Cultural Amnesia (39 page)

Memories from childhood tell me that it can be deeply disturbing to be addressed by an adult in the grip
of such all-encompassing certitude. It sounded like madness even before I could tell sense from nonsense, and ever since, through a life now blessedly stretching to some length, I have been
periodically rocked to meet otherwise normal-sounding people who are suddenly taken over by the same rhythmic rant. Those in the grip of an all-encompassing Answer soon make it clear that the
desire to be so enlightened has more to do with personality than intelligence. Few men were more intelligent than Arthur Koestler, for example. He was one of the first prominent international
commentators to develop a case of clear-sightedness about what was going on in the Soviet Union. During the Spanish Civil War, savage maltreatment by the NKVD helped to open his eyes. He stopped
believing in communism as an Answer. But he started believing in everything else: one fad after another until the end of his life. He thought the world was going to be put to rights by science
fiction, by J. B. Rhine’s researches into the paranormal, by a Lysenko-like offshoot of Lamarckian evolution. Finally he asked his ageing but loyal audience of intellectual supermarket
browsers to fall to their knees in wonder when they heard a word on the radio at the same time as they were reading it in a book—to be impressed, that is, by mere coincidence. Throughout
this stentorian career of waxing and waning enthusiastic, Koestler always maintained his solid capacity for realistic observation and cosmopolitan savvy. He was hard to fool, except when the
boondoggle was big enough, and sounded like science. If you want to read an essay whose humour attains the level of a cosmic joke, read P. B. Medawar’s demolition of Koestler’s
theories about the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Medawar put his fastidious finger exactly on the throbbing point of the fervent amateur’s psychological problem: Koestler was
science-struck. Untrained in science himself, he had a taste for it—the fatal proclivity for magnetism.

As Robert Musil said in praise of Alfred Polgar, our only
idée fixe
should
be the determination to avoid one. But the bonnet-filling bee is a tireless migrant, and can even show up in fields nominally concerned with the rational employment of the brain. Apart from the
sharpness of
the disappointment, there should be no surprise in the fact that the philosopher’s stone has always made its most prominent appearance in philosophy itself,
where its looming outline is the surest mark of incompetence. But monomania would be easier to deal with if the sufferer were of one mind: we could just avoid him. Unfortunately it is quite
possible for the subtle visionary and the shouting dunce to inhabit the same skull, so that Wagner the anti-Semite will always be there to help convince aspiring race scientists that they know
something about politics, and perhaps even something about music. Newton’s celestial mechanics constitute a mental achievement sublime beyond estimation. But those same exalted capacities
of ratiocination spent years plugging away at a system of chronology whose fraudulence was self-evident to any shopkeeper. From the evidence supplied by history’s teeming reservoir of minds
simultaneously clear and crazed, the logical inference can only be that we probably all suffer—somewhere on the pathway winding through our heads there is a philosopher’s stone
waiting to trip us up. But as long as we don’t hit anyone else with it, we are probably doing well. One of the loveliest women I ever knew was a believer in colonic irrigation as an aid to
beauty. She was mad enough to think that it had worked for her. But she wasn’t mad enough to suggest that it might have worked for me. On that showing, I would have pronounced her sane, but
I wouldn’t have wanted to stand surety for how she might have behaved if the Moonies had got hold of her. Fifty years before, it might have been Reich’s orgone box, and fifty years
before that it might have been the theories of Madame Blavatsky. When the beautiful Magda Rietschel met her future second husband, she had just finished being passionate about Buddhism. Before
that, it had been Zionism. In order to marry Josef Goebbels, she became equally passionate about National Socialism. Her latest and last enthusiasm made even less sense than the others, but there
can be no doubt it convinced her: she not only killed herself for it, she made certain that her children died too. And so on, all the way back through history, in which the beautiful women,
because they get written about, are forever cropping up in the grip of the latest explanatory fad, whose essential property is to console them for having been picked out from other mortals, and
thus made to feel so mortal. Friedell caught the essential truth about people prone to
catch-all theories: they aren’t in search of the truth, they’re in search of
themselves.

Mankind in the Christian era possesses one huge advantage over
the ancients: a bad conscience.

