Cultural Amnesia (36 page)

Eventually, in the West, we emerged from the age in which people paid with their lives for a religious allegiance. We
emerged into another age in which they were murdered by the million for other reasons, but not for that one. Though the religious might hate to hear it said, the West graduated from its nightmare
only because religion ceased to matter in any way except privately. At the time of writing, we are in the uncomfortable position of hoping that the same thing can come true for Islam, and do so
in a briefer time than the span of centuries it took to come true for us. While we are waiting, it might be of some help, although of little comfort, to realize that an Islamic fundamentalist
doesn’t have to share the psychotic certitudes of Torquemada in order to be dangerous: it is enough for him to share the civilized attitudes of Queen Elizabeth I, who wanted every invading
priest tortured as soon as caught, and gruesomely executed soon after that. It’s
the general view prevailing within a religious culture—the general view usually
described as being “moderate”—that matters most. When she was growing up in Somalia, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was taught that Salman Rushdie deserved death because he had blasphemed
against the holy book. She was taught it, and she believed it, as did everyone she knew. It was the moderate view. Now, as a member of parliament in Holland, and after her Dutch friend Theo van
Gogh was murdered in the street by an Islamic extremist, she believes differently. But how extreme was the extremist? Until the whole of the Islamic world repudiates him, we will be forced to
believe that its moderate views are dangerous in themselves, if only for what they condone. We will be forced to believe that there is something crazy about all those people actually
believing
all that stuff; and wish that their belief could become more unbelieving, like ours; and not a few centuries from now, but right now. Such a quick
transformation doesn’t seem very likely. Perhaps it would be better to wish that their religion could be reinforced, in that area where, so we are told, Islam means peace and tolerance.
Certainly there were times in history when Islam meant that, much more than Christianity did. But our understandable hope that every Muslim male of fighting age, if exposed to a sufficiency of
Western culture, might transform himself into Flaubert sounds very like wishful thinking; and it is quite likely that Flaubert was thinking wishfully in the first place, when he posited a
wonderful ancient time in which nobody had any Gods to worship. He searched the far past, and lo! He found a new dawn.

SIGMUND FREUD

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was first a neurologist, then a psychopathologist, in which second
role, and based in Vienna, he developed the technique of conversational “free association” that we now recognize as the distinctive feature of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and
counselling in whatever form we might happen to encounter them. Since at one time or another most of us will spend hours telling our troubles to somebody we hardly know, this is a very
widespread influence for a single thinker to have had. On an academic level, Freud’s theories about human personality will always be argued over, as they were when they were being
developed. The quarrels of his disciples with him and among themselves are interesting studies in how animus and outright hatred can arise from purely mental differences. The driving force of
any ideology stands revealed: it can’t be coherent without being intolerant. What there can be no argument about is Freud’s stature as an imaginative writer. Quite a lot of it
comes over into English—
The Psychopathlogy of Everyday Life
(1904) is a good place to start—but in the original German his body of prose is
poetically charged almost without equal. When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they banned psychoanalysis
straight away. After they took over Austria in 1938,
Freud was lucky to escape. In London he lived for a further year before succumbing to cancer. His house in Hampstead retains his wonderful collections of books and sculpture. The Freud name,
through his descendants, is still prominent in British cultural life.

Finis
Austriae.

—SIGMUND FREUD, AN ENTRY IN
HIS DIARY, PROBABLY MADE ON SATURDAY, MARCH 12, 1938

A
LL THE
ENTRIES
in Freud’s diary of his last decade are short. Very few are more than one line long. On the day he began to keep the diary in 1929, he signalled his intention on the first
page with the underlined heading “
Kürzeste Chronik
” (Shortest Chronicle). The entries are explicated ably in a Hogarth Press coffee table
book,
The Diary of Sigmund Freud 1929–1939,
edited by Michael Molnar: a punctilious effort which can be recommended, not least for its lavish
iconography. As picture books go, it’s a page-turner. But a longer and more sensitive explication of this particular entry would have been useful. Austria’s chancellor, Kurt von
Schuschnigg, had resigned, Hitler was already in Linz, and the
Anschluß
was inevitable. Its advent could be measured in hours. This was indeed the end
of Austria. But why did the great seer say so in Latin?

