Cultural Amnesia (110 page)

Another reason for Sperber’s slowness to accept this might have been his temperament. For Sperber, “absolute
negativity” was a horror (
ein Greuel
), a death in life, a forecast of extinction (p. 185). In one of
Sperber’s novels, a
Yugoslav partisan refuses to believe that cruelty is deeper than sympathy, or more real than love or even than the need for justice. Sperber was simply—or rather, not simply, but
firmly—a lover of life: a pretty generous reaction when you consider the range and determination of the forces that were always conspiring to bring about his death. He escaped the scythe,
but plenty of people he knew and loved did not, and he saw them go. No survivor’s writing could be further than his from the cheap consolations of ordinary uplift. His tone is
“positive,” but the affirmation has been hard won. The strength comes from the admission and examination of weakness. Without aligning himself with the perpetrators—which would
be another indulgence—he can plausibly suggest that most of them got into a life of crime because they were human, and were therefore unable, on the occasions when it mattered most, to face
the truth even when it was staring them in the face. He can suggest that from his own self-knowledge, but only because he has the rare gift of being honest about how his mind once worked: often
too slowly, and always far more wisely after the event than before. The only point he misses is the one still missed by reformed Communists all over the world. What about all those liberal
democrats who never fell for the voodoo in the first place, and will their tormented shades ever be offered an apology for being called social fascists while they were alive?

When a woman asked me, at an evening meeting a few days later,
how I could have presented an opinion that was so obviously contrary to likelihood, I defended my conviction aggressively. But I read in the eyes of this woman that she did not believe me,
and I was so struck by it that I remember that evening, and that scene, exactly, even today.

—MANÈS
SPERBER,
Die vergebliche Warnung
(THE UNHEEDED WARNING), P. 182

The evening meeting in 1931 took place a few days after Sperber had spoken publicly in a debate
following the first Berlin screening of the Soviet film
The Way to Life
. The film, famous at the time, purported to show that the Soviet problem of homeless
children (the
besprisorny
) was over, because they were all being re-educated in special schools to lead
a useful life: they went into
the school as wastrels and came out as scholars, heroes of labour, future leaders. Sperber was not long back from his first trip to Moscow, where, in a single square near his hotel, he had seen
dozens of homeless children sleeping rough, with nothing but an asphalt-melting oven to keep them warm. At the time, Sperber managed to convince himself that these must be the last of the
homeless children still on the loose, because it would have been easy for the government to sweep them out of sight. They were still there only because there were so few of them, and they would
soon be sent to the special schools. (Sperber had been taken to see a special school, where he swallowed the assurance that it was only one of many: the old Potemkin village trick worked again.)
A Russian psychologist at the psychological conference he had been attending tried to convince him that the government’s promises on the subject had not been fulfilled, and that the same
was true for every other promise in the first Five Year Plan. She could back up this argument with the evidence of her own life. As an academic of rank she had been allotted barely enough living
space and nourishment to maintain a decent existence. Sperber rationalized all her objections, even though she was the woman on the spot. Even as early as 1931, he was well capable of seeing that
the Soviet leadership was lying, especially about Stalin’s benevolence. But he still thought that without the Party’s leadership there could be no chance of rescuing Germany from the
obscenities of unemployment and the coming collapse of capitalism. It bothered him that the Soviet Union seemed to be suffering from shortages and privations even worse than those haunting his
homeland, but he wanted to believe the Soviet Union had a future, whereas Germany was dying in the grip of its past. So he understood the sardonic objections of his Russian friend without taking
them in.

