This is a great exhibition. You should definitely go. Fun, spooky, scarey, immersive, yet strangely liberating and uplifting. Completely different from the hard study required at something like the Tate Modern Cezanne blockbuster where you have to pay attention, read and study. Here you walk about and through and under and experience your own sensations, moods and thoughts.
Mike Nelson
British artist Mike Nelson specialises in big installations, room-sized installations, huge installations, assembled from industrial junk and derelict objects, knackered old tyres, abandoned doors, auctioned-off industrial equipment, bric-a-brac salvaged from junkyards, abandoned buildings, car boot sales and much more.
All this stuff and more is assembled into strange and eerie combinations and installations, some you look at, but some you can actually enter and wander through, all of them designed to tease and nag at the corner of your mind, with their eerie sense of abandoned building sites, derelict workshops, underground bars, rough plywood hoardings, half-plastered rooms.
I reviewed an installation of some of these works at Tate Britain back in 2019. There I go into some detail about the autobiographical reasons why I like modern art made from industrial junk, namely the number of labouring jobs I did when I was a teenager and young man, and so how powerfully evocative I find old industrial machinery, equipment, tools and especially tyres – car tyres, lorry tyres, their smell and feel and the black rubber marks they leave on your skin and clothes were a big part of my boyhood.
Anyway. Let’s consider some of the key works in this exhibition:
I, Imposter (2011)
A really big room filled with wide apart shelves crammed with all kinds of bulky non-descript industrial products, miscellaneous furniture and fixtures, with big palettes and wooden sheets leaning up against the wall. Atmosphere of a derelict warehouse. BUT the key fact: all illuminated by a low level but intense scarlet light. Not daylight or fluorescent light, but blood-red, deep dread, womb-red luminence. Abandoned, eerie, spooky. Straightaway taking you to another place, into the realm of horror movies or intense science fiction.
Installation view of I, IMPOSTOR by Mike Nelson (2011) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author
The Deliverance and the Patience (2001)
Next we move onto a big gallery space in which has been created out of wood a maze of narrow corridors, unpainted, with damaged, derelict half-built walls – a zigzag of short passages with wooden doors of different styles, presumably picked up from skips across London, leading into claustrophobically small, low-ceiling walls, some of which have further doors leading you on into the maze, others don’t so you exit the way you entered. The process of navigating this space is surprisingly unsettling and, at one point, I felt a surge of the panic I get when trapped in really small, confined spaces, like the real panic I experienced when I once went potholing with my son (and a guide).
Typical corridor scene inside The Deliverance and The Patience by Mike Nelson (2001) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author
Anyway, each of the ‘rooms’ – barely more than cubicles – are like tiny stage sets: one is a cramped bar with a photo-mirror of Elvis on the wall; another has old oil paintings of sailing ships and some model ships on the bar along with ‘Do not spit’ signs in English and Chines. Another is a sort of travel agents’, with a narrow counter and ancient posters of old-style air stewardesses standing in front of passenger jets. Another contains a small green baize table on which is a miniature roulette wheel, some tarot cards, and on the wall behind a communist-era Chinese poster of young model communist striding into the brave future.
The pokey little ‘travel agency’ inside The Deliverance and The Patience by Mike Nelson (2001) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author
As far as I can tell these don’t ‘mean’ anything. They are meant to be experiences, of eeriness and spookiness. A world of other times and lives which have all been abandoned. Wreckage. Remains. Detritus. As in a thousand and one science fiction movies where the entire human race is whisked away leaving meals half eaten and cigarettes still smouldering, for the dazed survivors to blunder amidst.
The ‘gambling den’ inside The Deliverance and The Patience by Mike Nelson (2001) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author
Triple Bluff Canyon (2004)
If all this cramped interiority is getting a bit claustrophobic, you then go up the steps to the upper galleries, which are dominated by one huge installation titled ‘Triple Bluff Canyon’.
Installation view of Triple Bluff Canyon (the woodshed) by Mike Nelson (2004) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
First off this is a wonderful work, combining everything I love in modern art: big, imaginative, made of industrial detritus, a profound comment on modern society at the same time as being funny, a kind of art joke. And, reading the wall label, you realise there’s more to it than meets the eye, in fact three distinct elements:
First off, it’s a homage to an American artist named Robert Smithson who, in 1970, half buried a woodshack in 20 tonnes of earth. Nelson has recreated the basic idea, but replaced earth with sand, maybe in reference to the Gulf War and the West’s general inability to stop meddling in Arab countries.
Second, the tyres. From what I could make out, these are part of a separate series of works which are simply collections of wrecked, damaged and abandoned tyres which can be found alongside motorways and highways around the world. Each little collection is simply titled after the road where Nelson found them. And so these tyres are titled ‘M25’.
Third, you see the white rectangle on the right of the photo, well that’s actually a doorway into a corridor which curves round into the woodshed itself which has been turned, by being half-buried, into a grim, spooky bunker. First of all the corridor is only 10 yards or so long but curves quite steeply, so that I was lucky to enjoy quite a cinematic moment; because I’d got as far as the door into the bunker when I heard footsteps behind me. A woman with very loud heels had entered the curved corridor and was walking very slowly, with a very loud clack of each footstep, behind me, following me, but because of the steep curve I couldn’t see her. Rather than push the door and go into the bunker I waited and it turned into a surprisingly tense, eerie couple of seconds as I waited for my mysterious pursuer to appear.
The Uncanny
I’ve been rereading Freud. Freud wrote an essay on The Uncanny. My understanding is that we experience ‘the uncanny’ when something we perceive reminds us of, evokes and stirs, childhood feelings and emotions which themselves are concealing deeper ‘truths’ or drives or instinctive wishes, which we have successfully repressed. The uncanny is the dread we feel in situations in which our childish fantasies and fears appear more real and true than our adult knowledge and perspective.
This description applies 100% to the feeling I had after getting lost in half a dozen cramped, subterranean rooms in The Deliverance and the Patience, and then his uncanny moment inside ‘Triple Bluff Canyon’
Eventually she came into sight and wasn’t actually the science fiction-cyborg-horror monster my unconscious was momentarily panicking about, but a regular gallery goer – so I held the door into the bunker open and we both went inside. Into another womb-like cave, entirely lit by blood-red lighting.
Installation view of I, IMPOSTOR (the darkroom) by Mike Nelson (2011) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
The wall label tells us that this interior is a separate work from Triple Bluff. This is ‘I, IMPOSTOR (the darkroom)’ which makes explicit reference to its nature as a mock-up of a photographer’s darkroom. Except it doesn’t feel like that at all. It feels like a cave, an underground bunker. The equipment on the bench doesn’t look like a professional photographer’s but is another collection of junk and detritus, and what’s the big boiler dominating the far end of the room? It feels like a room in a hobbit house late at night. More doors lead onto a half-wrecked room which is open to the sand pouring in from the main installation, again with a strong feeling of dereliction and abandonment, as in thousands of science fiction movies.
View from inside the sand bunker looking out – I, IMPOSTOR (the darkroom) by Mike Nelson (2011) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author
Absence
When I was a literature student ‘absence’ was an important concept in critical theory. I think I read about it in the work of French philosopher Pierre Macherey. Put very simply, what is absent from a work can sometimes tell you more than what is present. But you don’t have to dig that deeply to realise that what all these installations have in common is the absence of people.
This is emphasised by the way so many of them are types of locations which ought to be populated, such as the bars and gambling den and travel agents of ‘The Deliverance and the Patience’, the hobbit-bunker of I, IMPOSTOR, or the eerily empty red warehouse at the start. That’s why I’ve mentioned several times the powerfully eerie sense of abandonment and loss that pervades the exhibition.
Moving along the upper floor we come to another large room containing five items from the series Nelson calls ‘Asset Strippers’. I’ll quote my review of Asset Strippers’ when I saw it at Tate Britain.
There are old weaving machines, heavy-duty metal cabinets, two huge old-fashioned weighing scales, the threshing wheels of a tractor attachment, the huge rubber tracks from a mechanical digger. Nelson has collected knitting machines from textile factories like the ones he grew up around in the East Midlands, woodwork stripped from a former army barracks, graffitied steel awnings once used to secure a condemned housing estate, doors from an NHS hospital, and much, much more. It is a rag and bone yard, a paradise of defunct paraphernalia artfully arranged so that each piece creates a space around itself, defines its space, creates a psychic zone of defunct power.
Installation view of ‘Asset Strippers’ by Mike Nelson (2011) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
In my review of the Tate Britain display I tackle Nelson’s intended aim of commenting on the destruction of British industrial manufacturing and the trope of cliché that tells us we live in a post-industrial society. For some reason, at some point, I was struck by the word ‘strippers’. I know the title refers to the kinds of financial companies which buy up businesses not to run them at a profit but to gut them of all their assets and sell on the shell, and Nelson is implying this modus operandi can be applied widely across British society in the neo-liberal era i.e. the last 40 years.
But this time round I was struck by the word ‘strippers’. As in strippers in a strip club. And for a while I enjoyed perceiving each of these carefully assembled artefacts as Dada joke reworkings of the human figure, using abandoned industrial machinery.
The exhibition then takes you back down to the ground level where there are two more enormous works:
Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Munster
Apparently this is one of a series of such works which are designed to parody the notion of an artist’s studio as ‘a place for authentic production’. As a thing what’s noticeable is the heavy industrial vibe of the big wooden hoardings but most of all of the threatening thick-wire mesh matrix. Only when you look closely do you realise that the grey balls suspended throughout it are in fact grey clay models of human heads. As far as I could tell, all the ones I saw looked like the heads of Black people and all of them are hung upside down. Why?
Installation view of Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Munster – A Thematic Instalment Observing the Calendrical Celebration of its Inception: Introduction; towards a linear understanding of notoriety, power and their interconnectednessl future objecs (misspelt); mysterious island by Mike Nelson (2014) Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy of the artist and the Hayward Gallery
The Amnesiacs
Up the ramp behind this is a similar work, also using big industrial wood framing but much finer wire mesh to create what look like a series of rabbit hutches. These contain objects created from the standard sources to illustrate a fictional gang Nelson has created and which he calls The Amnesiacs. This little conceit combines a wistful yearning of ‘cool’ imagery from American culture (biker gangs from ‘The Wild Ones’ onwards) with Nelson’s characteristic feel for dereliction and decay.
Installation view of The Amnesiacs by Mike Nelson (1996-ongoing) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author
I particularly liked the ‘motorbike’ which is actually constructed, in a semi-Dalì kind of way, from two old tyres, two walking sticks for the front wheel prongs, antlers for handlebars, three yellow rubber rings supporting the antlers, which themselves rest on an orange helmet standing in for the petrol tank, with the main body of the ‘bike’ being a packing case covered in a fleece. The way that Nelson has recreated an everyday object out of readymade material adds support to my idea that the asset strippers might in fact be sly, Dada-joke sculptures of the human body…
Thoughts
Spooky, surreal, claustrophobic, anxiety-provoking, wonderfully imaginative, beautiful, thoughtful, silly, funny, surreal and a bit disturbing. it only took me 45 minutes or so to go round the entire exhibition but it was a very intense 45 minutes, and I staggered out of the gallery feeling like I’d watched half a dozen different movies and read or read a bunch of upsetting and disturbing science fiction short stories. Go experience it for yourself.
As in life: some doors open, some do not. You nly find out when you try them.
‘Tell me some of your dreams and I will tell you about your inner self.’
(E. R. Pfaff, quoted on page 134 of The Interpretation of Dreams)
Long
The Interpretation of Dreams may be an epoch-making book but it is far too long, running to 871 pages in the Pelican Freud Library (783 of actual text, 86 of appendix, bibliographies, index of dreams, and general index).
The first quarter or so is a vast review of the many, many theories of dreams held by people throughout Western history (seers and prophets and oneiromancers, historical philosophers and writers, right up to present-day psychologists such as Havelock Ellis), with Freud’s own commentary designed to itemise and categorise all aspects of dreams (their confused illogical nature, how we forget them soon after waking and so on).
Only about page 200 does there come the decisive insight delivered via his own dream about a patient he names Irma, namely that every dream has meaning because every dream is a wish-fulfilment. This is followed from page 200 onwards by an equally extensive series of actual dreams derived from his patients, described in great detail each with a painstaking decipherment.
The literary focus
It isn’t till page 363 that Freud takes the further step of asserting that almost all the dreams of most of his patients ultimately derive from fantasies about their parents. Here he stop for three pages to describe the legend of Oedipus and then to assert that something like Oedipal feelings occur in all his patients.
No sooner has he finished making the shocking claim that all of us, to some extent or other, go through a phase of loving the parent of the opposite sex and hating the parent of the same sex, than he moves on to a similar version of the same story, retold thousands of years later, and culturally rearranged and overlaid, to become Hamlet, then going on to mention other Shakespeare plays, Goethe, German literary critics and so on. (Goethe and Shakespeare are both mentioned about 20 times in the text, along with writers as diverse as Schiller, Heine and Zola, Jonathan Swift and Rider Haggard, the Bible, poetry in general, the music of Wagner 3 times, Mozart 4 times, Offenbach and so on.)
In other words, right from the start Freud’s conceptions of the mind were heavily conditioned and shaped by literature and by cultural forms (myths, legends, religion, folk tales) as much as, or more than, by ‘science’.
It is entirely characteristic of Freud’s focus on culture as source and subject to be investigated that in the preface to the Third Edition, he speculates that new material for the book will not be generated by, say, widening the types of patients he treats or the fast-expanding number of analyses being carried out by his followers i.e. scientific evidence based on data. No, he says the next edition will have to:
afford a closer contact with the copious material presented in imaginative writing, in myths, in linguistic usage and in folklore.
Autobiographical
Also, it is astonishingly autobiographical. Freud shares a surprising number of important experiences in his life, starting with the place and date of his birth followed by quite a few important and poignant memories from his childhood and youth. More than that he shares, and analyses at length, upwards of 30 of his own dreams, many of which show him in a less than flattering light, which are embarrassingly candid about his ambitions, his delusions of grandeur, his sense of failure, and so on and so on.
‘The Interpretation of Dreams is one of the great autobiographical studies in the history of mankind; in it Freud drew freely on his inner life in an effort to construct a psychological system relevant for all of us.’ (Freud and His Followers by Paul Roazen, page 35)
For Roazen this over-sharing was a heroic achievement and sacrifice the great man made on our behalves. But many critics have pointed out the weakness of a theory which relies so very heavily on just one person’s life and experiences and feelings, and on his own interpretation of them, and then claims to extrapolate them into universal principles underpinning all of human nature.
Introduction of key concepts
The book is important because it represents Freud’s first full-length description of the unconscious and the vast role it plays in the mental life of human beings. His theories about the unconscious would be elaborated and developed right up to his death 40 years later, but this is the first, primal statement of its central role.
Freud wrote to his colleague and confidant Wilhelm Fliess, who played a vital role as sounding board for his developing ideas in the 1890s, that the Interpretation of Dreams was substantially finished by 1896. It was published in 1899 but Freud was careful to ensure that it had ‘1900’ on the title page; he was very aware of his image and reputation and that the arrival of a new century heralded the dawn of a new age. All these considerations were in the mind of this very ambitious man.
And yet, after all this careful planning, only 351 copies were sold in the first six years.
Freud began writing this immense book while on holiday in the summer of 1985 at the Schloss BelleVue near Grinzing in Austria. Later he jokingly wrote to Fliess suggesting that a plaque be put on the wall of this castle reading: ‘In this house on July 24 1895 the secret of dreams was revealed to Dr Sigmund Freud’. (Mentioned in a note by the editors on page 199.)
Early days
Personally, I find Freud’s theory of dreams, his confidence that every dream represents a wish and that virtually all dreams can be decoded into various kinds of libidinal fantasy, optimistic and implausible. There feels to be a lot of pseudo-science in it. It feels very dated. For Freud, though, his ‘discovery’ that dreams have meaning, that they were suppressed and distorted wishes, was his big intellectual breakthrough, and the existence of the unconscious was always tied up for him with the breakthrough of dream interpretation.
But when I came to Freud it was through the later metapsychological works and the second theory initiated by Beyond the Pleasure Principle. By comparison with the sophistication of the second theory, with the greater role it assigns to the Death Drive, the Nirvana Principle, the greater account taken of violence and aggression (prompted by the catastrophe of the First World War), the sociological theorisation of the psychology of groups and crowds – compared with all this, going back to his early dream theory seems a little embarrassing, almost childish.
The final 50 or 60 pages take us deep, deep into what is in effect a new theory of human nature and existence, which is visionary and strange. But the hundreds and hundreds of pages of sometimes clunky dream interpretation which precede them are often cringe-inducing. Specially when he makes his stock sexist comments about women and their innate inferiority to men…
Executive summary
The Interpretation is important because it introduces several central ideas of Freud’s theory, namely the unconscious as a reservoir of instinctual wishes and desires which have been repressed from the conscious mind by censorship. These repressed urges try to re-enter the mind when the censorship is relaxed during sleep, but even then can only do so in garbled and distorted form.
So all dreams have two layers or levels which Freud defines as manifest content and latent content (p.381).
The manifest content is the narrative or series of images which we remember on waking, maybe write down or recount to a therapist. The latent content refers to the underlying ‘meaning’ of the dream.
The work of psychotherapy is to dig below the surface or manifest content to try and establish the meaning of the latent content i.e. to discover the wish lying behind the dream.
Freud then categorises the ways in which the ‘censorship’ garbles the latent content of the dream. It does this through distinct processes which he labels as:
Condensation – can happen in many ways, for example many ideas or wishes may be represented in one dream, or two or more people or ideas may be combined in one representation
Displacement – the fundamental notion that latent content, the expression of the wish underlying all dreams, is distorted and ‘displaced’
Representation – a great variety of ways in which images, words, sounds, word and phrases can represent the dream-wish
Secondary revision – not part of the process of censorship, this is what happens as the mind returns to consciousness and, half-asleep, tries to ‘make sense’ of the half-remembered dream by rearranging its elements into something closer to a coherent narrative
The comprehensive nature of this rewriting of the repressed wish explains why people can often make no sense at all of their dreams, so completely censored and disguised have they been.
