Even as We Speak (10 page)

It wasn’t, after all, as if the editors wanted to change the main thrust of the piece. There is a fine line between being asked to say something differently and being required to say
something different, but it is a clear one. When they do want you to say something different, of course, it’s time to take the kill fee and quit. But this piece was guaranteed to give me
trouble whatever the circumstances. Goldhagen’s book aspires to be wide-ranging over both the political and cultural background to the Holocaust, and if you hope to show that his reach
exceeds his grasp, you have to be pretty wide-ranging yourself, over a literature that it takes half a lifetime to absorb. It was probably as much a blessing as a curse that I had to write the
piece against a deadline, and that I had to do much of the work on it while I was filming in Mexico City, away from my own library and any other library that held the relevant books. To a great
extent I had to rely on what was in my memory. In retrospect, the restriction feels like a lucky break. Otherwise I would have ended up writing a review longer than the book, and it would have had
footnotes hanging off it in festoons.

There is something to be said for being forced into ellipsis. Skimpiness, however, is inevitably part of the result. You wouldn’t know, from Goldhagen’s book, that the question of
the Jewish contribution to German-speaking culture was far more complicated than he makes out. Unfortunately you wouldn’t know from my review just how complicated it was. It was elementary
work to rebut his line with a few simple examples. The editing process reduced them to even fewer, but the obvious point was made. It was also fudged. Goldhagen is clamorously wrong on that
particular topic, but the evidence by which he might think himself right is stronger than I had the time, the room or – less forgivably – the inclination to make out. As my admired
Marcel Reich-Ranicki explains in his
Der Doppelte Boden
(augmented edition, Fischer, 1992), some of the Jewish writers, though they enjoyed huge public acclaim, had ample motive for
feeling rejected. The novelist Jakob Wasserman, for all his success as a best-seller, despaired of social acceptance. Among Jewish artists in Germany after World War I that state of mind was not
rare, and in Austria it was common. Its epicentre had been registered by Arthur Schnitzler at the turn of the century, in a key passage of his great novel
Der Weg ins Freie
(The Path into
the Clear), where a leading character spells out the impossibility of true assimilation with a mordant clarity not very different from the polemical Zionism of Theodor Herzl. There can be no doubt
that Schnitzler was speaking from the heart.

The question abides, however, of whether he was speaking from a whole heart or only a part of it. Though insecurity was ever-present and outright abuse always a threat, the Jewish artists and
thinkers, if assimilation to the German-speaking culture was what they wanted, had good reasons to think it was being achieved in those last years before 1933. Their influence, even their
dominance, in the various fields of culture was widely acknowledged. On playbills, in concert programmes and on publishers’ lists there were Jewish names that attracted an audience totalling
millions. The career of Stefan Zweig, alone, would be enough to make Goldhagen’s cultural theory look fantastic. Zweig’s books were customarily translated into about thirty languages
but his sales in the German-speaking countries would have been enough on their own to make him wealthy. It shouldn’t need pointing out that his sales couldn’t have been that big if they
had been confined to an audience of Jewish background, a qualification which applied to only 300,000 people in the whole of Germany. Zweig was part of the German literary landscape, together with
the liberal values he professed. Hans Scholl, the master spirit of the White Rose resistance group in Munich, had already turned against his Hitler Youth upbringing, but his trajectory towards
outright subversion was accelerated after one of Zweig’s books was taken away from him by a Nazi official. Scholl thought that if the Nazis were against
that
, they were against the
Germany he cared about. (Goldhagen’s failure to so much as mention the White Rose, incidentally, is the kind of omission that makes a mockery of his scientific vocabulary. In science, the
fact that doesn’t fit the theory eliminates the theory, not the other way about. Hans and Sophie Scholl were gentiles born into a household formed by liberal German culture, were well aware
that Jews had helped to form that culture, and were ready to die for it rather than betray it. If Goldhagen wants to go on asking why the German population did not rise up, he might consider the
manner in which those two brave young people perished. The guillotine is a big price to pay for a conviction.)

