Well, it sounds like the world view of the European bourgeoisie: self-serving and proudly practical. The putting and taking satirized by Dickens in Hard Times or scourged by Eliot in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It was ridiculed — but only because it was a worthy target, embedded like the religion or ideology of its time. We forget the power of such a moment, because once past it exists in a diminished state. Mighty fortresses become windmills to be gently tilted at. Our own graven images will be diminished, too.
Arendt was a child of that bourgeoisie, born in its twilight, in 1906, to a non-religious German Jewish family. The rest of her life amounted to being torn from that setting, seeing it pulverized around her — the Nazis, the trenches, the Depression — yet she writes, I’d say, as if the demise of her childhood world was the end of a geological era and not just one limited episode.
Emil had a similar, though more religious, background. His father owned a department store in Halle, in what became East Germany. His family was rooted in German and Prussian culture. After the Cold War, he received compensation and died wealthy, friends say. He was born a decade after Arendt, but perhaps shared her sense of bourgeois culture as an ethical baseline for human nature.
I don’t mean that either held a bourgeois view of human nature, or even an explicit view of human nature. But their notions of “normal” human constraints may have to some extent — without being quite aware — harked back to that world view. Did they do so in revulsion at what happened around them? It sounds crudely Freudian.
Mind you, Freud was one of many who repudiated the bourgeois view of human nature. He did so long before the Holocaust then died on its eve, having chillingly anticipated it with notions like the Id, which undermined civilization’s efforts to be civilized. Back then, there was a cottage industry in rejecting the bourgeois ethos, like Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. Nazism itself banked on anti-bourgeois disgust. In fact, it is surprising that German Jews such as Emil and Arendt could say they were surprised by the descent into barbarity. Horrified and enraged but not startled. Unless it is one thing to anticipate theoretically a breakdown of civilization, but something else to see it embodied before your gaze while you pass through the fire yourself. That might send you scurrying to an earlier world view that once seemed banal. I can sort of hear Arendt say, “Look, Artaud was theatre. Freud was theory. But this happened. No one really expected it.”
Emil underwent Freudian analysis in Toronto but remained skeptical of broader applications. He’d say, in what he called his deadpan, “That’s like treating a sick horse with a pill through a blowpipe: everything depends on who blows first.” Still, he didn’t deny it — he just said something witty about it. As for Arendt, she rejected interpretations based on unconscious motives. She felt they deprived people of dignity. “Look,” I can hear her say again, “he says that’s his reason. If I don’t take him seriously, why should I take you, me, or anyone seriously?” She believed in will and choice and would not see them disparaged. Despite that, her writings include brilliant construals of the “real” meaning of events. As if she could not refrain from them. I don’t think that makes her inconsistent. There is a realm of will and choice, and an area of murk and uncertainty. They interplay like light and shadow.
As for me and my reactions — to Auschwitz, 9/11, the cops at Low Library, and other evil moments of my times? My version of common sense tends not to be perplexed by vile behaviour. I am surprised when people act well. I’m guessing it has to do with my dad.
He was prone to exploding, for no apparent reason. I used to think it was tension over his gambling debts or his fraught relations with his older brother, Al, who dominated their little business in the garment district on Spadina Avenue in Toronto. Or resentment of his own dad, who did nothing, he said, except neglect his family and run around with women. Perhaps he was just born mean and stayed that way.
At any rate, it was brutal. Screaming, abuse, derision. Mostly at my mum, for being stupid, incompetent, when he couldn’t find a tie or we were leaving on a trip. Though they had a stupendous sex life. Everyone noticed it (except me, but that’s another story, er, novel). She later told me he still came home for “lunch” when I was in high school. Until a year before his death at eighty-five, it continued at least three times a week. I asked if she ever had an orgasm, and she guffawed (not her usual mode). “Every time.”
My brother and I had no such compensations (her word for why she stayed). Dad would wake me in the middle of the night, bellowing that we’d be on the street tomorrow and it was my fault. When I had trouble with high school authorities, he said they were right. I said, but they’re wrong! “Even when they’re wrong,” he shouted, “they’re right!”
He bullied us because he could. When he was dying and still bullying my mother, who’d been ill for years, I said she’d go the day after him if he kept on. He said she had to die sometime. That’s when it struck me that he knew what he was doing, and that it was wrong. But he had learned that there would be no consequences.
It wasn’t Auschwitz, I know. Yet the possibilities of awesomely cruel behaviour were established in my mind then. When a kid sees his dad behave that way, he knows — or at least I think I did, like the Buchenwald survivor quoted by Arendt — that everything is possible. If my dad can let go like this with me, he can go to the end; nothing will surprise me. Like my sudden sight of the cops at Columbia. They weren’t the SS, but in other circumstances some would have been. The possibility of the Holocaust was contained in those dynamics in our apartment, whether it seems ludicrous to compare or not. My dad had good points — he wasn’t a Hollywood monster, but he had monster potential. I can’t ever be surprised when people behave wretchedly.
Of course, neither Emil nor Arendt were surprised at the brutality and barbarism of Nazism; they knew those were hardy perennials that weren’t blooming for the first time. But each insisted on the uniqueness of the Nazi case: Emil because it was self-destructive, and Arendt because of the cold intellectuality — that it was based, not on emotional satisfaction, but on logically carrying an ideology to the end. You can call these crucial differences amounting to something new in history, or you can say they’re mere variations. Nazi motives were articulated ideologically. But does that mean they got no traditional vicarious, sadistic release? I doubt it. There’s always something new and something ancient, a particular version of timeless impulses. Everything was always possible.
Now to backtrack (revisit, regress): why did just those pages by Arendt on the Holocaust leap out at me? And why now? Well, our milieu is dominated by the aftermath of 9/11 and its sense that everything has changed, that the world will never be the same. For me, those claims evoked earlier ones. (And not just me. The Holocaust was widely invoked post-9/11. Americans tended to identify with it, as if only the Holocaust was unique enough to compare. It also fit their sense of exceptionalism — both Jews and Americans as chosen — and US fundamentalism, with its messianic and catastrophic expectations, easily attached to 9/11 images.)
So something in the similar backgrounds or social conditioning of Emil and Arendt influenced their responses to the decisive event of their time. And something in mine — perhaps my dad’s screaming fits — shaped my response to their responses. Nothing surprising here. Then another event — 9/11 — evoked those earlier responses, and a new set of reactions.