Using the talking cure, free association and dream interpretation, the therapist can analyse a patient’s dreams, uncovering the secret wish which lies behind them and find a way into the reservoir of all our drives and urges and the words and images and behaviours which have become attached to them. Hence Freud’s famous declaration:
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS
The text is immensely schematic, divided and sub-divided and sub-sub-divided into numbered parts, sections, sub-sections, sub-sub-sections, as if to conceal the relative simplicity of what Freud was proposing under a mountain of academic apparatus. He recognised the work’s unmanageable length and published a much shorter version On Dreams in 1901, revised and expanded in 1911. The fact that the abbreviation is a mere slip of a thing at 53 pages in the English translation strongly hints at the redundancy of most of the material in the longer work. It’s there to bludgeon the reader into submission with the sheer quantity of ‘evidence’.
Part 1. The scientific literature dealing with the problems of dreams
The ancients had two theories: dreams as helpful messages from the supernatural or diabolical fantasy. These were said to emanate from gates of horn and of ivory, respectively.
A) The relation of dreams to waking life
Dreams seem at the same time totally removed from waking life yet continue many of the concerns of waking life.
B) The material of dreams: memory in dreams
Dreams often preserve memories much more clearly than waking life and yet what is remembered is often trivial.
C) The stimuli and sources of dreams
1. External sensory stimuli
For example, alarm clock prompts dreams of church bells etc. But why do the same external source prompts different dream-imagery?
2. Internal (subjective) sensory excitations
3. Internal organic somatic stimuli
News from internal organs, often warning of disease. But how are these messages conveyed?
4. Psychical sources of stimulation
Present definitions of psychical stimulation do not suffice.
D) Why dreams are forgotten after waking
Natural that the intensity of daytime experiences blots out dreams. More importantly, everyone proceeds to reconstruct partially remembered dreams, stringing together half-memories in usually very misleading ways.
E) The distinguishing psychological characteristics of dreams
Dreams perceived as immediate experience. Lack of critical self-consciousness. In dreams we don’t think, we experience.
Crazy chains of association. Logic and causation which we (mostly) demand in conscious life are conspicuous by their absence.
Regression to earlier impulses. The tremendous virtuoso intensity of dream experiences. Freud reviews a wide range of views about dreams, from total disparagement to hymns to dreams’ poetic intensity.
F) The moral sense in dreams
Some say people lose all moral sense in dreams and behave with shocking amorality; others say you act in dreams according to your character. Dreams often show us insight into our deeper feelings, unknown to our conscious selves. Dreams reveal illicit desires, as in saints’ confessions of being miserable sinners. In dreams our instinctual life is exposed. We acquiesce in desires we spend our waking lives controlling and resisting.
G) Theories of dreaming and its function
The ancients thought dreams are sent from the gods as a guidance to action. More recently three schools have emerged:
Rational. The dream-mind works just like the conscious mind but deprived of the sense-data of consciousness
Mechanistic. Sleep relaxes the conscious control and dreams are responses of different parts of the mind to the passing sensory stimulants of the night. Or dreams are the excrescence of all the semi-cogitated impressions and thoughts of the day.
Dreams are a holiday for the mind. Rest and recuperation.
H) The relations between dreams and mental diseases
Patients sometimes cured during the day continue their pathological behaviour in dreams or while asleep. ‘The madman is a waking dreamer’ etc. Dreams and psychoses are both fulfilment of wishes.
2. The method of interpreting dreams: analysis of a specimen dream
The aim which I have set before myself is to show that dreams are capable of being interpreted. (p.167)
Lay interpretation confined to symbolic reading (for example, pharaoh’s seven fat and seven lean kine; also mentioned p.448) and decoding (treating dream-language as a code).
Outline of the technique of free association.
An extended analysis of Freud’s own dream, the ‘dream of Irma’s injection’ interpreted to show how it conflates evidence to justify Freud’s treatment of her, i.e. a wish to be impregnated (pages 180 to 199).
3. A dream is a fulfilment of a wish
Elaboration of Freud’s fundamental insight, that every dream is the symbolic fulfilment of an unconscious wish. Examples of children’s dreams. The point is dreams may express wishes, but so comprehensibly distorted and garbled as to usually be unrecognisable to the dreamer.
4. Distortions in dreams
If all dreams are wish-fulfilments, why do some present as the opposite – wishing the death of a loved-one, anxiety dreams etc?
Because the wish is distorted. There are thus at least two aspects to a dream, the manifest content (the coherent narrative we make from the dream imagery) and the latent content (the real concern), and there is always an element of repression or censorship. This is the dream-work, which translates latent content into the manifest content we experience and remember.
The similarity of distortion in dreams and the hallucinations or obsessions of neurotics.
5. The material and sources of dreams
A) Recent and indifferent material in dreams
Frequent occurrence of material from the day before, the ‘dream-day’; but radically disguised or itself masking other meanings. Thus the concept of displacement.
B) Infantile material as a source of dreams
The deeper one carries the analysis of a dream, the more often one comes upon the track of experiences from childhood which have played a part among the sources of that dream’s latent content.
C) The somatic sources of dreams
All dreams are in a sense dreams of convenience. They serve the purpose of managing the processing of unconscious content in such a way as to preserve sleep. Dreams are the guardians of sleep.
If dreams are prompted by internal somatic stimulation, why do we not dream continuously of flying (the working of the lungs) etc? Because somatic stimulation is brought into the formation of a dream only when it fits with the ideational content derived from the dream’s psychic sources; only when it’s needed.
D) Typical dreams
He reviews:
1. Embarrassing dreams of being naked
2. Dreams of the death of persons whom the dreamer likes (childhood rivalries)
It is in this section that Freud describes the fierce emotions and rivalries attributable to children, which can spill over into hostility against their parents:
Being in love with the one parent and hating the other are among the essential constituents of the stock of psychical impulses which is formed [n childhood] (p.362)
He starts to invoke the Greek myths and this leads up to page 363 on which he posits the central role of the Oedipus legend.
It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. (p.364)
3. Other typical dreams
4. Examination dreams
6. The dream-work
Freud reviews the different mental processes he claims are at work in dreams, which collectively he calls the ‘dream-work’:
A) The work of condensation
Seen at its clearest when it handles words and names. In dreams words are often treated like things, chopped up, compressed etc.
B) The work of displacement
A dream is often differently centred from the dream-thought which lies behind it. The work of displacement as well as condensation are the result of the censorship imposed on the unconscious wish material.
The kernel of my theory of dreams lies in my derivation of dream-distortion from the censorship. (p.418)
C) The means of representation in dreams
Dreams do not have any of the methods with which we construct narratives or logical arguments at their disposal.
The most striking example of absence of logic is the absence of the negative, meaning that no means yes, that something can be represented by its exact opposite: the process of reversal (p.429) This can apply to causality where normal cause and effect are reversed.
Or dream images can appear by a process of similarity or consonance of even a tiny part of it with something else (p.431).
The common sensation of running but never getting anywhere.
Dreams are completely egoistic. They deal with the dreamer and only the dreamer (p.434).
D) Considerations of representability
Some dreams make use of ‘primeval’ imagery, being similes reaching back to remote antiquity (p.462).
Wherever neuroses make use of such disguises they are following paths along which all humanity passed in the earliest days of civilisation. (p.463).
E) Symbols in dreams: some further typical examples
Tempting to think that recurrent symbols in dreams may be universal symbols, specially when they recur in ‘popular myths, legends, linguistic idioms, proverbial wisdom and current jokes’ (which gives you a good sense of Freud’s evidence base).
Freud proceeds to give a lexicon or handbook of symbols, starting with the King and Queen who are, of course, the dreamer’s parents, moving on to how playing with a little child, especially beating it, betokens masturbation, and so on.
a hat is symbolic of a man, or the male genitals
a little one is the penis
being run over is coitus
buildings, stairs and shafts represent the genitals
female genitals represented by a landscape
castration dreams
urinary symbolism
staircase dreams
flowers represent the genitals (p.496)
dreams of flying or floating have a very varied meaning
He makes the ‘shocking’ claim that psychoanalysis makes no qualitative distinction between normal and neurotic life i.e. there is no ‘normality’ i.e. we are all on a spectrum (p.493).
And the centrality of sex in all these hundreds and hundreds of examples:
The more one is concerned with the solution of dreams, the more one is driven to recognise that the majority of the dreams of adults deal with sexual material and give expression to erotic wishes. (p.520)
F) Some examples: calculations and speeches in dreams
The special significance of numbers in dreams.
Speech rarely makes sense in dreams, being recombinations of words or phrases taken from other sources.
G) Absurd dreams: intellectual activity in dreams
Obviously many dreams are absurd or absurdist in content, but Freud tries to identify different reasons for this, often to do with negative or contradictory elements in the motivating dream content.
The dream-work produces absurd dreams and dreams containing individual absurd elements if it is faced with the necessity of representing any criticism, ridicule or derision which may be present in the dream-thoughts. (p.576)
H) Affects in dreams
It is commonly observed that the mood induced by a dream lingers longer than most of the details into the waking day.
I) Secondary revision
This occurs at the end of the process of dream-construction and is the application of conscious thought processes to the dream material. Just before waking the renascent ego tries to gloss over inconsistencies in the dream narrative, trying to create sense out of absurdity.
So it’s not part of the censor’s work, not part of displacement and condensation; it comes after that and re-arranges elements of the dream, but has the practical effect of scrambling it even more, making dream interpretation even harder (pages 641 and 642).
7. The psychology of the dream process
The dream-work is not simply more careless, more irrational, more forgetful and more incomplete than waking thought; it is completely different from it qualitatively and for that reason not directly comparable with it. (p.650)
A) The forgetting of dreams
Forgetting details of a dream is a common experience. But Freud is convinced that more is retained than we commonly think and that in the therapeutic situation more can be reclaimed than you’d expect. And often the so-called ‘forgetting’ of a dream is really only the work of the censor and repression; with sensitive work it can be recalled.
Can we interpret every detail of a dream, or every dream? No. Because the power of repression and resistance is so severe. But you can interpret much more than you’d initially believe.
B) Regression
Freud works through a series of diagrams meant to convey the relationship between dream wishes, memories, the preconscious, the unconscious and so on. By ‘regression’ Freud means that, with the motor system i.e. active use of the body, shut down in sleep, wishes express their outcomes not in (sleeping) body but by bouncing back into the psyche. Regression refers to internally generated images which are fed backwards into the cortex as if they were coming from the outside. He goes on to distinguish three types of regression:
topographical regression
temporal regression, the harking back to earlier psychic structures
formal regression, where primitive methods of expression and representation take the place of the usual ones (p.699)
He concludes by making the picturesque but now discredited claim that some element of dreams also connects us with primeval memories of our ancestors.
We may expect that the analysis of dreams will lead us to a knowledge of man’s archaic heritage, of what is psychically innate in him. Dreams and neuroses seem to have preserved more mental antiquities than we would have imagined possible; so that psychoanalysis may claim a high place among the sciences which are concerned with the reconstruction of the earliest and most obscure periods of the beginnings of the human race. (p.700)
C) Wish-fulfilment
It may be intuitively agreed that a dream expresses a wish, albeit heavily disguised by the censorship, but Freud goes on to address the paradox that anxiety and negative dreams can also express wishes. He devotes 2 pages to explaining the definition of a ‘wish’ as it first comes to be experienced by the screaming baby, considered as an inchoate organism seeking the most basic physical satisfactions.
During which he makes the kind of comment that I like, namely that ‘thought is after all nothing but a substitute for the basic physical wish’.
D) Arousal by dreams: the function of dreams: anxiety dreams
Further clarification of why anxiety dreams and other dreams with acutely negative affect are, nonetheless, expressions of a wish. The anxiety is an index of the force of the repression needed to keep the unacceptable wish material under wraps.
E) The primary and secondary processes: repression
In technical and difficult phraseology, Freud repeats the basic idea that the primary system (the unconscious) is concerned with securing the free discharge of the quantities of excitation which are troubling it, while the second system, attempts to inhibit this discharge (p.759).
The primary process endeavours to bring about a discharge of excitation in order that, with the help of the amount of excitation thus accumulated, it may establish a ‘perceptual identity’ with the experience of satisfaction. The secondary process, however, has abandoned this intention and taken on another in its place – the establishment of a ‘thought identity’ with that experience.
All thinking is no more than a circuitous path from the memory of a satisfaction (a memory which has been adopted as a purposive idea) to an identical cathexis of the same memory which it is hoped to attain once more through an intermediate stage of motor experiences. (pages 761 to 762)
These final pages take us deep, deep into Freud’s most theoretical musings about the nature of the mind and of thought, which tend to undermine the possibility of ‘reason’ at all, because he makes all the activities of the mind arise from a really primeval stratum of primitive needs, as transmuted into wishes, as repressed and distorted into a thousand and one memories, behaviour patterns, obsessions and so on. Nobody can think rationally, because this unconscious swamp is the basis of all human thought.
I’m not sure it’s worth reading the preceding 750 pages to get here, but they are in a sense the preface to a deep dive into a truly other vision of human nature, the human mind, human existence. All thinking is, in a sense, repeated attempts to recapture the primeval, primitive physical satisfactions of the baby which have been so thoroughly repressed that they can never be achieved. All humans are, in a sense, condemned to search endlessly for the unfindable. Hence [Freud doesn’t say this, I’m saying this] the universal notion of The Quest found across all human cultures.
F) The unconscious and consciousness: reality
The unconscious is vast and the basis of the psyche. The conscious mind is a small, fragile blip floating on the great unknown ocean of the unconscious.
The unconscious must be assumed to be the general basis of psychical life. The unconscious is the larger sphere which includes within it the smaller sphere of the conscious….The unconscious is the true psychic reality. (p.773)
Typically, Freud immediately goes on to say that this explains a lot of creative process too, with numerous poets and composers describing how their great works ‘came to them’ without planning, unexpectedly, whole and complete. Well…the unconscious!
The conscious mind is like a kind of sense organ for the perception of psychic qualities. It is entirely typical of Freud that this dense and difficult conceptualising gives way, on the page before last, to yet another reference to Greek mythology, and to the story of Zeus castrating his father, Kronos. Literature and myth are never far away in Freud’s writings. And are often a welcome respite from the more difficult technical passages.
And one of the oldest traditions of dreams, which he mentioned right at the start, 780 pages earlier, widely believed in the ancient world that they predict the future. Do they? No, not in a literal sense, no. And yet, in another sense:
By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are, after all, leading us into the future. But this future, which the dreamer pictures as the present, has been moulded by his indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past. (last sentences, page 783)
Criticism
The same period (1895 to 1900) saw the zenith of detectivehood in the fictional figure of Sherlock Holmes. Very widespread was the idea human personality as a mystery, a puzzle to be solved.
And the idea of psychic division into two opposing parts, light and dark, good and bad: the döppelgänger or split personality abounds in the stories of the time: Jeckyll and Hyde and The Secret Sharer and Dorian Gray and all the characters in Holmes leading respectable lives while concealing depths of vice and criminality.
After the long dull review of existing dream literature, Freud’s exposition his new theory of the interpretation of dreams contains steadily more and more personal material, including candid stories of antisemitism. He shares with us his identification with Hannibal; he describes himself as a conquistador; the narrative of the dream of Irma’s injection is above all a wish to be justified.
Surprisingly, maybe, there is no mention of the Oedipus Complex and little mention of childhood sexuality. He added notes about these to all the later editions, but reading the text as first published makes you realise how very bare of all his theories it is, or to put it another way, what a huge edifice of complex psychological theory it was to grow into.
Throughout the book you can see Freud extending the mechanisms revealed by his own dream analysis backward and forward in order to derive a psychology of all stages of life; in particular pushing the source of dreams back into childhood. The nature of childhood fantasy and its connection with childhood sexual feelings were become central to the development of the theory over the next five years.
This essay was one of 27 commissioned for a series called ‘Contemporary Medicine in Self-Portrayals’ i.e. less a strict autobiography than a ‘my life and my contribution to science’.
It comprises a sketchy historical review of the events leading up to Freud’s ‘discovery’ of psychoanalysis, then an exposition of psychoanalysis’s central tenets, an explanation of the technique, and a sketch of its applications to other spheres of human knowledge.
Early life
Sigmund Freud was born on 6 May 1856 in Freiberg in Moravia, in the modern Czech Republic, the youngest of 9 children of the bankrupt wool-trader Jacob Freud (also mention in The Interpretation of Dreams, page 284).
Moves to Vienna aged 4. Consistently top of his class at the Gymnasium (junior school).
His father, Jacob, though poor, said, ‘Follow whatever career you wish, son’. He didn’t specially want to become a doctor:
I was moved rather by a sort of curiosity which was directed more towards human concerns than towards natural objects.
At higher school he was caught up in the intellectual excitement generated by the theories of Darwin and, after listening to an inspiring essay on Nature by Goethe, he decides to study medicine (as recounted in The Interpretation of Dreams, page 572).
1873: Starts attending University of Vienna. Encounters antisemitism for the first time. Unsure what to specialise in until he attends classes by Ernst Brucke, Professor of Physiology, who becomes his hero.
1876 to 1882: Researches physiology of the nervous system of fish and eels. Takes a long time to win his Degree as Doctor of Medicine, in 1881.
1882: Brucke tells him, ‘You are poor. There’s no money in pure research; best to take up the actual practice of medicine.’ So Sigmund enters the Vienna General Hospital but continues with his theoretical interests, now concentrating on disorders of the human nervous system.
From the anatomy of the brain – still very theoretical, i.e. no cash – Freud moved on to study nervous diseases. Almost nothing was known about nervous diseases in the 1880s, there were no specialists and few texts in Vienna. Far away in Paris shone the beacon of Jean-Martin Charcot, a leading light in treating mental illness.
1885: Appointed Lecturer on Neuropathology due to his research. Soon afterwards awarded a bursary and set off to Paris to study under Charcot. Here Charcot had proved that hysteria existed as a definite distinct diagnosis. Contrary to received opinion it could be found in men as well as women. It resulted in physical symptoms. It could be brought on by hypnotic suggestion. But as to the psychological origins of hysteria – nothing.
1886: On the way back from his winter stay in Paris he stopped at Berlin to study the disorders of childhood. Via the prestigious Kassowitz Institute for Children Freud published a string of learned studies of cerebral palsy.
1883 to 1884: Freud experiments with the new drug cocaine as a possible anaesthetic, but others do the definitive work.
