Cultural Amnesia (105 page)

This is where the pundit clinches his seemingly open-and-shut case for Schnitzler’s flight into stupidity as the
principal motivation of the film’s creators, or perpetrators. He might concede that some of the perps are technically clever, but in that case he will insist that there is still a
collective perp: the system itself. And he will be right, but not as right as he thinks. He has overlooked the factor of star power, which is what made him see the movie in the first place.
Letting Burton keep his everyday hairstyle was the studio’s only chance of getting him into this sector of World War II. (He kept a bit less of his thatch for his cameo appearance in
The Longest Day
, but it still wasn’t buoyant enough to get him arrested by his own side, let alone by the enemy.) And Burton wasn’t being stupid
either. He had realized that the point was not to look like a British agent plausibly pretending to be a German officer: the point was to look like Richard Burton. The reality of star power
depends on exactly that. Malleability is for actors. For screen stars, recognizability is what matters. Much later, and in a better movie, Robert Redford proved it all over again by declining at
the last moment to adopt an English accent when he played Denys Finch Hatton in
Out of Africa
. He was right.
Out of
Africa
was a serious venture, but it was still a blockbuster, and it needed Redford as a draw on the marquee, not as a paragon of authenticity on the screen. Redford was content to leave
all that to Meryl Streep and Klaus Maria Brandauer. He wasn’t just content, he insisted. And it was by making such demands that he became Robert Redford. If we doubt the value of that, we
should remember that he would never have been in a position to set up the Sundance Festival, and thus alter the whole course of independent and intelligent film-making in America, if he
hadn’t been Robert Redford in the first instance. He is a very clever man, and so, between drinks, was Burton, who could recite English poetry by the mile. Burton
was
clever enough to intuit a deeply awkward truth, and incorporate it in the hairstyle he carried into action in one of the most lucrative movies he ever made. To one side of the world’s great
events, there is the interpretation of them. To one side of the interpretation, there is entertainment. And to one side of entertainment, there is absurdity. But if the absurdity is correctly
judged, it will be found entertaining, even by those who are well aware of the real importance of the events being travestied. There can be a willing, mass participation in the flight into
stupidity, because there can always be an agreed moment when the flight away from responsibility becomes irresistible. To pick that moment takes a kind of talent. It might be a spoiled talent,
but mediocrity will never make it.

In all those big, bad movies that ought to have been better (I don’t mean the big, bad movies that couldn’t be
worse, like
The Avengers
or
Pearl Harbor
) the stupidity is institutionalized, and you can take it for granted that if
they make a big score on the opening weekend, almost everyone concerned is very clever indeed, and often dauntingly cultivated. But these masterminds are smart and suave enough to know that their
target audience for the opening weekend is neither of those things. The masterminds are after the young, who know nothing. It is usually a mistake to overestimate their degree of
dumbness—the movie has to make some kind of sense—but to overestimate their ignorance is impossible. The disparity of intellect between the manufacturers and the consumers would be
frightening if the manufacturers were not at the consumers’ mercy, instead of vice versa. Hence the tendency of Californian film moguls to revel in their own superiority: they have nowhere
else to hide from the consequences of a mistake. Their flight is not into stupidity, but into sophistication. In the British cinema you can meet plenty of people who know something about Frank
Lloyd Wright, but only in Los Angeles can you meet a movie executive who lives in a house that Frank Lloyd Wright built, and who devotes time, taste and knowledge to restoring it. His name is
Joel Silver, and he is the same man who, in
Die Hard
, sent Bruce Willis hurtling barefooted through a plate-glass window to settle the hash of two dozen
combat-trained terrorists instead of slicing himself to hamburger. Luckily the guns of the terrorists were loaded with the standard magic bullets rigged to swerve around any actor on our side
with star billing, and
nobody virtuous got killed except a Japanese executive, possibly as a payback for Iwo Jima.