But this other woman, the one at the evening meeting in Berlin, shook him. He knew at the time that he already had his
underlying doubts, but he had been able to keep them in balance against his need to believe in the Soviet mission. Her disapproving look was instrumental in the long process by which the balance
tipped towards disbelief. The process took all of ten years, but this was where it started. A mind that knew it had been massaging the facts was altered towards facing the consequences.
Sperber’s trilogy is full of such moments, and their
quietly dramatic presentation as turning points in a long road puts his masterpiece on a level with Bowlby’s
three-volume work
Attachment and Loss
, except that Sperber’s emphasis is on the mechanisms of political allegiance rather than of neurosis. Belief is
made concrete as the memory of a woman’s glance. Not long after I read this passage for the first time, I was watching one of the later episodes of
Band of
Brothers
. The crucial moment of morally revealing behaviour involved a woman’s glance. Deep in Bavaria on their way to Berchtesgaden, Easy Company of the 82nd Airborne is billeted in
a small town. In a grand house, the American captain, an alcoholic in search of a drink, deliberately drops the framed photograph of a Wehrmacht officer so that the glass breaks. The Wehrmacht
officer’s well-born wife stares at him accusingly and he wordlessly admits his embarrassment. Next day, a company scout finds a slave labour camp nearby in the woods. In keeping with the
facts, the scenes are horrific. (This much we owe Spielberg and his visual achievements in
Schindler’s List
and
Saving
Private Ryan
: whatever his Disneyland impulse towards last-ditch uplift, the look of the thing had never been so true to the facts before.) Again in keeping with the historical reality,
the good burghers of the town are put to work dragging the ruined corpses to the burial pits. One of the appalled citizens put to work turns out to be the Wehrmacht officer’s wife. The same
captain sees her at her labours. He catches her eye, and this time it is she who registers shame before she looks away. Again there are no words, but everything is said, and it will all be
remembered.

If I look carefully at my own memories, many of them centre on the humiliating moment when shabby behaviour was observed
and correctly judged by someone else whose face I still recall exactly, and for no other reason. Other people tell me that the same is true for them. If there is such an automatic and unceasing
system of moral accountancy in the mind, Sperber was one of its first scholarly explorers, although of course it had been explored in literature from the beginning. Shakespeare’s ghosts are
memories that haunt living minds. Tolstoy is full of such moments. When we read his biography, his egocentricity seems monstrous. But when we read
him
, we
see that his soul was examining its memories constantly, and assessing them all according to a moral test. When, in
War and Peace
, Zherkovim makes a
condescending joke about General Mack and is chewed out by
Andrey, why is Zherkovim’s humiliation so vividly presented? Almost certainly because it happened to Tolstoy
himself. He was laying a ghost to rest. The conspicuous merit of Sperber’s great work is that these admissions about the mind’s embarrassments are not offset on to fictional
characters, but are faced fair and square as personal experience. Writing in that vein, Sperber is like Freud transferred into the political dimension that Freud himself fought shy of by focusing
his attention on character traits formed in infancy. Nobody can entirely supplant Freud: but he can certainly be supplemented, and Sperber triumphantly does. Sperber would probably have given the
credit to Adler, but he would have been too generous: his honesty about his own mind was born in him, like a poetic gift.

That being said, we are entitled to point out a gaping hole in his analysis of the political forces
contending in the last years of the Weimar Republic. He is good and honest about saying why he believed in communism against all the evidence that was coming out of the Soviet Union, and even in
despite of the Comintern’s incomprehensible instructions that that the Communists should join the Nazis in voting against the Social Democrats. But he doesn’t say enough about the
Social Democrats. There were always more people voting Social Democrat than voting Communist, right to the end. Why did not the Social Democrats see the Party as the only hope? Sperber
doesn’t tell us. One can only conclude that even while he was writing his monumental autobiography, at the end of his life, he still clung to the belief that the people who fell for neither
of the political extremes weren’t fully serious about politics. Such is the long-term effect of an ideological burden: when you finally put it down, you save your pride by attributing the
real naivety to those who never took it up.