1886: Freud marries Martha Binnays, fiancée for 4 long frustrating years due to his lack of money or prospects Now, aged 30, with no real achievements to his name, Freud really needs money to set up the kind of bourgeois household he wants.
1886: When Freud lectures in Vienna on Charcot’s discoveries he is largely ridiculed and excluded from research laboratories. So he sets up as a private consultant on nervous diseases. How does he treat people? With electrotherapy (which he soon drops) and with the hypnotism he had witnessed in Paris.
1889: Freud visits Nancy to watch the great Hippolyte Bernheim perform hypnosis. It was Bernheim who developed the notion of suggestibility under hypnosis. Freud had translated Bernheim’s On Suggestion and its Applications to Therapy in 1888. He took along some of his private patients. Pondering hypnosis hints that there are forces operating on the mind of which we are normally unconscious. But in practice it rarely cures real neurotics.
1880 to 1882: While all this went on Freud befriended Josef Breuer, a physician 14 years his elder. Breuer tells him about his treatment of Anna O. This clever young woman is afflicted with a colourful array of neurotic symptoms. Breuer discovered that if he hypnotised her, she was capable of explaining the origins of the symptoms in real-life events of which she was unaware in waking life. Not only that, but once she explained the cause, the symptom disappeared! Clearly neurotic symptoms have meaning; they are related to real life events, so they are memories but they are buried somewhere inaccessible to waking consciousness. Freud replicates Breuer’s results with many of his private patients.
1895: Freud publishes Studies On Hysteria, a list of case studies with some theory of the ‘cathartic’ method of cure i.e. hysteria is caused by suppressed memories but if these memories can be brought into the conscious minds, the symptom disappears. Breuer is happy to leave his findings at that.
1895 to 1900: The Heroic Period. Freud sets out on a voyage of discovery building on the insights gained so far. Above all he begins to suspect a sexual factor in the aetiology of hysteria. He moves on to confirm a similar sexual motive lying beneath neuraesthenics. He realises that much of the success of hypnotism is due to the patient’s trust in the hypnotist. After a while he realises that he can get comparable results in his patients (i.e. the release of a flood of memories) by just asking. Slowly he evolves the technique of free association.
1896: Freud’s father dies and he begins a pitiless self-analysis reviewing his whole life, his aims and achievements to date. He comes to realise the importance of little-suspected motives, of early fears and anxieties in his adult life, choices and behaviour. At the same time he is examining his patients for similar origins to their obsessions and symptoms.
All the thoughts of this turbulent period are recorded in his epic correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess, an ear-nose and throat specialist based 500 miles away in Berlin. Nowadays dismissed as a crank, Fliess nonetheless provided an invaluable sounding board for Freud’s wacky speculations at a time when respectable opinion in Vienna increasingly shunned him.
Psychoanalysis
1899: publishes The Interpretation of Dreams which contains all Freud’s major discoveries, either explicitly or in embryo:
Neurotic symptoms are the return of repressed memories of desires or feelings too shameful for the patient to cope with, which is why they are repressed.
The amount of effort needed to recall them to conscious thought is a measure of resistance.
Free association helps the patient approach the dangerous memory.
But a quicker way to get there is through dream interpretation.
Dreams are the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish.
Dreams use the language of the unconscious in which everything is eternally present, persons are interchangeable, logic is forgotten and the vilest desires are expressed.
Desires are distorted by the dream-work which consists of condensation, overdetermination, displacement – so that a dream has two layers, the manifest content (what we remember and tell upon waking) and the latent content (the distorted wish).
Dream interpretation is the royal road to the Unconscious.
An instinctive wish wells up in us. The ego forbids it entrance to consciousness. It is repressed but it must have expression. So it re-emerges, disguised, in dreams and in neurotic symptoms. Therefore, mental illness is a message from the unconscious; when the painful message is deciphered by the common work of analysis, the wish is discharged with an ‘affective release’ i.e. emotion; the patient bursts into tears etc.
Following on the Release of Tension there is the Act of Judgement or Sublimation. You consciously come to terms with this shameful part of your personality; or, less consciously, you sublimate its energy into a new understanding of your life, your motives, your agenda, into higher goals.
The essence of the Psychoanalytical Revolution is this: Everything mental is in the first instance unconscious; the further property of consciousness may be present or it may be absent. Consciousness, this precious mind, is, then, almost irrelevant to the truth about us and to how we actually behave as human animals.
This is a departure from all previous theories of the mind which, reasonably enough, had concentrated on asking how Reason and Intellect work, what is the role of language in thought etc etc? Two thousand years of philosophers worrying away at the nature of the links between sensations and concepts and the words we express them in.
Freud says this is irrelevant. Consciousness is a puny, secondary, almost irrelevant secretion – a rationalisation, a justification – of decisions and wishes and desires and strategies which are fully worked out in a part of the mind which can by its nature never be accessible to us. We can only guess at its activities by inference, from the misshapen tip of the iceberg which is all we can see.
The sexuality of children
1905: Three Essays on Sexuality. The other major component of the theory is the sexuality of children. Through analysis, through dreams and free association, most of his patients traced their problems back to infantile sexual experiences. Though not sexual in the standard meaning (erection, ejaculation etc) Freud found that children are excited and gain pleasure – gratification – of the sexual instinct, through different parts of their bodies as they grow. He called these the erotogenic zones.
He hypothesised a developmental model:
Years 0 to 1: pleasure through the mouth, sucking on the breast, the oral phase
Years 1 to 3: pleasure in acquiring control over peeing and defecating, the anal-sadistic phase
Years 3 to 5: pleasure in playing with the little penis or clitoris, the phallic stage
At this point the sexual drives are clearly in approximately the right place for the purposes of reproduction to which they will be called at the onset of puberty.
The actual pleasure is derived from the operation of a whole number of instincts which steadily sort themselves out into their component parts as the child grows, often resulting in pairs of opposites: masochistic and sadistic urges; the urge to show and to look.
Small children’s play amounts to continuous experimentation with a steadily growing range of instinctual drives and satisfactions, applied to the child’s steadily growing awareness, first of parts of its body, then of their functions, then of the body’s relationship to the outside world, and finally to other people, to its siblings and parents.
The sexual impulse overall is called the libido. The libido does not develop smoothly.
As a result either of the excessive strength of certain of the components or of experiences involving premature satisfaction, fixations of the libido may occur at various points in its development. If subsequently a repression takes place, the libido flows back to these points (a process described as regression) and it is from them that the [frustrated] energy bursts through in the form of a symptom.
The Three Essays set out to schematise all human sexual experience.
‘Normal’ heterosexual genital intercourse undertaken for the procreation of children – the only form of sex allowed by the Catholic Church – is a product of the most strenuous repression of other desires, and the pinnacle, the furthest highest peak, of sexual development. In reality the overwhelming majority of the population are unable to adhere to this incredibly restricted target and indulge in various forms of ‘perversion’ (in the Catholic sense).
The Three Essays turn 2,000 years of theories about sex and our relationship with our bodies on their heads. In Freud’s model the gratification of physical instincts is the bedrock of human existence; in his view, children, far from being sexless innocents, from the earliest age are indulging these desires, and none of us ever really gives them up; they are merely repressed. They can be repressed in numerous ways, if badly resulting in us becoming twisted or neurotic; or they can be sublimated into ‘higher’ activities acceptable to society.
The structures of society, the institutions of civilised life which we like to pride ourselves on – its laws and morality and religion and philosophy and art – are constructed in order to hide our true animal nature from ourselves.
Back to the theory of development. The developing instincts must have an object: to begin with it is the infant’s own body, in a state of permanent auto-erotism (thus the small infant is said to be polymorphously perverse simply meaning that it finds pleasure in every aspect of physicality).
Later, the infant develops an awareness of the breast it is suckling from and develops an image of the Good Mother (who suckles it) and the Bad Mother (who goes away).
Later still the child becomes aware of the complementary roles played by its mother and father, and the boy-child wants to take his father’s place and take possession of his mother. This is the Oedipus Complex, which Freud placed slap-bang at the centre of his theory of childhood development, of the aetiology of the neuroses, of the origins of culture and society, and of the way existing societies are run.
All a child’s puzzles about its little winkle, about where it came from, everything becomes centred on this grand obsession: 1) terror of the all-powerful Father, and the reverse side of terror, aggression, the wish to kill him; and 2) love of the mother who suckled us and is affectionate.
Like Oedipus we wish to kill our father and sleep with our mother. These are the only people in the child’s life; onto them he projects models of all the possible relations human beings can have. No surprise, then, that in later life so many of our attitudes to authority figures, love objects, other citizens, work-mates etc will be found to derive from the primitive stratum of emotional webs which are centred on the Oedipal Complex.
Once the child has overcome these feelings, he lapses into years of amnesia, the latency period from 5 to the onset of puberty at 11, 12, 13. The storm and stress of infancy are largely forgotten while the child’s faculties are concentrated outwards onto social activity, on learning from parents, teachers and other authorities, what rules to obey, how to read and write and judge, how to handle your peers: the vital work of acculturation, of learning the ancestral wisdom which separates us from the simple beasts who repeat in each generation their timeless instinctive activity.
The latency period seems to be a phenomenon of advanced societies. During this period the child develops reaction-formations (equal and opposite reactions against the sexually intense years), meaning emotions such as disgust and shame.
These, for Freud are the origins of morality. You are indoctrinated into thinking that the acts of defecating, peeing, playing with your parts are ‘dirty’. You react with shame. Encouraged by your parents, your teachers and everything you read, you develop an idea that sex is ‘wrong’, ‘dirty’.
A strong body of tradition originating from the highest possible authority (God) goes to confirm all these feelings and to encourage you to sublimate them into socially-acceptable forms. Thus religious believers themselves display many interesting examples of perversions, neuroses and various types of abnormal behaviour under the protection of piety.
The child introjects all of these injunctions from their parents and other authority figures, and constructs an ego-ideal, a model way to live and behave and think. They hero-worship idealised figures, from Jesus to Hollywood stars to the latest soccer players.
You want to live up to their standard, to impress them with selflessness and devotion to an ideal. You lay down in your mind a superego or conscience, the internalised laws of your culture which now supersede the rules of the parents (who are, in any case, beginning to seem all-too-human and fallible).
Puberty
The onset of puberty with its rush of hormones and the development of primary and secondary sexual differentiation is a traditional time of turmoil in all societies and a time when the young have to be forcibly, sometimes painfully, initiated into full adult membership of society.
In more advanced cultures this means the early sexual patterns are revived but come into fierce conflict with the reaction-formations of disgust and shame and the powerful strictures of the introjected superego.
But the ideal, mature grown-up is as much of a myth as the ideal, model, married heterosexual. Freud’s theory helps to explain what a chaos of complexes and obsessions and instincts and desires and repressions and terrors and self-punishment we have to pass through to emerge as anything like the responsible grown-ups which society requires.
I hope it will be easy to gather the nature of my extension of the concept of sexuality. In the first place sexuality is divorced from its too close connection with the genitals and is regarded as a more comprehensive bodily function, having pleasure as its goal and only secondarily coming to serve the purposes of reproduction. In the second place the sexual impulses are regarded as including all those merely affectionate and friendly impulses to which usage applies the exceedingly ambiguous word ‘love’.
The detaching of sexuality from the genitals has the advantage of allowing us to bring the sexual activities of children and of perverts into the same scope as those of normal adults. The sexual activities of children have hitherto been entirely neglected and though those of perverts have been recognised it has been with moral indignation and without understanding. From the psychoanalytic standpoint, even the most eccentric and repellent perversions are explicable as manifestations of component instincts of sexuality which have freed themselves from the primacy of the genitals and are now in pursuit of pleasure on their own account as they were in the very early days of the libido’s development. The most important of these perversions, homosexuality, scarcely deserves the name. It can be traced back to the constitutional bisexuality of all human beings and to the after-effects of the phallic primacy. Psychoanalysis enables us to point to some trace or other of a homosexual object-choice in everyone…. Psychoanalysis has no concern whatever with any judgements of value.
The second of my alleged extensions of the concept of sexuality finds its justification in the fact revealed by psychoanalytic investigation that all of these affectionate impulses were originally of a completely sexual nature but have become inhibited in their aim or sublimated. The manner in which the sexual instincts can thus be influenced and diverted enables them to be employed for cultural activities of every kind.
Psychoanalytic therapy
Freud then moves on to explain the technique of analysis. This is based on the concept of transference. The patient soon forgets the wish to be cured of unhappiness or troubling thoughts and symptoms. He begins to project onto the analyst his deepest feelings. These may be of love and affection for the great healer of souls – in which case the analyst can work with them to continue towards catharsis.
But transference may become entirely negative, the patient projecting aggression and defiance onto the analyst. This makes things difficult, sometimes impossible. The centrality and the limitation of transference explains why analysis works with some patients and not with others; and also why whole categories of patient are beyond its help, namely schizophrenics and paranoiacs, who are too detached from reality to form the realistic relationship with the analyst which transference requires in order to work.
The transference is made conscious to the patient by the analyst and it is resolved by convincing him that in his transference attitude he is re-experiencing emotional relationships which had their origin in his earliest object attachments during the repressed period of his childhood.
The history of the psychoanalytic movement
1900: Freud’s discoveries were either ignored or dismissed. Freud came to attribute this to the resistance of the wider world to the truth, resistance which is modelled on and derives from the original work of repression carried out during the latency period. It is denial from the wider world similar to the denial Freud encountered from individual patients who disbelieved his interpretations until they were finally persuaded and cured.
1902: Interested physicians begin to meet at Freud’s house.
1906: Interest in Freud stirs in Zurich, at the renowned Bergholzli Sanatorium run by Eugene Bleuler and his rising assistant Carl Gustav Jung.
1908: All interested parties, from Austria, Germany and Switzerland, meet at Salzburg for the first Psychoanalytic Congress.
1909: Freud and Jung are invited to America, to lecture at Clark University, Worcester, Massachussetts, at the invitation of President Stanley Hall. In the States Freud meets Harvard neurologist James J. Putnam and the ‘pragmatic’ philosopher William James. James in his classic text, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), had set out to draw a limit to the kind of scientific positivism espoused by Freud, and to reserve an exclusive area of experience open only to intuition: more or less religious experience.
1910: The Second Psychoanalytical Congress in Nurenberg sets up an the International Psychoanalytical Society and appoints Jung the first President.
1911 to 1913: Two secessionist movements. Alfred Adler leaves to set up Individual Psychology based on the ‘masculine protest’, the idea that neuroses are formed by the drive to overcome perceived organ inferiorities. (This is the origin of the inferiority complex). Jung leaves to set up Analytical Psychology, emptying Freud’s libido of its sexual content, rejecting the Oedipus Complex and importing ideas like a ‘racial unconscious’, ‘the oceanic feeling’, ‘archetypes of behaviour’ – in every instance abandoning the specific discoveries of Freud for vaguer, more mystical interpretations of personality.
1914 to 1918: The Great War brings psychoanalytic practice and publications to a halt.
1920: Psychoanalytical Congress at the Hague. The War helped spread psychoanalysis by bringing home the reality of the psychogenesis of mental illness to the general population. Previously sceptical doctors, put off Freud’s theories by their sexual aspects, were forced to take into account ‘the flight from reality’, ‘the flight into illness’, in the form of shell-shock which had afflicted so many combatants.
Freud says the history of psychoanalysis breaks into two periods: the Heroic Period 1895 to 1906 when he was substantially alone; and 1906 when the Swiss came on board to the time of writing (1925) when a body of analysts has grown in its own right and contributed many new ideas.
Narcissism
One major new addition was the theory of narcissism. Before the ego has identified external objects it takes itself as an object and an element of narcissism never really leaves us.
All through the subject’s life his ego remains the great reservoir of his libido, from which object-cathexes are sent out and into which the libido can stream back again from the objects. Thus narcissistic libido is constantly being transformed into object-libido, and vice-versa. An excellent instance of the length to which this transformation can go is afforded by the state of being in love, whether in a sexual or a sublimated manner, which goes so far [in self-love] as involving a sacrifice of the self.
In 1925, at the period of writing this pamphlet, Freud had entered a new phase. The new concept of narcissism had disrupted the simplicity of the old theory. Previously Freud had divided the instincts into sex-instincts and ego-instincts; into a conflict between sex – operating on the Pleasure Principle – and the ego – working on the Reality Principle. The conflict between these two opposed forces explained repression, neurosis etc.
But if the ego could also be the object of libido, which is what narcissism amounts to, then the two supposedly antagonistic forces are closer together than was previously thought.
Second theory
In 1922 to 1923 Freud wrote Beyond The Pleasure Principle, The Ego and The Id, and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Between them these works tried to resolve these contradictions with two innovations:
First, a new topographic theory of the mind incorporated the unconscious drives and instincts into the new and bigger concept of the id; the id provides the energy for the ego, which grows out of it by a process of repression and having to come to grips with the external world i.e. the ego is formed by the clash between the inner Pleasure Principle of the human creature and the harsh unyielding world compressed into the Reality Principle; at a later stage, as we’ve seen above, the child develops the superego or conscience.
But Freud also posited a major new force, the Death Drive. He grouped together all the positive instincts of the earlier theory, all the drives towards satisfaction which seek unity and binding-together, the drives propelling us forwards through life, under the name Eros. In opposition to them, as the drive which seeks dissolution and a return to the inorganic, he posited the existence of a death drive or Thanatos.
The death drive wishes the organism to return to stasis, to achieve peace. The death drive is made up of components which include the wish to suicide – the death wish – a wish to return to the peaceful, unstrife-ridden world of the womb. That’s the death drive turned inwards, against the self. But it can also be directed outwards, sublimated and projected, in the form of aggression towards others.
Freud was well aware that these new developments were highly speculative but the impact of the Great War had shown everyone that as well as sexual or libidinal satisfactions a great deal of vicious violent barbarism made up a major part of the human animal. The death drive is Freud’s attempt to bring together all these anomalies under one roof.
These innovations proved fruitful for future developments in psychoanalysis. The new way of thinking of the ego as the zone of protection for the animal, the place where it learns to mediate between its wild lusts and the restrictions of outer reality, led to research which views many mental activities as essentially defensive.
These psychic mechanisms of defence which the human animal erects were to be investigated in detail by Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud. And the understanding of aggression, of the hate and rage which the tiny animal feels against its parents in the earliest years and which it later projects outwards onto society, these were to be investigated by Melanie Klein.
