Leonard Cohen and Philosophy

by Holt, Jason

  During the war Germany had been perceived as the archenemy and Russia as an indispensable ally; afterwards, for political reasons, the roles shifted. As a result, the few depictions of the Holocaust produced during that time were particularly striking. For example, The Diary of Anne Frank, a 1955 Broadway box-office hit play adaptation of the Dutch text (adapted in turn into a film in 1959) was structured as a universal melodrama with a moving and uplifting ending—a quotation from the diary that read: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

  Among various notable events that sparked widespread public interest in the Holocaust in the early 1960s, and finally resulted in what we see as the contemporary obsession with memory, one seems to be of particular importance not only in general but also to Cohen himself—the capture, trial, and subsequent death sentence for Adolf Eichmann, eponymous subject of one of Cohen’s poems. Although this event caught both the CIA and the American public by surprise, it coincided with favorable political and social conditions. With the death of Stalin, the Krushchev thaw, and the end of McCarthysim, the Cold War entered a new era. The need for a clearly defined enemy diminished. The West was now ready to face both the victims of the Holocaust and its perpetrators.

  The court proceedings, which lasted for a few months, were broadcast on television and radio throughout Europe and in the US—a historical first. This had also been the first time since 1945 that the Holocaust received widespread newspaper coverage, including daily analyses, editorials, contextualizing articles, and so on. People gathered to watch and listen to both Eichmann, the bureaucrat who logistically organized the destruction of European Jews, and an endless procession of witnesses who described the horrors they endured in minute detail. It was a spectacle—directed as such by Israeli authorities—through which the atrocities inscribed themselves in the Western collective imagination. Peter Novick has observed: “As part of this process there emerged in American culture a distinct thing called ‘The Holocaust’—an event in its own right, not simply a subdivision of general Nazi barbarism” (p. 144).

  The most influential interpretation of the Eichmann trial was the concept of the banality of evil, coined by Hannah Arendt (recently famous thanks to von Trotta’s 2012 biopic) in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), a book collecting her reports from the courtroom proceedings for the New Yorker. She presented the accused as a bland, shallow, mindless man—“thoughtless and speechless”—motivated not by ideological zealousness, but by private ambitions and the principle of obedience. Eichmann’s ordinariness—which seems to have made a deep impression on Cohen as well—was underlined by the fact that he excelled at nothing prior to the Final Solution—he was a mediocre violinist, a poor student, and a boring companion. Contemporary evil—according to Arendt—is banal, because even deeds that are horrifying and committed on a gigantic scale are not a result of pathology or ingenious wickedness, but rather petty motives and seemingly meaningless people.

  These reflections coincided with the results of the famous psychological experiment by Stanley Milgram, conducted in 1961 in an attempt to resolve the “Eichmann question” posed by Arendt. It showed that ordinary people would willingly and voluntarily administer pain and suffering to others when pressured by an authority figure. Although the social diagnoses of Arendt and Milgram have been modified and subjected to critical scrutiny since, they played a crucial role in the development of the collective sense of guilt for the Holocaust in the 1960s in Western culture.

  The concept of the banality of evil is directly alluded to by Leonard Cohen in the poem “All There Is to Know about Adolf Eichmann,” where Eichmann is described—in the form of a personal survey—as a perfectly normal and ordinary man without any distinguishing features. At the same time our expectations towards this embodiment of evil are targeted and questioned—we anticipated a madman, a demon, someone who would relieve humanity from blame for the atrocities of the Holocaust. However, parallel to Arendt’s concept, the horror prevails, because—as Adorno would put it—the social and psychological conditions that enabled the Holocaust still flourish in today’s world. The role played in Flowers by supreme Nazi officials and architects of the Holocaust—Eichmann, Goebbels, Goering, and finally Hitler himself—is therefore paradoxical. On the one hand, they engage in seemingly ordinary activities and are placed within images and descriptions of normality (even if these are filtered through the poetic imagination): the yawning summer, the rusting harbor, normal physiology, and so on. On the other, their very names are necessarily associated with atrocities, which are then extended, by association, into every corner and walk of life.

  Global Memory?

  Flowers for Hitler is at the same time a product of the 1960s’ tendency toward collective memory and a distinctive voice within that discussion. Again, somehow paradoxically, Cohen’s understanding of the Holocaust—encompassing the atomic bomb, ecological catastrophes, and so on—transgresses the historical event, making it rather a metaphor than a strictly literal object of discussion. It may be said, then, that for Cohen the Holocaust is rather a means to than an object of poetic description.

  Jeffrey Alexander, a leading sociologist from Yale, investigated how it is possible that this one specific historical event could become transformed into a universal symbol of human suffering and moral evil. Alexander answers this question by pointing to a phenomenon also present in Cohen’s Flowers. He shows how the “cultural transformation,” as he calls it, was possible because the original historical event, traumatic in the extreme for a particular group of people, was redefined as a traumatic event for all humankind. “Now free floating rather than situated—universal rather than particular,” writes Alexander, the Holocaust “lives in the memories of contemporaries whose parents and grandparents never felt themselves even remotely related to it” (p. 6). Isn’t this exactly what strikes us so much about Cohen’s Flowers?

