To the extent that we now demand (at least in theory) a moral context for action, humanity can probably be said to have progressed. Yet such progress has brought new problems in its wake; for the very awareness that demands a moral context for action is the same awareness that can question the purposes of any action whatever, and can lead ultimately to paralysis. In mobilising the United States for the Second World War, Roosevelt pointed out that all we have to fear is fear itself. Awareness can foster a greater fear of fear than of the circumstances that engender fear. We are all familiar—through books and films, if not through personal experience—with the soldier who is less afraid of the enemy guns than of something in himself, something which might, at the crucial moment, panic in the face of those guns. It is a tired but none the less valid truism that some price in efficiency will be paid by the soldier who thinks, who questions the cause for which he is fighting, who visualises the circumstances of his own death, who imagines what he will feel at the impact of bullet, bomb or mine. His morale may well flag. He may become utterly panic-stricken and freeze. Heroism in such circumstances is less a triumph over an external foe than over something within himself—a form of self-mastery.
The epic, ‘larger-than-life’ protagonists of nineteenth-century literature—Faust, for example, Prince Andrey Bolkonsky in War and Peace or Ivan Karamazov—perform precisely such an act of self-conquest. It is from this, in large part, that their heroic stature derives. But in the process, they also resolve the dichotomy between what Conrad, towards the end of the century, labelled ‘the man of thought’ and ‘the man of action’.
The achievements of such fictional characters had their counterparts in history. Since the Lutheran Reformation, if not indeed before, the ‘Renaissance man’—the man displaying audacity in both thought and action—had played a dominant rôle in Western civilisation. There were, for example, the figures of the Elizabethan age—soldier-poets like Sir Philip Sidney, explorers and adventurers like Sir Walter Raleigh. In the seventeenth century, there were figures like Rupert of the Rhine, Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein. In the eighteenth century, there was Frederick the Great himself who, between campaigns, consorted with Voltaire, composed music, wrote poetry and speculated in philosophy. In the nineteenth century, there were Nelson and Napoleon. There were some of the dashing yet still reflective commanders of the American Civil War, such as the ‘Grey Ghost’, John Singleton Mosby; there were adventurers like Sir Richard Burton, and explorers like Ludwig Leichart, the prototype for Patrick White’s Voss. All of these individuals were men endowed with the capacity for thought and action. And it was largely from their aptitude for both that they derived their heroic status.
It is by now a cliché that the twentieth century witnessed the decline of traditional concepts of heroism—not just the primitive heroism of Achilles and Cuchulain, but also the heroism of the ‘Renaissance man’. There were, of course, many contributing factors to this decline. The First World War produced heroism on an inflationary scale, like that of German currency in its aftermath; and like German currency, the very concept of heroism became debased and devalued. In the prolonged stalemate of the Western Front, there was not much opportunity for distinctive or decisive heroic action. Anyone, with a bare minimum of effort, could become a hero. One did not even have to lead a localised charge or perform a deed of derring-do. One had only to poke one’s head too far above the parapet of a trench—or, like Saki, according to the accepted story, light three cigarettes on a match—and one promptly became a dead hero. With heroism in itself so plentiful and so easily obtainable, the concept became discredited.
