PART SIX
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Civilisation / Barbarism
16
A Walk from Goethe’s Gartenhaus to the Gates of Buchenwald: 10,166 Steps
Words are seeds. Sometimes, blown from we know not where, they can lie dormant inside us for years, waiting for the conditions to grow. Sun and rain and sometimes a little help from gardeners. Nothing can grow on its own. The ecology of the mind is as interdependent as the ecology of the earth, and we need writers and thinkers and ideas just as much as any plant needs oxygen and nitrates and water. These next pages bring together several of these gardeners of the mind.
I return to five writers’ words again and again. They do what even the most brilliant historians cannot do: they all have compelling things to say about the interrelationship of civilisation and barbarism in the atrocities of the twentieth century. This question which returns over and over again, like an unanswered riddle, like an image that haunts you. But these are the voices who have got closer than anyone else – George Steiner, Primo Levi, Sven Lindqvist, Jorge Semprún and Jean Améry.
At university, in my final year, I came across these words, from the preface to Steiner’s Language and Silence:
I realise that historians are right when they say that barbarism and political savagery are endemic in human affairs, that no age has been innocent of disaster. I know that the colonial massacres of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the cynical destruction of natural and animal resources which accompany them … are realties of profound evil. But I think there is hypocrisy in the imagination that would claim universal immediacy … my own consciousness is possessed by the eruption of barbarism in modern Europe; by the mass murder of the Jews and by the destruction under Nazism and Stalinism of what I try to define … as the particular genius of ‘Central European humanism’. I do not claim for this hideousness any singular privilege; but this is the crisis of rational, humane expectation which has shaped my own life and with which I am most directly concerned.
The blackness of it did not spring up in the Gobi desert or the rainforests of the Amazon. It rose from within, and from the core of European civilisation. The cry of the murdered sounded in earshot of the universities; the sadism went on a street away from the theatres and museums. In the later eighteenth century Voltaire had looked confidently to the end of torture; ideological massacre was to be a banished shadow. In our own day the high places of literacy, of philosophy, of artistic expression became the setting for Belsen.
I cannot accept the facile comfort that this catastrophe was a purely German phenomenon or some calamitous mishap rooted in the persona of one or another totalitarian ruler. Ten years after the Gestapo quit Paris, the countrymen of Voltaire were torturing Algerians … in some of the same police cellars … It is not only the case that the established media of civilisation – the universities, the arts, the book world – failed to offer adequate resistance to political bestiality, they often rose to welcome it … Why? What are the links, as yet scarcely understood, between the mental, psychological habits of high literacy and the temptations of the inhuman?
Later, with his work In Bluebeard’s Castle, Steiner makes the intellectual challenge even more explicit:
there have been few attempts to relate the dominant phenomenon of twentieth-century barbarism to a more general theory of culture. Not many have asked, or pressed home the question, as to the internal relations between the structures of the inhuman and the surrounding, contemporary matrix of high civilisation. Yet the barbarism which we have undergone reflects, at numerous and precise points, the culture which it sprang from and set out to desecrate. Art, intellectual pursuits, the development of the natural sciences, many branches of scholarship flourished in close spatial, temporal proximity to massacre and the death camps. It is the structure and meaning of that proximity which must be looked at. Why did humanistic traditions and models of conduct prove so fragile a barrier against political bestiality? In fact, were they a barrier, or is it more realistic to perceive in humanistic culture express solicitations of authoritarian rule and cruelty?
In the middle of so much turgid, academic writing (and I was at Cambridge in the heyday of post-structuralist theory), it was electrifying to come across words of such clarity and passion. And to feel, instinctively, that Steiner was right in identifying these questions. Not that I could even attempt to find answers at that point, but it was enough to have logged the questions in my mind, waiting for a time when these could be brought out into the light again. Many years later, reading Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes, this sentence leapt off the page and reminded me forcefully of those original questions:
‘The idea of extermination lies no farther from the heart of humanism than Buchenwald lies from the Goethehaus in Weimar.’
Triggered by this, and remembering Steiner’s earlier words, an idea began to take shape in my mind – a walk that could become a meditation on the relationship between civilisation and barbarism. By chance, in July 1999 Platform had been invited to teach in Germany, in Bochum, at Hannah Hurtzig’sfn1 Summer Academy for young artists, writers, theatre directors, film-makers and dramatists. Later in the summer we were scheduled to run a two-week seminar at the New University of Sofia, in Bulgaria. Looking at a map of Europe I realised that our train journey from the Ruhr to Sofia would take us within a few miles of Weimar. My colleagues on the trip, J. and Kay, agreed we would spend a couple of days in Weimar, and I decided to conceptualise a walk from Goethe’s summer house (one of his favourite writing places) to the gates of the Buchenwald concentration camp, just to the west of the town.
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Buchenwald had been vividly in my mind at that time because I’d just read Jorge Semprún’s remarkable memoir Literature or Life, his account of surviving the camp. Semprún was twenty years old when he arrived at Buchenwald on 29 January 1944, a brilliant former philosophy student at the Sorbonne, and, despite his youth, already a communist activist and a veteran of the French Resistance. His year or so in Buchenwald, from January 1944 to April 1945, paralleled almost exactly Primo Levi’s and Jean Améry’s enslavement at Auschwitz-Monowitz. Yet the texture of Semprún’s writing and his preoccupations are quite distinct from Levi’s or Améry’s. His engagement with literature, philosophy and activism permeates the book, he relates animated conversations with fellow inmates about the intellectual figures and debates of the time. At times Semprún’s Buchenwald comes across as a kind of displaced university for partisans and Marxist philosophers.
Jean Améry writes about the vastly different experiences of these places in At the Mind’s Limits. How amazed he is, after the war, reading Goethe in Dachau by a Dutch friend of his and a survivor of that camp, Nico Rost. The book relates how despite being in a concentration camp, some prisoners were able to lead a rich intellectual life, reading and studying ‘still more, and more intensively. In every free moment! Classical literature as a substitute for Red Cross packages.’ Améry describes how impossible such activities were in Auschwitz. In Dachau, as in Buchenwald, political prisoners were in the majority – and this group included many intellectuals. ‘In Dachau there was a camp library; for the ordinary inmate at Auschwitz a book was something hardly still imaginable.’ Every trace of energy was put into surviving the brutally hard labour, the next day, and, if you did meet another thinker or writer, soon any attempt at intellectual conversation withered and died: ‘The philosopher from the Sorbonne gave monosyllabic, mechanical answers and finally grew silent entirely … He simply no longer believed in the reality of the world of the mind.’