These functional anomalies of the mass media teach us to look out for whether the rules of the game induce clever people,
in other fields as well, to behave in stupid ways. In the year when Senator John Kerry challenged President George W. Bush, the question of why Bush pretended to be able to speak English was
never as interesting as the question of why Kerry pretended not to be able to speak French. In the United States, the free democracy whose electoral system most nearly approximates a free market,
an historical consensus of extremely clever operatives has decreed that a candidate should not only keep things simple, but seem simple himself. Cultural memory is difficult: too much detail.
Cultural amnesia is easier. Eventually there will be nobody alive who knows for certain that there was never such a thing in World War II as Richard Burton’s hairstyle in
Where Eagles Dare
, so why don’t we forget it straight away? President Bush’s speechwriters encourage him to forget that World War II even existed before
Pearl Harbor was attacked. Not even he could not know that: but it is deemed expedient that he should seem not to. How these decisions about utilitarian ignorance are taken is a study in itself.
But it is the very study that intellectuals as a class are least equipped to make. For past catastrophes, dull intellectuals try to blame a dumb individual: hence the notion that all the soldiers
in the trenches of World War I were murdered by Field Marshal Douglas Haig. Slightly smarter intellectuals try to blame a dumb collectivity: hence the notion that the escalation in Vietnam was
the work of the CIA. (In fact, the CIA warned JFK not to commit troops on the ground: he ignored the warning.) Clever intellectuals can analyse a complex event, but tend to attribute a simple
motive: hence the notion that the Cold War and the arms race were American inventions designed to stifle the socialist aspirations of liberated Europe. It takes a very smart intellectual,
however, to accept that those vast, costly and even criminal stupidities were brought about by people no less bright than he. Clever contemporary thinkers who proceed on the assumption that their
predecessors were stupid are apt to write the superior nonsense that works mischief. It is a consideration that Schnitzler left out of his aphorism: there is indeed a flight from
responsibility into stupidity, but the flight from responsibility into cleverness can be equally destructive.

“But what if,” said Leo, “the execution fires
should be lit again?”

“In that case,” said Heinrich, “I solemnly
promise I will come straight to you.”

“Oh,” George objected, “those times will never
return.”

—ARTHUR SCHNITZLER,
Der Weg ins Freie

On some unspecified day around the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth,
the three Jewish boys have been lolling on a well-appointed hillside. They have been conducting a long, lazy argument about whether to dream of Palestine is really an appropriate response to the
petty, everyday anti-Semitic snobbery of Vienna. After all, none of them is religious. But the argument gets quite heated, and they break the tension with this joking exchange. Looking back
across eight decades, we can see it as one of the most prophetic moments in modern literature. But it should also remind us of the dangers of historicism: hindsight is not a view of the world, it
is an indulgence of the self. It puts us in control of history, whereas the first thing we should realize about history is that we are not in control of it: not by looking backward, and still
less by looking forward. Only one of the three young characters believes that assimilation is a dangerous illusion, and even if all three of them did, they would still be characters: they would
not be Schnitzler. If Schnitzler himself had really thought that the future was cut and dried, he would never have written another line. But the idea of a possible disaster is undoubtedly being
floated, and it comes from the author’s heart. Schnitzler understood Theodor Herzl’s views about the
ignis fatuus
of Jewish assimilation. He
himself was about as assimilated as someone of Jewish background could well be. Even after World War I, with the old empire broken up, Schnitzler’s prestige in Vienna’s cultural life
was on the scale that Mahler’s had been when Franz Joseph still ruled. At the Burgtheater Schnitzler, the unchallenged master playwright, was accustomed to multiple curtain calls for every
successful first night: sometimes he seemed to be on stage almost as long as the actors.

