Cultural Amnesia (123 page)

Most of our friends and acquaintances in theatre, film and
literature, who had no personal persecution to fear and could remain in their country, stayed true to us, the exiled, and let us know in every possible way that between them and us there was
no division. A few, a very few, turned out to be opportunists, delators and traitors.

—CARL ZUCKMAYER,
Als wär’s ein Stück von mir
, P. 387

T
HIS IS GENEROUSLY
said,
and it is a relief to know that it is said truly. Among those artists who, enjoying the dubious privilege of racial acceptability, were able to stay on in Nazi Germany if they wished,
comparatively few took the opportunity to flourish. None of those could have guessed, before the battle of Stalingrad, that there would be a reckoning within their lifetimes. If they chose not to
cooperate, it was a moral choice. The temptations were hard to resist, yet hardly anyone of real note succumbed. The playwright and Nobel laureate Gerhart Hauptmann agreed to speak well of the
Nazis, but he did it because he was old; and even at the time he blamed his own cowardice. The case of the eminent actor-manager Gustav Gründgens, who was pleased enough to be patronized by
Goering, is celebrated because it was rare, and the picture of him painted in
Mephisto
is far too dark: Klaus Mann had a mean streak. (Gründgens
didn’t help his case by the way he defended himself after the war: his book was self-justificatory, without showing any awareness that the necessary prelude to explanation was an admission
that justification was impossible.) Nevertheless there were those who could not resist a place on the gravy train. Zuckmayer knew most of them personally. The quoted passage
is not all he has to say on the subject. Without abandoning the philanthropic restraint that marks his book of memoirs—its title, translatable as “As if It Was a Piece
of Me,” is meant partly as a signal that the friendships of a lifetime helped to form him—the great man of the Weimar theatre goes on to give an example of what one of the
opportunists managed to achieve.

His name was Arnolt Bronnen, and he was a friend of Brecht. Under Weimar, Bronnen’s socially
conscious plays attained enough acclaim for the sceptical Anton Kuh to find them fatuous. When the Nazis came to power, Bronnen faced an abrupt demotion from his success, because his father was a
Jewish schoolmaster who had married an Aryan woman. Luckily for him, Bronnen’s powers of dramatic invention served the purpose. He concocted a deposition by which his mother had betrayed
her husband with an Aryan man, and therefore he, Bronnen, was
ein rassenreiner Fehltritt
: a racially pure false step. Having thus armed himself with the
proper dispensation, Bronner was able to get along under the Nazis, although they did not forget that his plays had been a success under the
Judenrepublik
,
their typically oafish nickname for the Weimar democracy. Off the hook but not yet on the bandwagon, Bronnen tried to improve his position by publishing anti-Semitic articles. His piece called
“Cleaning Up the German Theatre” featured a would-be nifty flight of punning word play about Max Reinhardt: “
Jetzt aber nicht mehr Reinhardt,
sondern rein und hart!”
(“But now no more Reinhardt: instead, clean and hard!” It loses something in translation, but there was never much to lose.) After the Nazis
collapsed, Bronnen found another totalitarian bureaucracy to serve. He became an editor in East Germany. The function of an East German literary editor, it hardly needs saying, was to seek out
fresh talent and make certain it did not get published.

Zuckmayer was even better acquainted with Hanns Johst, a mediocre man of letters who ranked as a big noise among the Nazi
literati. (Johst, not Goering, was the original author of the crack about reaching for his revolver when he heard the word “culture”: an instructive example of a clever remark
floating upwards until it attaches itself to someone sufficiently famous.) But Zuckmayer correctly spotted that Bronnen was the more interesting moral case. Accusing your own mother of adultery
to save your skin is creativity of a kind so special it
can almost be called a talent. Our challenge, however, is to convince ourselves that we would not have done something
similar: perhaps a less shameless version, but equally self-serving. And the self-serving action becomes easier on the conscience if we can persuade ourselves we are serving our art, which would
be impoverished without us. This process of mental deception seems to have proved especially prevalent among the musicians. Perhaps the writers, confined as they were to words, were quicker to
spot it when they were telling themselves lies. Musicians could tell themselves that their art was not affected by the world of ideas. The conscience of Herbert von Karajan seems to have been
unaffected, either then or later, by his Nazi party membership, which he applied for voluntarily, on the grounds that he needed it to get ahead. The unblushing readiness of the rising young
soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf to sing for the Nazi hierarchs (her luxurious apartment had previously belonged to a Jewish conductor forced into exile) makes us doubly grateful for the memory of
Marlene Dietrich, who could not sing from the operatic repertoire but had at least seen the nightmare coming, and made her attitude clear from an early date. As an Aryan, she could have gone home
to Germany had she wished: but she never did until Hitler was defeated. Zuckmayer’s point, however, is even more encouraging: most of those who stayed behaved with honour.

