Cultural Amnesia (52 page)

To save Germany was not granted to them; only to die for it; luck
was not with them, it was with Hitler. But they did not die in vain. Just as we need air if we are to breathe, and light if we are to see, so we need noble people if we are to live.

—RICARDA HUCH,
Für die Martyrer der Freiheit
, MARCH/APRIL 1946, CITED IN
Briefe an die
Freunde
, P. 449

B
EFORE WE
SPEAK
about the old lady who wrote this, we should recall the doomed bravery of the young men she was writing about. For those involved in the July 20, 1944, plot against Hitler’s
life, martyrdom was always a possibility, and in retrospect, naturally enough, it looks like a certainty. A successful coup d’état would have required far too much to go right. Even
if the conspirators had succeeded in killing Hitler, their own lives would have been forfeit: Himmler had the exits covered. With martyrdom secured, canonization duly followed, especially on the
conservative right. Many of the plotters had been aristocrats and it was felt—felt because wished—that they had expressed a long-standing repugnance among people of good family
towards the vulgar upstart Hitler.

Actually it had never been as simple as that. When some of the condemned young officers had been even
younger, Hitler had looked to them like a saviour, a new Bismarck. Nor was it only the Wehrmacht that benefited from well-connected enthusiasm. Aristocratic recruits to the SS were plentiful:
promotion was rapid, and there were opportunities to ride horses. (Funding an SS equestrian team was one of Himmler’s master strokes.) Most of the young officers who developed doubts about
Hitler had close friends who never developed any doubts at all.
Critics on the left who would like to deny saintliness to the high-born conspirators will always have a lot to
go on. But the papal voice, the voice that matters most, spoke early. The voice belonged to the distinguished scholar Ricarda Huch, the bearer of a resounding title given to her by no less an
authority than Thomas Mann. He called her the First Lady of Germany.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Ricarda Huch, by then heaped with laurels but still glamorously
prominent as an enfant terrible, was the kind of illustrious Aryan name they wanted to keep enrolled in their academic institutions to help offset the gaps left by the expelled Jews. Already of a
certain age but with plenty of a glittering career left in her, she nevertheless, and without hesitating for a moment, found the courage to tell the Nazis where they could put it. The composer
Max von Schelling, president of the Prussian Academy of the Arts, received a letter from her in which she insisted that the “Germanness” the Nazis kept talking about was not her
Germanness:
nicht mein Deutschtum
. Her point made, she retired into private life. It was a mark, of course, of Nazi Germany’s relative porosity
vis-à-vis the Soviet Union that it offered bolt holes in which it was possible to lie still and say nothing, as if silence were not treason. Had the regime lasted longer than its brief
twelve years, Himmler’s steadily growing SS imperium and Bormann’s always more enveloping bureaucracy would have probably closed off the last chances of tacit dissent: as under
Stalin, vociferous affirmation would have been the only survivable posture. But under the Third Reich a woman of Ricarda’s age and authority could get away with holding her rulers in
contempt, as long as she wasn’t vocal about it. The housebound matriarch survived the war and resumed her career afterwards, living long enough to find her early works forgotten. With the
relentless, and largely justified, left-wing critique of the old institutions increasingly establishing an unchallenged ascendancy, a scholarly achievement like hers was thought too bourgeois to
be valuable. The First Lady of Germany was quietly lowered into the tomb of her own respectability. The Germans have a word for it:
togeschwiegen
. Killed by
not being mentioned.

But there was a paradox in the deathly hush, because the First Lady, when young, had been the First Vixen. Born too grand
to be impressed by high society, Ricarda became an establishment figure only by
default and by the lapse of years: as a girl she was a rebel, not to say a bit of a raver.
Intellectually, she had begun as an admirer of Mussolini, not for his Fascist hegemony but for his rowdy anarchist origins. She had admired Bakunin for the same reason. Emotionally, she was a
feminist role-reverser
avant la lettre
. In Wilhelmine Germany, at a time of stifling conformity when the marriageability of young women was the quality that
mattered most, she managed, by sheer force of character, to dish out to men the kind of treatment she would ordinarily have been expected to take. If women got in her way, they too were given
short shrift. She stole her sister’s husband without compunction and usually made a point of getting engaged to her suitors before giving them the elbow, just to ensure that they would have
the humiliation to remember. She was a social revolutionary in the deepest sense: no party, not even the Sparticists, had a programme to match her behaviour. She was on her own. For her spiritual
equivalent in modern times, you would have to imagine a combination of Germaine Greer, Billie Jean King and the London bluestocking Barbara Skelton, the fiery amalgam eventually cooling into the
general shape of Muriel Spark, with overtones of Camille Paglia after the second cocktail.