A necessary conclusion, about the large and well-informed German-speaking audience for the arts, would be that if they were all eliminationist anti-Semites, they must have been strangely ready
to sideline their otherwise overmastering prejudice when it came to matters of aesthetic enjoyment. It’s not a conclusion that Goldhagen feels bound to draw, because he doesn’t even
consider the matter. Nor does he consider that the abuse heaped on Jewish artists by the Nazi propaganda machine before the
Machtergreifung
was a measure of the success they had achieved
in becoming a part of the landscape. Finally and fatally, he doesn’t consider that the massive and irreversible damage done to German-speaking culture by the repression, expulsion and murder
of the Jews was the full, exact and tragic measure of how they had been vital to it. Once again it is an awful thing to find oneself saying, but it has to be said: the
Reichskültur-kammer
, if it were still in business, couldn’t have done a better job of treating the Jewish contributors to German culture as if they had been an irrelevance,
simply begging to be swept away.

But a young historian can be forgiven for lacking the kind of cultural information that would bring such questions to the forefront. The richness of what the German-speaking Jews achieved before
the Nazi era takes time to assess. Harder to understand is Goldhagen’s apparent supposition that nothing much has happened in Germany
since
the Nazi era when it comes to his own
field – history. You would never know, from his book, that whole teams of German historians, in the full knowledge that they are trying to make bricks from rubble, have dedicated themselves
to the study of the catastrophe that distorted their intellectual inheritance. As in any other country at any time, there have been a few historians who have devoted prodigious resources to missing
the point. Of the star revisionists mixed up in the
Historikerstreit
, Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber at least had the merit of being too blatant to be plausible: they pretty well
blamed the Holocaust on the Soviet Union. Klaus Hildebrand and Michael Stürmer were more insidious because there was nothing wrong with their facts: after the Red Army crossed the German
border, the retreating
Wehrmacht
really
was
fighting heroically for its country’s heritage. Unfortunately their suggestion that post-war German patriotism might thus claim a
solid base was hopelessly compromised by the consideration that part of the heritage was the Holocaust. In his various essays and open letters about the
Historikerstreit
, Jürgen
Habermas (who, it is only fair to concede, admires Goldhagen’s book) was marvellous on the equivocations and the delusions of the revisionists, but on the main point he didn’t need to
be marvellous: it was too obviously true. The revisionist historian can’t reasonably hope to have a Germany that is not obsessed with the past. There can be no putting off shame to achieve
maturity. The shame
is
the maturity.

Most of the German historians are well aware of this. The revisionists did not prevail, and the work entailed in rebutting them had already become part of the accumulated glory of
Germany’s indigenous historical studies as the terrible twentieth century neared its end. But if German culture really had been nourished at its root by eliminationist anti-Semitism, as
Goldhagen argues, it is hard to see why so many of today’s German historians should now be so concerned about the Holocaust. Very few of them are Jews, for sadly obvious reasons. Surely they,
too, are ‘the Germans’, as Goldhagen would like to put it. It can only follow that their culture has other continuities apart from the one that Goldhagen picks out. Their urge to
comprehend, their respect for the facts – these things could not have started up all by themselves, out of nowhere.

There are plenty of Germans, naturally enough, who would like to think that their country as they know it today
has
started up out of nowhere. For those who would like to throw off the
burden of history and move on, Goldhagen’s book has been a welcome gift. Purporting to bring the past home to the unsuspecting present, he has had the opposite effect. If he has not yet asked
himself why his book has received such an enthusiastic reception in Germany, he might ponder why ‘the Germans’ should be so glad to be supplied with the argument that their parents and
grandparents were all equally to blame because they inhabited a culture blameworthy in itself: we’re different now. But nobody is that different now, because nobody was that different then.
It will always suit the current generation of any country to blame the turpitude of their ancestors on the culture then prevailing, as if people had no choice how to act. It saves us from the
anguish of asking ourselves how we might have acted had we been there, at a time when plenty of people knew there was a choice, but couldn’t face the consequences of making it, and when those
who did choose virtue were volunteers for torture and death.