Then, too, there was the debasement of language by the burgeoning organs of the media. In The Man Without Qualities, the protagonist is known only as Ulrich, his surname having been suppressed ‘in order not to embarrass his father’. Ulrich is a man without qualities because he is conscious of possessing, at least in potential, all qualities—which is tantamount to having no qualities because they cancel each other out. As a result, Ulrich is left with the agonising dilemma of what to do with his life—and, even more painful, of what simply to be. For a time he considers becoming ‘a man of importance’. That seeming somewhat too vague, he then entertains the prospect of becoming a genius, which he is certainly sufficiently well equipped to do. But this alternative is also frustrated by what the media have done with language:
The time had already begun when it became a habit to speak of geniuses of the football-field or the boxing-ring, although to every ten or even more explorers, tenors and writers of genius that cropped up in the columns of the newspapers there were not, as yet, more than at the most one genius of a centre-half or one great tactician of the tennis-court. The new spirit of the times had not yet quite found its feet. But just then it happened that Ulrich read somewhere—and it came like a breath of too early summer ripeness blown down the wind—the phrase ‘the race-horse of genius’. It occurred in a report of a spectacular success in a race, and it was quite possible that the writer was far from aware of the magnitude of the inspiration wafted into his pen by the spirit of contemporaneity. Ulrich, however, suddenly, grasped the inevitable connection between his whole career and this genius among race-horses. For to the cavalry, of course, the horse has always been a sacred animal, and during his youthful days of life in the barracks Ulrich had hardly ever heard anything talked about except horses and women. That was what he had fled from to become a man of importance. And now, when, after varied exertions, he might almost have felt entitled to think himself near the summit of his ambitions, he was haled from on high by the horse, which had got there first.4
As Musil ironically demonstrates, both the term and the concept of ‘genius’ could easily be debased by media hacks. A similar debasement of such terms and concepts as ‘hero’, and ‘heroism’ had already, by Musil’s time, begun to occur. If a sports journalist could speak of a ‘race-horse of genius’, he could—and often does—speak of, say, the horse’s ‘heroic effort in the final stretch’. And if comparison with a horse can deter one from wanting to be a genius, it can equally well deter one from wanting to be a hero.
The concept of heroism also implies that, in the fashionable American phrase, ‘one man can make a difference’. Almost by definition, the hero is an individual whose action, to one or another degree, makes a difference. In Homer’s Iliad, the outcome of the Trojan War rests entirely on the actions of the heroic figures Achilles and Odysseus. But as society grows more complex, as chains of command become more attenuated and complicated, as the decision-making process becomes more collectivised and bureaucratic, the opportunities to make a difference become more limited. By the twentieth century, the scope for heroic action of a decisive kind had become dramatically circumscribed. What, for instance, could anyone conceivably have done to make the difference—or even a difference, however modest—on the Western Front during the First World War? One could obviously rescue a comrade, eliminate an enemy machine-gun post, capture a sector of trench. But such feats could do nothing to alter or determine the course of events, unless they were performed in such quantity as to become routine.
In the world of the twentieth century and after, what scope remains for the kind of heroism that was still possible as recently as a century before—for a unity of thought and action that makes some sort of decisive difference? One can no longer play Wyatt Earp and single-handedly ‘clean up’ today’s equivalents of Dodge City and Tombstone. Despite the impressions fostered by film and television, modern law enforcement is more often than not a bureaucratic ‘team effort’, which offers little latitude for the decisive individual initiative of ‘mavericks’. In the sphere of exploration, there are precious few uncharted territories to discover, no lost cities to seek, no Northwest Passage to be found. Terrestrial exploration now more closely resembles sport than anything else; and even the vaunted ‘conquest of space’ is a bureaucratic ‘team effort’ which, like law enforcement, offers little latitude for decisive individual i
nitiative. One cannot simply find a patron, recruit a crew, build or buy a ship and set off into the unknown as did the maritime adventurers of five centuries ago. Even war, the traditional arena for heroism, affords restricted opportunities for it today. One can no longer lead the flamboyantly colourful cavalry charge that determines the outcome of the battle. In modern warfare, the only opportunity for decisive individual heroism lies in covert operations, in guerrilla activity, in sabotage and missions behind enemy lines—the sort of thing associated with the Long Range Desert Groups, or with the SAS and other special forces of our own era. Even then the individual’s actions may not necessarily be decisive. They may simply be contributing factors—and relatively minor contributing factors at that—to the eventual outcome.
