or zeal. One hundred twenty words are not very much, especially if you’re permitted to write only one
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What words would someone choose to send a loved one, with only 120 at his disposal? Surely the letters, cut up as they were, must have appeared disjointed and fragmentary to those who received them. I began imagining letters the prisoners might write, 120-word letters.
For economy’s sake, they might omit parts of speech, using only essentials, for instance:
quarry move rocks blistering sun no hat
guards beatings thirst hunger
lights all night no reading
piss bucket rain solitary chains sick
The problem with my imagined letters, though, was that they could never have been sent. Letters couldn’t mention political activities or prison conditions, which obviously omits what was crucial to the writers. My letters would be scissored to bits.
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Dear Robert,
I have sad news for you. Two nights ago, assault on prisoners because of hunger strike, not that reason is required. Customary beatings. When they were over, your father lay unconscious. Had been weak ever since he returned from three months in isolation, then injured his back, fell in quarry. Was carried to doctor but we have had no word, I fear the worst. Contact lawyers for more information, they tell us nothing. This will be hard to bear but better truth from me than official letter of lies, who knows when. Tell your mother gently, do what you can for her. We all grieve with you, he was brave till end, take courage until this nightmare is
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I read some books to learn more about conditions on Robben Island. It was first used as a prison by the Portuguese in 1525; it remained a prison later under the Dutch and British, and served as a leper colony and an insane asylum.
Years before apartheid was dismantled, I heard the African American novelist John Williams speak about the brutal South African regime to a mostly white audience. His bitter closing words: Who here knows how to spell Robben Island?
Now that Nelson Mandela’s presidency has come and gone, as has the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, people are probably even less aware of Robben Island. It still interests me, though. Besides the conditions, it’s the restrictions on the letters.
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Or they might expand a bit more:
Dearest, you ask what life is like: quarry hammer stone to
gravel rain wind no hat no shoes socks no stopping singing talking Today shovel trip fall limp doctor back to work aches back legs mealy-meal sandy, flies in bowl night warders beating strip searching shouting no newspapers radio try studying waiting for books censors eyes sting need spectacles lights burn all night sleep damp mat concrete floor Enough. Write me of you, children. Colin in school still? little one read yet? Your parents sisters brother? Roof fixed? You my love? Your knee? In my dreams always
16 words to spare love wait for me patience end will come faith
forever your Joshua
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words aren’t much, especially if you’re permitted only one letter every six months: this during the worst period, 1962–1966, described in Neville Alexander’s Robben Island Dossier, a 1984 report to the international community, as the “years of hell.” From 1967 to 1970, the rules relaxed marginally; one letter a month. (In 1971–1972 treatment grew harsher again, in what the report calls a “pendulum policy.”) What words, given such limitations? Poets have thrived on formal limits, meter and rhyme and the rigorous rules of sonnets, sestinas and such. Freedom within certain boundaries is the principle behind those forms (as behind some forms of government), and great poems have resulted. However, I doubt that the Robben Island
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prisoners would have found any virtues in the rules imposed on them.
Indeed, I can’t imagine what they might have written, besides inquiring after the health and welfare of their families, which would make for rather dull letters. Dearest Mother, I’m doing well, my foot is all healed. How are you and my sisters? Has Nellie’s asthma improved? Did you manage to get the TV working again? I couldn’t compose such letters. Could the prisoners? They must have composed in their heads other letters, the ones they wished they could write. Those were the letters I was imagining. But as I did, I developed doubts about whether I could even imagine them. What did I know about prison life, never
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My dear Mother,
Don’t worry about me, I’m doing fine. My foot is all healed from the pick-axe and I’m getting strong muscles. I think of you each day and pray for your health and that of my father. The men here help me as I am the youngest. Please ask the lawyer about my enrollment in university. If you can find the money and he obtains permission I can continue my studies here and complete my degree. We have classes when we can, after the day’s work, history and economics, but books are scarce and censored. I miss your good cooking—today I found a horsefly in the soup! Luckily he did not drink much.
Your loving son,
William
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The buses took us to the quarries where the prisoners worked, huge, sandy open spaces where they crushed stones and sometimes moved piles of stones uselessly from one place to another, as was the practice in Nazi concentration camps. Other work, I learned from my reading, included chopping wood, repairing roads and dragging seaweed from the beaches. We saw the small bungalows where the white warders lived. This part of the island, far from the prisoners’ quarters, was not desertlike, but rather resembled a barracks village with uniform houses in uniform rows, each with a bit of yard outside, even a few swing sets, a wagon, a bicycle; the guards lived there with their families, so the yards must have
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been used by children. There were also sports fields for the guards. Nevertheless, it didn’t resemble a place where anyone would want to live or raise a family.
The guide led us through the barracks or dormitories where the political prisoners slept; we saw the tiny concrete cells containing only the buckets used as toilets. We saw Nelson Mandela’s cell. I was expecting that this would induce awe, as if an aura of Mandela’s courage and resilience still inhabited the room. But I had to admit, to my chagrin, that the cell was merely an empty, bleak space like the others.