STEFAN ZWEIG

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) is a fitting name to introduce the coda of this book, because his
life, work, exile and self-inflicted death combine to sum up so much of what has gone before, which is really the story of the will to achievement in the face of all the conditions for
despair. Zweig’s own achievements are nowadays ofen patronized: a bad mistake, in my view. Largely because of his highly schooled but apparently effortless gift for a clear prose
narrative, he attained, while he lived, immense popularity not just in the German-speaking countries but in the world entire, and he is still paying the penalty for it. Except in France,
where his major works are never out of print, it is usually safer to call him second-rate. Safer, but not sound. Most of his poems, plays and stories have faded, but his accumulated
historical and cultural studies, whether in essay or monograph form, remain a body of achievement almost too impressive to take in. Born into Vienna’s golden age, he took the idea of
cultural cosmopolitanism to heart, and looked for its seeds in the past, in a series of individual studies that form a richly endowed humanist gallery, in which the first and still the most
impressive portrait is his monograph
Erasmus
. Such names as Goethe, Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche, Rilke, Herzl,
Freud,
Schnitzler, Mahler, Bruno Walter and Joseph Roth might have been expected to attract Zweig’s attention, but he also wrote a whole book on Balzac, as well as valuable essays on Dante,
Montaigne, Chateaubriand, Sainte-Beuve, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Renan, Rodin, Busoni, Toscanini, Rimbaud, James Joyce and many more. Full-sized books on Marie-Antoinette, Mary Stuart and
Magellan were international best-sellers. For beginners who can read some German, his collection
Begegnungen mit Menschen, Büchern, Städten
(Meetings with People, Books and Cities) is probably the best place to start, and they will be reading much more German afterwards. His
Die Welt von
Gestern
(
The World of Yesterday
) is—it bears saying again—the best single memoir of Old Vienna by any of the city’s native
artists, although George Clare’s
Last Waltz in Vienna
will always be the book to read first. A lustrous picture book,
Stefan Zweig
, came out in German in 1993, and in French the following year. Its dazzling pages prove that he got some of his immense archive of documents and
photographs away to safety. His magnificent library in Salzburg, alas, was burned by the Nazis in 1938. They knew exactly what he represented, even if some literary critics still don’t.
Stefan Zweig was the incarnation of humanism, so when he finally took his own life it was a persuasive indication that the thing we value so highly can stay alive only in a liberal
context.

With whom have we not spent heart-warming hours there, looking
out from the terrace over the beautiful and peaceful landscape, without suspecting that exactly opposite, on the mountain of Berchtesgaden, a man sat who would one day destroy it all?

—STEFAN ZWEIG,
Die Welt von Gestern
, P. 396

“
H
EART-WARMING HOURS”
sound less corny in German:
herzliche Stunden
. Zweig had a house in Salzburg, and from the terrace he
could see across the border into Germany, to the heights on
which the exterminating angel perched, gathering its strength. If Hitler had looked in the other direction, he
would have seen, on Zweig’s terrace, everything he was determined to annihilate, and not just because it was Jewish. There were plenty of gentiles who came to see Zweig. But they were all
infected with
Kulturbolschewismus
, the deadly international disease that presumed to live in a world of its own: the disease that Hitler, in his role as
hygienist, had a Pasteur-like mission to eradicate. Everyone who mattered in the European cultural world knew Zweig. It was one of his gifts. He believed in the sociability of the civilized. In
the long run it was a belief that might have helped to kill him. When he committed suicide in Brazil in 1942, he already knew that the Nazis weren’t going to win the war. But the Nazis had
already won their war against the gathering on the terrace.

The question remains of whether Zweig had valued that gathering too much. Never a man for being alone in
the café, he had staked everything on the artistic community and the mutual consideration which he supposed to prevail automatically within it. The artistic community, not his worldwide
popularity, was the context of his success. When Hitler destroyed that success, Zweig quoted Grillparzer’s line about walking alive in the funeral procession behind his own corpse. Zweig
had no notion that the Nazi assault on the idea of an artistic community was not unique. As late as the year of his death, he was still saying that there was “no second example” of
such murderous irrationality. Though he had once been on a train ride with the Bolshevik cultural commissar Lunacharsky to visit Tolstoy’s old estate at Yasnaya Polyana, Zweig knew little
of what had been going on in the Soviet Union, where the artistic community of Petersburg that had gone on flourishing between 1917 and 1929—a confluence of talent to match any gathering on
his terrace—had been obliterated as a matter of policy. (The crackdown was announced by Lunacharsky himself, the erstwhile bohemian chosen by Stalin to put out the lights of bohemia.) To
the bitter end, Zweig believed that the natural state of affairs between exponents of the humanities was one of affectionate respect: a professional solidarity.