Cultural Amnesia (108 page)

Randall Jarrell had a phrase that exactly jibed with Salinger’s diagnosis of the sick place in the American dream:
“a sad heart at the supermarket.” Salinger’s pot of balm for the sad heart was the elevated chatter of the pre-teen, pre-sex alpha-nymph, unearthly in her potential
understanding, limited only by her lack of experience, desperate to grow up. Faced with her bewitching purity, the damaged veteran, himself too holy for this world, has only two courses of
action: to accept his karma with renewed humility or to blow his brains out. In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Seymour Glass chose the second path. Though there are cynics who think
he did it from remorse after exposing his penis underwater to his angelic interlocutor, it seems far more likely that Salinger’s version of the Dalai Lama offed himself because,
after meeting the incarnated Godhead, he had nowhere else to go. The bananafish wasn’t a euphemism, it was a mantra. Similarly with Marty: her upmarket vocal articulation
while she mashes snow with her tiny gloves is a guarantee of her heavenly credentials. Her snowballs are pills to purge melancholy. She’s a script-conference pitch dressed up as a
pixie.

After meeting Marty, the sapped, self-doubting Will (“You’ve really got to chill,
Will,” trills Marty cutely) can at last face up to the life in which his dreams of being a great jazz piano player won’t come true. He’ll still be the saddest heart at the
supermarket, but he’ll be a good citizen. Marty’s barely pubescent love for him, and the vision of her that he will take away, are his consolation prize, a wish fulfilment pure and
simple. Or rather, not so pure and by no means simple: a bill of spiritual goods, a high-tab product marketable to every small-town dilettante who wants to convince himself that he has been sent
into the world to suffer for his sensibility. But if that’s the kind of vision we need in order to be better than we are, then Natalie Portman is the girl to embody it. The thoughtfulness
of her screen presence—you practically hear those little wheels turning—can raise an average part to the mental level of the heroic. In the years to come she is doubtless destined to
make many serious movies look profound and many that are shallow look serious. Her function, and perhaps her fate, will be to sanctify anything they hand her. At best (at
their
best, because it will always be her best) she will turn a well-written role into a poetic epiphany, as in
Closer
. At worst
she will breathe life into bathos, although not, we hope, into any more than three stipulated Star Wars prequels, of which the first,
Star Wars Episode I: The
Phantom Menace
, wasted her gift with such casual indifference that I would not see the second if I were paid. Even in that tongue-tied clunker, as she visibly struggled with the
unrewarding role of Amidala, Queen of Naboo, the Bad Hair Planet, she almost managed to humanize what looked like the central character in the first all-zombie production of
Turandot
.

In addition to her talent, Natalie Portman has another conspicuous qualification for playing Sophie Scholl. As far as one
can tell from reading her print interviews, Natalie is leading a good life—an important requirement for pretending to be a good person. She has already played Anne Frank on Broadway. Better
than a career move, her taking
of the role was a testament to her fundamental seriousness, and to the unflashy professionalism of the people around her. The gifted girl seems
to have sensible parents: there is no Culkin factor. As a college student, she emulates Brooke Shields and Jodie Foster in her admirable determination to have a life of the mind beyond the
exiguous parameters of the entertainment industry. Apart from the mad hairstylists of Naboo, no professional freaks have so far succeeded in sidetracking her very far down their sinister alley.
For too many of her magazine-cover photo shoots she has been caked with makeup, but probably her parents weren’t to blame. Photographers can be persuasive. (Whatever Annie Leibovitz was
thinking of when she rouged and lipsticked Natalie’s defenceless face for
Vanity Fair
, it reminded me of how Brooke Shields was dressed and lit by
Louis Malle for
Pretty Baby
, his justly neglected movie about a New Orleans whorehouse.) The frozen poses are against Natalie’s nature. When she
talks, you can hear her thirst for learning, as if that were her only passion. As our sad Babylon of a Western world goes, the kid is still a virgin.

Yes, if a Hollywood movie about Sophie Scholl gets made for the international market, it has to be with Natalie Portman.
Myself, I kind of hope it never happens, and not because I distrust Hollywood
per se
. The place has come a long way since the era when it could guarantee to
miss the point. In the bad old days, it wouldn’t have been hard to imagine the first preview when the cards came in negative about how Sophie’s story ends. (“We can’t
snuff the muffin. It’s a reshoot, people.”) But that couldn’t happen now. At worst you would get the smoothest, most literate possible rearrangement of the recalcitrant
historical facts, always in the name of pressing home the dramatic point. In reality, Sophie and the nice boy she loved—he was a fellow conspirator—never slept together. In the movie
they would have to at least do a bit of heavy petting: you know, to show what she’s going to miss by this crazy choice of hers? Pity we can’t
call
it
Sophie’s Choice
, but there it is. And we can’t have her dying before the boys do, the way it actually
happened. The prison officers took mercy on her and killed her first because they knew from experience that waiting was the worst part. Merciful Nazi prison officers? It’s confusing, like
those Gestapo heavies who don’t even do any torturing because the kids spilled everything as soon as they were sure there was nobody still free out there
that they had
to protect. A lot of script points to iron out, but it can all be done with a clear conscience as long as the main point is left intact: the girl dies.