It is difficult to imagine a sphere of today’s world in which an individual’s behaviour, combining thought and action, can make a significant difference—can qualify, in other words, as ‘heroism’, on something more than a circumscribed, parochial or localised level. During the peak of the Cold War, espionage represented one of the few such spheres remaining. Thus James Bond could become a hero of the sixties. Even then, most people recognised that Bond was more fantasy than anything else, and that the world of espionage was much more accurately portrayed by Len Deighton and John le Carré; and today, the dashing spy whose derring-do saves ‘civilisation as we know it’ is little more than escapism, camp or farce. What remains? Perhaps the best answer to that question offers scant comfort. For if there is still one realm in which a semblance of ‘heroism’ is still possible, it is crime. Thus the criminal can become a romantic figure and a rôle model for a generation of youth unable to find heroes elsewhere. In reality, as opposed to Hollywood, Wyatt Earp may have been transformed into corporate man, a cog in the wheel of an ever more automated, ever more ‘high-tech’ police force, but Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde, the Mafia ‘hit man’ of today and, in Northern Ireland, his terrorist paramilitary counterpart can still retain a spurious mystique of romantic individual glamour—can still become, according to the popular phrase, a ‘contemporary folk hero’.
The past century has been an age of celluloid heroes, mass-produced by the film and television industry. Their sheer prevalance, and the appeal they exercise, attest to our perennial need for such figures; and our need is all the greater because current history and reality contains so few of them.
Although the First World War could accommodate innumerable localised heroic deeds, it allowed no sustained heroic activity, and certainly not an heroic life, except in peripheral theatres of operation, where a man like T. E. Lawrence could make his mark. The rhetoric of politics and the jargon of the media both indulge in a facile, indiscriminate hyperbole which debases language and renders such words as ‘hero’, ‘heroism’ and ‘heroic’ meaningless. The nature of modern society provides less scope for decisive heroic action, and our own pervasive awareness of implications, ramifications, repercussions and consequences often constitutes an inhibiting factor which dissociates the ‘man of thought’ from the ‘man of action’. As a result, the dominant protagonist of twentieth-century literature is one or another variant of what critics call the ‘anti-hero’. According to these same critics, the ‘anti-hero’ is the epitome, and most accurate reflection, of twentieth-century man.
Who or what precisely is the ‘anti-hero’? Literary and cultural criticism has devoted endless pages of analysis to this question; for the ‘anti-hero’ can appear in as many guises as can the hero. Ultimately, however, he conforms to one of four basic patterns. He can be a ‘man of action’, who lacks the awareness and capacity for thought required to cope with his circumstances. Such is the dilemma of Franz Biberkopf, the protagonist of Alfred Döblin’s influential novel Berlin, Alexanderplatz, and of Joe Christmas in Faulkner’s Light in August. Alternatively, the ‘anti-hero’ can be a ‘man of thought’, whose hyperconscious awareness negates his capacity for action—Mann’s Tonio Kroger, for instance, Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus and all the other artist-protagonists of twentieth-century fiction. Third, the ‘anti-hero’ can be the kind of figure who populates Kafka’s work, incapable of effective thought or effective action, a hapless victim at the mercy of an alien and inimical reality. Or he can be like Musil’s Ulrich in The Man Without Qualities, potentially capable of both thought and action, but trapped in a milieu which allows the effective exercise of neither.
In whichever guise the twentieth-century ‘antihero’ appears, he differs from his heroic nineteenth-century predecessors precisely in his inability to bring thought and action together and exercise them in an effective manner. It is this which makes him appear ineffectual, ‘small’, impotent or even puerile in comparison with the likes of Faust, Ivan Karamazov or Prince Andrey—and with Patrick White’s eponymous protagonist in Voss, the creation of a twentieth-century artistic imagination but placed in an earlier historical context.
The ‘anti-hero’ is not, of course, unique to Germany. He is a product of twentieth-century civilisation as a whole; and, as such, he can be found everywhere—in English, Irish and continental literature, in the literature of North and South America, from the dawn of the twentieth century to the present day. But it could be argued that he is accorded his fullest, most comprehensive, most exhaustive and obsessive treatment by Germanic artists of the first half of the century—by Mann, Musil, Broch, Rilke, Kafka, Döblin, Hesse and numerous lesser-known figures. What is more, he performs, in Germanic literature, a very particular function. The dissociation in Germanic literature between the ‘man of thought’ and the ‘man of action’ mirrors, in individual terms, the collective identity crisis—the dissociation between a political entity based on nationalism, and Goethe’s ideal of a nation dedicated to culture and the spirit.
