On my recent trip to Africa, dashing from one plane to another at Heathrow Airport – in my opinion equaled only in its awfulness by the airport in New Jersey – I stopped at a bookshop to grab some reading for the journey. Hurried, I went for a safe choice, Robert Harris’s Fatherland, now celebrating its 20th year since publication. I had read it a long time ago and remembered it sufficiently to know that I liked it a lot and did not remember it sufficiently to anticipate every turn of the plot. It was a good choice and kept me engrossed going down Africa and coming back.
I guess everyone knows the basic idea, the conceit as one might say. Hitler won World War Two. His attack on the Russians proved successful and they were pushed back way beyond Moscow into central Asia. England had collapsed and now was (with other countries in Western Europe) under Nazi suzerainty. America and Germany were locked in a Cold War, neither daring to attack the other, although the U.S. supports Russian opposition. At the time of the action, 1964, Hitler is about to celebrate his 75th birthday and the President of the U.S.A. is a Kennedy – Joseph, the awful anti-Semitic father, not the charismatic son Jack.
If you don’t know or don’t remember the plot, I won’t spoil it by telling you. What I do want to remark on is the way in which the novel (as so often happens with good novels) brings home factual truths far more vividly than we writers of nonfiction can usually achieve. In particular, it shows with tremendous force just how awful, in so many ways, the Nazi vision of utopia really was.
First, obviously the killing of the Jews, and Fatherland comes across with incredible and frightening power on this. But the morality apart – and don’t accuse me of not taking the moral issue as prime – it is the downright stupidity that strikes home. Why Hitler and his cronies thought that eliminating the Jews would solve the world’s problems entirely escapes me. And even more puzzling is why they – living in Germany where the Jews were emancipated – couldn’t see the essential contribution to society and culture offered by the Jews. I cannot begin to imagine the impoverishment of my own field of philosophy were there no Jewish thinkers.
Second, the total nuttiness of thinking that the basic, positive solution to Germany’s needs was to empty cold and harsh lands to the East and then ship out central and western Europeans to people and farm them. Again it is the inherent stupidity, the daftness, that gets to me. You live tucked away happily in your little Bavarian town, beer and Wurst, and you are going to move to lands east of Moscow and till them for the greater glory of the Third Reich? It sounds to me worse than having to teach five courses a semester on “Improving Your Reasoning” in a state college somewhere – well, let’s not get into the insulting or demeaning business by naming an actual state. Writing for Brainstorm is slowly teaching me that not everyone finds my jokes as funny as I do.
Third, the kitsch. Fatherland starts right off with a picture of the Berlin that Albert Speer designed for Hitler. A massive dome 1000 feet high (the Brandenburg Gate is 80 feet high), a monstrous avenue 400 feet wide and three miles long, an arc of triumph 400 feet high (the Arc de Triomphe in Paris is 164 feet high). And all so unbelievably awful. Not just bad but ghastly. Great for uniformed marches through the city, but in just about every other respect somewhere between tragic and hilarious.
In a way though, this is the problem I have with Germany – and I take Germany as an extreme example and not as unique. On the one hand, it was the country that led and fueled so much of the Enlightenment. The country of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, of Immanuel Kant, of Ludwig van Beethoven. And yet it was the country that fell to the Nazis – so evil and so vulgar. Watch Leni Riefenstahle’s Triumph of the Will, the film of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, if you want a sense that Fatherland is not exaggerating.
I sensed this divide in Wagner’s Ring that, thanks to the Met transmissions of HD performances, I have been watching at the local cinema. There are times of too-painful beauty and emotion. Wotan’s farewell to his favorite daughter Brünnhilde at the end of Die Walküre. And then there is all of the cringe-making stuff about being a hero. Why in God’s name, having got his girl, does Siegfried have to set out on adventures, knowing that it is only going to lead to Big Trouble? When I was a kid there was a monthly magazine known as the Boy’s Own Paper, all about daring feats of brave, white men in the farther reaches of the Empire. That for me just about sums up the main plot of Götterdämmerung.
Christians can explain it all. We humans are tainted by original sin. I am not into that kind of explanation, but I do think they have a point. We are a mélange of good and bad. It is silly to pretend that we are all bad, but it is dangerous to think that we are all good or can be made so readily at some point in the near future. I have a feeling that there is a message here for us all, especially those of us living in the rather tense society of the U.S.A. today. As the Nazis show only too vividly, simplistic solutions blaming our troubles on others don’t work. Are women, blacks, gays, and Muslims our Jews?