It is doubtful, however, if the wild girl’s pilgrim soul was ever tamed, even by time. One modern parallel that
won’t work is to attribute to her a Jane Fonda–like anabasis from one mould of progressive conformity to the next. Ricarda was never a conventional spirit looking for the display case
of a radical context: she was always a genuine solo act. Her opinions were entirely hers and often uncomfortable to even the most wide-ranging liberal hierophant, as if she had been some kind of
clerical surrealist out to shock with decontextualized opinions instead of sliced eyeballs and soft watches. In June 1943 she recorded in writing her profound enjoyment of her first air raid. It
was the same month that Hamburg was incinerated. Thoughts of doom and retribution would have been more suitable, but Ricarda could not repress her delight that the full-colour spectacular had
come to a cinema near her. “Finally Jena has had a sensation.” In Berlin after the war she wandered the world of ruins—the
Trümmerwelt
—where it would have been permissible for the author of one of the most important books on the Thirty Years War to weep heavy tears for the
downfall of a civilization. She loved it. Her aesthetic enthusiasm for the
gutted buildings and heaped rubble was boundless. She was in her eighties at the time.

And that was the time when she wrote her encomium to the suicidal young nobles of July. It would do us
good to remember that the old lady had lived a long life as they had not, and that she had lived it with originality as they might never have done. They were exactly the kind of stiff-necked,
tight-trousered cadets to whom she had once so enjoyed giving the runaround. If she could salute them, so should we. She was, after all, absolutely right on every point in the paragraph. The boys
never had a chance. Even if the apprentices had managed to kill their sorcerer, they could not have saved
Grossdeutschland
, which was going down to
unconditional surrender no matter who led it. But even if they had known in advance that a coup would not work, they would still have been right to try. Henning von Tresckow, who knew more about
the Killing Hitler business than anybody, guessed that the July 1944 plot was doomed but said it should go ahead anyway. He could only have meant that he saw it as a ceremony: a moment of honour
that would be remembered when there was nothing else to remember except shame.

Ricarda was well aware that there were other and less charismatic people in the conspiracy apart from the glamorously
uniformed
Hochadel
scions whose consciences had developed few notable doubts until military defeat became a certainty. There were obscure commoners who had
seen through Hitler from the beginning. What she meant by nobility was the sacrificial spirit that joined, in this one instance, the beautiful young men from the
Almanach de Gotha
and the plodding minor bureaucrats from the local council. She could take such a large view of nobility because she was noble herself. One of the
marks of the natural aristocrat is that the brain, the centre of rationality, does not become detached from the viscera, the seat of moral judgement. As a student of German history—and a
reader of her book on romanticism will wonder if there was ever a better student—she was well placed to assess the condition her country was in during the Weimar Republic, and to understand
the appeal that a strongman might have to those conservative forces who feared a Bolshevik insurrection beyond anything else. But she had only to see the Nazis in action to know exactly what they
were, and when they invited her to join them she had only one
answer to give. Millions of dead bodies later, those who equivocated were slow to mention her name. Their
reluctance was understandable, and remains easy to share. Conscious that we, too, might have found no uncompromising path through a moral maze, we would all like to believe that there was no easy
answer. And indeed there wasn’t. But there was a clear one. It was to tell the Nazis to go chase themselves.

All it took was courage. But courage is hard to come by: as Ricarda’s rococo c.v. suggests, to have
buckets of guts you need to be a little bit mad. Hence the discomfort which haunts any of us who write about the subject: the malaise comes from our self-doubt, and the self-doubt is the surest
sign that the murderers in black uniforms are still with us. It is almost as disturbing that a woman like Ricarda Huch is still with us, but if we seek reassurance about human dignity instead of
mere acceptance of human weakness, we must face up to her, and try to remember why Judas found it so hard to look into the face of Christ—not because of the divine serenity that was there,
but because of the self-seeking calculation that was not.

Ernst Jünger

ERNST JüNGER

Ernst Jünger was born in Heidelberg in 1895 and reached maturity just in time to volunteer
for service in World War I, during which his bravery won him the Pour le Mérite, Germany’s highest military decoration. After the war, his book
In
Stahlgewittern
(
Storm of Steel
) launched him on a literary career that amounts to as big a problem for the student of twentieth-century humanism
as Bertolt Brecht’s. In Jünger’s case, however, the problem came from the other direction. Jünger emerged from the trenches as a believer in national strength, which he
thought threatened by liberal democracy. Though he never gave his full allegiance to the Nazis, he was glad to accept military rank in the Wehrmacht, and wrote approvingly about the invasion
of France, in which he accompanied one of the forward units. After the plot against Hitler’s life in July 1944 he fell under suspicion, but his prestige and his Pour le Mérite
made him untouchable. Never an active conspirator, he thought he was fulfilling his duty to civilized values merely by despising Hitler. The thought of killing him did not occur. In his
post-war years, Jünger wrote contemptuously against the apparatchiks of the East German regime, who found it easy to condemn him for his right-wing track record, describing him
in their official literary lexicon as “an especially dangerous exponent of West German militaristic and neofascist literature.” Having missed his first chance to
identify a totalitarian enemy in good time, he didn’t miss the second. Demonstrating powers of compression and evocation that could pack a treatise into a paragraph, his two collections
of linked short essays,
Auf den Marmorklippen
(
On the Marble Cliffs
) and
Das
abenteuerliche Herz
(The Adventurous Heart), are the easiest introduction to his literary talent and political vision. The talent is unquestionable. The vision is quite otherwise. But
when he finally realized what Hitler had done in pursuit of the same ideal of strength that he had himself cherished, even he was obliged to consider that his espousal of Darwin (the struggle
for existence) and Nietzsche (the will to power) might have depended on some sort of liberal context for its rational expression. He died in 1998, his name much honoured, with good reason,
and much in dispute, for a better one.

