Cultural Amnesia (113 page)

For an opera libretto, Henning’s conversations with the young officers would provide tempting opportunities for
duets, trios, quartets and so on, with the additional attraction that everyone was in Wehrmacht uniform, with no SS insignia in sight: a stage full of fresh-faced idealism. If a certain element
of fresh-faced naivety is hard to ignore, it should be remembered that these really were the flower of their generation, and even the most dense among them had realized that something had gone
seriously wrong with Germany’s historic mission. There were thousands of young officers who got all the way through the war—or anyway all the way to an early death—without
realizing that the Jewish business was at the very least a mistake. Henning’s conspirators knew better, even when they still believed that
Grossdeutsch
land
, conveniently rid of Hitler, might somehow be allowed to fight on beside the western allies in the battle to save civilization against the threat from the east. After July 20, 1944,
the Gestapo included several of the young aristocratic officers on their list of conspirators who had confessed to having rebelled because of Nazi policies towards the Jews.
Henning chose his soldiers well. The question of why there were so few like them is largely answered by the fact that there were so few like him. The aristocracy was a network that
had been there before the Nazis arrived. The aristocrats had a language they could share in private. They knew how to talk freely to one another. But anyone who wanted to get them organized had
to trust them not to talk out of turn. Once there were more than a few involved, the contact man was living on borrowed time. In other words, a hero was required, and that cut the field right
down: cut it down, in effect, to Henning von Tresckow.

Unfortunately for the librettist, there is a problem with Henning himself. In the first winter of the
Russia campaign, it became apparent that if there were no quick victory the German troops, stuck in place, would freeze. They had no warm clothing. Behind barbed wire, hundreds of thousands of
Russian prisoners still had their felt boots and overcoats. It was decided—in clear defiance even of German military law, let alone of the Geneva Convention—that the Russian prisoners
should be deprived of their warm clothing so that it could be given to the German troops. In their book
Der Krieg der Generäle
, Carl Dirks and
Karl-Heinz Janssen show that one of the men who endorsed this sinister initiative was none other than Henning von Tresckow. Stealing the warm clothes must have seemed like common sense at the
time. But it was common sense only in the context of the world that Hitler had created, and that was the very world that Henning had set himself against. Faced with this awkward information, one
must struggle to remember that Henning had a long-term aim, which would have been impossible to achieve had he been removed from his staff post—and if he had refused to sign the order, he
would probably have been removed straight away. Henning’s stature as a hero just about survives the struggle. But the opera becomes a casualty. A baritone aria on the theme of “Let
the Russians freeze first” would make a mess of Act One.

LEON TROTSKY

After being murdered at Stalin’s orders, Lev Davidovich Bron-stein, alias Leon Trotsky
(1879–1940), lived on for decades as the unassailable hero of aesthetically minded progressives who wished to persuade themselves that there could be a vegetarian version of communism.
Trotsky could write, orate, loved women, and presented enough of a threat to the established Soviet power structure (admittedly showing signs of rigidity by then) that it should want to track
him down to his hiding place in Mexico and rub him out. It followed, or seemed to follow, that Trotsky must have embodied a more human version of the historic force that sacrificed innocent
people to egalitarian principle: a version that would sacrifice fewer of them, in a nicer way. Alas, it followed only if the facts were left out. It was true that Trotsky, in those romantic
early days in Paris, was a more attractive adornment to the café than Lenin. In the Rotonde, where Modigliani settled his bill with drawings and paintings when he lost at craps, Lenin
could at least defend “socialist realism” against Vlaminck, whereas Trotsky couldn’t even get a job as an artist’s model (too small). But the Russian Civil War that
turned Trotsky into one of the century’s most effective amateur generals also unleashed his capacities as a
mass murderer. The sailors at Kronstadt, proclaiming
their right to opinions of their own about the Revolution, were massacred on his order. In the vast crime called the collectivization of agriculture, Trotsky’s only criticism of Stalin
was that the campaign should have been planned more like a battle. The only thing true about Trotsky’s legend as some kind of lyrical humanist was that he was indeed unrealistic enough
to think that the secretarial duties could safely be left to Stalin. His intolerance of being bored undid him. But his ideas of excitement went rather beyond making love to Frida Kahlo, and
at this distance there are no excuses left for students who find him inspiring. Trotsky’s idea of permanent revolution will always be attractive to the kind of romantic who believes
that he is being oppressed by global capitalism when he maxes out his credit card. But the idea was already a dead loss before Trotsky was driven into exile in 1929. He lost the struggle
against Stalin not because he was less ruthless, but because he was less wily.