No wonder Goldhagen is so popular. On top of leaving out the large numbers of German citizens who declined to vote for the Nazis even when there was almost no other party remaining with credible
means to stop the chaos in the streets, he doesn’t even mention the Germans who were so suicidally brave as to defy the Nazis after they came to power. Sacrificial witnesses to human decency,
they died at the rate of about twenty-five people per day for every day that the Third Reich was in existence. They might seem to add up to a drop in the bucket, and it was terribly true that they
had no real hope of having any effect, but Goldhagen is keeping questionable company when he treats a handful of powerless lives as if their deaths meant nothing in the eye of history. Some of the
questionable company he is keeping is alive now. We would all find life a lot easier if we didn’t have to ask ourselves how we would have measured up to the same test. Hence the temptation to
suppose that nobody ever did. The challenge to one’s compassion is tough enough, without compounding it by the challenge to one’s conscience.

In our time and privileged surroundings there has been no such examination to pass or fail, but what makes the difference is political circumstances. The new Germany is a democracy. So was the
old Germany, or it tried to be: but then the Nazis got in, and Hell broke loose. It can break loose anywhere, in any people: all peoples have hellish propensities. When Daniel J Goldhagen has lived
long enough to value democracy for what it prevents, he will be less ready to be astonished by what his fellow human beings are capable of when they are allowed. And the Germans really are his
fellow human beings. To assert otherwise is to further the kind of argument which the Nazis, thereby achieving their sole lasting value, contrived to discredit beyond redemption.

2001

Two volumes of the Library of America containing all that matters of Mark Twain’s journalism –
Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays
is the title –
came out last autumn, and have kept at least one reader going ever since, with the occasional pause to consult the two volumes of Twain’s major writings which were published in the same
format a decade or so ago. There is an almost audible clicking into place: this covetable quartet of books gangs up like gauge blocks, those machine-shop measures that don’t need anything
except their trueness to keep them together. At least two more Twain volumes are yet to come, but for now it’s hard to imagine a set more satisfactory than this – four volumes just as
neat as all the others in the Library of America, and even more solid, energetic, genial and creative: it makes a good gift suggestion for the new Administration. If President Clinton is a better
speechmaker than President Bush, it is mainly because he steals better stuff. He should steal from the best: Mark Twain, who could rock the room for an hour while talking nothing except sense, and
would have staved off Arsenio Hall without needing a saxophone.

For some years, it has been becoming clearer that the Library of America is the symbol for itself that the United States has long been in search of. Colonial Williamsburg is too Disneyfied to
stand for tradition, Disneyland too childish to stand for innovation, Mt Rushmore too big to stand in your living room. You can line up the Library of America on a few shelves. Of course, the
French could do the same sort of thing earlier. The Pléiade was the library that Edmund Wilson had in mind when he caned the Modern Language Association for burying the country’s
intellectual heritage while pretending to preserve it, sponsoring volumes that owed too much to pedantry, not enough to readability, weighed a ton, and looked like hell. Wilson kept up the campaign
for a long time but seemed to stand no better chance of winning it than of beating his income-tax rap. Then the Library of America made Wilson’s dream happen. From its first few volumes it
was obvious that the Library of America had struck the ideal balance between authority and portability. Its volumes begged irresistibly to be picked up, like brilliant children.

Remarkably, they didn’t lose this unthreatening quality even as they multiplied. If you own more than about thirty of the sixty-five volumes so far, monumentality becomes a present danger:
the massed black jackets loom like midnight, and it starts to look as if the Pléiade had chosen better – first, to wear white, and then, when that started looking like a cliff of snow,
to let the horizontally striped gold-blocked spines show through a transparent jacket, like scaling ladders to a Fabergé Bastille of imprisoned wisdom. But you can always alleviate the pangs
of gazing at a wall of uniformity by taking one of the Library of America volumes down and letting it fall open in the hand. If this is dignity, it is user-friendly. And with these two volumes of
Twain’s minor writings here is the original, unashamed vitality that lies at the heart of the whole enterprise. You could just about convince yourself that
Huckleberry Finn
was a
work of literature in the Old World style, aimed at a refined public – after all, it certainly has the rank, if not the manner. But Twain’s journalism is a daunting reminder that he was
ready to lavish everything he had on everybody, every time. He was democratic all the way down to his metabolism. For Twain, there was no division between democracy and creativity. They were
versions of the same thing: exuberance.