Tacitus

Margaret Thatcher

Henning von Tresckow

Leon Trotsky

Karl Tschuppik

TACITUS

Throughout this book, Tacitus (ca.
A.D
. 55–ca. 120) is
the voice behind the voices. In Greece, Thucydides had already given the world a way of talking about democratic politics, but Tacitus gave the world a way of talking about the despotism and
terror that so often succeed the collapse of a representative system—a familiar pattern in recent times. The tone of voice he found to deal with these matters has remained a paradigm
for almost two thousand years. From Montesquieu through to Golo Mann, pre-modern and modern heroes in this book measured the fulfilment of their responsibilities against the grandeur of
Tacitus, his powers of condensed expression. Born and raised under the Empire, Tacitus never saw the old Republic except as an ideal, although his first work praised his father-in-law,
Agricola, as an exemplar of the lost virtues. The first career of Tacitus was as a pleader at the bar and as a praetor. But his formative experience, and the source of his secret as an
analyst of the totalitarian mentality, was under the tyranny of Domitian: a reign of terror that gave him his retroactive insight into the age of Tiberius, which had happened before his time,
but whose influence, he correctly assumed, had generated a lingering infection. When the relatively benevolent
Nerva dispelled the climate of fear created by Domitian,
Tacitus returned to public life as a consul, and was able to continue his career as an historian without threat of reprisal. After the useful
Germania
,
his third major work was the indispensable
Historiae
, an analytical narrative covering the period from the accession of Galba in
A.D
. 68 to the death of Domitian. Only the first four and a fragment of the fifth of its twelve books survive, but the student should regard the
Histories
as a necessary port of call, and as a reason, all on its own, for learning to read some Latin. For students acquiring Latin in adult life, the language is
most easily approached through those historians who really wrote chronicles—Cornelius Nepos, Sallust, Suetonius and Livy—but with the
Histories
of Tacitus you get the best reason for approaching it at all. There are innumerable translations but the original gives you his unrivalled powers of
compression. (You can pick this up from a parallel text, always remembering that the purists, when they warn you off the Loeb Library, are giving you the exact reason you should hold it
dear—it’s a painless dictionary.) What Sainte-Beuve said of Montaigne—that his prose is like one continuous epigram—is even more true of Tacitus. His last capital
work,
Annales
(
Annals
), is a still harder nut to crack: even experts in the ancient languages find it as
difficult in the Latin as Thucydides is in the Greek. Tacitus’s already elliptical style becomes so tightly wound that it seems impenetrable. But the narrative is a must. It concerns
the Julian line from Tiberius through to Nero. Only about half of the original work survives, but what we have would still be essential reading if it contained nothing else except
Tacitus’s reflections on the reign of Tiberius, which was the single most startling ancient harbinger of twentieth-century state terror, just as Tacitus’s account of it remains
the single most pentrating analysis of what we now see as the morphology of limitless power. If, below, I presume to offer a critique of a great critic, it is only on a single point, and in
the full knowledge that I would not even possess the viewpoint from which to attempt it if Tacitus had not first lived and written. This whole book of mine grew out of a single sentence of
his:
“They make a desert and they call it peace.” More than fifty years ago I heard that line quoted by one of my schoolteachers, and I saw straight away that
a written sentence could sound like a spoken one, but have much more in it.

But in Rome, the consuls, the Senate, the knights, rushed
headlong into servitude.

—TACITUS,
Annals
, BOOK 22

A
LONG WITH
THUCYDIDES,
Tacitus by his mere existence pushes us hard up against the central conundrum posed by the realistic political thinkers of the ancient world: if they were so like us, why
weren’t they more like us? Though his characteristic technical device was the pregnant statement rather than the extended argument, Tacitus showed powers of analysis that we are unable to
take for granted even among political writers of our own time.
Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant
. They make a desert and they call it peace. As a
four-word encapsulation of a counterproductive political policy and a campaign of euphemistic propaganda, it identifies each and condemns both. Not many writers now could match it for
compression. (What makes the line even more impressive is that Tacitus gives it to a German leader speaking against Roman policy in general, not just against a specific abuse.) In the
Annals
book 22, his picture of the Roman upper orders volunteering for subservience goes to the root of the Republican tradition’s irretrievable
collapse in the time of Tiberius.

You would think that a man who could see that could see anything. And indeed Tacitus saw
the tragedy in every aspect of the old order’s vulnerability: when virtue had been declared a crime, there was no refuge even in reticence. The more nobly behaved the family, the less
chance it stood. Psychological torture had become a weapon in the emperor’s hands more effective than military violence. Fathers had to choose between giving up their daughters to
concubinage or condemning the whole family to death. Tacitus was so alive to all this that he had to develop a new kind of prose to contain his despair: the prose of the crucible.

