Cultural Amnesia (94 page)

He was right about that. Strolling on to the stage came the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The maestro appeared in front of
it, raised his baton, and launched into the opening measure of
Also Sprach Zarathus tra
. Being Solti, he didn’t get further than the first eight bars
before he brought the whole thing to a halt in order to re-educate a violinist, but I was already carried away by the magnitude of an historic moment. Here was a man whom the Nazis would have
killed on the spot, and he was playing one of their tunes. But of course it wasn’t just theirs: that was the point. It was ours—something that Strauss must have realized,
even while the Nazis were trying to bend him to their odious purposes. After all, he wasn’t a fool: just old, conceited and weak, and at some time in our lives we are all of
us those things, although not, if we are lucky, all at the same time. The writers know straight away when they are being weak, whereas the composers can kid themselves for decades at a stretch.
We think of the Soviet Union’s favourite epic novelist, Sholokhov, as a shameless liar, but of the composer Khachaturian as just a hack. Perhaps we should think worse of Khachaturian, since
all the evidence suggests that for a true musician in the Soviet Union the price of seriousness was to suffer unmistakeable humiliation through being obliged to kiss the badly barbered behind of
one cultural commissar after another. Shostakovich, on his own anguished confession, was a case in point. (And lest there be any doubt that Solomon Volkov’s recension of
Shostakovich’s memoirs, even though largely a fantasy on Volkov’s part, had solid roots in reality, it should be noted that Ashkenazy settled the question in an article he wrote for
the May 5, 2000, issue of the
Financial Times
. He wrote it because he had grown sick of listening to clueless debates about the basic facts of the regime
from which he, unlike Shostakovich, had been lucky enough to find a way out.)

It remains a moot point, however, whether there was ever any such thing as specifically totalitarian music. Watching a
couple of well-built slaves doing their love dance in
Spartacus
, it is hard not to think of all those people freezing to death in Vorkuta while pig-eyed
Presidum members at the Bolshoi were doting on the ballerina’s bare thighs, but that was scarcely Khachaturian’s fault. (The divine Plissetskaya, incidentally, as her memoirs written
late in life reveal, was well aware that she was dancing for murderers: but she was a dancer, and where else was there to dance?) In Sydney when I was first a student, Carl Orff’s
Carmina Burana
was introduced to me by a European refugee who probably had no idea that its composer found favour with the kind of people who had gassed her
family: there was nothing in the music to tell her, except perhaps a certain predilection for bombast. If Prokofiev had never gone home to Russia, he might not have written
Romeo and Juliet
, but he would still have been Prokofiev, not Stravinsky. There is enough historicist determinism in the world without our straining our wits to attach
it to people who think up tunes.
Doktor Faustus
has some
of Thomas Mann’s most marvellous writing in it, but there is something
crucial it does not include: we get no idea of how Leverkühn’s bargain with the devil shows up as music. The safest bet is that it showed up as boredom.

There is a marvellous piece by James Thurber about an heroic solo aviator who earns the worship of America before anybody
realizes that he is a prejudiced buffoon who will be a public relations disaster if sent abroad to represent his country. Finally he has to be pushed out of a window. Clearly Thurber meant
Lindbergh. In real life, Lindbergh could never be manoeuvred close enough to a suitable window, but in the long run something more drastic happened. He was justly famous for his bravery and skill
as a lone flyer. But when his baby was kidnapped and killed he showed a kind of courage that the media didn’t like: reticence. The way was prepared for his reputation to collapse when the
isolationism he favoured (the America First movement) was discredited by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Understanding, it seemed, had gathered around his name, and certainly, on close scrutiny,
there was nothing noble about his fondness for the dictators. (Gore Vidal, while making a good case for Lindbergh’s isolationism, neglects to explain why anti-Semitism had to be part of the
package.) But there was a later phase, less known, that ought to be part of the picture. Lindbergh tested high-performance aircraft, probably shot down a Japanese aircraft in combat, pioneered
long-distance routes for Pan Am, and generally lived out a productive life. His fame is in two parts, like Brecht’s: he is the hero and the villain. For the thoughtful, it is in three
parts: he is also one of the first victims of the celebrity culture. (There would have been no kidnapping if he had not been so publicized that even a stumbling halfwit had read about him.) But
it ought to be in at least four, because behind all the personae determined by events there was a personality that remained constant. He valued self-reliance, and possibly valued it too much: it
made him hate collectivism so blindly that he thought fascism was the opposite, instead of the same thing in a dark shirt. Yet there is something magnificent about a man who could make a success
out of any task he tackled. To complete Rilke’s observation—and it is an observation, because it answers visible facts—we must accept this much: to measure the distortion
of life we call fame it is not enough to weigh the misunderstandings against the understandings. We have to see through to the actual man, and decide whether, like so many artists,
he is mainly what he does, or whether he has an individual and perhaps even inexpressible self, like the lonely flyer.