—EGON FRIEDELL,
Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit
, VOL. 1, P. 132

Friedell wrote this not long before the Nazis arrived in Vienna. Had he survived the
onset of the new barbarians, Friedell might have modified an unwarrantably uplifting sentiment. He must have been revising it in his mind long before he went out of the window, because it had
already turned out that he had chosen too confident a grammatical form for the verb. Mankind in the Christian era
ought
to possess a bad conscience. By the
time of his wisely chosen suicide, the evidence had already been coming in from Germany for the previous five years that Christianity was in for a comprehensive rewrite, the main aim being to
jettison its moral encumbrances, of which the bad conscience was the most burdensome.

Even if the Nazis had stayed where they belonged, at the ragged edge of politics instead of in the
centre, the same sort of evidence would still have been coming in from Russia for a full twenty years. A conscience of any kind, good or bad, was never listed as an item of a Bolshevik’s
mental equipment. Loyalties beyond the state’s declared aims were thought to be inimical, and an
a priori
set of values carried within the mind could
have no higher status than that of a psychological problem. Since Christianity was the main source of the problem, the elimination of Christianity was a state aim from the word go. The state
could have lived with the icons and the incense. The icon, in fact, was about to come into its age of gold, even if the gold was the light gilded alloy of the badges that bore the images of Lenin
and Stalin, and which always startled you by weighing no more that snowflakes when you picked them up.

But the Soviet state could never live with spiritual values. Strangely enough, the Nazi state could, as long as the
spiritual values were aimed in the right direction, along the path of Parsifal, or of Siegfried on his journey down the Rhine. Compared with the Soviet state, which was a
monolith, the Nazi state was a bucket of eels, with conflicting values of individual conscience having validity independently of the programmes of state power. Even near the top,
departments were in contention. There were even different departments to interpret orthodoxy, so that Alfred Rosenberg, the cultural “expert” on policies towards foreign populations
in the East, would have ideas on race that other top Nazis thought stupid. To get a ruling was hard: Hitler would have preferred it if all his subordinates were in conflict with each other,
always. Only the paper-pusher Martin Bormann ever succeeded in imposing hegemony, and he could do so only as an exercise in pure bureaucracy, after Nazi power to influence events had ceased to be
a reality. The Nazi state got its act together when it could no longer act. There was always room in the upper reaches of the Nazis’ earthbound Valhalla for dreamers to imagine they were
following the true path—for an appeal to spiritual values of chivalric dedication. Himmler brought it down to pentagrams and runes, but even among the SS there were would-be Teutonic
Knights in the picture. It was possible to dream of being Parsifal—Parsifal standing upright in the turret of a Tiger tank. Siegfried could carry a flame-thrower charged with Wotan’s
magic fire. The mark of sentimentality it is to be all choked up with feeling about nothing, and the mark of black-and-silver ceremonial was to upgrade sentimentality to the religious plane by
working towards a future in which nostalgia for the supposed purities of the heroic past would become real. The time and treasure that the Nazis put into mumbo-jumbo was one of the marks of their
regime. Other racist regimes have been more pragmatic. In post-war South Africa under apartheid, when it became expedient to make the Japanese racially acceptable, they were simply declared
racially acceptable. Under the Nazis, when it became expedient that the Japanese should be reclassified as Aryans, Himmler poured a lot of the Reich’s money and effort into proving the
point scholastically. Cynicism could have worked the trick in an instant, but sincerity demanded evidence. Nothing except the fervour of religious belief can explain such a rush of blood to the
head.

After the defeat, the Nazis vanished completely. Officers of the occupying powers forgivably got the idea that the party
membership had consisted of nothing but opportunists. Some of the opportunists were among the hierarchs. Goebbels stood out for his willigness to
accompany Hitler to oblivion.
Himmler and Goering were both ready to forget the whole thing. But we should not overlook the dreamers: there were many men who looked back on their duties not just as a dedication of moral
effort, but as a sacred rite. Those quondam mass executioners who talked about “the task” were the Nazis we should not write off. Many of them, after the war, grew comfortable enough
to wear fleece-lined car coats, drive a big Mercedes, and die in bed, and some could not resist telling the television reporters how sad it was to see a new generation of young people who
believed in nothing and had no respect for values, because they had never done anything hard and clean. There is no reason to believe that those terrible old men were faking their disgust. They
remembered their lives as a crusade.