Is it coincidental that the two most monstrous totalitarian ‘isms’ of the twentieth century took root in Germany and Russia, the two nations most torn by a collective identity crisis, most in quest of a self-definition and therefore most vulnerable? Not if one again draws an analogy to the individual undergoing a personal identity crisis, whose quest for self-definition all too readily leads him into the hands of a petty Führer—the guru, or the cult leader. In both instances, the individual and the collective, the need for self-definition is accorded an ersatz fulfilment which conforms to what Stefan George called ‘das Leichte’, ‘the facile’. By means of ‘das Leichte’, the Führer, whether great or petty, fosters more than just a sense of solidarity and belonging. He also fosters a sense of group identity, to compensate for the abdication of individual identity. And this group identity will invariably be that of an ‘elect’, a ‘chosen few’—or a ‘master race’. Each member of the collective entity is handed a ready-made and prefabricated identity. He is ‘one of the saved’, ‘one of the enlightened’, one of those entrusted with a destiny higher and more exalted than that of other people; and this complacent arrogation of superiority offsets the vacuum within. Identity and self-definition are no longer to be sought and found within oneself, but in the group as a whole. And through the group as a whole, one can acquire the qualities one lacks in oneself, including heroism.
The totalitarian ‘isms’ of our age, whether Left or Right on the political spectrum, propagate a kind of collective heroism. The ‘People’ as a whole become heroic, whether they be the German ‘Volk’ of Nazism or the ‘proletarian masses’ of Marxism-Leninism. Again and again in the rhetoric of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, as well as in that of Mussolini’s Italy and Mao’s China, words like ‘heroism’ and ‘heroic’ are repeated like a drumbeat. It is not the individual that is heroic, however, but the collective. A grandiose collective ideal of heroism is proclaimed, while individual awareness is negated or eclipsed through a semi-hypnotic state induced by mindless chanting and incantatory rhythm, through an air-tight system of belief which requires only adherence and precludes any independence of mentality. And as an adhesive component for the collective-as-hero, a scapegoat will be put forward, wh
ich inspires even greater fear than that inspired by the unknown and unpredictable elements within man himself—a scapegoat who distracts one from the potential dangers of introspection, and focuses one’s energy on a supposed external threat. In near-Manichaean conflict with this supposed threat, collective heroism is seemingly attained—or, at least, promised.
The meretricious character of such collective heroism should be self-evident enough. If it absolves—or, more accurately, deprives—the individual of responsibility, it also deprives him of his very individuality, of everything Western civilisation considers most uniquely sacred. And the putative collective heroism offered by modern totalitarianism is also profoundly retrograde—a return to the ‘primitive’. It is, in effect, the mindless berserker bravery of Achilles again, divorced from a moral context and justified solely by an enforced unanimity and uniformity. It does nothing to fulfil the need for self-definition, either individual or collective. It offers no satisfactory solution to the individual or the collective identity crisis. It fails to re-integrate the dissociated spheres of thought and action. At best, it constitutes a form of psychological and spiritual anaesthesia.
Claus von Stauffenberg represents an alternative. Like T. E. Lawrence and perhaps a dozen or so others, he is a lineal successor to the epic, ‘larger-than-life’ heroic figures of nineteenth-century literature and nineteenth-century history—a ‘real life’ avatar, in a sense, of Prince Andrey Bolkonsky. He is also an heroic figure of particular relevance to our century: a man whose capacity for action is equalled, yet not inhibited, by his capacity for thought. In his own personality, he reconciles political commitment with moral vision, and with Goethe’s ideal of dedication to culture and the spirit. To that extent, he embodies a resolution to Germany’s collective identity crisis. To that extent, too, he exemplifies what the German people at their best can be—and not just the German people, but all of us, and our civilisation as a whole.
Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie Page 33