VIRGINIO ROGNONI

Virginio Rognoni was born in Corsica in 1924. A student of law and a practising lawyer after World
War II—the period in which the new democratic Italy was transforming, sometimes insufficiently, the embarrassing inheritance of the Fascist legal system—he rose to prominence as
professor of institutions of civil procedural law (a typically Italian mouthful of an academic title) at the University of Pavia. In 1968 he was elected to parliament as a Christian Democrat.
After the kidnapping and eventual assassination of ex–Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) in 1978, Rognoni was put in charge of the Ministry of the Interior,
his chief task being to defeat the terrorists. The job took him five years, and produced enough dramatic action to keep the Italian movie and television industry supplied with plot lines
until the present day and presumably beyond. At the time, however, the tension was all too real. Neo-fascist bombers got into the act on their own account and the legal system looked like an
unarmed prophet. But Rognoni’s chief triumphs were in court. Historians from either wing generally agree that the Red Brigades were finished from the moment that the American General
James Lee Dozier, whom they had taken hostage, was recovered
alive in 1982. After his success against the terrorists, Rognoni went on to a number of political posts, the
most important of them concerned with legal reform. His effectiveness as vice president of the Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura (Superior Council of the Magistracy) can be argued about
indefinitely by sceptical critics of Italian politics, who suffer from no shortage of subject matter, those on the left always able to detect the hand of the CIA, those on the right always
alert to the revival of Communist subversion in a new disguise. But nobody can seriously deny that Rognoni played the crucial role in confronting a genuinely dangerous threat to democracy and
neutralizing it by reasonable means. Right-wing theorists continue to believe that there was a terrorist mastermind (“
grande
vecchio
”—grand old man) who escaped. Left-wing theorists continue to believe that the terrorists were right-wing
agenti provocantori
.
Sensible people prefer to concentrate on what Rognoni thinks of the matter. Luckily his opinions, closely allied to his vivid memories, are available in print, providing a crucial text for
all humanist students beginning to grapple with the question of how a liberal democracy can maintain its integrity when forced to defend itself against misuse of the freedoms it exists to
cherish. Since Lincoln himself wondered aloud how a state dedicated to liberty could be strong enough to protect it, there is no blame attached to not having a ready answer. As Rognoni found
out, however, the answer is, or had better be, there within ourselves, waiting to be discovered. When faced with an ideology of opportunist violence it helps to have some principles in
advance, before the pressure of events starts reinforcing the idea that expediency might be a principle in itself.

In whichever way a democratic system might be sick, terrorism
does not heal it, it kills it. Democracy is healed with democracy.

—VIRGINIO ROGNONI,
Intervista sul terrorismo

I
N ITALY,
THE
publishing firm Laterza puts out an attractive series of booklets devoted to interviews with leading cultural, scientific and political figures: Alberto Moravia, Gianni Agnelli, Enrico
Fermi, Federico Fellini and many more are among my own collection. To the new student of Italian, I can recommend the series as an
autostrada
into the
culture. You can hear the language being spoken at its top level, and the subject matter is real: sometimes all too real. This interview with Virginio Rognoni is one of the best. He had
impeccable credentials to pronounce the opinon quoted above. As minister of the interior between 1978 and 1983, Rognoni was the man on the spot in the period the Italians still call
gli anni di piombo
—the years of lead. It was a period in which the extreme right and the extreme left staged a shooting and bombing competition which held the
spectators on tenterhooks, because they were among the targets. As the death toll mounted, Rognoni was under tremendous pressure to arrogate emergency powers to himself: not least, of course,
from the terrorists, who would have liked nothing better than for the state to adopt illiberal means. Rognoni resisted the temptation and settled in for a long battle. The blessed day when a full
thirty-two leaders of the Red Brigades were sent to gaol—it was Monday, January 24, 1983—happened on his watch. Terrorism in Italy wasn’t over, but its back was broken. Rognoni,
a prime target himself, had done his job. Though he was accused by the left of pursuing left-wing terrorists harder than he pursued right-wing terrorists, the facts prove his neutrality. He was a
good Catholic, but so were plenty of the terrorists, even among the Marxists. His enemy was not the left, but terrorism
tout court
, which he, better than
anybody, knew was cherished by many of its adherents as an end in itself, rather than a means to justice. In other words, evil had become a career for the otherwise unemployable, and there would
be no end to it unless it was stopped.