Yet he could never see anything wrong with the legal precept by
which a slave’s testimony could
be taken only under torture. It would have been too much to expect that he might have seen something wrong with the institution of slavery itself. But he might have seen something wrong with
torture. Rome, after all, was not Greece. In Athens, both Aristotle and Demosthenes had regarded torture as the surest means of getting evidence. But they were only Greeks.
Autres temps, autres mœurs
, and Rome prided itself on being a step forward. In Rome, even Cicero—by every measure a lesser mind than Tacitus, and certainly
the greater opportunist—managed to figure out that torture had something wrong with it. By this important parameter, then, Cicero, and not Tacitus, became the precursor of Montaigne,
Montesquieu, Voltaire and Manzoni, who all condemned torture, and of the less famous but far more efficacious Cesare, Marquis of Beccaria, the reforming jurist who not only wrote against it but
actually managed to introduce the practical measures that cleared it out of Tuscany in 1786. Cicero the infinitely malleable advocate had the right idea. Tacitus, the man of steel, didn’t.
It seems never to have crossed his mind. By mere intuition, with no means of observation, Nicholas of Cusa guessed right about the movement of the planets, Lucretius guessed right about atoms,
and Heraclitus guessed that the whole of existence was an endless flux. Tacitus, whose opportunites to observe were ample, never guessed right about the morality of putting slaves to the torture.
He heard the screams, and must have been revolted. He just never worked out what his revulsion meant.

But we should avert our gaze from the spectre of what Tacitus never did, and fix it on the reality of what he could do,
because without the reality we never would have seen the spectre. Tacitus did not invent the cruelties of his age, though such is the force of his prose that he inevitably seems to have done: he
invented the pity for them. Somehow, as if a tunnel had opened through time, our feelings go back to join his voice. In the
Annals
, the young daughter of
Sejanus is taken away to be killed. “What have I done?” Tacitus has her say. “Where are you taking me? I won’t do it again.” We have heard that voice before, but it
was later: it was only yesterday, in the Ukraine, at one of the Dubno shooting pits, on October 5, 1942. All the victims were naked. The German engineer Hermann Graebe recalled one moment
particularly. “I still clearly remember a dark-haired, slim girl who pointed to
herself as she passed close to me and said, ‘Twenty-three.’” It is the
same horrific event, dramatized with the same helpless voice, and just as we can’t admire it as an artefact in the modern instance, because it is too real, we should not admire it in the
ancient instance either, because it was real then. If it had not been for Hermann Graebe, we would not have heard the girl at Dubno speak; and we would not have heard Sejanus’s daughter
speak if it had not been for Tacitus.

It is quite possible that Sejanus’s daughter said nothing, and that Tacitus made up what she said,
as all the Roman historians made up the speeches of their emperors and generals. But the emotion he registered, both hers and his, was a true one, and puts us beyond aesthetics. Great writing is
not just writing. As we can see in the troubling case of Ernst Jünger, even the most gifted writer can hide from reality in his art, and it might well be true that the more gifted he is, the
more he is tempted to do so. Jünger, in his notebooks before July 20, 1944, had already said enough about Hitler to get himself executed if the Gestapo had seized them. We can see from his
notations that he had been told everything that mattered about the Final Solution. But he couldn’t address the dreadful reality in his writing. After the failure of the attempt on
Hitler’s life, while people Jünger knew well were being tortured and strangled for their complicity, he turned his full attention to Monet’s country studio at Giverny, and gave
one of the best ever literary descriptions of the cycle of paintings we call the
Waterlilies
. After visiting the Groult Collection in the Avenue Foch, he
voiced his sensitive concern about the holes in the roof caused by flak splinters. The holes might let in the rain, to damage the treasure house of Fragonards, Turners and Watteaus. You can hear
his full concern about a threatened civilization. But the threat to civilization had already gone far beyond that, and he had declined to deal with it, as if it was beneath his art.