Cultural Amnesia (109 page)

M
OST OF
SIEDLER’S
books have been published under his own class-act imprint. I have a collection of his lavishly illustrated and finely printed monographs about architecture in Berlin and
the Mark Brandenburg, and about how that architecture was restored or further wrecked—usually the latter, wherever the Communists were in charge—after the war. On the left of the
right, Siedler is a very civilized, quietly persuasive voice. One of his most seductive themes is the idea that the Nazis were the militant arm of bourgeois taste: that they never really
radicalized a comfortable, well-stuffed patrimony, but instead co-opted it for their purposes. Care for the end phase of the bourgeois era, he says at one point, doesn’t really contradict
the law of tyranny: it expresses it. There is something in what he says. Though there was plenty of very bad, very kitsch Nazi plastic art—much more than Siedler can be bothered to contend
with—there was never very much specifically Nazi literature, and it would probably have been swept aside if it had ever existed. As things were, Germany had no Vilfredo Pareto,
Georges-Eugène Sorel, Charles Maurras or Giovanni Gentile. As an approved literary pet of the Nazi regime, the dud scribe Hans-Friedrich Blunck thought that an enthusiasm for Fascism might
threaten a diversion of National Socialism in the direction of un-German intellectualism. Blunck was not alone among Nazi thinkers in finding Fascism dangerously novel and far too concerned with
the brain.

The more cultivated among the Nazis proved their cultivation by knowing the traditional names: minus, of
course, the names of Jews. When a production of a Mozart opera came to occupied Poland, the soundtrack of the newsreel celebrated the occasion thus:
Auch so, auf
tanzenden Füssen, kam Deutschland in dieses Land.
(“Even so, on dancing feet, Germany came to this land.”) No mention of the Stukas and Panzers: it would have spoiled the
mood. Siedler is unbeatable in his evocation of the regime’s anti-modern, thatched tone. He practically makes you taste the cream cakes that were Hitler’s fast food of choice. But
Siedler’s final effect is to overstate his case by underplaying the
facts. Perhaps because he thinks that everybody else has already done it, he doesn’t make
enough of the enormous, raucous, radically perverted creativity represented by the Nazi system of Führer worship and mass murder. There was nothing normal, snug or unchallenging about the
filth coming out of the radios and the loudspeakers. The instantly disgusting
Der Stürmer
was on sale at street corners, not in cellophane packets on
top shelves. By putting such an emphasis on the bourgeois normality of the Nazi period, Siedler retroactively creates an ambience in which an intelligent man might be lulled into thinking that
things were not so abnormal after all. It was certainly the message that a man like Albert Speer wanted to hear. In 1973 at his villa in Berlin-Dahlem, Siedler, in his role as publisher, hosted a
launch party for Joachim Fest’s biography of Hitler. Speer was the guest of honour. Marcel Reich-Ranicki was invited without being told that Speer would be present. In
Mein Leben
(p. 482) Reich-Ranicki records how Speer, to establish an atmosphere of chummy colloquy, gestured at Fest’s black-bound 1,200-page book where it lay on
a table and said: “
He
would have been pleased.” Reich-Ranicki went home, and his friendship with Siedler was never the same again.

Speer was also a social hit at his own launch parties, especially in London; and probably for the same
reason: reassurance. His suavely barbered poise helped to persuade civilized people that on the Nazi question there might have been no clear choice. Perhaps we all would have fallen for it,
especially if there were a few men in well-cut suits like him around. That was the lazy assumption that the post-war Speer counted on. But it was also the assumption that the Nazis counted on:
none of the good, dependable things in life have changed, you can have your nationalist dream and eat your cream cakes too. Siedler has done us a service by bringing out the cosiness that the
Nazis offered the middle class in return for its quiescence. He could have done more to bring out the Nazis’ cleverness in offering the lower orders, set free to climb by the radical social
programmes, a point of aspiration that would recompense them for any horrors they might have to endure or inflict: membership of the middle class. But what he scarcely brings out at all is that
nobody with half a brain, whether the brain was bourgeois or plebeian, could have failed to notice for five minutes that the whole Nazi state was a raving madhouse.

MANÈS SPERBER

Manès Sperber (1903–1984) was psychologist, philosopher, epic novelist and fascinated
eyewitness to both of the main twentieth-century European tidal waves, which collided right in front of his eyes. Like Sartre’s
Road to Freedom
novels, Sperber’s fictional trilogy,
Like a Tear in the Ocean
, can be read as a saga of the politically engaged conscience, but Sperber’s
enduring testimony as a writer is another trilogy, the set of autobiographical books that record his own story directly, without benefit—or anyway with less benefit—of imaginative
reconstruction. Non-fiction in the truest sense, Sperber’s autobiography makes a point of shirking nothing about the author’s initial Communist convictions and the long and bitter
business of disillusionment. Born in Galicia, Sperber first picked his political side in Vienna, and was an active Communist organizer when he moved to Berlin in 1927, by which time the
Communists and Nazis were already fighting it out in the streets. Doubts about Stalin had set in even before he transferred to Paris, but they did not reach fever pitch until news came
through of the Moscow trials. Even as late as 1939, however, Sperber was still writing articles in which he called Nazism an extension of capitalism: he developed that view to
the point of explaining the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact as proof that the two totalitarianisms had both become forms of “state capitalism” at root. A tenuous
position, but by that time nobody was listening anyway, because events had outrun theories. Lucky enough to be granted domicile in Switzerland, Sperber emerged after the war as one of the
most prominent analysts of a period he had been very lucky to get through unhurt by one or the other of the popular forces dedicated to destroying all notions of the liberal democracy which
he himself never quite got round to taking seriously. The three books of autobiography, collectively called
All das Vergangene
(usually translated as
All Our Yesterdays), are
Die Wasserträger Gottes, Die vergebliche Warnung
and
Bis man mir Scherben auf die Augen
legt
. They can be found in English translation, called, respectively,
God’s Water-Carriers
,
The Unheeded
Warning
and
Until My Eyes Are Closed with Shards
. In the original language, in paperback, they can be handily carried as pocket books. The
complete work can be confidently recommended as a guide to the times. Above all it gives disturbing credibility to the view that so many serious young people of Sperber’s age had no
choice except to decide that democracy was doomed.