One reason might have been that
The Times
of London had already
said it in Latin. True to the paper’s appeasing form in that period, the
Times
leader writers had behaved despicably right up to the crucial moment,
but when the catastrophe finally looked inevitable even to them, they summoned the courage to admit that the end might indeed be near. (Up until then, they had run endless assurances about
Hitler’s benevolence.) Because
The Times
was read religiously in Vienna, and especially by the Jewish intellectuals, the imported Latin tag had been
circulating for a week. But there was no reason for Freud to pick up on it. He probably did so to give the moment an automatic historical perspective, and thus claim for himself, through speech,
an oracular viewpoint.
Shakespeare did the same for Julius Caesar:
Et tu, Brute?
At the moment when all is lost, Caesar reverts out of
his everyday language (which in the play, of course, is English) to the formal language of his schooldays, which for Shakespeare would have been Latin. Shakespeare, a psychologist far more
intuitive that Freud himself, knew that people revert under pressure. (Even trained singers, when things are going wrong, will suddenly retreat into the shallow breathing that was once all they
knew, and any professional in whatever field could tell a similar story.) In the case of Caesar, Shakespeare was probably helped to the idea by Suetonius. In Suetonius’s account of
Caesar’s life, Caesar, when he receives the last blow, reverts out of Latin into Greek:
kai su, teknon
. The effect is not just of a retreat to youth
but of a distancing, as if history has inevitably led to this, and the moment must be given its dignity as a point in the flow of time.

The irony in Freud’s case is that his tendency to an historical perspective on modern European politics was
portentous for himself and potentially lethal to his family. The Nazis emerge slowly in the last years of his diary: too slowly, as it turned out. From the historical viewpoint, the diary is not
a proportionate account, because the history that really mattered is barely mentioned. No doubt in his everyday conversation he said much more, but in the diary he said so little that the paucity
can be assessed as a kind of inverted
Sprachfehler
—one of those linguistic slips in which he saw so much when they were made by other people. In the
years of Austria’s final and fateful destiny, he had been working on two culminating trains of thought. One train of thought is captured in
Die Zukunft einer
Illusion
(The Future of an Illusion), his most intense evocation of the destructive impulses in mankind. In that book, he defined civilization as the overcoming of nature, with the
implication—and the implication was fully worked out—that mankind’s natural state was destructive. It was a powerful argument brilliantly articulated, and remains to this day
one of the most magnificent condensations of a world view into a prose style. But there was a penalty to be paid, and he paid it. The growing threat to civilized Austria seemed nothing special.
He even seems to have seen nothing special about the Nazis themselves. Did he think civilization would contain this destructive force in the same way as, recently at any rate,
it had contained all the others? Or was he fatalistically resigned to the catastrophe?

If he was fatalistically resigned, his other important train of recent thought might have played a part.
It was in these years that he brought to a climax his theories about the libido and its typology: erotic, narcissistic and obsessional. Everyone, he thought, shares all three departments, with an
emphasis on at least one of them at the expense of the other two, and possibly on two at the expense of the third. The narcissistic-obsessional was the most creative combination. Those blessed
with it, or cursed, could do great work. But beneath it all, as Philip Larkin was later to put it, desire of oblivion runs. Thanatos, the death wish, was much on Freud’s mind. It is
possible to say—although it might be wiser to say something else—that he looked forward to personal extinction. He was suffering badly from his cancer by then, and might well have
longed for a crisis that would release him. He could not seriously contemplate oblivion as a thing of his own will, because his mother was not yet dead. (He called that “the
barrier.”) But he might have contemplated it for his country, which, if it went down to destruction, would take him with it.

What makes that line of argument seem unwise is the terrible array of facts that would have to be counted as its cost if
it were true. When the reign of terror finally arrived, Freud, with help from abroad, was able to get away to England. But four of his sisters were trapped. All of them were in their eighties,
but none was allowed to die of old age. (Marie and Pauline went to Treblinka, Rosa to Auschwitz and Adolfine to Theresienstadt.) In Freud’s beloved Vienna, Jewish contemporaries who almost
equalled him in eminence suffered the tortures of the damned. Thanatos was no gentleman, and he came not to rescue minds from their torments, but to torment bodies until minds collapsed. Thanatos
was a raving maniac, not a mental principle. How was it that Freud, of all people, could not foresee this? Hannah Arendt and E. H. Gombrich, among others, have reminded us that in the
German-speaking countries the assimilated Jews thought of themselves as nationals first and foremost: that there was never really any such category as the Jews until Hitler invented it. But
Hitler had already invented it. From Germany, the news had been coming in for five years
at least. Everyone in Vienna who knew anything about politics was well aware of what
might be in store. But to Freud, it might all have been happening to the Hittites and the Assyrians. His historical perspective was everything but actual.