Social theory
Lastly Freud turns to psychoanalysis’s applications to other spheres of knowledge. Here he refers to the way psychoanalysis has taken off in France mainly in the arts. (As Roy Porter pointed out, in France many of Freud’s discoveries in the realm of the unconscious and developmental theory, already existed in the work of Charcot and Janet and Piaget, so he was not seen as such a ground-breaking pioneer.)
Literature and myth
In the final sections of this essay Freud outlines how he applies the insights of psychoanalysis to other areas. Central is the Oedipus Myth which has haunted all the ages because it is a perfect representation of a universal law of the human mind. Hence the mystique of Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, which is a more refined application of the same insight. Hamlet is paralysed to revenge his father because Claudius (his father’s murderer) has already acted out Hamlet’s own deepest (repressed) fantasy: he has killed his father and is sleeping with his mother.
Freud’s loyal English disciple Ernest Jones wrote a full-length study of Oedipus and Hamlet. Otto Rank, Freud’s loyal secretary, wrote a compendious book on the Incest Theme in literature and went on to compile an encyclopedic analytical interpretation of The Myth of The Birth of The Hero.
Thus was born a whole new way of relating to, thinking about and interpreting literary and artistic creations, in terms of analysing out the hidden or repressed analytical material, an academic tradition which continues to the present day. Freud in various works devised theories and insights into art, literature and the imagination, which gave them a special privileged place in his theory:
The realm of imagination is a ‘reservation’ made during the painful transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle in order to provide a substitute for instinctual satisfactions which had to be given up in real life. The artist, like the neurotic, had withdrawn from an unsatisfying reality into this world of imagination; but, unlike the neurotic, he knew how to find a way back from it and once more to get a firm foothold in reality. His creations, works of art, were the imaginary satisfactions of unconscious wishes, just as dreams are; and like them they were in the nature of compromises, since they too were forced to avoid any open conflict with the forces of repression. But they differed from the narcissistic asocial forces of dreaming in that they were calculated to arouse sympathetic interest in other people and were able to invoke and satisfy the same unconscious wishful impulses in them too.
Freud himself applies these insights in his books on Leonardo and on Michelangelo’s famous statue of Moses.
Freudian slips and jokes
He had also expanded the application of psychoanalysis into the psychopathology of everyday life, clearly showing the continuity of the wish-principle in everyday slips of the tongue and accidents which, also, turn out to be messages from the unconscious realm, the ‘return of the repressed’.
In addition there was his study of jokes in Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious (1905) which similarly points to the return of embarrassing repressed material in the socially acceptable form of comedy.
Religion
Then he had turned his attention to religion. In the short early essay, Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907) Freud showed that obsessive actions amount to a private religion and that religion amounts to ‘a universal obsessive neurosis’.
In this work Freud then gives a useful summary of Totem and Taboo (1913) in which he had tried to show how the universal taboo on incest and the worship of taboo animals supposed to have fathered the tribe were reducible to primitive attempts to control the Oedipus Complex.
Bearing in mind that many of these tribes every year kill and eat the totem animal (which is otherwise feared and revered) in a special feast, Freud hypothesises:
The father of the primal horde, since he was an unlimited despot, had seized all the women for himself; his sons, being dangerous to him as rivals, had been killed or driven away. One day, however, the sons came together and united to overwhelm, kill and devour their father, who had been their enemy but also their ideal. After the deed they were unable to take over the father’s heritage since they stood in one another’s way.
Under the influence of failure and remorse the learned to come to an agreement among themselves; they banded themselves into a clan of brothers by the help of the ordinances of totemism, which aimed at preventing a repetition of such a deed [the Primal Parricide], and they jointly undertook to forgo the possession of the women on whose account they had killed their father.
They were then driven to finding strange women, and this was the origin of the exogamy which is so closely bound up with totemism. The totem meal was the festival commemorating the fearful deed from which sprang man’s sense of guilt (or ‘original sin’) and which was the beginning at once of social organisation, of religion and of ethical restrictions.
Now whether we suppose that such a possibility was a historical event or not, it brings the formation of religion within the circle of the father complex and bases it upon the ambivalence which dominates that complex.
After the totem animal had ceased to serve as a substitute for him, the primal father, at once feared and hated, revered and envied, became the prototype of God himself.
The son’s rebelliousness and his affection for his father struggled against each other through a constant succession of compromises, which sought on the one hand to atone for the act of parricide and on the other to consolidate the advantages it had brought.
This view of religion throws a particularly clear light upon the psychological basis of Christianity, in which, as we know, the ceremony of the totem meal still survives, with but little distortion, in the form of Communion.
Thus psychoanalysis is able to throw light on the origin of everyday slips, dreams, jokes and humour, morality, art, religious belief and practice, myths and folktales, and shows them all to be different ways of dealing with the same psychological material.
Psychoanalysis has also led to investigations and clarifications of symbolism, building on the symbolism of dreams to look at symbolism in art and religion.
In the field of education Freud singles out Oskar Pfister, author of pedagogical books (and his great interlocutor on religious issues) and, for the analysis of children and greater theorisation of childhood, Freud refers to Melanie Klein and his daughter Anna.
Postscript (1935)
Freud concludes that with the announcement of the topographical structure of the mind (id, ego and superego) and the division of instincts into classes (Eros and the death instinct) he has finished his theoretical contribution. Others are carrying on where he left off.
My interest, after making a lifelong detour through the natural sciences, medicine and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which had fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking….
I perceived ever more clearly that the events of human history, the interactions between human nature, cultural development and the precipitates of primeval experiences (the most prominent example of which is religion) are no more than a reflection of the dynamic conflicts between the ego, id and the superego, which psychoanalysis studies in the individual – are the very same processes repeated on a wider stage.
Thoughts
Freud was a politician to his fingertips. In a letter to Fliess he described himself as a conquistador and he wasn’t exaggerating. The word indicates the grandiose scale of his ambition and his self-image.
Moses and Monotheism is on one level an attempt to rewrite Jewish history the better to place himself as its logical conclusion. Freud is the new Moses leading the Chosen People of the new science, psychoanalysis, into the Promised Land of scientific understanding and psychological health.
Most of the dreams in The Interpretation are analysed to reveal a mammoth ambition and self-confidence, clearly in part derived from the wish to overcome, to supersede his weakling father Jacob.
Everything he wrote was written with a political aim. The History of the Psychoanalytical Movement (1914) is a case in point, containing as it does a fierce polemic against the acolytes who had recently seceded from the Movement: Alfred Adler who went on to found ‘Individual Psychology’ and Jung who founded ‘Analytical Psychology’.
Seen in this light The Autobiographical Study is interesting because:
it goes to great lengths to convey the strictly scientific nature of his research before psychoanalysis came along and to demonstrate the continuity of psychoanalysis with mainstream science
it seeks to put the record straight on his relations with Janet. Pierre Janet, a disciple of Charcot’s, was the founder of modern psychology in France and the French (with typical chauvinism) claimed that Freud had come to France, purloined all their ideas, then dressed it up in heavy Germanic philosophical terms
Freud reproves the entire profession of philosophy for not being capable of fitting his concepts into their intricate systems of words, which is why he had a lifelong indifference or dismissal of philosophy as irrelevant to his discoveries which he always, of course, were based on facts not mystifying word games
The Freud Museum is located at 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX, a 6 or 7 minute walk from Finchley Road tube station.
It’s the house which Freud’s English colleagues and supporters bought for him and his family to come to after the Nazis annexed Austria, and Freud’s lifelong home town of Vienna, in March 1938, forcing him to flee the country.
Freud himself was already very ill with the throat cancer which would kill him 18 months later in September 1939. But after his death Maresfield Gardens remained the Freud family home until his daughter, Anna Freud, herself a pioneer of child psychoanalysis, died in 1982. The house opened as a museum four years later.
It’s a fascinating place to visit at any time, light and clean and airy, with a comprehensive bookshop at the back, opening into a leafy London garden.
But the centrepiece of the museum is the ground floor where Freud recreated the study from his house in Vienna and which has been lovingly restored to how it was in his time. You can see the desk where he wrote so many great works, his bookshelves packed with leather-bound volumes of psychology, history and literature.
Freud’s desk at the Freud Museum, London (photo by the author)
You can see the famous couch, smothered in dark patterned rugs, where his patients came and lay and free associated their thoughts, projecting their hopes and fears and fantasies onto the inventor of psychoanalysis, who sat quietly listening.
Freud’s couch at the Freud Museum (photo by the author)
So far, so Victorian, in décor and furnishings.
But maybe the most striking and unexpected aspect of the room is the astonishing number of antiquities scattered everywhere. There are half a dozen or more glass cases packed with ancient statuettes and figurines, vases and jugs, there are busts on platforms and stands, lined up along shelves all round the room, and a double row of small antique figurines on his desk right in front of him, in his field of vision every day as he either wrote or listened to his patients.
Freud was an obsessive collector of ancient figures and antiquities all his life, building up a collection of several thousand by the time he died, and literally hundreds are stacked on shelves, in cases, on mantlepieces and stands. Everywhere you look, in every direction, hundreds of ancestral presences sit silently, looking out at you with a cold timeless regard, from very angle.
Another view of Freud’s study, showing desk (in the foreground), shelves and glass cases packed with antiquities
And that’s what this exhibition is about. It’s a small but powerful exploration of Freud’s lifelong fascination with archaeology and antiquity and the role they played in his writings, his practice, in his deepest formulations of the new ‘science’ of psychoanalysis which he invented and developed through 40 intensely productive years, and in the successive models of the human mind which he developed, refined and publicised.
Freudian reservations
Let me explain my position regarding Freud. Very like the other two world-shattering geniuses, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, Freud’s influence is so enormous and all-pervasive, so underpins almost everybody’s modern notions of human nature and our behaviour in the world, that it’s more or less irrelevant whether most or all of it is ‘true’ or not.
The various versions of his theories and the hundreds of insights they generate have provided mental maps, sociological constructs amounting to an entire worldview which we all now inhabit, thronged with insights, phrases and terminology (Freudian slip, the unconscious, the ego, being repressed, ‘anal’ behaviour, Oedipal conflict) which are freely used in newspapers, magazines and conversation.
With regard to the psychoanalytical method – the talking cure – my understanding is that many scientific trials have been undertaken to assess the efficacy of psychoanalytical therapy compared with other depth psychologies, with more orthodox psychiatric treatment, with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and with drugs. But the attempt is problematic for quite a few reasons. For a start no two people are alike so what works for one patient might simply not work for another. It’s impossible or very challenging to set up a double-blind, controlled study.
For another thing, Freudian psychoanalysis doesn’t necessarily aim at a fixed outcome. CBT may cure a symptom which is preventing you from living your life happily, but Freudians would say it’s only addressed a symptom, not the underlying cause. Freudian psychoanalysis can be open-ended, can indeed last the whole of the rest of your life – which leads cynics and critics to attack it as a money-making scam, hooking the vulnerable into an endless sequence of sessions, at an exorbitant fee.
I was offered and took depth therapy on the NHS in my 20s, and know lots of people who’ve had extended psychotherapy of one sort or another. It didn’t cure me of anything but it certainly helped to be listened to, at length, discussing issues and memories which became quite painful to recall.
Nut even then, in the 1980s, there were lots of varieties and schools and flavours of psychotherapy and my understanding is that the range of practices and theories underlining them has continued to grow. But my understanding is that Freud invented the paradigm of counselling, of extended therapy which aims to dig deep to resolve deep psychological problems, on which all other schools of therapy are based.
Another line of attack is the number of scandals which have come to light about abusive analysts, drunk analysts, power-mad analysts, and so on. The analyst-analysand (therapist-patient) relationship does give the therapist an unprecedented amount of power to steer and control the emotional lives of the very vulnerable. But my understanding is that this kind of thing, like the abuse of power in many other positions (in the church, in sports coaching) can be reported and handled by the relevant professional bodies as well as the police and legal system.
Another line of attack comes from feminists who, right from the start, pointed out the hair-raisingly sexist nature of almost everything Freud wrote and protested his engrained view of women as biologically, physically and mentally inferior to men. You can’t deny it, it’s there on almost every page, along with entire essays dedicated to proving women’s inferiority. Feminist Freudians have tried to overwrite concepts like the notorious ‘penis envy’ which he thought girls and women suffered from, but in this and many other concepts and assumptions, Freud remains rebarbatively sexist.
Then there’s the earliest and most unimaginative argument against Freud, that his obsession with sex, sexual drives, libido, anal eroticism, fetishism and so on prove that he himself was a sex maniac, a pervert, and so discredit the theory. You can see why a one-sided reading of his earlier theory, especially the early focus on the sexuality of children, would trigger this attack. But, for me, it betrays ignorance of the wider context of the theory which, especially in its later, expanded form, is just as interested in aggression, anger, depression, group psychology, and spends a lot of time exploring the idea of the conscience, the part of the mind which holds us to high standards and punishes us for our failures.
And most powerful of all is the accusation that, although many of his patients in the 1890s told him they had suffered real, physical sexual abuse as children, he was so disturbed by its apparent ubiquity that he couldn’t countenance it, couldn’t accept it; and that one of his central claims – that children fantasise about sexual activity (sex with the parent of the opposite sex, while hating the parent of the same sex, the insight he named the Oedipus complex) – was a denial of the reality of child abuse; that Freud made what we now regard as the cardinal sin when treating child abuse, which is to refuse to listen and refuse to believe what his patients were telling him.
If true, this was obviously shameful for a physician, sworn to help his patients; but, more powerfully, successive critics have argued that this rejection of actual real-world abuse compromises his entire theory, leading to the accusation that the entire theory is based on a self-serving lie. His rejection of the fact of child abuse and transformation of it into the realm of infantile fantasy may be the most difficult accusation to counter and one which resonates to this day.
So I hope I’m aware of the battery of arguments which can be brought against Freud the man, against his theories, against his personal attitudes, against the inefficacy and/or luxury nature of his type of therapy, of the disproveability of the efficacy of the talking cure, along with plentiful historical examples of its abuse.
But, in my opinion, although many of these attacks deserve to be taken seriously, especially the final one, none of them can really dent the incalculable impact, for good or ill, which Freud has had on the vast shared set of values, ideas, concepts, phrases and ideas which we call Western culture.
Ancient figurine of the sphinx, central player in the legend of Oedipus, symbolising for Freud, as for generations of thinkers before him, the riddle of human existence, but which Freud boldly (arrogantly) thought he had solved
Until Freud’s time most psychologists, most philosophers and lawyers and, following them, most people thought of the human mind as basically Rational, a thinking machine which is aware of its own thoughts, can order and control them, home to Reason which guides our behaviour to rational, definable ends.
If people behaved irrationally then experts directly involved with human nature, such as philosophers or theologians or lawyers, developed explanations and excuses for this falling away from Ideal reason, ideas of possession by outside forces, or temporary madness and so on, notions which explained away people’s irrational behaviour in such a way as to preserve the basic premise that man is the Rational Animal.
In the Christian tradition which dominated western thought for a thousand years, and which in fact predates Christianity, going back through Stoic philosophy for centuries before Christ (cf Cicero and Seneca) – in this immense tradition, human beings have been endowed with reason by the Creator of the universe and, although this spark of Divine Reason may sometimes be clouded by ‘passions’ or frenzy or extreme emotion or drink or drugs, these are temporary aberrations from the basically rational soul which God has given each of us.
Freud’s theory blasts this model to smithereens. By the 1890s there had been plenty of secular thinkers, especially in the life sciences which were swiftly converted to Darwin’s revolutionary theory of evolution by natural selection, but no-one who undermined the old models of a God-given, rational mind so completely.
For Freud the mind is a battlefield, a site of endless conflict between conflicting psychological forces, drives, urges, instincts, wishes, dreams, fantasies, angers, anxieties and many more. His fundamental insight was that the human mind, far from growing into a stable, mature and reliable tool for managing our way through the world, is a dynamic, ever-changing site of tremendous psychic conflict.
Because – second big idea – the majority of mental activity is unconscious. We are only dimly aware or not aware at all, of the tremendous forces, urges, drives and so on which motivate us every waking moment and haunt us in our dreams. Why do so many people behave so irrationally? Why are so many people in the grip of compulsive behaviour which they know is self-destructive (smoking, alcohol, over-eating, drugs, risk-taking, outbursts of psychopathic anger or helpless despair) yet feel powerless to change?
Because we are driven by tremendously powerful unconscious forces which we repress and prevent ever emerging into full consciousness.
As Freud stumbled deeper into these discoveries in the 1980s, trying to make sense of what his clinical patients were telling him, engaging in the slightly dubious ‘self analysis’ of his own dreams and memories and feelings, and corresponding with his friend and intellectual confidant Wilhelm Fliess, he threw again and again used metaphors around the idea of having to dig down below the level of conscious thought, having to excavate layer after layer to get down to the basic fears, anxieties and so on which seemed to be driving his patients.
“Thus it came about that in this, the first full-length analysis of a hysteria undertaken by me, I arrived at a procedure which I later developed into a regular method and employed deliberately. This procedure was one of clearing away the pathogenic psychical material layer by layer, and we liked to compare it with the technique of excavating a buried city.”
(Studies on Hysteria, 1895)
Again and again Freud referred to the work he was doing with his patients to try and rediscover their childhood memories in order to free them of their adult illnesses, and the parallel work he was doing on himself, digging deeper and deeper into his own repressed memories, as forms of archaeology.
And it’s this, the meeting place between Freud’s continua use of the metaphor of excavation and archaeology, and the ancient objects derived from the actual practice of real world archaeology which Freud obsessively collected and packed into his study and invoked in his writings from the start to the end of his career as a thinker and writer – which this exhibition addresses and explores. Which it excavates.
The exhibition
The exhibition space is upstairs. It’s only one room but, considering the ideas whose origin it describes and investigates went on to transform all human culture and to underpin how almost everyone alive today conceives of human nature and of themselves, it feels like it contains an entire world. An atom bomb of ideas.
Installation view of ‘Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire’ at the Freud Museum, showing three of the six themes and their display cases, being Oedipus, Charcot and Dreams. Note the small number of items on display. But it isn’t the number of artefacts, it’s the ideas behind them that fill the room.