But he also knew what it meant to feel insecure even in his eminence. Some of his best
plays have that for a subject.
Professor Bernhardi
is a play about a man of Schnitzler’s prestige finding out how little his prestige avails him
against the perennial hatreds. Schnitzler never betrayed the same sort of nervousness as, say, Jakob Wassermann, a novelist who despaired of a social acceptance to match his big sales. Schnitzler
took his popularity as a sign of approval. But he knew that the contempt was always there, a tincture in the culture. For two reasons, he was particularly stung by the essayist Alfred
Polgar’s critical notices. One reason was that Polgar wrote so well: limiting judgements hurt most when they come from a writer of talent. The other reason was the one that barely shows up
even in Schnitizler’s private correspondence, but it is detectable between the lines. Polgar was a Jew, and should, Schnitzler felt, have found less hostile language for his belittling
judgements. Franz Werfel had a right to feel the same way about Karl Kraus. In the first year of the twenty-first century, the eminent art historian E. H. Gombrich, nearing the end of long life,
protested against the misguided consensus of commentary which seemed to assume that there had ever been such a self-conscious body as The Jews before Hitler so portentously invented it.
Solidarity had to be imposed, and was never really felt even then. Among the prosperous, fully assimilated Jews of the professional classes who found themselves bewilderingly subject to Nazi
proscription, there were plenty who went to their doom still convinced that the whole thing would never have happened if not for the resentment aroused by the influx of all those strangely
dressed and unsociable
Ostjuden
refugees from the accursed east. But you can still see why a prominent Jewish artist who was cut down to size by a Jewish
critic should feel betrayed: things were tough enough without being done down by your own people. Things were even tougher if, as an assimilated Jew, you had rejected the idea of there being such
a thing as your own people. Like so many stars who have been told too often and too glibly that they embody the hopes of a race, Schnitzler wanted to be an individual, not a representative. The
anguish aroused by your own principles is hard to take.

If Schnitzler, who was lucky enough to die of natural causes when Hitler was not yet in power, had lived long enough to
see Nazism
begin to make actual the atavistic threat that his characters laughed off, what would he have thought? Luckily, such speculations are useless, because they make an
inadmissible presumption about the continuity of personal psychology. Schnitzler was an unusually perceptive man, but his perceptive powers might have withered with further age, or even rejected
the evidence of his senses. Karl Kraus lived long enough to say that he had nothing to say about Hitler. The implication was that Hitler’s unspeakable awfulness had been beyond the scope of
even Kraus’s satirical view. The truth was that Kraus, largely because he thought the institutionalized Viennese anti-Semitism of the late 1890s was as nasty as things could get,
hadn’t seen Hitler coming, and his blindness was at least partly wilful. Later on, the gifted satirist Kurt Tucholsky, desperate in exile, doubted if his persistent mockery of the Weimar
Republic had ever been wise. Kraus had come too far to have the same doubts about his own activities in post–World War I Austria. He was too tired to adapt his forces to the new challenge.
The same thing might have happened to Schnitzler. By the time of his death in 1931, Schnitzler had heard Nazi voices in full cry: they found the Jew plutocrat and erotomaniac Schnitzler a
tempting stimulus for their own literary efforts. Some of the stuff written about him is too horrible to quote.

But he didn’t make a subject of it. That these voices in the alley would ever take power was hard to imagine even
for him. He had been through all that back at the turn of the century. (My copy of
Der Weg ins Freie
is dated 1922, but he was working on the manuscript in
1903.) He had poured into a great novel all his reflections on Jewish identity, on assimilation, on its impossibility in less than a thousand years, on how everyone affected would have to find
his own path into the clear. Since then, he had found his: through achievement, success, fame, the rich emotional rewards of his private life. If he encountered anti-Semitism in grand
drawing-rooms, there were few grand drawing-rooms he could not enter. It was hard to imagine that all those subtle, stylishly insidious old parlour prejudices would gain an entirely different
order of force when restated by maniacs. In Freud’s last diary we can see that even the great student of the primitive subconscious was slow to acknowledge the scope of the Nazi challenge
to civilization. Freud, Kraus, Schnitzler—they were all at the apex of Viennese cultural
intelligence. But for all three of them, there was no Jewish Question in the
Hitlerite sense. The question they had dealt with had been about anti-Semitism as a stain on a living culture. The new anti-Semitism
à la
Hitler was
a culture all by itself: a culture of death. Theodor Herzl had prophesied its advent, but on the evidence of what had always happened in the east. To accept that the same order of destruction
might be possible in the civilized west, a prophet was what you had to be, with the prophet’s vulnerability to suggestions by reasonable people that he might be mad. Prophecy and creative
intuition might have something in common: they both depend on a consideration of possibilities that does not censor itself in advance. Schnitzler’s richness as a writer depended on his
capacity not to censor the reports from his own instincts: in writing about desire, he established a tradition that comes all the way down to Philip Roth, who owes more to Schnitzler than he does
to Kafka, because it was Schnitzler who opened up the subject of how desire can saturate the imagination. (One of Roth’s most memorable book titles,
The
Professor of Desire
, fits Schnitzler exactly.)