Things like that belong to the style of the times.

—ERNST JüNGER,
Kaukasische Aufzeichnungen
(CAUCASIAN NOTES)

W
HEN IT COMES
to a great
offence, a phrase like “the style of the times” can be self-serving, because it removes the obligation to place blame. Even before Hitler launched Germany on a catastrophic war,
Jünger should have been able to assess the toxicity of the Nazis by the intellectual quality of some of the people who were trying to get beyond their reach. In retrospect, his phrase
“the style of the times” enrols itself among many euphemisms that served to sanitize the effects of the Nazi impact even on the learned professions. Jünger, as an Aryan, was safe
from that impact. He should have cared more about what happened to those less privileged. A learned man himself, Jünger knew all their names: even the names of the minor figures, the spear
carriers and walk-ons. In the late 1930s, in a race for a foreign chair of philology, the obscure Victor Klemperer was beaten to a safe seat in Ankara by the illustrious Erich Auerbach. If
Klemperer had secured
the prize instead, and got away to safety, it is unlikely that he would have written anything with the bold scope of Auerbach’s
Mimesis
. We should not romanticize Klemperer because of what he went through: millions did. But we are compelled to admire him for what he made of it. Compared to
Auerbach, Klemperer was a plodder. Fated to stay where he was, however, he was granted the dubious reward of experiencing from close up what the Nazis did to the German language: an instructive,
if disheartening, philological field. Some of Klemperer’s conclusions are loosely distributed through his indispensable two-volume diary, published in English as
I Shall Bear Witness
and
To the Bitter End
. But most are tightly contained in a separate book assembled after the war out of the
notes he somehow managed to make and keep during it:
LTI
. (The initials stand for
Lingua tertii
imperii
—Language of the Third Empire—a bitter scholarly pun.) As a Jew in the Third Empire, Klemperer was allowed no new books or newspapers. He wasn’t even allowed to
listen to the radio. But he picked up the new usages at second hand. Reading his analysis, we can only conclude that the Nazis wrecked the language they had usurped. They wrecked it with
euphemism: they spoke and wrote the officialese of slaughter.

But we should not delude ourselves that an Aryan non-Nazi, no matter how exalted his intellect, could
exercise the privilege of remaining uninfected. Ernst Jünger is a case in point: perhaps
the
case in point, because he was incomparably the most gifted
writer to remain on the scene. In his wartime diaries, the strange usage isolated in my opening quotation keeps on cropping up. It centres on a single word. The word is
Zeitstil
: “the style of the times.” In early December 1942 we find Jünger visiting the Russian front. He hears about dreadful things happening to
Russian prisoners. First of all he convinces himself that the prisoners are partisans, and can thus expect no quarter. When this thesis starts to look shaky, he convinces himself of something
else: that both sides are behaving dreadfully, and it all belongs to “the style of the times.” Later on in the same month, he hears from a general (the generals were always at home to
Jünger, whose prestige was immense) that the Jews are being slaughtered. Jünger’s reaction is: “The old chivalry is dead: wars from now on will be waged by
technologists.” Once again, it is the style of the times. And so it was, but not in the way he meant it.

Jünger had lent his literary gift to the idea of German militaristic renewal. Until
the news about the extermination camps was finally and unmistakably read to him by a German general in 1943, no amount of horrifying truth could induce him fully to admit that he had made a
mistake. His way out of such an admission was to blame the style of the times: i.e., to console himself with the belief that everyone was at it, led back to barbarism by the modern spirit of
technology. The style of the times was a powerfully useful idea. It didn’t even need to be put into words. It could be put into silence. In his elegant, learned and finally disgraceful
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
, published in 1948, T. S. Eliot simply declined to admit that the Holocaust might be a pertinent topic in a
discussion of what had happened to Europe. Closer to the scene but equally untouched, Eliot’s admirer and colleague Ernst Robert Curtius achieved a similar feat of inattention. If pressed
on the point, both savants would have blamed the new technological order: the style of the times. But there was no such thing as the style of the times, except in the sense that they themselves
personified: a style of not concerning themselves with the catastrophic results of a political emphasis they had been given ample opportunity to recognize as the first and most deadly enemy of
the humanist culture they claimed to represent. The humble Victor Klemperer, if they had been forcibly reminded of his name, would have been dismissed as small beer by both of them. Ernst
Jünger would have behaved better. To give him the respect he has coming, he finally realized that the massacre of the Jews could not be wished away. But he never quite gave up on the airy
notion that the style of the times was to blame for things like that.