  How did this universalization happen? Alexander shows how important the development of new media was for establishing this memory firmly in the global consciousness. The same intuition is present in Cohen’s repertoire of symbols. Just look how far his sight reaches! The narrator of his poems seems to live simultaneously in Canada, Cuba, and even Poland. It seems that the radio could be taken as an important symbol of this point of view (or, point of hearing). Just look how Cohen uses his radio to listen to the whole world! Among the static he’s picking up America, or Russia, or “the end of a Mexican song” (“I Had It for a Moment”), even a Polish lullaby (“Waiting for Marianne”). Despite being global, the way he uses the radio as a poetic image and symbol still remains personal, even intimate. It is he, the lonely poet, carefully listening to the pulse of the globe.

  Similar to the radio, another recurring item in the poet’s world is the telephone, which represents interpersonal communication. In the new, post-traumatic reality, however, every attempt at such intimate communication seems futile. The communication is never successful. You call somebody, although you don’t want to. At the other end of the wire a telephone is ringing, but nobody answers. Isn’t that the paradox of the telephone? As with any medium, it separates by giving an illusion of being closer.

  So the poet-protagonist is trying to look into the mysterious past, using the means available to him (media and images). What exactly does he see? What does he hear on his radio and through his telephone? Well, that’s where the most controversial part of the new, global memory begins. For many people Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem was an outrage. Many critics claimed that by diminishing the horrifying image of the perpetrators and openly disputing the guilt of some victims, she blurred the moral line dividing the evil from the good. If Adolf Eichmann had some human qualities, and if the Jewish Councils (Judenrats) were said to collaborate with the Nazis, then why not to ask about the moral guilt of the Soviets, the Americans, the Mexicans, the Poles? Had everybody really done everything possible to prevent the Holocaust?

  What Cohen sees when he projects hi
s imagination back into the past, is this very confusion. He sees himself both as a victim and as a perpetrator. One day he wakes up as a survivor from a concentration camp, staring at a number on his forearm. The next day he feels like a Nazi, burning his books (“Millennium”), or even feels that “Hitler the Brainmole” remains inside his head. This troubling identification seems to anticipate the reflections of Zygmunt Bauman, who claims that the most unsettling knowledge that we can infer from the Holocaust is not that we could also have been the victims, but rather that we could well have been the perpetrators.

  The Return of the Repressed

  Let’s go back to the image of grass that grows on ashes. Let’s try to think of it geologically, in terms of layers, following an image from “Another Night with Telescope,” where the world seems “an eternal unimportant loom / patterns of wars and grass.” A cross-section of history shows a constant stratification of ashes and grass, age after age, surface after surface.

  What if grass is green not despite all the murders, but because of them? If we are all both victims and perpetrators, then life is a concentration camp. If the postwar world is grown on ashes, all the flowers are flowers for Hitler. The day is beautiful. One sees “flowers all over . . . new grass,” reads “Folk,” there is “a little church,” we read, a school, some waving flags, even “some doggies making love.” But what is behind this curtain of pleasant appearances? There’s always more than meets the eye, or rather, there’s more than we want to meet the eye. Flowers for Hitler presents a Gnostic vision of the world, one that conceals a dark mystery. It’s a vision of a sham as the building material of “reality,” so familiar thanks to the Wachowskis’ The Matrix. But in the real world (in the matrix of memory) it’s not machines that are to blame for erasing humanity’s remembered sense of reality, but humanity itself.

  In Flowers the whole culture is exposed as a fraud. There is no innocence anymore. Even comic book heroes are implicated. As commentator Sandra Wynands puts it, “Disparate figures of contemporary Western culture are listed as collaborators in the Nazi crimes . . . no peculiarly German form of authoritarianism or mentality produced the Holocaust but rather Western culture as a whole, including exponents of ostensibly ‘innocent’ popular culture” (p. 203). As in a horror movie, Flowers for Hitler reveals the concealed by showing the uncanny in everyday life, in two senses: first, the normality of life that returns after atrocities; second, a dark mystery lurking beneath ordinary life, threatening at any moment to erupt on the surface. Leonard Cohen forces us to face the uncanny and ask: If normality functions only to cover up the horror, isn’t it complicit in that horror, isn’t it guilty too?

  14

  Doom and Gloom in a Cloistered Room

  LIANE HELLER

  Leonard Cohen was born September 21st. Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer died September 21st. The date coincides with the autumnal equinox, the astronomical event during which daylight and darkness are balanced within a single day. This coincidence serves to illuminate both the similarities and the differences in the two men’s explorations of the negative, one tilted away from darkness toward the light of love, the other angled away from love toward the darkness of self-denial, both bent on understanding and expressing the irrational nature of the world. Their chosen enclosure—a room—is also their route to freedom: darkness and (at least some) light counterbalanced within consciousness.