Exhibition structure
The exhibition selects twenty-five key objects – antiquities, figurines and statuettes, books and prints – each normally hidden from view, extracted from the clutter of Freud’s study for special attention and investigation at close range, to illustrate how Freud’s collecting was bound up with his development of the concepts and methods of psychoanalysis.
The exhibition is divided into six themes, which I’ll briefly list here then explore in greater detail:
Oedipus:
Charcot
Dreams
Gradiva
Totem and Taboo
Moses
1. Oedipus: the riddle of desire
Inevitably the narrative must start with Oedipus who gave his name to Freud’s notion of the Oedipus Complex. This is in fact just one part of the process of growth and maturing which Freud thought all boys go through. At around the age of 5 all boys have grown enough, and experienced enough pre-pubescent sexual feeling, to sense that they want to be very close to their mother and come to resent their father’s possession of her. In the unconscious mind, the boy wants to have sex with his mother and kill his father. Freud introduced the idea in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and coined the term in his paper A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men (1910).
The Oedipus story is super well-known ad previous thinkers had interpreted it and its symbolism. Freud used it to dramatise what he saw as a universal condition, a universal experience of all growing boys which they have to completely suppress in order to mature properly, but whose repression leaves its marks on the adult and, in some men, is constantly threatening to return, so that it has to be staved off with harsh mental defences which sometimes result in florid mental beliefs, patterns and behaviour.
But early on in the myth of Oedipus he has to solve the riddle put to him by the sphinx and so the story had another significance for Freud: for trying to excavate down into the psyche of each patient could also be described as solving their riddle.
Objects on display
On display from Freud’s collection are six objects connected with Oedipus, three vases, a statuette, an amulet and a print of Ingres’ classic painting of Oedipus and the Sphinx.
2. Charcot: from iconography to archaeology
Jean-Martin Charcot was a French neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology. Freud went to study with him in Paris in 1885 (when Freud, born in 1856, was 29). Charcot used hypnosis to treat patients who displayed physical symptoms with no organic cause, a class of patients categorised as ‘hysterics’. His work made the subject of ‘hysteria’ a popular one for doctors interested in psychology across Europe. A book was published containing comprehensive descriptions of Charcot’s work and numerous prints of his hypnosis of hundreds of patients.
A Clinical Lesson at the Salpetriere. Print of engraving by E. Pirodon after the oil painting by Andre Brouillet (1888)
But this stuff about Charcot is really here because Charcot was about the surface. There was a fair amount of showmanship in Charcot’s demonstrations, made to auditoriums full of admiring students, and Freud came to dislike the way Charcot exaggerated the patient’s superficial symptoms in order to cure them.
In reaction against Charcot, Freud set off in the opposite direction. His cures would be conducted not in public but in private; they would not be wonder cures achieved in one flashy demonstration, but the result of sustained engagement over a prolonged period of time. And above all they would not work by bringing florid symptoms (hysteria, weeping, sobbing, moaning, screaming) to the surface of the human mind, but quite the opposite, entail a systematic, extended, and ever-deeper excavation down through layer after layer of the human psyche.
Which is why the exhibition places next to the Charcot print a copy of the big leather-bound volume of Ilios, the huge work in which the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann described his discovery of the legendary city of Troy (in western Turkey). Freud was going to be an archaeologist of the human psyche.
3. Dreams: decoding the way to the wish
From ancient times through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, dreams were given a special place as omens, as warnings from the gods, as indicators of good or bad fortune for the dreamer, and thousands of books had been written interpreting the universal symbolism of dreams. In 1880s and 1890s scientific circles the view was the opposite: that dreams are the meaningless by-products of physiological processes of the mind.
In his breakthrough book, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud proposed a middle way: that dreams do have a meaning, a symbolic purpose, but that they are not universal to mankind. Each dream has a meaning which is specific to the dreamer. Each dreamer’s mind selects images which symbolise individual and specific hopes, fears etc.
Each dream is a wish fulfilment but what exactly the wish is, and how it is converted into particular images, can only be established by lengthy, in-depth excavation down through the layers of the conscious mind and into each patient’s unconscious.
The display case shows an ancient wine jug, a bust and a warrior figurine. The Interpretation of Dreams includes scores of Freud’s own dreams. In one of them his wife Martha gives him a drink from an Etruscan cinerary urn like the one on display here. The urn represents satisfaction of a basic instinct (thirst) but also symbolises the wished-for return of an object like it which he had given away then regretted.
It’s a fairly simple demonstration of the way we humans give objects multiple everyday or conscious meanings, and then how images of the objects are recombined in the unconscious to emerge in strange combinations, accompanied by sometimes haunting, sometimes terrifying, sometimes blissful emotional feelings, in our dreamlife.
4. Gradiva: tracing the pathways of archaeological desire
Gradiva plays a special role in the history of Freud’s writing about writing i.e. about literature, which he was to come to have such a seismic influence on. In 1907 he published his first full-length analysis of a literary text, a novel by the German writer and poet Wilhelm Jensen titled Gradiva: A Pompeian Fantasy which had been published in Vienna in 1902, so it was quite a current work.
Straightaway the word Pompeii should alert us to the fact that the book is going to play straight into Freud’s fascination with ancient ruins. Freud refers to the relevance of Pompeii, where secrets had been long buried and were now being excavated and restored to the light, to his own concepts of psychoanalytical therapy, in his letters to Fliess in the mid-1890s, and he actually visited Pompeii itself in 1902.
In this novel the hero, Norbert Hanold, who is studying archaeology, ‘falls in love with’ (becomes obsessed with) an ancient bas-relief of a young woman striding along in a Roman toga.
Cast relief of ‘Gradiva’ (1908)
Since the relief was found as part of the excavation of the buried city of Pompeii (just recently being unearthed) the hero decides to travel to Italy, and to the archaeological site, to find this woman, or her spirit, or her reincarnation.
So you can straightaway see how the novel is about a man in the grip of a delusion and a compulsion, psychological territory Freud was striving to make his own during the later 1890s and early 1900s.
In the end, after failing to find the modern avatar of the beautiful statue anywhere in the real world and after some painful self-analysis, Hanold comes to realise that who the woman reminds him of is a childhood friend who lives opposite him back home, returns, tells her of his love etc.
For Freud the novel is rich in confirmations of his theories. The hero had youthful erotic feelings for this neighbour but his strict upbringing forbade him from acknowledging them. Instead he repressed them and sublimated them i.e. redirected his psychic energy into the socially acceptable medium of studying archaeology and ancient history.
When he came across the bas relief as part of his studies, he was seized, possessed by something about it which he couldn’t define. Well, that’s because he had completely repressed his childhood longing for his sweetheart. the feeling remained but divorced from its source. So the bas relief became what Freud calls a compromise formation i.e. a real-world object which can ‘satisfy’ his libidinal drive and desire, but in a socially acceptable mode (i.e. a perfectly natural part of his adult studies).
The obsession he develops with it, however, obviously goes beyond the bounds of the ‘normal’ and this is like the patients who came to see Freud, people in the grip of obsessive, compulsive, neurotic thoughts or behaviour which they couldn’t explain and couldn’t shake off.
It also plays right into Freud’s hands that the hero is depicted as having numerous florid and bizarre dreams, thus allowing Freud to apply the insights he’d recorded in The Interpretation of Dreams to show how Hanold’s dreams were continually urging acknowledgement of his real-world love, but were blocked from doing so by the forces of repression and so emerged in complex combinations of symbols and imagery.
And the way the heroine, Zoe, cares for Hanold after his breakdown, slowly coaxing him back to health and to accept his love for her, is comparable to the psychoanalytic method Freud had devised, the famous listening cure.
Objects on display
On another level, the novel is about the journey of a repressed north European to the warm south which has, for centuries, symbolised release into and acceptance a world of sensual pleasures which we uptight northerners deny ourselves in order to function in our advanced capitalist economies.
The excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii had unearthed a surprising number of explicitly sexual objects, specifically depictions of the erect penis, often with wings, a magical object worthy of veneration or kept as a lucky charm or amulet. The fact that this is still regarded as shocking or bizarre shows you how far we are from the ancient world’s frank acceptance of the facts of sex.
Six phallic objects and amulets from various cultures of antiquity, part of Freud’s collection. You are free to regard these as sinister, sexually suggestive, funny (as I do), or as examples of the ancient world’s frank acknowledgement of the importance of sexuality in human life, which had to be censored, suppressed and policed in industrialised, capitalist societies. At the same time, this or any other view you have is quite obviously a projection of your own personal ideas, memories, associations and patterns of thought onto simple, cold, inanimate objects, and it is this power of mental projection onto objects which it is part of the aim of the exhibition to both explore and to demonstrate.
5. Totem and Taboo: the search for origins
Another criticism of Freud is that he quite early on strayed beyond his area of supposed expertise i.e. psychology (theory of the mind) and psychiatry (practical cure of mental illness) into subjects quite beyond his speciality. And it’s true. He not only produced a substantial body of literary and art criticism (essays and book-length studies) but did the same in anthropology and theology.
In 1913 he published Totem and Taboo. It was partly a response to his protegé Carl Jung who was rebelling against Freud’s insistence on the centrality of repressed sexuality and the Oedipus Complex in all human development. Therefore it ups the stakes by asserting that the Oedipus Complex is not only a part of the normal development of every boy, but explains a founding event in actual, real-world history.
Freud asserted that the founding event of ancient societies was an actual parricide, where the sons of the chief rose up and killed him, then claimed access to the queen or women of the harem. A sexual rebellion. But, crippled by guilt at murdering their father, the sons then set about repressing all memory of it, denying and blocking anything which would indicate their great crime. And this is the origin of the compulsive taboos which contemporary anthropologists observed in so many ‘primitive’ societies.
Freud then goes on to make the grandiose claim that this Primal Event was the foundation stone of all religion, morality, society and related art.
Objects on display
On display are copies of ‘The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion’, the hugely influential compendium of myths, legends gathered from all round the world by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer, which influenced a generation of writers and thinkers. A two-volume edition had been published in 1890 but Freud owned the twelve volumes of the third edition, published serially from 1906 to 1915. His copies, some of which are on display here, are covered with pencilled notes and he incorporated much material from the book into Totem.
Amusingly, Freud sent a copy of Totem and Taboo to Fraser, who didn’t deign to reply.
The curators don’t mention this but my understanding is that almost every aspect of Totem and Taboo has been disproved. It very obviously represents a kind of imperial ambition by Freud to move his theory out of the world of private practice and discreet papers written for specialist journals, and stake a claim to making major discoveries in history, anthropology, the origins of religion, morality and so on.
Although the specific claims made about ‘primitive’ societies being comprehensively rejected by actual anthropologists, Freud successfully made a new myth about himself and his role as explainer of everything. It was the kind of grandiose ambition which drove one-time followers like Jung, and others like Adler and Rank, to secede from the official psychoanalytic movement and set up their own variations.
A digression on Freud’s sociological writings
This world-claiming ambition, this tendency to stray way beyond his area of expertise and set himself up as a master explainer of society is evident in many of Freud’s later works. In The Future of An Illusion (1927) he sets out to disprove religious belief by rewriting every religious belief and practice in terms of psychoanalytic terminology (repression of sexual urges, ‘sublimated’ into love of an all-powerful father, accompanied by a world of obsessive-compulsive rituals and ceremonies).
In 1930’s Civilization and Its Discontents Freud applies psychoanalysis to sociology, arguing that modern, mass, industrial, capitalist societies need to enforce widespread suppression and control of people’s libidinal urges, not just to sex but to express other needs and drives, and it is this systematic repression of human needs which makes so many people unhappy in modern society. In many ways this turned out to be Freud’s most influential work, because it influenced social reformers and would-be revolutionaries, especially in the utopian 1960s.
Anyway, this final display is about Freud’s deepest foray into myth, legend and so on as he took on the roots of Christianity and, behind it, of Christianity’s parent, Judaism.
Freud was a Jew who accepted his secular inheritance but rejected the religious aspects of Judaism. Running alongside the obsessive references to archaeology throughout his writing career, which this exhibition focuses on, was Freud’s parallel obsession with denying and debunking religious belief and practice at every opportunity.
There are quite a few Freudian explanations of this noticeable obsession. One is that he was guilty about rejecting the religion of his forefathers and so spent his entire life trying to deny its reality. A subtler one is that Freud didn’t so much deny the reality of the Jewish religion as attempt to rewrite it in his own terms. In his imperial way, he attempted to overwrite religion, to write it away. Coming from a different angle, you could say that this ‘obsession’ was a response to the lifelong anti-semitism which he and his family and Jewish friends and colleagues suffered on an almost daily basis, in personal encounters but also in the press and culture of turn of the century Vienna.
Everyone mentions the fact that from 1897 to 1910 Vienna was run by the unusually powerful mayor, Karl Lueger, who oversaw the transformation of the city into a modern metropolis but at the same time exploited populist and anti-semitic feeling, legitimising widespread and semi-official antisemitism which some historians think established a model for the psychotic racism promoted by Adolf Hitler who was, of course, Austrian and an impressionable teenager during Lueger’s time in office.
You can take your pick of interpretations or mix and match all of them and this, also, is a Freudian idea which he called over-determination. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud speculated that individual dream images or narratives can operate on multiple levels or be representing more than one wish or drive. Same with the symptoms his patients presented with. Overdetermination occurs when a single-observed effect is determined by multiple causes any one of which alone would be sufficient to account for the effect.
Thus I routinely describe historical events as ‘over determined’, such as the First World War, for which historians have proposed a vast number of causes. The Freudian notion of over-determination i.e. multiple cause for one event, frees you up, allows you to accept a number of different explanations, allows you to experiment with apportioning different levels of responsibility for different events.
It’s an example of the way Freud’s theory gives conceptual definition to the complexity of life, motivation, simple and complex events which we all know are multi-levelled and multi-motivated. Freud’s theory provides a theoretical underpinning for this multiplicity of viewpoints, about anything.
6. Moses: the return of the repressed
Freud’s last published work was not a grand summary of his theory (although he was working on one, which remained unfinished). It was the long, densely argued and eccentric work of religious sociology, Moses and Monotheism. In it he applies the Oedipus story to the entire history of the Jewish people, his people, in an attempt to dethrone the founder of Judaism, Moses. It was itself a nakedly Oedipal attempt to overthrow the father and assert his (Freud’s) moral and intellectual independence.
For Freud makes the scandalous assertion that Moses was not himself Jewish. Freud argues that Moses was in fact an Egyptian prince, but one who followed the heretical teachings of the pharaoh Akhenaten. From what we can tell, Akhenaten, the tenth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, who ruled from 1353 to 1336 BC, attempted to overthrow the Egyptians’ traditional polytheism i.e. belief in a large and florid pantheon of gods, and replace it with worship of the One True God.
Tasked with overseeing the Israelite captives in their slave tasks, this Egyptian prince, Moses, tried to impose Akhenaten’s strict monotheism on them but they rose up and, as in the classic Oedipal narrative, murdered their father figure. But, like all good Oedipal actors, they then couldn’t cope with the guilt of their deed and repressed it, wiping out all memory of the historical event, and instead reinventing Moses as one of their own and a wise and good teacher.
Following the basic model of the mind he had postulated as long ago as 1897, Freud speculated that knowledge of their collective murder kept threatening to leak out and so the Jews, as a people, instituted a comprehensive system of taboos and restrictions, the most famous being not to eat pork, but there are hundreds of others. As time went by these taboos were expanded and elaborated until they dictated almost every aspect of everyday life, as well as a host of religious rituals.
This last display takes Moses and Monotheism to be not only the climax of Freud’s career as a writer but of his vaulting ambition to establish a psychoanalytical version of human history, society, and the origins of religion and morality. Like Totem and Taboo there’s something slightly mad about this book, disreputable about its theories and the interpretations which Freud applies to history and strain to breaking point. It’s absurd. But there’s also something awe inspiring about the man’s grandiose ambition.
If you stop thinking about it as a serious piece of archaeology or sociology and consider it as simply a piece of imaginative writing, the ambition and the ingenuity with which Freud attaches his theory to every aspect of Jewish history, theology and practice are dizzying.
Objects on display
A small statuette of the Egyptian god Amon-Ra, who Akhenaten promoted as the one true God. A print of Rembrandt’s famous painting of Moses coming down from the mountain holding the tablets of the law. An edition of the Philippson edition of the German Bible. And a small hannukah lamp, associated with domestic Jewish ritual.
The end wall and right-hand wall of the exhibition, showing the section about Gradiva (at the end) and Totem and Moses, on the right
Objects and meanings
The title of the exhibition includes the word ‘objects’ because among Freud’s many insights is the way all of us project wishes, desires, anxieties onto all the objects around us all the time. We not only relentlessly anthropomorphise the world – that’s level one psychology; we also personalise the world by investing all manner of objects around us with value and meaning. And these meanings alter over time, over very short periods as our moods or memories change, as events invest them with new auras of meaning, some of them over lifetimes.
In other words, all the objects around us are invested with some measure of significance, we can’t stop ourselves. And so the exhibition’s attention to the objects which Freud a) collected obsessively b) positioned all around him in his working environment c) described, discussed, referred to and invoked endlessly in all his writings from start to finish is both an ‘exploration’ of the significance of some of the objects, but also the evocation of all kinds of associations and feelings in us, the visitors.
H.D.’s interpretation
Freud arrived in London before his belongings. When these arrived, especially the crates containing his carefully wrapped antiquities, his friend and former patient, the American poet H.D., sent Freud a bunch of gardenias with a note ‘to greet the return of the Gods’.
HD is also represented by a short but powerful quote on the main introductory wall label. Here she is recorded as noting, in her memoir of Freud and her psychoanalytical treatment, what we’ve already observed, that his rather staggering array of figurines, statuettes and antiquities were intimately bound up with his development of the concepts and methods of psychoanalysis. But she goes on to say something more. She has the insight that they helped Freud to ‘stabilise the evanescent thought’ that was continually at risk of dissipation.
This is a new and powerful insight. I’ve already mentioned the idea of ambivalence, which follows from Freud’s dual structure of the mind (conscious mind struggling to repress all kinds of unconscious urges). Once developed, this explains how we can all have ambivalent or contradictory feelings about objects, because there is so much going on in the unconscious which we’re not aware of, and because the human psyche’s tendency to project these feelings, moods, anxieties, desires onto all manner of inanimate objects around us.
