Cultural Amnesia (46 page)

Things could be more discreetly managed among the upper orders, with the usual proviso that too much
discretion tended to stifle the action. During an official visit to Nuremberg, the Minister drove out to the countryside to take lunch with the Gräfin Faber-Castell, an accomplished,
gracious twenty-six-year-old beauty who clad herself in a dirndl for the occasion. After the war the Faber-Castell firm was still making most of the pencils produced in Germany; in Australia as a
schoolboy I had a whole box of them in various grades, and very fine pencils they were. (In Solzhenitsyn’s long narrative poem
Prussian Nights
, the
invading Russian soldiers marvel at the perfection of the Faber-Castell pencils: the very kind of reaction to Western goods that Stalin was afraid of, and obviated retroactively by purging his
victorious army, nicely calculating how long a stretch in the Gulag it would take to forget a centrally heated house or a flush toilet that worked.) As pioneering participants in the post-war
Wirtschaftswunder
(economic miracle), the Faber-Castell dynasty saw no reason to change the firm’s name, and indeed they hadn’t done anything.
They had just made pencils; and made Goebbels welcome. After lunch, there was a cultural interlude. When the Gräfin played and sang
Lieder
, her
illustrious visitor joined her at the piano for a four-handed, two-voiced recital. If not a passionate physical relationship, it was certainly a passionate spiritual one. She was his upper-class
muse and point of solace: the same supporting role that was played for Goethe by Anna Amalia, Herzogin von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, a parallel that Goebbels would have been well equipped to draw.
The Gräfin Faber-Castell’s exalted name crops up repeatedly as the end approaches. It was already approaching on the day of that cosy little combined lunch and
Lieder
concert. It was June 6, 1944.

After D-day Goebbels gave up smoking, probably because he was on a psychological high. He really did think,
or said he thought, that the chances of working a political master stroke were going up as the military situation deteriorated. By July 1, however, he was smoking again. We have to admit the
possibility that his mind was working at two levels. He was the pre-eminent Nazi advocate of Total War (he was surely right that if he had been allowed to institute it earlier, Germany would have
done better) but he was also a realist; although we should always remember that he was a realist in a surreal world, the madhouse he had helped to create. There was a significant development on
June 11, 1944: von Oven’s help was required in a comprehensive reordering of the Doctor’s personal library. All the standard party literature was thrown out and the remaining books
were arranged purely according to literary standards (
nach literarisches Maßtäben
). There is something touching about that. Goebbels wasn’t
getting out of the Nazi party. He thought that the Nazi party would be eternal, even if it were reduced to two members, him and Hitler. But he seems to have decided that all this ideological junk
had nothing to do with the real thing. He might have also been trying to get back to his essential, untainted self, all unaware—or perhaps only almost unaware—that the taint
was
his essential self. Nevertheless there had been a day when, as a young student, he had it all before him. It was a day when he had respected his Jewish
professors, saw a literary future for himself, and had not taken the Nazis seriously. A day before he met Hitler. Perhaps now, with the roof falling in, he hankered for the lost past, at a level
he could not examine. But the reordering of his books did the examining for him. A man’s relationship with his books tells you a lot about him, and in the case of a man like Goebbels we
should pay close attention, because a crucial early choice he made was one that continually faces any of us who read at all. He chose a life of action, and his life would have been different if
he had not. It could be said that the lives of millions of innocent people would have been different too, but there we should be equally alert to the danger of optimism. The only thing different
might have been that he would have had a job like von Oven’s. He might have been merely reporting on the insanity instead of helping to create it, but the insanity would still have been
there. Hitler wouldn’t have
needed to find someone else. Someone else would have found him. When absolute power is on offer, talent fights to get in.

The Nazis had no tragedies: they caused tragedies for other people. In tragedy there must be a fall from
high degree, or at least from the level of common humanity: and the Nazis had nothing to fall from. The tower they built was subterranean. But we can sympathize with their children. Near the end
of the second volume Frau Goebbels speaks; and when she speaks, laughter dies. It is the April 22, 1945, and the Russians are already in the U-bahn tunnels under Berlin. She tells von Oven that
she and her husband have already said goodbye to life. They had lived for Nazi Germany and would die with it. “But what I can’t wish away is the destiny of the children. Certainly my
reason tells me that I can’t leave them to a future in which they, as our children, will be defenceless before the Jewish revenge. But when I see them play around our feet, I just
can’t reconcile myself to the idea of killing them.”