The religious trappings of the Nazi movement were kitsch, like all its art: but as with the art, they left a long echo in
the mind for as long as the mind had nothing else in it. It was by no great act of cynical calculation that Nazi liturgical material could be pitched unerringly at the kind of people who were
genuinely moved by tripe. It was concocted by the same sort of people. Bad taste gives aesthetic expression to the aspirations of upstarts, and part of the appeal of Nazism was in the way it
turned social mobility into a path of adventure rewarded with decorations at every step. The kind of women who could pin a diamond studded swastika to a bias-cut jersey silk evening dress were
thrilled by the kind of men who had learned just enough about Wagner’s Siegmund to fancy the idea of impregnating Sieglinde. When the years of power were over, there was plenty to be
nostalgic about. The memorabilia market was soon in the position of having to manufacture souvenirs: there are probably more SS ceremonial daggers in existence now than there were in 1945. In the
Soviet Union, by contrast, nobody ever felt the same way about the paste cookies cranked out by the state medal factories. A Soviet officer at general staff rank was covered with medals like a
pangolin with scales, to no lasting effect except on the spectator’s funny bone. The Soviets knew nothing about rarity value, whereas the Nazis made sure that the ascending grades of a high
decoration all occupied the same focal space—the Knight’s Cross was worn at the neck, and so was the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and
Swords, and the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds. The “Diamonds” was
referred to in the singular and almost invariably conferred by Hitler
personally. The aim was to stress quality over quantity, and once again the trick worked particularly well on people who had not been brought up to know the difference. After the Berlin Wall came
down I bought a KGB cap (it was from a clerical branch of the KGB: no rough stuff, and therefore not very glamorous) at a stall near the Brandenburg Gate for a few dollars. An equivalent SS cap
would have cost a hundred times as much, and I would have had to buy it in Islington. In Germany, the stuff is so precious it either circulates in secret or is crated for export to
America’s alarming abundance of people who find the Nazis glamorous. The big question, in Germany, has always been whether the hard-eyed sentimentality would live on into the next
generation. The question was hard to answer because the older generation was so slow to go away. Nobody lives longer than those old men who got tough from killing children. They can ski until
they’re ninety. They don’t even lose their hair.

It can be said that the Nazi brew of Nordic saga, Wagnerian fable and elfin tomfoolery had little to do
with the Christian concept of conscience. There is truth to that, although we ought not to leave out the consideration that for many centuries a Christian conscience was no obstacle to the most
hideously comprehensive persecution of unbelievers. Nevertheless the liberal conscience, the conscience we really value, would never have arrived in the world unless the Christian conscience had
preceded it; so Christianity can be conceded the primacy.

When Friedell talked about a bad conscience, he meant the mind that was capable of seeing that might and right were not
the same thing. The Nazis were dedicated heart and soul to observing no such discrepancy. Their superstitions served merely to make them feel better about it. If the Communists had managed to
come good on their declared aim of abolishing all superstitions, they would have been even more frightening than the Nazis. It is a weird kind of consolation, but at least it is something, to
have evidence that they couldn’t keep up the secular momentum beyond the death of Lenin. Already during Lenin’s life, his writings and sayings had been awarded religious value, like
the poetry of Virgil, which for a large part of the Christian era was consulted as an oracle. Even as late as the seventeenth century, and in a country as civilized as England, people were still
poking a finger at random
into the
Aeneid
to be given a portent of an upcoming battle. Lenin was awarded that treatment while he lived,
having given the lead by the way he treated the writings of Marx. After Lenin’s death, the embalming fluid was an interior anointment presaging the divinity to come. Stalin’s act as
the Son of God depended on Lenin’s continuing as God, so the corpse remained safe. The superstitions attached to Stalin need not be rehearsed. Though they generated boredom on an
intercontinental scale, they remain interesting to the extent that he agreed with them: the great realist really seems to have believed, for example, that he knew something by instinct about
economics, biology and military strategy. Stalin’s capacity to join in the superstitions centred on his person is the gateway to the larger subject of how an utterly cock-eyed metaphysics
guaranteed that the Soviet experiment could not possibly succeed even though the men who led it were ready to murder the innocent en masse.