So much for ambivalence. And so much for the notion that Freud used the antiquities to inspire his ideas about excavating and archaeology. It’s a typically voodoo, Freudian, psychoanalytical insight, one which appears absurd on the surface but slowly makes more sense the more you ponder it, that the figurines littering his desk and study, also in some sense, limited and controlled his thought.
Because if there’s one thing about Freud’s achievement as a writer, it’s that he was so very fecund with ideas. From the initial insights around 1900 were to spring an exploding, ever-ramifying, ever-more complex system or network or matrix of ideas and insights and categories and theories and terminology which he never ceased developing and refining, and which he consciously amplified and spread beyond psychology into disciplines far removed from his area of expertise, as this exhibition makes abundantly clear.
So maybe the figurines not only inspired his writing (and his treatment) but also brought him back to the thing he started writing about, focused things back on the project in hand. They were instruments of inspiration and control.
Who’s to say whether this is ‘true’ or not, but by this stage, hopefully, you have joined me in not being so concerned about the truth of a lot of this so much as its interpretive and, above all discursive power. It enables the imagination. Psychoanalysis’s uncanny combination of scientific phraseology applied to ideas which sometimes seem acute, sometimes way off beam, sometimes suck you in and make you see the world in a completely different way, this all leaves the pragmatic world of truth values far behind as we go romping through a wild and shaggy, dense and huge, huge and fascinating imaginative realm.
Three figurines from Freud’s collection. Which one – smooth elegant Egyptian, primitive fertility figure, or happy dancer – do you identify with, and why?
Digital archive
The exhibition is accompanied by a digital multimedia resource, containing video recordings, podcasts, photos of rarely seen objects from the collection, and a list of suggested reading.
The Museum has produced a comprehensive catalogue for the exhibition, with essays expanding the themes raised in the wall labels. But, unsurprisingly, there also turn out to be quite a few book-length academic studies of Freud’s fascination with antiquity and obsession with collecting:
The family of nations is run largely by men with blood on their hands. (p.82)
The main title and the picture on the cover are a bit misleading. They give the impression the entire book is going to be an investigation of the honour or value system of the many groups of soldiers, militias, paramilitaries and so on involved in the small wars which broke out across the world after the end of the Cold War.
Not so. This book is more varied and subtle than that. The investigation of ‘the warrior’s code’ is limited to part of the longest section, chapter 3. No, in the introduction Ignatieff explains that his overall aim in this collection of essays is not to investigate them, the people massacring each other in failing states, but to examine why we in the rich West feel so obliged to intervene in foreign countries to bring peace, feed the starving etc.
The narratives of imperialism are dead and buried but they have, according to Ignatieff, left us with ‘the narrative of compassion’. Why? Is this a novel development in world history, that the rich nations feel such a connection with the poor and such a moral obligation to help them? If so, what does this mean in practice? And why do our efforts seem doomed to fail or fall far short of what is needed? In which case, what is needed to bring peace, order and fairness to the trouble spots and failed nations of the world?
Introduction
Ignatieff sees the modern culture of international human rights and the conviction of so many in the West that we have to help the poor in the developing world – all those refugees and victims of famine or conflict – as a new development in human history, ‘a crucial new feature of the modern moral imagination’.
Our moral imagination has been transformed since 1945 by the growth of a language and practice of moral universalism, expressed above all in a shared human rights culture. (p.8)
I’m not totally convinced. It’s been a long time since 1945, the founding of the UN and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The situation he describes in 1998 as if it was a sudden new thing was actually the result of a long evolution of legal understanding and organisational practice. The UN, aid agencies and charities have been working since the end of the Second World War, changing and adapting.
And the sudden sense of ‘crisis’ he describes in his 1994 book Blood and Belonging and in this one, may have seemed suddenly more real and acute at the time but now, looking back, tends to seem part of a continuum of disasters, which includes Biafra and Congo in the 60s, the killing fields of Kampuchea 1975 to 79, the first Gulf War 1991 before he was writing, and 9/11, the Darfur genocide (2003 to the present), the collapse of Iraq, the Syrian civil war, the Libyan civil war, the Rohynga genocide and so on, after.
On the one hand, taking the long view, maybe he’s correct that it is a newish phenomenon that people in the West, spurred on by television news feel a moral obligation to help people in the Third World caught up in crises. But I can immediately think of two objections. One is that my recent reading of Victorian explorers and politics shows that the plight of people in the developing world was widely publicised back then, in the 1870s and 1880s, by explorers and missionaries writing books, newspaper articles and going on popular lecture tours. Which in turn inspired societies to be set up to help people in poor countries.
In particular I can think of the Bulgarian Uprising of 1876 which was suppressed by the Ottoman Empire, which sent militias into Bulgarian villages and murdered men, women and children. Maybe 30,000 Bulgarians died in all and the bloody repression was widely reported in Britain and became known as the Bulgarian Atrocities. The Liberal politician William Gladstone wrote a famous pamphlet about it which castigated the pro-Turkish policy of the British government of the day led by Benjamin Disraeli. Eye-witness accounts of western journalists who visited the burned-out Bulgarian villages and described the dead bodies lying everywhere were very widely reported in the European and British press.
All this is not really much different in spirit from the eye-witness accounts of Saddam’s gassing of Halabja or the Serb mass murder at Srebrenica, nor from the way these atrocities were widely reported in the West, and they anticipate journalistic denunciations of the inaction or impotence of the British government which have rung down the ages.
So the basic structure and content of reporting foreign atrocities has been around for at least a hundred and fifty years. On the other hand, maybe there is something to Ignatieff’s claim that television, in particular in the 1980s and 1990s, brought these disasters into everyone’s living rooms with a new urgency and prompted calls for action and triggered mass charitable movements.
He’s thinking of Live Aid from 1985, and that certainly felt like a truly epic event. But surely it was part of a continuum of public sympathy and charitable donation? There had been huge publicity about the Biafran civil war and famine 1967 to 1970, many pictures, news footage, public outcry, pressure on the government to intervene. I’ve seen Don McCullin’s photos of the prolonged Congo Crisis from that decade, ditto. In 1971 the Concert for Bangladesh raised money for UNICEF’s work in the new country born in famine and war, for the first time mixing consciousness raising about an international disaster with fund raising and popular culture.
Like most journalists and commentators, Ignatieff is making the case that the thing he’s writing about is dramatically new and requires his urgent analysis, which, on a bit of investigation, is sort of, maybe new-ish, has new aspects, has become more far-reaching, but is at heart not quite as dramatically novel as he claims.
Chapter 1. The ethics of television
This first chapter focuses on this issue. It reflects Ignatieff’s conviction that one of the things which is new in the 1990s is the way disasters in faraway countries are mediated by television.
He describes the way television news is selected, structured and edited, the way it is a genre in its own right. Fair enough, I used to work in TV news, I know very well what he’s talking about. But hand-wringing about the positive or negative effects of TV now seems very dated, very 1980s and 1990s. Things have, to put it mildly, moved on. He was writing before the internet and a full decade before smart phones and social media began. How people get their news, and how it is packaged for their slick consumption, has dramatically changed. But I find this whole media studies approach to newspapers, telly and social media profoundly boring.
Excitable commentators these days have transferred their moral panic from TV to social media and not a day goes by without hand-wringing articles about the devastating impact of Facebook and the rest. Who cares. It’s not interesting because:
it is an over-analysed subject thousands of articles which all end up with the same conclusion – something must be done
and yet little or no practical result – thousands of articles saying how terrible Facebook is and yet and Facebook is still there
so ultimately it’s boring; in the 1990s people kept on watching TV news despite hundreds of articles and books saying how bad our addiction to TV was, and now, 25 years later, people carry on using Facebook, Instagram, Tik-Tok and all the rest of them, no matter how much the chattering classes tut and tsk
Ignatieff summarises the argument of his first chapter thus:
the moral empathy mediated by television has a deep philosophical history, namely the emergence of moral universalism in the Western conscience (which he traces back to Montaigne and Locke)
moral universalism (no man is an island; any man’s death diminishes me) is permanently at odds with moral particularism (we should worry most about family, friends and our own people)
in the second half of the 20th century moral universalism has increasingly taken an apolitical siding with the victim
there is a moral risk involved, which is that too many pictures of too many victims leads to indifference or, at worst, disgust with humans and misanthropy
this risk is increased by television’s superficiality as a medium, people watch, are shocked for 30 seconds, then immediately distracted by something else, then something else, then something else: picture of disasters, famines and so on become hollowed out, the viewer becomes more and more blasé
I dislike writing about morality because I think it has so little applicability to the real world. Give a moral philosopher a minute and she’ll start describing some improbably complex scenario designed to force you to make some kind of ‘moral’ decision you would never face in real life. (‘Imagine you have the power to save the world but only by killing an innocent child, would you sacrifice one life to save billion?’ – that kind of thing. Time-passing undergraduate games which have no application to real life.)
I also dislike writing about morality because morality is so endless. It is a bottomless pit. There is no end of moral hand-wringing… but at the same time most moralising writing has little or no impact on the world. It’s a paradox that moral philosophy ought to be the most practical and applicable form of philosophy, but is often the opposite.
I also dislike writing about morality because it is often sloppy and superficial. This first chapter is by far the worst in the book. To my surprise Ignatieff bombards us with cultural references which he himself (ironically, in light of his accusations that television is superficial) treats very superficially. He namechecks the history of Christianity, Roman slave society, early enlightenment philosophers like Montaigne and Bayle, then leaps to the French literary critic Roland Barthes, mentions the racism inherent in imperialism, explains some Marxist theory and practice, namechecks the French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the American politician Robert MacNamara, the theorist of colonialism Fritz Fanon, gives a list of post-war atrocities, civil wars and famines then a list of international charities, a snippet from Don McCullin’s autobiography, the Vietnam War, Bosnia, the Rwandan genocide, CBS’s nightly news, the New York Times, Goya’s Horrors of War, Picasso’s Guernica.
See what I mean? It’s magpie philosophy, feverishly jumping from reference to reference. ADHD thinking. Compare and contrast with Blood and Belonging. In that book each 30-page chapter was set in a specific location. Ignatieff met and interviewed a cross-section of people from the country at length, who we got to know and understand. Their lives and experiences then shed light on the place and the situation and allowed Ignatieff to slowly draw out more general ideas about the world we live in.
This first chapter on telly is the opposite. It addresses a tired theme with a machine-gun rat-a-tat-tat of highbrow references, thrown out at such a rate that there isn’t time for any of them to acquire depth or resonance. I started skipping paragraphs, then entire pages.
This introductory essay shows Ignatieff at his most modish and pretentious and wrong. Take, for example, his passage on the way the state funerals of President Kennedy, Winston Churchill or Lady Diana were covered on TV.
These are the sacred occasion of modern secular culture, and television has devised its own rhetoric and ritual to enfold viewers in a sense of the sacred importance of these moments: the hushed voices of the commentators; loving attention to uniforms and vestments of power; above all, the tacit inference that what is being represented is a rite of national significance. (p.31)
This is not only pompous pretentiousness using breathy metaphors to dress up the bleeding obvious, but it is also largely wrong. The funeral of a much loved president or prime minister kind of is a rite of national significance, there’s no ‘tacit inference’ about it. Television has not ‘devised its own rhetoric and ritual’ for covering these events: I think you will find that funerals had a fair bit of rhetoric and ritual about them centuries before TV came along, in fact a key aspect of Homo sapiens as a species appears to be the care we’ve taken to bury people, as evidenced by graves from up to 80,000 years ago. All telly has done is develop technical ways of covering what were already highly rhetorical and ritualised events. As to ‘the hushed voices of the commentators’, well, you do tend to keep your voice down at a funeral, don’t you. As to attention to ‘uniforms and vestments of power’, again I think you’ll find people at presidential and prime ministerial level have always paid a lot of attention, since time immemorial, to wearing precisely the correct outfits at a funeral, complete with the insignia of office or medals for military types.
In other words, this paragraph is dressing up the obvious in pretentious metaphor to make it sound like insight. But it isn’t thinking or valuable analysis, it’s just being a smart-ass. Having ‘proven’ that TV has a semi-religious, ritualistic aspect, Ignatieff goes on to use this as the basis for further argument. But the argument, as a whole, fails, because it is based on precisely the kind of assertion and rhetoric demonstrated in this passage, rather than on the facts and real insights which characterise Blood and Belonging.
This first chapter, about TV, ends up by concluding that watching a 90-second TV news item isn’t as informative as reading a good newspaper or magazine article about the subject, let alone a book. Well… that’s not a very original or useful thought, is it.
The final few pages call for television journalism to completely change itself in order to give more information about the world. That way, via detailed discussions of gathering crises, viewers might get to learn about famines and wars before they broke out. This transformed TV might help viewers to understand the world so much better that we could all prevent atrocities and catastrophes before they happen.
This is so utopian as to be laughable.
The entire chapter now feels utterly out of date. My kids don’t watch any TV news (and neither do I). All they know about the world comes to them via their feeds on Facebook, Instagram, Tik-Tok and a host of other social media apps I’ve never heard of.
Blood and Belonging is a brilliant book because it examines in detail the political situations of half a dozen part of the world and
although they’re nearly 30 years old, his snapshots of moments in each country’s history remain relevant to this day because they continue to be excellent analyses of the basic ethnic and political situations in each of the countries
so acute is his analysis of different types of nationalism that the general principles he educes can be applied to other nationalist crises elsewhere in the world and still today, in 2021
Whereas this essay about the special power of television news not only felt contrived and superficial at the time (when I first read it, back in 1998) but has dated very badly and now feels relevant to no one.
Chapter 2. The narcissism of minor differences
Chapter two is much better because it starts from a specific time and place. It invokes the time Ignatieff spent in a village in Croatia holed up with Serb paramilitaries in the basement of an abandoned farmhouse, an observation post from which the bored soldiers occasionally take potshots at the Croats, in a similar ruined building two hundred and fifty yards away. How did it come to this?
This chapter picks up themes from Blood and Belonging and digs deeper. The most obvious thing to an outsider like Ignatieff is not the way Serbs and Croats come from distinct ethnic and religious groups, or represent the so-called Clash of Civilisations (the concept promoted by Samuel Huntingdon which became fashionable in the 1990s). It’s the opposite. Serbs and Croats come from the same racial stock, look the same, they speak the same language. Sure, they belong to different religions (Croats Catholic, Serbs Orthodox) but Ignatieff’s point is that hardly any of the men he talks to go to church and none of them gave it a thought till a few years ago.
Ethnic conflict is not inevitable
Ignatieff’s central point is that ethnic nationalism is NOT the inevitable result of different ethnic groups sharing one territory. Serbs and Croats lived happily together in Croatia and Serbia when both were governed by an (admittedly authoritarian, communist version of) civic nationalism.
The ethnic nationalism which tore the former Yugoslavia apart was the conscious creation of irresponsible rulers. It didn’t have to happen. Ethnic conflict is not inevitable where rulers make a sustained effort to inculcate civic nationalism at every level of their society. But once you let ethnic nationalism in, let it gain a foothold, and it quickly spreads. Go out of your way to actively encourage it – as Franjo Tuđman did in Croatia and Slobodan Milošević did in Serbia – and you get disaster.
That 600,000 Serbs lived inside Croatia didn’t matter when Croatia was merely part of a larger federal country. But when Croatia declared its independence on 25 June 1991, those 600,000 Serbs became intensely anxious about their futures.
Instead of doing everything in his power to address those concerns, the ruler of Croatia, Franjo Tuđman, made a series of errors or provocations. He restored the Croatian flag. Street signs began to be changed to Croat. The government announced that Croat would become the official language of the country and taught in all the schools. All of this reminded older Serbs of the Yugoslav civil war of 1941 to 1945 when Croatia allied with Nazi Germany and carried out a genocide of Serbs, murdering as many as 100,000, most notably at the notorious concentration camp at Jasenovac.
In other words, Serbs began to have real concerns that they were being quickly manoeuvred into becoming second class citizens in a place where they’d lived all their lives. Tuđman failed to address these concerns and so left the door open for the leader of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, to depict himself as the heroic saviour of the Serb minorities within Croatia and then the other Yugoslav states (notably Bosnia) and to send into those territories units of the Yugoslav Army (mostly staffed by Serbs) along with new Serb paramilitaries, to ‘save his people’.
A proper understanding of the sequence of events makes crystal clear that the situation came about because of the complete failure of all political leaders to maintain and promote civic society and their crude rush to whip upethnic nationalism of the crudest kind.
Nationalism creates communities of fear, groups held together by the conviction that their security depends on sticking together. People become ‘nationalistic’ when they are afraid; when the only answer to the question ‘who will protect me now?’ becomes ‘my own people’. (p.45)
The psychodynamics of ethnic nationalism
So much for the macro scale, the large political picture. But Ignatieff is fascinated by the nitty gritty of what the individual Serbs in the basement of a ruined farmhouse think they’re actually fighting for. And here he makes some brilliant observations about how fake ethnic nationalism is and what a struggle it is, deep down, to really believe it.
He does this through a long consideration of Sigmund Freud’s idea of the narcissism of minor differences. Freud started from the observable fact that people who hate each other are often very close, for example members of the same family or husbands and wives. Nations often reserve their strongest antipathies for their neighbours, the English and the Scots.
To outsiders, these look like people who live in the same place, speak the same language, share the same values and experiences, and so on. And yet they are often divided by real antagonism. It’s as if, in the absence of all the large-scale reasons for difference, all their psychic energy is focused on the tiniest trivialest differences.
This isn’t totally persuasive, but Freud says something else. Which is that when individuals join a group, the voluntarily suppress their own individualism in order to belong.
Ignatieff stitches together these insights to develop his own variation, which states: a nationalist takes minor differences with those around them and, in bigging up themselves and their cause, inflates them into shibboleths, into stumbling blocks, into the things which define himself and his group.
Nationalism is guilty of a kind of narcissistic attention to trivial details (how you were your hat, how you pronounce one particular letter or sound, this national song instead of that national song) and exaggeration – turning apparent trivia into a matter of life and death.
This systematic overvaluation of our story, our suffering, our language, our patriotic songs and so on always comes at the price of a systematic denigration of other people’s same attributes. An unrealistic over-valuation of the self seems to necessarily involve an equally unrealistic depreciation of others, and this depreciation is most intense at the point where the Other approaches nearest to being like you.