And that’s where the dream movie falls apart, because if Natalie Portman plays the role, the girl
won’t die. Natalie will go on after the end of the movie with her career enhanced as a great actress, whereas Sophie Scholl’s career as an obscure yet remarkable human being really
did come to an end. The
Fallbeil
(even its name sounds remorseless—the falling axe) hit her in the neck, and that was the end of her. Her lovely
parable of a life went as far as that cold moment and no further. It’s a fault inherent in the movies that they can’t show such a thing. The performer takes over from the real person,
and walks away. For just that reason, popular, star-led movies, no matter how good they are, are a bad way of teaching history, and you don’t have to be an oaf to get impatient when they
try to. Most of us, when sitting in the dark at the multiplex, would rather be entertained than instructed. Instruction is for the art house. If every tent-pole movie we saw gave us the full
complexity of existence, we’d be living twice. My own ration for a movie like
Gods and Monsters
,
Lone Star
or
Breaking the Waves
is about three a year. And it seems cruel to say so, but if Emily Watson, playing the central figure of
Breaking the Waves
, had been more famous, we would have found the story easier to take, and thus harder to assess at its true high worth. The same would be true if
Natalie Portman were to play Sophie Scholl. Simply because it would be she saying them, her lines of dialogue would get into the common interchange of civilized speech, and eventually into
literature. But part of the sad truth about Sophie Scholl is that nobody remembers a thing she said, and in her last few minutes alive she said nothing at all. If she had said something, the man
who bore witness to her bravery would have remembered it.

WOLF JOBST SIEDLER

Wolf Jobst Siedler (b. 1926) would be a fair choice for the title of Most Civilized Man in
Post-War Germany. In 1943 both he and Ernst Jünger’s son were sea cadets when they were caught making sceptical remarks about the future of the Nazi regime. At the personal
intervention of Dönitz their lives were saved, but Siedler spent nine months locked up before he was drafted as a
Luftwaffenhilfer
—a dogsbody
in a flak battalion. After the war he studied sociology, philosophy and history at the Free University of Berlin before spending ten years as a literary journalist. He then rose to an
influential position in publishing with the houses of Ullstein and Propylaen, before, in 1980, starting his own house. Siedler Verlag became such a successful property that the Bertelsmann
conglomerate eventually bought it, but Siedler continued in place as the most high-toned publisher in Germany. His own writings helped his glossy image. There was a series of beautifully
produced picture books about the foundations and fate of the architectural heritage. (The picture book with long, well-informed captions can be a delicious form in the right hands, which his
were.) But his most valuable contribution has always been as an essayist. He wrote a whole series of essays emphasizing the cleverness
of the Nazis in leaving the high
bourgeoisie able to feel that nothing much had changed. Some of Siedler’s critics on the left thought that he had underestimated the anti-Semitism of the cultivated class before the
Nazis came to power, and overestimated its ignorance afterwards. But Siedler’s immense learning and faultless taste—best sampled in his volume of selected essays
Behauptungen
(Opinions)—gave his views weight. As the publisher of the historian Joachim Fest, Siedler can perhaps be held accountable for aiding and abetting
Fest’s effect of displacing the Holocaust as a central theme in Nazi history. When it comes to the case of Albert Speer, however, there is no “perhaps” about it. There can
be no doubt that Siedler aided and abetted Speer’s post-war campaign of selfrehabilitiation. As Speer’s publisher, he attended on Speer as one civilized man attending on another,
and Speer’s pose as a man who never really knew what the Nazis were doing to the Jews was given extra plausibility by his being so welcome in Siedler’s ambience. Siedler’s
credentials to play host look impressive. From his student years onward he was decorated with all the favours of post-war democratic German culture, right down to the signed presentation
copies of Ernst Jünger’s books and the fond letters from Thomas Mann. Persuading us that even the unthinkable can be finessed from the centre of our attention and normalized as a
source of growth, his finely judged tone of voice gives comfort. But we should be cautious when we spot comfort creeping into the historic memory: if it climbs the wall like a stain, it could
be a sign that the truth is being drowned.

As well as the most spooky and unsettling, the most misleading
thing about this State was that on the very evening of the burning of the synagogues, an event which brought the Eastern Europe of the Middle Ages into the Germany of the twentieth century,
everywhere in the cities of our country festively clad people went to operetta, theatres and symphony halls, and that, six hours after the
deportation wagons left the
station platforms of Berlin, the trains for the seaside left also.

—WOLF JOBST SIEDLER,
Behauptungen
, P. 72