10 July 1999, Weimar to Sofia
We manage to connect with our train to Sofia at the railway junction town of Jena this morning. There is some concern from the stationmaster that this international train may not stop here. We point to our Thomas Cook European Train Timetable, wanting reassurance, but he makes an exasperated sound which we take as meaning that we should not trust its pages. But, in the end, our Hellas Express does decide to make a halt here and we clamber on gratefully with our rucksacks.
By the evening we’re rattling through Hungary, by midnight we’ll be crossing the border with Serbia. It will be strange going through Novi Sad in the early hours, where Kay and I have friends. No doubt it’s these associations that start us talking in the restaurant car tonight, over some beers. We’re reflecting on the walk yesterday and have gone back to the Steiner piece that began this chapter, the proximity of what he calls ‘Central European humanism’ to the barbarism of the concentration camps. Kay recalls my shock at discovering that half the attendees of the Wannsee Conference had doctorates; but should that really be such a surprise? Come on, they were doctors of law, doctors of theology! Surely subjects that should have human rights and ethics at their heart? Not necessarily. Well, what about the wider culture of questioning that surely has been a part of academia since the beginning? The influence of Greek philosophy, especially the concept of Platonic thought and Socratic questioning? J. then joins in by reflecting that there are other, more authoritarian traditions in education as well – not sure how much emphasis on questioning there was in the Prussian education system in the nineteenth century. Or, for that matter, in his own education in the 1970s.
The wider issue, though, is that the links between authoritarian power and the intellectual are closer than we often imagine. Primo Levi writes of this proximity in his essay on Jean Améry, ‘The Intellectual in Auschwitz’. He speaks of a collusion that Améry rightly identifies, and then continues:
By his very nature the intellectual … tends to become an accomplice to Power, and therefore approves of it. He tends to follow in Hegel’s footsteps, and deify the state, any state; the sole fact of its existing justifies its existence. The chronicle of Hitlerian Germany teems with cases that confirm this tendency: to it have yielded, confirming it, the philosopher Heidegger, Sartre’s mentor; the physicist Stark, a Nobel Prize winner; Cardinal Faulhaber, the highest Catholic authority in Germany, and innumerable others.
The Irish writer Fintan O’Toole goes even further: ‘It is not just that the creative people are ultimately powerless against guns and prison camps, that the cultured person is at the mercy of the ignorant killer. It is something much worse: that the cultured person and the ignorant killer have often been one and the same.’
And of course, as we edge closer to the border with Serbia tonight, it is impossible not to think about the central role played by that published poet Dr Karadžić, in the catastrophe of the Yugoslavian war over the last decade. And indeed, the responsibility of the prolific writer Dobrica Ćosić, infamous for co-ordinating the 1986 memorandum published by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts which claimed the Serbs had always been a persecuted nation and proposed ‘the integrity of the Serb people’ to be the central aim of future policy. The historian Noel Malcolm, in Kosovo: A Short History, describes the significance of this memorandum – it was ‘in retrospect … a virtual manifesto for the Greater Serbian policies pursued by Belgrade in the 1990s’. And going back even further, how can we quantify the damage done by the 750 Serbian academics who signed the notorious supporting statement that helped to establish Slobodan Milosevic as a serious political force in the 1980s?
Strikingly similar collusions – between the educated and the perpetrators of genocide – can be seen in the context of what happened in Rwanda in 1994. Fergal Keane makes this point in Season of Blood:
In my journey through Rwanda I encountered many of the killers: the genocide was a crime of mass complicity, one could hardly avoid meeting people who had been involved. They stood at every roadblock, at every army encampment … A few gave the appearance of being truly psychopathic individuals. The mass of others were ragged and illiterate peasants easily roused to hatred of the Tutsis. Perhaps the most sinister people I met were the educated political elite, men and women of charm and sophistication who spoke flawless French and could engage in long, philosophical debates about the nature of war and democracy.
Philip Gourevitch, in We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, describes how many of the impulses for the 1994 Rwandan genocide can be traced back to the publication in 1957 by nine Hutu intellectuals of what became known as the ‘Hutu Manifesto’. He also quotes a lawyer from Kigali saying:
The peasants who were paid or forced to kill were looking up to people of higher socio-economic standing to see how to behave. So the people of influence or the big financiers, are often the big men in the genocide. They may think that they didn’t kill because they didn’t take life with their own hands, but the people were looking to them for their orders.
The educated, the white collar, the desk killers. But l’m not sure we’re much further on in trying to identify exactly what it was in European humanism that led not only to the extermination camps, but also to the earlier mindset of genocidal colonialism that Lindqvist sketches so vividly in Exterminate All the Brutes. Or indeed, to look beyond Europe, at the Hutu genocide of the Tutsis, for example. What impulse, what energy, propelled all of these initiatives forwards? A desire for racial purity? A quest for some perverted sense of ‘perfectibility’? Lindqvist cites the supposedly ‘liberal’ philosopher Herbert Spencer’s views on progress in the mid-nineteenth century and the perceived need for racial purity, and emphasises that such views were by no means extreme for the period:
He writes in Social Statics … that imperialism has served civilisation by clearing the inferior races off the earth. ‘The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way … Be he human or be he brute – the hindrance must be got rid of.’
And we should also remember the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann’s advice not to prolong ‘the death struggles of savages who are on the verge of extinction’, and how ‘the true philanthropist’ should actually help with accelerating this process.
These statements embody, with a shocking clarity, the exterminist impulses within ‘civilisation’. They seem to support Adorno’s contention (citing Freud) that ‘civilisation itself produces anti-civilisation and increasingly reinforces it … If barbarism itself is inscribed within the principle of civilisation, then there is something desperate in the attempt to rise up against it.’5
And, more and more, I now find myself moving away from Steiner’s idea of the ‘proximity’ between civilisation and barbarism, and reflecting that these two conditions may in fact be a single condition – just as, in the seventeenth century, the coffee houses of London (and all the fine talk of civilisation within them) were built on the foundations of the slave trade and the Atlantic Triangle. And if we think our current societies are so much better – that we have moved on from such civil barbarism – let us look at a single example from our times. Our governments now employ lawyers to work out (on our behalf) the precise extent of how far a man or a woman can be tortured (on our behalf) and what method of torture may be employed (on our behalf), not using the word ‘torture’ once.