The nationalist thinks his tribe and nation are wonderful, special and unique; so that if someone calmly points out that they are actually pretty much the same as the other half dozen tribes of nations which surround it, the nationalist will furiously deny it, and the more alike they are, the more furious the denial.
Thus there is an anxiety at the heart of nationalism. When Ignatieff talks to the paramilitary in the farm basement he slowly realises the man has a bad conscience, a very bad conscience. When asked why he hates the Croats a couple of hundred yards away, he comes up with all kinds of reasons, many of which contradict each other. Ignatieff realises there is no reason. There is no rational reason why Serb should hate Croat or Croat hate Serb. Instead they have plunged into this mental condition of Group Narcissism in which they find psychological validation, reassurance and belonging by investing all their psychic energy in the Group Ideology, and investment which denies reality. Which denies that they were ever friends, went to the same pubs, shopped in the same shops, were married to people from the other group.
If you allow a rational consideration of the situation to enter, it undermines the unrealistic fantasy at the core of ethnic nationalism and this is why ethnic nationalists get so angry about it, furiously denying that they have anything in common with them, the others. They are all murderers and rapists; we are all heroes and martyrs. The possibility that they’re just flawed people like we are cannot be allowed otherwise it brings the entire artificial and overblown fiction of nationalist belief crashing down.
This explains for Ignatieff what he sees among so many nationalist communities which is a certain amount of fakery and insincerity. It often seems as if the politicians, ideologues, spokesmen and soldiers on the ground don’t entirely believe what they say. Inauthenticity, shallowness and fraudulence. It is if the extravagant violence with which ethnic nationalist beliefs are stated amounts to wilful overcompensation for notions the speaker knows, deep down, not to be true. He knows that his Croatian neighbour is not actually the murderer and rapist which his Serbian nationalism tells him he is, but… but to carry on being a member of the Group he has to conquer his own doubts. He has to march in line, wear a uniform and badge, get drunk with the boys and shout out patriotic songs.
All to conceal from himself his uneasy awareness that it’s all bullshit.
Ignatieff doesn’t say this but it struck me that this explains a common phenomenon, which is the documentaries you watch which interview people caught up in massacres, wars and genocides and… they themselves don’t really understand what happened. They look back and they can’t really explain why they and their friends grabbed their machetes and ran round to their neighbours’ house and hacked him, his wife and children into hunks of bloody meat, as hundreds of thousands did during the Rwandan genocide. Now, calm and quiet, sitting sedately in their garden sipping tea, they can’t quite believe it happened. I’ve noticed this in many TV documentaries about atrocities. Years later the participants can barely believe it happened.
Clearly, this is because it was a kind of mass intoxication. It was a delirium, like a prolonged party in which everyone was in a mad, feverish, drunken mood and did all kinds of wild things… and then they sobered up. Indeed Ignatieff records how everyone he spoke to in Yugoslavia expressed surprise that the boring, everyday society they knew collapsed so quickly and so completely into a Hobbesian nightmare of war and terror. They describe it as a kind of madness or intoxication.
He concludes with words of advice for liberal society which can be summarised in two strategies:
1. His analysis suggest there is a kind of basic mathematical formula at work, an inverse ratio: the more people overvalue their group, their tribe, their nation (and overvalue themselves as a part of this Heroic People), the more, as if by some fateful psychological law, they will denigrate outsiders who are not members of the Heroic People. The more intense the positive feelings for our side, the more intense our negative feelings for the other. The cure for this is, pretty obviously, to moderate our feelings for our side. To cultivate a nationalism which is proud of various aspect of our national life and culture, but not blind to its faults, not exaggerated.
We are likely to be more tolerant toward other identities only if we learn to like our own a little less. (p.62)
Because all historical precedent suggests the more you big up yourself, the more you find someone to denigrate and anathematise.
2. Nationalist intolerance works by converting real people into abstractions.
Nationalist intolerance requires a process of abstraction in which actual, real individuals in all their specificity are depersonalised and turned into carriers of hated group characteristics. (p.70)
The solution to this is to consider everyone as an individual, including yourself. Instead of thinking of yourself primarily as a member of this tribe or nation or people or group, you should consider yourself as an individual person. This then forms the basis for treating everyone else you meet as themselves individuals in their own right, and not as representatives of this or that group, with all the (probably) negative connotations you associate with that group.
The essential task in teaching ‘toleration’ is to help people see themselves as individuals, and the to see others as such. (p.70)
Credit
History judges no one. There will be no reckoning at all. (p.55)
The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience by Michael Ignatieff was published by Chatto and Windus in 1998. All references are to the 1999 Vintage paperback edition.
‘Hutus must stop having mercy on the Tutsis.’
Eighth of the Hutu Ten Commandments published by Hutu Power propagandist Hassan Ngeze in 1990 (page 88)
Disappointment
Simon’s law of book-buying states that the more you spend on a book, the more likely you are to be disappointed. Nothing has brought me as much pleasure as picking up a copy of my childhood favourite, The Town That Went South by Clive King, for 30p in a National Trust second-hand bookshop a few years ago. By contrast, I paid full whack to buy We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families and almost immediately took against it.
The shiny cover of the Picador paperback somehow belies the fact that it was published in 1998 and so is nearly a quarter of a century old.
Next, the introduction by Old Etonian and Conservative Party leadership contender Rory Stewart is reasonable enough but offers no insights or ideas. In fact it opens with disappointing stupidity. His very first sentence is: ‘Is genocide a suitable subject for literature?’ to which the obvious answer is, ‘Yes, everything is a suitable subject for literature’. More specifically, ‘Yes – have you not heard of Holocaust literature?’ Literature about the killing fields of Cambodia, about the Armenian genocide, and so on? So it’s a non-question asked for purely rhetorical effect.
And finally, Gourevitch’s book itself is also disappointing because, although it contains a lot of good quality history of the background and buildup to the genocide, of the events of the genocide itself, and then a detailed account of the aftermath up until late 1998 when he completed his text, and although it contains interviews with a phenomenally large number of representative figures – it is continually interrupted by Gourevitch’s own meditations on the nature of genocide, what we should feel about genocide, whether we can write about genocide, the difficulty of imagining genocide and so on, which are uniformly poor quality, entry-level, GCSE-level. Trite ideas padded out with lame and obvious quotes. It is a big disappointment. Gourevitch may be a terrific reporter but he’s no intellectual.
The tone is set in the puzzling first chapter where Gourevitch retails a conversation he had with a pygmy (one of the aboriginal inhabitants of the region now known as Rwanda, who were swamped by later Bantu incomers and now make up about 1% of the population). This conversation delivers the thumpingly banal message that humanity is one and needs to be united in its struggle against nature. This is the ‘insight’ message Gourevitch chooses to open his long book about the Rwandan genocide with, i.e. not very insightful at all, certainly not worth paying £10 for.
With a sinking feeling, I realised within a few pages that this book was not going to offer much insight into politics or human nature. In fact, in the passages where he tries to ‘think’ about the genocide, Gourevitch’s banal meanderings tend to blanket and dull the impact of the horrifying facts he sets down so powerfully in the factual passages.
The second disappointment is that a major part of the book’s USP is that it contains interviews and conversations Gourevitch had with scores of Rwandans from all parts of the country, from all classes and professions, Hutus and Tutsis, which go to create an impressive mosaic, like the walls of photos I’ve seen in some art installations, hundreds of photos of ordinary people caught up in a nightmare. Hence the book’s sub-title, Stories from Rwanda.
But I’m sad to report that these stories, also, partake of the general disappointment because they, also, are often surprisingly dull and banal. Obviously, many of the interviewees describe horrifying scenes: they describe entire lives lived in the shadow of the ethnic conflict between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi populations, they describe the repeated crises in the 1960s and 70s, when small-scale pogroms, massacres and localised ethnic cleansing broke out for one reason or another; then they describe the atmosphere of fear created by the RPF invasion of 1990 and the emergence of really vitriolic Hutu supremacism, the advent of magazines and radio stations calling for the complete extermination of the Tutsis; and then describe gathering round their radios to listen to the dreadful news that the moderate Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane had been shot down as it came into land at Kigali airport and the terrible sense of doom most of them felt.
And then, of course, Gourevitch includes eye-witness account of going into hiding, being arrested, trying desperately to contact family members, watching people being shot, hacked to death with machetes, driving through smoking villages, coming across streets full of bodies, terror and despair.
The content of these stories is, of course, gripping and horrifying. But the style is uniformly flat. They all sound the same, they all speak very simply. Either that’s because all Rwandans sound the same, very simple and flat. Or because all Rwandans are dull and boring. Or maybe because every interview had to be carried out through an interpreter, since most Rwandans speak French, and French has less lexical variety than English and that’s why everyone comes out sounding the same. Or maybe it’s because all the testimony has been first translated, and then put through Gourevitch’s own style machine. All the interviews are made up of suspiciously complete sentences. There are no hesitations or repetitions or stumblings. All Gourevitch’s interviewees speak in perfect and grammatically correct sentences. They all sound the same and they all sound boring.
He even manages to make Paul Kagame sound boring, which is quite a feat. Paul Kagame was born and raised a Rwandan exile in Uganda. He volunteered to join the Ugandan army, rose quickly through the ranks, studied military theory, was a senior officer in the rebel force which helped Yoweri Museveni overthrow the Ugandan dictator Milton Obote. Kagame then went on to become a co-founder and eventually leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) which invaded north Rwanda in 1990 and fought the Rwandan army to a ceasefire in 1993. Kagame was still working through implementation the peace accords he signed with the Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana in August 1993, when the latter’s plane was blown out of the sky in April 1994. This was the trigger for Hutu Power extremists in the government to launch their genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsi population, so Kagame immediately resumed the RPF incursion into Rwanda, quickly seizing large parts of the country, taking the capital Kigali on 4 July 1994, then pushing west to conquer almost the entire country and putting an end to the genocide by 17 July 1994.
Kagame then took up the twin roles of vice-president and defence minister in the post-genocide government, but everyone knew he was the real power in Rwanda, which he has gone on to lead down to the present day, 2021, when he is still serving as president.
Kagame is described by analysts as a military leader of ‘genius’ for turning the RPF from a ragtag of half-armed volunteers into a highly disciplined and effective military force (p.218). And then, after all this, he went on to be the military and strategic brains behind the alliance of armies, the AFDL, which invaded east Zaire in 1997 to close the Hutu refugee camps where Hutu Power génocidaires had been regrouping and preparing for genocide part two. This was the incursion which led to the AFDL marching all the way to Kinshasa and overthrowing Zairean dictator Joseph Mobutu.
In other words, Kagame is one of the most fascinating characters of the late 20th/early 21st centuries and Gourevitch has had the privilege of interviewing him not once but on numerous occasions. And yet, in Gourevitch’s hands, this is what Kagame sounds like:
“I have wanted to be original about my own thinking, especially in regard to my own situation here. Not that I don’t realise that there are other people out there to admire, but it is just not my habit to admire anybody. Even if something has worked, I think there are many other things that could work also. If there’s anything else that has worked, I would certainly pick a bit from that. But if there could be another way of having things work, I would like to discover that. If I could have some original way of thinking, that would be OK for me.” (quoted on page 213)
Pretty dull, eh. It’s far too harsh to say that Gourevitch is a lightweight and he makes everyone he interviews sound like a lightweight, but that thought did cross my mind during more than one of the duller interviews in the book.
He’s spoken to literally hundreds of people, including many key players and all kinds of experts and aid and UN officials and yet…hardly any of them say anything interesting. Only towards the end did some of the Rwandan officials complaining about the utter ineffectualness of the international community make an impression.
A literary account, alas
Gourevitch is a longtime staff writer for New Yorker magazine and a former editor of The Paris Review. He knew nothing about Rwanda or African politics before he watched the shocking images on the TV news as the Rwanda genocide broke in spring 1994. Fascinated and appalled he realised he had to find out more (or realised this was a terrific opportunity for an ambitious journalist looking for a subject for a book).
So Gourevitch began visiting Rwanda in 1995 (p.7) and over the next two years made nine trips to the country and to its neighbours (Zaire, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania) to report on the genocide and its aftermath. He made 6 trips lasting a total of 9 months (p.185). During that time he interviewed hundreds of people from Rwanda and the neighbouring countries and the book contains an impressive number of first-hand, eye-witness testimony from many, many Tutsi survivors, as well as more confrontational interviews with men accused of complicity or of organising particular local massacres.
Possibly his lack of background in African affairs partly explains the air of hopeless bewilderment he exudes right from the start. In the opening sections of the book Gourevitch goes heavy on his inability to imagine the events, on the importance of imagination in our lives, his interest in how people imagine their identities, on the importance of the narratives which shape their lives. In other words, he brings a heavily literary slant to his huge and complicated subject.
On the first page of his text he mentions Charles Dickens, on page 3 he is citing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, there are epigraphs from George Eliot and John Milton. Directly after that limp quote from Kagame which I cite above, Gourevitch says it reminds him of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke writing on love and art (p.213).
Oh dear. It is going to be literary journalism, the worst sort, the type of journalism which spends a lot of its energy emphasising the author’s own sensitivity, which foregrounds his own emotional responses, to the subject matter, rather than doing a journalist’s job which is to get on and tell you what happened and let interviewees tell their own stories, preferably without a load of editorialising about how you everything you find out about the horrors makes you feel. In the showbiz world of American journalism, ruined by the egotistical displays of Norman Mailer or Tom Wolfe in the 1960s, it is acceptable to put the author and his responses at the centre of the story, but I wanted a history, I wanted to know the facts, not reiterations of how a pampered New York journalist was appalled to discover how brutal life is in much of Africa and how thoughtlessly cruel human beings can be.
His factual sections are sensational but when he stops to reflect on it all, Gourevitch writes quite a lot of stupid things. When he writes that ‘Power is terribly complex’ on page 78 I suddenly realised I was dealing with an idiot. My daughter learned more about political, social and cultural power in her GCSE Sociology course than Gourevitch displays in this entire book. All the ‘reflection’ in the book displays a disappointingly low knowledge of political theory, knowledge of international relations, or philosophy about human nature.
And I was irritated by his casual assumption that the ‘we’ he continually refers to are all white, liberal, college-educated, East Coast readers of New Yorker magazine, that ‘we’ all share his over-developed moral scruples and his severely under-developed sense of world affairs, geopolitics, African history and politics. Right at the beginning he tries to implicate the reader in his sensitive moral scruples:
I presume that you are reading this because you want a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. (p.19)
Well, er, no. I am not disturbed by my interest in reading about the Rwandan genocide in the same way that I am not disturbed by my interest in reading about the Holocaust, or the Second World War, or the First World War, the Somme, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American Civil War, the Tapei Rebellion, the rape of Nanking, the Gulag Archipelago, the Russian Civil War, the Ukraine famine, the Partition of India, Islamic State, the Crusades, the decimation of the Incas and Aztecs, the violent rise of Islam, the blood-soaked fall of Byzantium, the life and massacres of Genghiz Khan. I could go on…
I am reading this book because I want to be better informed about human history which, as anyone who has even a superficial knowledge of the subject knows, amounts to an unrelenting series of wars, massacres, genocides and bloodbaths. I’m kind of used to it.
So, no, I am not in the slightest disturbed by my curiosity to want to understand a recent historical event better. Seems perfectly normal to me, and most of the history books I read include passages where historians say the public in general ought to be more aware of history. In addition, many progressive historians and commentators tell us we need to get out of our Eurocentric frame of reference and understand more about the wider world and places beyond London or Paris. So that’s why I’m reading a book about Africa, and about one of the most striking events in post-war African history.
Gourevitch’s comment betrays a basic…what…dimness, obtuseness, ignorance…about the entire subject of History and why people would want to study it, which is to find out what happened, to try and understand why it happened, in order to better understand the forces at work in the world around us, now, in the present.
The facts
The book consists of three elements:
Gourevitch’s self-consciously literary fretting over the power of imagination and the importance of narrative and the centrality of stories and the difficulties of human identity and a familiar checklist of progressive, liberal arts issues
interviews with scores of Rwandans, UN officials, foreign doctors and aid workers, politicians and so on, giving often harrowing descriptions of their experiences or clarifying the political situation in Kigali, in the UN, in the aid camps in Zaire
actual historical facts
When he sticks to the facts, Gourevitch is very good indeed. Suddenly, about a third of the way into the book, after the kind of maundering speculation I’ve been slagging off, it changes tone dramatically and becomes a riveting account of the early history of the country, a description of the colonial era when the Belgians divided the two ethnic groups of Hutu and Tutsi the better to control them, and how this ethnic division, once created, went on to dog the Rwanda, which won independence in 1962 but continued to suffer repeated outbreaks of ethnic violence, pogroms and massacres (the massacres of 59, of 61, of 63, and so on).
In what follows I extract the facts Gourevitch gives and supplement them from other sources to try and create a comprehensive and useful timeline.
Rwandan history
In 1994 Rwanda had a population of about 7 million. Relatively small, it was the most densely populated country in Africa. About 85% of the population were Hutus, 14% Tutsis and 1% pygmies known at the Twa.
Rwanda is divided into five provinces: Kigali, Northern, Eastern, Southern and Western.
Because they were illiterate, no Rwandans before the arrival of Europeans had ever written anything down. Therefore, their prehistory relies entirely on unreliable oral traditions and speculation. Modern archaeology tentatively suggests that the hilly region was inhabited by pygmies as long ago as 8,000 BC, before it was slowly infiltrated from 700 AD by Bantu tribes from West Africa who went on to form the Hutus, and by ‘Nilotic’ ethnic groups from the north who were ancestors of the Tutsi (p.49). Maybe.
Hutus and Tutsis
For centuries before Europeans arrived, the Tutsis were nomadic cattle rearers, which made them wealthier than the Hutu majority who were mostly static farmers; the ruler of Rwanda was a Tutsi and the aristocratic Tutsis looked down on the peasant Hutus.