When the time came, she managed it. It probably never dawned on her that her innocent children were following at least one
and a half million other innocent children into the same poisoned oblivion, and for the same reason—no reason. (Once again, incidentally, von Oven forgets to explain why the Jews should
have wanted revenge. Had something bad happened?) In all the literature about the Nazis, there is nothing quite like
Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende
to tell you
that the whole vast historical disaster was a figment of the imagination. If only we could return the dead to life and the tortured to health, we would be able to see it as a comic extravaganza.
Goebbels was the limping, shrieking embodiment of the whole thing. He was not a fool. In many respects he was very clever. He even had creative powers. But his creative powers were all at the
service of Hitler’s destructive powers. So everything the most eloquent of the Nazis said was a joke. If the joke had all happened within his study—if the Doctor had remained what he
was, a dreaming student walled in by books—the laughter would never end, and we might even sympathize. The way things turned out, the most we can do is try to understand. As for Wilfred von
Oven, his long post-war career provided evidence that a Nazi past could count as a sort of qualification if you could hang in long enough. In Argentina he was prominent in the circle around
Hitler’s favourite Stuka pilot
Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the bunch who always knew where Eichmann was. Having never been deprived of his German citizenship, von Oven went back
to Europe as often as he liked, and as late as 1998 he was loudly active in Belgium with an outfit dedicated to winning back separate nationhood for the Walloons. For his fellow agitators, his
curriculum vitae, going all the way back to service with the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War, was a powerful indicator that he knew what he was talking about. And on top of all that, he
had known Goebbels personally!

WITOLD GOMBROWICZ

In Poland between the wars, Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969) became a successful writer of a
recognizable type, principally because of his surrealist novel
Ferdyduke
(1938). After he went into exile in Argentina, however, he gradually transmuted
into a type of writer that we are only now starting to recognize: the writer who doesn’t write in established forms, but just writes, and who, not belonging anywhere, makes everywhere
belong to him. When Poland ceased to suffer under the Nazis, Gombrowicz declined the opportunity to go home and see it suffer under the Communists. In the many volumes of his
Journal
,
Varia
, correspondence and memoirs (all available in French, but only some, alas, in English) he worked out a
position by which he himself was Poland, and the detailed description of his flight from artistic form was the only art-form to which he felt responsible. On this latter point he differed
from his fellow Polish-speaking exile Czeslaw Milosz, who practised all the literary art-forms as if they were one. In his long final phase, Gombrowicz practised none of them, and wrote about
how he didn’t. But the way he wrote, in a prose teeming with observed detail and subversive perceptions, was a continual fascination, and went on being so after
his
death: volumes of his casual-seeming writings continued to appear, and his widow, Rita, became the curator of his reputation as it rose inexorably to fame. At his death he was called
“the most unknown of all celebrated writers.” Two decades later, in the year that the Berlin Wall came down, the first uncensored edition of his complete writings finally appeared
in Poland. His country had come home to its most obdurate world citizen.

I find that any self-respecting artist must be, and in more than
one sense of the term, an émigré.

—WITOLD GOMBROWICZ,
Varia
, VOL. 1, P. 203

“
E
VERYONE,” SAID DR. JOHNSON,
“has a lurking wish to appear considerable in his native place.” If he had been blessed with clairvoyance, he might have
added: “Everyone except Witold Gombrowicz.” Having spent most of his writing life in exile, Gombrowicz was under some compulsion to judge the experience vital to his cast of mind: but
he seems not to have been faking. He might possibly have gone back to Communist Poland if its literary authorities had not been so stupid as to attack him before he got there instead of
afterwards. In his
Journal Paris-Berlin
we find him merely nervous about going back. He is not yet refusing to. But things worked out as they always did,
with one of Poland’s most talented writers confirmed in his course of having as little as possible to do with Poland and its immediate concerns. It seems fair to say that he liked it better
that way. He wasn’t just making the best of a bad job. Over the course of a writing life spent far from home, he took the opportunity to examine just how closely a national writer must be
connected to his nation. In
Journal
I he asked: is the life of an exile
really
more fragmentary? In
Journal
II he said that the more you are yourself, the more you will express your nationality—with the implication that it was easier to express it if you were
free of nationalist pressures. In Nazi Germany, he had noticed, the citizens had become
less
typically German,
less
authentic. (It should be said that in the writings of Gombrowicz the frequently employed word “authentic”
has an authenticity that it never has in the context of
Sartre’s existentialism, where it essentially means having the chutzpah to do what it takes so that you may suit yourself—not quite the same thing as being true to yourself.) In
Journal
II Gombrowicz said: “I want to be only Gombrowicz”: i.e., a country all by himself. He could see the attendant danger:
“
mon moi gonfle
”—my self inflates. “Because the trivial concerns oneself, one fails to see it might be boring.” But in the
end, he said in
Testament
, to lose one’s country is a release. In Empson’s famous poem, the companion piece to the line “It seemed the
best thing to be up and go” is “The heart of standing is you cannot fly.” If Gombrowicz had not been able to fly, he would probably have ended up dead. But it is not impossible,
just difficult, to imagine him choosing a quiet life from the start, and writing his diary in secret. It is impossible, however, to imagine him not leaving home if given the choice. The idea he
spent his life refining—that art was its own kingdom—was an idea that he was born with.