A bad conscience, an ineradicable feeling of responsibility for
the crimes committed in the name of Germany, could be found only among men and women who had always been opponents of Nazism and had suffered from its rule. These, the guiltless, had overcome
either late or never their shame for what had happened.

—MANÈS
SPERBER,
Bis man mir Scherben auf die Augen legt
(
Until My Eyes Are Closed
with Shards
), P. 260

T
HE QUICKEST WAY
to
praise the inexhaustibly unfolding wisdom of Manès Sperber’s three-volume intellectual autobiography
All das Vergangene
(All Our Yesterdays)
would be to say that almost every moral judgement in it is as good as this. At this point he is talking about
the Germans he was meeting in the French zone of occupation after
World War II, where the German Communists were playing the same cynical game as in the American zone. (The game was “cynical” even if the anti-Communists said it was: one of the
easiest points to forget when reading about European politics in the aftermath of World War II.) The German Communists, denying all vestige of their real allegiance, were masquerading as
democrats in order to persuade the occupation authorities that the Social Democrats were the enemies of civil order. In the French zone the tactic succeeded to the extent that an
Antifaschistischen Kampfbund (Anti-Fascist Battlegroup) was set up, whose cover remained unblown until 1948. (In the Russian zone there was no need for pussyfooting, and the Social Democrats
could be sent straight to Buchenwald, which was kept open for business specifically to accommodate them.) Sperber was an adept at working out what was really going on because he had known the
Communist Party from the inside. It was not until very late in the 1930s that he started making the break. There is a telling confessional passage early in
Bis man
mir Scherben auf die Augen legt
(a better translation would be Until They Put the Pennies on My Eyes) in which he lays bare, through bitter hindsight, the psychological mechanism that
enabled him to predict in June 1934 how the massacre of the SA leadership in the “Röhm purge” would strengthen Hitler’s position rather than weaken it. As a Communist,
Sperber was obliged to debate the point with his comrades. As always, they were certain that the Nazis had overreached themselves and would shortly disappear from history.

Unusually blessed with realistic insight, Sperber guessed that such confidence was moonshine. But while doing his best to
convince his comrades that the opposite was true, he never once brought forward the example that weighed on him and from which he shrank with a reflex of fear—namely, the way Stalin’s
elimination of the left social revolutionaries, the worker-opposition and the Trotskyists had bolstered his dominance. Sperber wrote his intellectual autobiography near the end of his life. The
great psychologist was at last ready to ponder the mental subterfuge by which, long ago, he had failed to admit even to himself the significance of what he already knew. The news about the
brutalities of Soviet rule had been reaching the socialist movements in Europe—and especially the Germans—since the 1920s.
Sperber had known all about it. But he
was not yet ready to think about it. The third volume of his fascinating experiment in self-examination is especially useful for showing us how intelligence can work to defeat itself for as long
as any kind of grip is maintained on the wrong end of the stick. If he had been more dense, he might have found fewer mental tricks with which to go on convincing himself that his faith had never
been misplaced.

Arthur Koestler’s horrifying personal experience in Spain—loyalty to the independent left
almost got him killed by the Stalinists—was a big influence on Sperber’s eventual reappraisal of his own historic expectations. Before its publication in 1940, Koestler showed Sperber
the manuscript of
Darkness at Noon
. Sperber was convinced by the book’s central idea that a figure like the Old Bolshevik Bukharin could have made
such absurd confessions at the 1938 show trials only out of duty to the Communist ideal. This notion remained popular among ex-Communists until the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, when
Khrushchev convincingly pointed out what should always have been obvious: that the confessions had been obtained by torture. (“Beat, beat, beat!” shouted Khrushchev, who knew all
about it, because he had actually done it.) Sperber analyses the process by which those who had held the illusions were so reluctant to be disillusioned completely. “Many years had still to
go by after our break with so-called Marxism-Leninism before we were finally free from all illusions and from many picture-book imaginings [
Bilderbuchvorstellungen
] that despite everything we almost unconsciously, and anyway without willing it, had held on to” (p. 172). One of the picture-book
imaginings had been the consoling notion that a bloodstained old ideologue like Bukharin, with his perpetrator’s knowledge of monstrosity on the grand scale, might have been some kind of
idealist despite all. Even the hard-bitten Koestler—one of the first to realize, and to say, that communism was the god that failed—had cherished that pious wish at some level. The
pious wish had helped to give
Darkness at Noon
some of its complexity and force, but it was nonsense. The secret of the show trials was that there was no
secret—they were an exercise in unlimited violence.