  Cohen was twenty-two, a recent graduate of McGill University in his native Montreal, when his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies, was published in 1956. Already his lifelong quest for love and transcendence is in full flower, shot through with the dark, painful, lonely awareness that neither may be fully attainable in a brutal, broken world. This realization will develop and widen, in later poetry, novels, and songs, into a dystopian view of humanity tempered by his characteristically biting wit and mordant humor, and by an unquenchable tenderness for the warped world he unflinchingly describes. Earth is collapsing under the weight of hatred and greed, he writes; yet there is still a moment for a last kiss.

  Schopenhauer was twenty-five when his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, was published in 1813. In it, he already lays out his departures from conventional philosophy’s view of the world as comprehensible, of reality as rational, a critique he expands exponentially in his masterwork, the subject-object cataclysm that is The World as Will and Representation, published when he was still only thirty. Schopenhauer’s Will is a directionless, purposeless, reasonless—and unavoidable—compulsion at the heart of all of us, the heart of everything, which results in endless conflict and violence as we express, or represent, its force in the world. Daily life, he writes, “is really a constant suffering” (Will and Representation II, p. 239).

  On Women

  If, for Cohen, “love’s the only engine of survival,” as he offers stunningly amid his bleakest of apocalyptic visions, “The Future,” with its spent landscapes and finality of murderous doom, in the face of which our worst atrocities seem desirable by comparison, then for Schopenhauer it is renunciation of corporeal desire—the ascetic’s solution, since the aesthetic one, even music, the most sublime art, can only temporarily free the sufferer from the agonizing pain of living in a world of agonizing pain. (Unlike those who were critical of Cohen for sidelining the “high art” of poetry in favor of the “lowly” pursuit of popular music, Schopenhauer no doubt would have approved, given his high regard for the power of music to soothe the beastly Will. Indeed, Cohen himself, in “A Singer Must Die,” unsparingly addresses the question of whether or not he has abandoned his ideals.)

  The great American poet Emily Dickinson wrote extensively about the conflict between spirit and flesh, of the renunciation of the immediate for the promise of consummation—poems that Schopenhauer might have appreciated if not for his scathingly dismissive views on the other gender. As he wrote in the denunciatory “On Women,” a now notorious essay from the second volume of his 1851 collection, Parerga and Paralipomena:

  And you cannot expect anything else of women if you consider that the most distinguished intellects among the whole sex have never managed to produce a single achievement in the fine arts that is really great, genuine, and original; or given to the world any work of permanent value in any sphere. (pp. 619–20)

  And yet, as if defying his harsh outlook, Schopenhauer insists that love plays a crucial role in the world—a peculiar kind of love, influenced by his belief that personality and intellect were inherited, and tinged by what in a few decades would be termed eugenics: “The ultimate aim of all love affairs . . . is more important than all other aims in man’s life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it. What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation . . .” (Will and Representation II, p. 566).

  As an old man, he also seems to have softened his stance on women’s potential. According to Rudiger Safranski, as Schopenhauer posed for the German-American sculptor Elisabet Ney, he told Richard Wagner’s friend Malwida von Meysenbug: “I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man” (Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, p. 348).

  Unlike Cohen, who has flourished in the romantic realm and given to the world an array of beautiful and moving love poems that clearly speak of his rich, complex life of the heart, Schopenhauer experienced few, and dismal, romantic relationships. He had an affair with a servant in Dresden who gave birth to an illegitimate daughter; she was born and died in 1819. Then there was an ill-fated relationship with a nineteen-year-old opera singer. Finally, at the age of forty-three, as described by Alexander Rosenthal, he fell for a girl of seventeen who noted in her diary after he offered her a bunch of grapes at a party: “I didn’t want the grapes because old Schopenhauer had touched them, so I let them slide, quite gentl
y, into the water” (“Christmas Celebration Speech,” p. 43). Later, bitterly, alone, he wrote: “In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties” (Parerga and Paralipomena, p. 622).

  Schopenhauer’s dismal history with the opposite sex could not be further from Cohen’s experience of and attitude toward women. He has had longtime collaborations with female artists, including musicians Jennifer Warnes, Sharon Robinson, and his current partner, Anjani Thomas. He famously said (to Jack Hafferkamp in The Rolling Stone in 1971): “Women are really strong. You notice how strong they are? Well, let them take over. . . . The premise being, there can be no free men unless there are free women” (“Ladies and Gents, Leonard Cohen,” par. 7).

  Of his reputation as a Lothario, with liaisons ranging from the legendary beauty Marianne Jensen (inspiration for “So Long, Marianne”) to singer Janis Joplin to actress Rebecca De Mornay and many others, he told Nick Paton Walsh of the Observer in 2001:

  I read with some amusement my reputation as a ladies’ man. My friends are amused by that, too, because they know my life. Even when I was younger I was never aware of it, to tell the truth, so I could not take advantage of it. But for someone who has that sort of reputation and has spent so many nights alone, it has a special bitter amusement attached to it. (“I Never Discuss My Mistresses or My Tailors,” par. 21)