Under a totalitarian regime it is the apparatus that implements
the dictatorship. But if my hirelings are occupying all the key posts in the apparatus, how is it that Stalin is in the Kremlin and I am in exile?

—LEON TROTSKY, QUOTED BY
DMITRI VOLKOGONOV IN
Stalin
, P. 303

T
ROTSKY WAS GOOD
at
sarcasm. His journalism written in Mexican exile would have been enough reason on its own for Stalin to nominate him as a target. Pro-Soviet credulity among Western intellectuals was usually
proof against logic, but Trotsky had rhetoric: a more penetrating weapon. If Stalin’s emissary had not managed to smash Trotsky’s head in, there might have been more such jokes to
make the Moscow show trials sound less convincing. From that viewpoint, Trotsky’s murder was not only horrifying, it was untimely. Treachery made it possible, and the subject is still
surrounded with a miasma of bad faith. Pablo Neruda was instrumental in smoothing the
assassin’s path but never wrote a poem on the subject: something to remember when
reading the thousands of ecstatic love poems he did write. They are full of wine and roses but no ice axe is ever mentioned. Admirers of Neruda don’t seem to mind. The same capacity for
tacit endorsement is shown by Trotsky’s admirers, who even today persist in seeing him as some sort of liberal democrat; or, if not as that, then as a true champion of the working class; or
anyway, and at the very worst, as one of those large-hearted Old Bolsheviks who might have made the Soviet Union some kind of successfully egalitarian society had they prevailed. But when it
became clear that the campaign for the collectivization of agriculture would involve a massacre of the peasantry, Trotsky’s only objection was that the campaign was not sufficiently
“militarized.” He meant that the peasants weren’t being massacred fast enough.

Trotsky had previously shown the same enthusiastic spirit when leading the attack on the rebellious sailors of Kronstadt,
and Orlando Figes’s book
A People’s Tragedy
proves all too thoroughly that Trotsky’s talent for mass murder was already well developed
during the Civil War. We can dignify his ruthlessness with the name of realism if we like, but the question abides of just how realistic his ruthlessness would have been if he had won a power
struggle against Stalin and stayed on to rule the Soviet Union. As things turned out, there never was a power struggle. Trotsky wasn’t interested in the hard, secretarial grind of running
the show: leave that to Stalin. But—an important but—Trotsky yielded no points to Stalin in the matter of dealing with anybody who dared to contradict. It was a trick they both
inherited from Lenin. Golo Mann said it went back all the way to Marx. Croce quoted Mazzini’s observation that Marx had more anger in his heart than love, and that his whole temperament was
geared to domination. We can still see it today, even when totalitarianism is no longer a thing for states, but only for religious fanatics. It is the trick of meeting contradiction by silencing
whoever offers it. Trotsky’s undoubted fluency as a polemical journalist does not mean that he wouldn’t rather have had a gun in his hand. The humanist makes a big mistake in
supposing that a literary talent automatically ameliorates the aggressive instinct. Osama bin Laden has several of Trotsky’s characteristics. According to students of Arabic, he commands
his native language with vibrant fluency, giving a thrilling sense of its historic depth; he can lead a simple life and make
it look enviably stylish, as if asceticism were a
luxury; and above all, he can inspire the young to dedicate their lives to an ideal. If the ideals of the caliphate tend to become more elusive on close examination, so did the ideals of
communism: but they needed to be incarnated for that very reason. Trotsky lived on after Stalin, and to some extent is still alive today, not because young people want the world he wanted: a
phantasm that not even he could define. What they want is to be him.

KARL TSCHUPPIK