We saw the large mess hall—long wooden tables and benches, and on the walls, charts of the precise
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What did I know about prison life, never mind a South African prison? True, I had read books and talked to many South Africans, including several who’d left the country in frustration and disgust. A writer should be able to imagine herself into any situation—that’s what imagination is for. Even so, I felt a sense of presumption. Did I have the right to attempt these letters? Would they sound absurdly ignorant?
Such doubts assail all writers no matter what they’re writing. But they felt particularly powerful to me, maybe because South Africa was so far away and the prisoners’ lives and struggles so remote from my own experience. And then I was suspicious of my reasons for visiting Robben
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My son,
I know it’s a heavy burden to be without your father, and your mother not well. Remember how proud I am that you’re behaving like a man, though I wish you might have enjoyed your boyhood longer. Here you are with me constantly. Thoughts of you, your mother and sisters keep me strong, counting the days until I see you again—978. Meanwhile take care of your mother and sisters and above all, keep at your studies. When you are tempted to fall into idleness or despair, struggle against it with all your might. Never be ashamed that your father is in prison—you understand the cause. See that your mother gets some rest and don’t let her
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wall charts of the precise amounts of food allotted for each meal: a few ounces of bread, soup made of powder and water, mealy-meal (maize) and tea. The charts listed quantities of food for each racial group, with Africans receiving the smallest amount. Five diets were cited in the Robben Island Dossier: A for European females, B for European males, C for nonwhite females, D for Indian and Colored (mixed-race) males, and F—an all-maize diet—for black African males. Indians and Colored people got extra sugar for coffee. The “spare diet” punishment was boiled maize and soup powder in water twice daily; “three meals” punishment meant no food at all that day. Frequently the “meals” included sand and insects.
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suspicious of my reasons for visiting Robben Island and of my reactions on seeing the rock quarries, the mess hall, Mandela’s cell and all the rest. Was there some secret prurient thrill in being so close to suffering, a suffering I hadn’t had to endure but wanted a visceral inkling of by proxy, by way of others’ suffering? I’ve never wanted to visit Auschwitz or Dachau or the other German camps now transformed into tourist attractions. I even consider the transformation of these places into tourist attractions a form of vulgarity. On the other hand, people are naturally curious and have a right to see the residue of history, which might serve some educational purpose. Do those tourists who visit
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As with food, clothing was allotted by race. Until 1970 only Colored people and Indians were issued long pants, shoes, socks, a shirt and jacket for the work in the quarries. In the early “years of hell,” and indeed until 1970, black African prisoners had no shoes, socks, long pants or warm clothes to protect them against the winter winds coming off the sea. They wore shorts all year round. Colored people and Indians had hats, Africans a cap. No one had hats suitable for rain or the sizzling summer sun. They were given only a few blankets in cold weather, described in the report as “old, thin, dirty, smelly.” In 1974 prisoners were issued underwear for the first time.
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Dearest Mother,
Madiba was put in solitary today, on my account. I stopped work, my head pounding so badly in the hot sun, the guard came to strike me, as expected. I only needed a moment’s rest. But I didn’t expect that Madiba, working alongside me in the quarry, would step in. He grasped the guard’s raised arm and said calmly to let me alone, I was just a boy and doing the best I could. Then three guards attacked us both and dragged him off. I feel very bad about this. Everything feels different without him, morale lower. He kept us going. I hope he’s back soon. If you can get word out maybe they’ll release him—his reputation.
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tourists who visit Auschwitz or other camps become more humane as a result? Who can say? In any case, I could visualize the barracks, the smokestacks, the piles of shoes well enough. I had read plenty about them, and reading, for me, makes things as vivid as actual seeing, or more so. I’d never wanted to write from the point of view of those prisoners. Maybe the South African prisoners’ experiences drew me because although they were more remote geographically, they happened during my lifetime. While I was attending school, sleeping in a bed, dreaming of future opportunities, others were breaking rocks, getting beaten, and sleeping in narrow concrete cells. Was I seeking some sort of atonement for my privileges?
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Many of the island’s political prisoners tried to pursue their studies and to keep up with events on the outside, but this was overwhelmingly difficult. No newspapers or radio were allowed, and study privileges were withdrawn as a punishment for any perceived misbehavior. Prisoners could not apply to university programs unless they had enough money in a bank account; the installment plan available to ordinary students was not offered. Because it was hard to study right after the day’s work, prisoners asked to be allowed to sleep for a few hours after work, then resume their studies at night, but no reading was permitted after eleven o’clock, even though the lights were kept on all night. Prisoners had to reapply
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for study privileges each year. No law studies were permitted; no scientific journals were available. The number of books was restricted, and reference works and encyclopedias were unavailable. Often prisoners waited months for books they had ordered; they weren’t permitted to lend books among themselves. But by far the worst restriction was censorship: no material including references to Marxism, Lenin, Russia, China, Cuba, socialism, communism, revolution, civil war, violence, Africa, anti-apartheid literature or political literature written by blacks. Nonetheless, despite these limitations, prisoners held their own classes.