The regime was essentially feudal: Tutsis were aristocrats; Hutus were vassals. (p.49)
Although there’s a racial stereotype that the Hutus are full-on ‘negroid’ African in appearance while the Tutsis have narrow faces, with narrow noses and thin lips, in reality scores of generations of interbreeding meant the majority of the population didn’t conform to these stereotypes and very often Rwandans couldn’t tell which groups each other belonged to (p.50). Plenty of the Rwandans Gourevitch talks to tell him they pass for one ethnic group when they in fact belong to another. In other words, it wasn’t such a starkly obvious divide as between blacks and whites. Many Hutus and Tutsis are indistinguishable.
Tutsi ruler Kigeli Rwabugiri reigned from 1853 to 1895 and expanded the kingdom to its greatest extent. He oversaw a society which was regimented and hierarchical, with layers of military, political and civil chiefs and governors, priests, tax collectors, sub-chiefs, deputy governors and so on (p.49). Divisions between Hutu and Tutsi were hardened, with the former obliged to perform forced labour for the latter.
When the Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885 carved up Africa between the European imperial nations, Rwanda was handed to the Germans because they had explored the region, had missionaries on the ground, and nobody else wanted it (p.55). After Germany lost the Great War, Rwanda was combined with the neighbouring nation of Burundi and handed by the victorious allies over to Belgium, because they abut the huge Belgian Congo to the west. Belgium ran Rwanda from 1918 to 1962.
The Belgians hardened the ethnic division in the country by compelling every citizen to state on their identity papers which group they belonged to. This had the effect of crystallising a racial divide which had been far more fluid and flexible before.
The Hutu revolution
Throughout the century Hutu resentment at their inferior status simmered. With the advent of an educated class it found expression. In 1957 nine Hutu intellectuals published a Hutu Manifesto. Its full title was ‘Note on the social aspect of the native racial problem in Rwanda’ and it was ten pages long. The manifesto called for a ‘double liberation’ of the Hutu people, from the colonial oppression of the Belgians, and then from the racial oppression of the Tutsis. The manifesto called for the political disenfranchisement of the Tutsi, banning intermarriage between the two groups, and banning the Tutsi from military service.
1959 Hutu political leaders backed by elements in the Belgian administration overthrew the Tutsi monarchy (which had continued to exist throughout the colonial period) and replaced it with a republic. Violence against Tutsis spread across the country and tens of thousands of Tutsis fled to neighbouring countries, including Uganda. (When many of these exiles returned with the triumph of the RPF government in 1994, they were referred to as ’59ers’.)
Independence 1962
Rwanda was separated from Burundi and the two countries gained independence on 1 July 1962. Tutsi militias raised among exiles, especially in neighbouring Uganda, staged occasional raids into Rwanda, which always led to reprisals by the Hutu government. In December 1963 a Tutsi raid led to Hutu reprisals in which tens of thousands of Tutsis were massacred, in what one journalist called a genocide and Bertrand Russell declared was the worst massacre since the Holocaust. (This Russell quote crops up in Fergal Keane’s book on the genocide; it’s obviously one of those quotable quotes you get extra marks for in your GCSE essay.)
More than 336,000 Tutsi left Rwanda in 1964 to escape the Hutu purges. In 1972 Tutsi school students across the country were attacked, beaten, their houses torched. So large-scale massacres and pogroms came in waves.
Meanwhile, in neighbouring Burundi, it was the Tutsis who were in charge and in 1973 embarked on a pogrom of Hutus. As many as 100,000 were killed and a further 200,000 Hutus fled as exiles into Rwanda, where every one of their stories fed the fuel of anti-Tutsi anger.
The 1973 influx of Hutu refugees inspired the Rwandan president Grégoire Kayibanda to order his army chief of staff, Juvénal Habyarimana, to set up ‘committees of public safety’, which promptly set about massacring Tutsis. On this occasion the victims were ‘only’ in the hundreds, but as many 100,000 Tutsis fled abroad.
To summarise, Rwanda and Burundi have a long record of attack and counter-attack, profound ethnic antagonism and ethnic cleansing of the two groups which dated back before independence and flared up on an almost annual basis, with the Tutsi almost always being victimised, massacred, and fleeing the country in tens of thousands. The 1994 genocide was generations in the making.
Habyarimana’s coup 1973
In 1973 Rwanda’s army chief of staff, Hutu nationalist Juvénal Habyarimana, carried out a coup, overthrowing president Kayibanda and declaring himself president of independent Rwanda. Under his rule Rwanda became a totalitarian, one-party state in which every citizen was compelled to be a member of his MRND party and was required to chant and dance in adulation of the president at mass pageants (p.75). Habyarimana was to remain dictator of Rwanda for 21 years, kept in place by lavish aid from Western nations and in particular from his most loyal Western supporter, France. Naturellement.
Gourevitch makes the point that during the 1980s and 90s France channeled huge amounts of armaments to the Hutu government, up to and through the actual genocide; that French advisers helped the government at all levels; that French president Francois Mitterand’s son Jean-Christophe was an arms dealer who made a packet from the trade (p.89).
In 1986 the global price of Rwanda’s main exports, coffee and tea, collapsed, and real hardship for the majority of the population added to simmering Hutu disaffection. The racist, supremacist policies of Hutu Power spread like a virus, popularising the insulting term inyenzi or cockroaches for Tutsis.
The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) The Tutsis in Uganda
But so did the Tutsi fightback. It is important to understand the role played by Ugandan politics. In 1979 Tutsi exiles in Uganda formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). (It was initially known as the Rwandan Refugees Welfare Association and then, from 1980, as the Rwandan Alliance for National Unity (RANU)). It was formed in response to the persecution of Tutsi refugees by the regime of Ugandan president Milton Obote. Obote accused the Rwandans of collaboration with his predecessor, Idi Amin.
Tutsi refugees Fred Rwigyema and Paul Kagame had joined Yoweri Museveni’s rebel Front for National Salvation (FRONASA). Museveni had fought alongside Obote to defeat Amin in 1979 but withdrew from the government following Obote’s disputed victory in the 1980 general election.
With Rwigyema and Kagame, Museveni formed a new rebel army, the National Resistance Army (NRA). Their campaign to overthrow Obote’s government became known as the Ugandan Bush War.
Obote remained hostile to Rwandan refugees throughout his presidency and in 1981 forced RANU into exile in Kenya. In 1982 he encouraged local councils to force Rwandan refugees out of ordinary civil life and into refugee camps. When Rwandans attempted to cross the border back into Rwanda, the Habyarimana regime confined them to isolated refugee camps and closed the border to prevent further migration.
You can see why many Tutsi exiles found themselves in an impossible position and it explains why so many joined up with Museveni’s NRA with the aim of overthrowing Obote and restoring their rights within Uganda.
In 1986 the NRA captured Kampala with a force of 14,000 soldiers which included 500 Rwandans, some of them senior officers, among them Kagame and Rwigyema. Museveni was grateful for their support and relaxed all Obote’s laws discriminating against Rwandans.
But you can also see why their success in the Bush War led soldiers like Rwigyema and Kagame to think they might launch a similar military attack against the consider an attack against Rwanda, with the aim of overthrowing the dictatorial Habyarimana regime, installing a moderate government and so allowing the Rwandan refugees inside Uganda to return home. And you can see why the new man they’d helped to power in Uganda, Museveni, would support such a move.
The Rwandan civil war 1990 to 1994
At its 1987 convention RANU renamed itself the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). After a small-scale incursion was repelled in 1989, a cohort of Tutsi soldiers within the Ugandan army deserted, along with uniforms, arms and ammunition and invaded north Rwanda in 1990. It was the right year, as the Cold War came to an end and Western powers abruptly ceased their support for African dictators like Mobutu of Zaire and Habyarimana of Rwanda and force them to instal multi-party democracies.
The RPF incursion developed into the Rwandan Civil War. (To give a sense of the relatively small scale of all this, the original Tutsi incursion numbered some 2,500 soldiers who effectively went AWOL from the Ugandan army, accompanied by some 800 civilians such as doctors and nurses.) The RPF were defeated and repelled by the Rwandan Army (bolstered by French troops flown in to prop up another notorious African dictator) and withdrew to the Virunga mountains where Paul Kagame, establishing himself as its paramount leader, led a very effective regrouping and reorganisation. He attracted funds and exiles, he imposed strict military discipline and turned the RPF into an impressive fighting machine. In 1991 they emerged from the mountains to conduct an effective guerrilla campaign, hitting military targets across the north.
Throughout this period Hutu Power stepped up their propaganda that the Tutsis were parasites on decent hard-working Hutus, exacerbated by the war which Hutus blamed on Tutsi invaders. The circle around Habyarimana’s wife, Agathe, set up a propaganda magazine, Akura, edited by Hassan Ngeze, who developed into the Dr Goebbels of the regime and in December 1990 published a Hutu Ten Commandments mandating Hutu supremacy in all aspects of Rwandan life (p.87).
Propaganda claimed the Tutsis were an alien people, were not Christians, were fighting to gain dictatorial control of Rwanda, restore the old monarchy and reduce the Hutu majority to slaves. In 1992 Hutu Power ideologue Leon Mugesera made a much-reported and chilling speech calling on Hutus to send the Tutsis back to Ethiopia by river i.e. as corpses down the river Nyabarongo (pages 53 and 96). And throughout the war Radio Rwanda broadcast anti-Tutsi hate and there were sporadic anti-Tutsi pogroms around the country, in which thousands were murdered.
The RPF invasion ratcheted up the very anti-Tutsi hate they were set up to counter.
Fragile peace 1993
By 1992 Habyarimana had been forced to accept a measure of multi-party politics and had included politicians not members of his party in the cabinet. It was these opposition politicians who met with the RPF leadership and negotiated a ceasefire in July 1992, leading to face-to-face peace negotiations.
It’s vital to realise that the hardline Hutus, often referred to as the akazu (p.81) and linked with the extended family of the president’s wife, disapproved of Habyarimana’s willingness to compromise and negotiate. They began setting up parallel hard-line Hutu structures within the organs of state, the civil service, the media and the army. Historian Gérard Prunier names late 1992 as the time when the idea of a genocidal ‘final solution’ to kill every Tutsi in Rwanda was first floated among this group. It was led, ironically enough, by one of the new parties encouraged to form by Western pressure to set up a proper democracy, the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic (CDR).
When Habyarimana signed a treaty with the RPF in early 1993 promising a transition to a genuine pluralist democracy in which Tutsi rights would be respected the CDR refused to sign, organised nationwide protests and encourage anti-Tutsi violence in which hundreds were murdered. In response the RPF resumed hostilities, this time defeating the Rwandan army which hadn’t been paid due to the country’s deteriorating economy.
Ever-faithful France sent troops to bolster the Rwandan army. The numbers are tiny. Just the arrival of 400 well disciplined and trained French troops was enough to halt the RPF advance. Nonetheless the RPF came within striking distance of Kigali but Kagali overruled his senior officers and refused to take the capital, shrewdly pointing out that it would alienate his foreign backers and the Hutu population. Instead he declared a ceasefire and called for more negotiations.
On the Hutu side, factions arose in all the parties which allied themselves with what became known as Hutu Power. Each party split into a moderate faction which believed in some amount of political negotiation, and a ‘Power’ faction, which rejected compromise and stood for total Hutu supremacy (p.97). Youth militia wings of each of the parties emerged, including the Interahamwe meaning ‘those who attack together’, who had their origin in football supporters clubs (p.93).
Habyarimana began to realise that the Hutu Power militants were more his enemy than the RPF. After prolonged haggling over the make-up of the post-war Rwandan army, a formal peace treaty was signed on 4 August 1993 (p.99). A transitional government was to be set up with members from all the main parties. UN troops were flown in to supervise the treaty, while Hutu Power authorities began to plan a genocide. Four days after the signing a new radio station set up by the akazu, Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines, began broadcasting genocidal propaganda (p.99).
The general situation was not helped at all when president of Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, who had been elected in June as the country’s first ever Hutu president, was assassinated by extremist Tutsi army officers in October 1993, leading to a Hutu uprising and a violent crackdown by the Tutsi army which left around 50,000 dead (p.101). The assassination reinforced the notion among Rwandan Hutus that the Tutsi presented a permanent threat and that there could be no peace, not real long-lasting peace, until they were completely eliminated. This very fragile ‘peace’ lasted from August 1993 till April 1994.
Trigger for the genocide 1994
On the night of 6 April 1994 a plane carrying president Habyarimana and his counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi – both Hutus – was shot down as it approached Kigali airport, killing everyone on board. Hutu extremists blamed the RPF. The Hutu Power wing of the army, led by Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, assassinated the next in line to civilian authority, the (Hutu) Prime Minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, along with ten Belgian UN soldiers charged with her protection (who were tortured first, p.114), and immediately started to implement the campaign of slaughter which they had been developing for years. It was to be a ‘final solution’ to the Tutsi problem.
The RPF claims that Hutu extremists themselves murdered their own president because he was engaged in negotiations with the Tutsis i.e. was a moderate Hutu and seen by a ‘sellout’ by the extremists on his own side.
The very next day, 7 April, as systematic killings across the country began, Kagame warned he was abandoning the treaty and the RPF broke out of its base in the north, attacking into Rwanda in three directions. So the genocide took place against the backdrop of renewed invasion and war. The RPF slowly seized territory in the east, heading south. UN troops were stationed in the demilitarised zone in the north but were ordered to withdraw to their camps to avoid getting involved in the fighting.
You can see why the renewal of war incited the Hutu Power advocates to carry out the genocide with feverish haste, ordering their followers at local level to kill as many as possible as quickly as possible before either the RPF won or the international community stepped in. For Hutu Power, it was a race against the clock.
The genocide – 100 days in 1994
Between April and July 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days. Three key facts to grasp are that:
1. The Hutu Power extremists had been preparing for this day for years, had drawn up lists of every Tutsis in the country with names and addresses, had assigned local Hutu leaders to direct and manage the slaughter, and had plans to take over state radio The Hutu extremists set up a radio station, RTLM, and newspapers which circulated hate propaganda, urging people to ‘weed out the inyenzi‘, to broadcast messages of hate. In other words, it was all extremely well planned. The identity cards which every Rwandan had been obliged by law to carry ever since the Belgians introduced them in 1931 (p.56) now became death warrants for any Tutsi stopped by police, militias, at road blocks, in the street, stopped search identified and hacked to death with a machete.
2. Second thing is that Rwanda was unique in tropical African countries in having been, from before Europeans arrived, a highly hierarchical country, organised like a pyramid from each district up to the top of government. Habyarimana’s governing party, the MRND, had a youth wing called the Interahamwe, which was turned into a militia to carry out the slaughter, but they operated within a highly organised society. It was a very well-organised genocide.
3. French troops, fighting on the side of the Rwandan army, freed up resources which Colonel Théoneste Bagosora could redirect to speeding up the genocide (p.90). On the nights of 16 and 18 June French arms shipments were flown into Goma in Zaire and then ferried across the border to support the genocidal Hutu Power regime (p.155). Gourevitch writes of:
The French political and military establishment’s…blatant complicity in the preparation and implementation of the butchery. (p.155)
I was amused to read that as the RPF closed in a French military plane whisked Habyarimana’s wife, Agathe, the central figure in the networks of Hutu Power, the leading figure in the azaku, to safety back in the homeland of liberty, equality and fraternity. Vive la France!
Number killed
At least 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in just 100 days, making it the fastest mass killing in human history. People were slaughtered at a faster rate than even during the Holocaust. Some Tutsis, commentators and historians put the figure higher at 1 million, for example a Red Cross report published soon afterwards.
What’s Somalia got to do with it?
Six months before the genocide broke out American troops had carried out Operation Gothic Serpent, an attempt to take on the evil warlord, Mohamed Farrah Aidid.,who ruled Mogadishu, capital of Somalia, which led to the so-called Battle of Mogadishu on 3 and 4 October 1993 during which a black hawk helicopter was shot down and 19 American soldiers were killed and 73 wounded. Not just that. The American corpses were paraded through the streets, and filmed and the video footage beamed around the world. The world’s only superpower was humiliated.
This explains why, when trouble broke out in another faraway African state, the administration of President Bill Clinton desperately tried to ignore it, then downplay it. Gourevitch quotes the press conferences given while the genocide was being carried out in which the poor press secretary tried to explain the administration’s position that ‘genocidal acts’ were taking place but these didn’t amount to an actual genocide. Why the hair-splitting? Because if the Americans conceded it was a genocide, then they would be legally obliged under the Genocide Convention of 1948 to intervene. And Clinton refused under any circumstances to risk another Black Hawk Down humiliation. And therefore officials at every level of the administration were under strict orders never to use the g word.
A bit too neatly Gourevitch says that in May, as the genocide was in full swing, he was visiting the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which happened to have been opened by President Bill Clinton who made a speech repeating the museum’s motto Never Again. But not only did it happen again, and the American government was the number one reason that the West, the international community and the United Nations did not do more to stop it (as explained in detail on pages 151 to 154). Disgusting.
French involvement and guilt
By June the RPF, attracting more and more Tutsi recruits, controlled the east of Rwanda, had surrounded the key cities including Kigali. In the same month France launched Opération Turquoise in the west of the country, entering from bases in the Zairian cities of Goma and Bukavu and eventually controlling the western fifth of Rwanda in order to create a safe haven for refugees. The fact that many of these refugees were Hutus, fleeing the advancing RPF army, and included many Hutu Power administrators and officials, has led to claims ever since that the French in effect protected those responsible for the genocide.
From the moment they arrived, and wherever they went, the French forces supported and preserved the same local political leaders who had presided over the genocide. (p.158)
Throughout the genocide French military spokesman argued that it was a ‘two-way’ genocide, both sides were as bad as each other and sneeringly referred to the RPF as the Khmer Rouge. The French had many motivations. 1. To maintain hegemony over the widest possible area of francophonie. 2. To maintain its credibility with the other African dictators it supported. Hatred of the English. Hard though it is to believe, the French government opposed the RPF because they originated in English-speaking Uganda. French culture must be preserved even at the cost of supporting the largest genocide since the Holocaust. This was recognised as a factor in France’s support for mass murder by as senior figure as Paul Kagame:
‘If they wanted people here to speak French, they shouldn’t have helped to kill people here who spoke French.’ (p.160)
The permanent grievance of the history’s losers.
The signal achievement of [France’s] Opération Turquoise was to permit the slaughter of Tutsis to continue for an extra month, and to secure safe passage for the genocidal command to cross, with a lot of its weaponry, into Zaire. (p.161)
Scum. cf p.289 and p.325.
End of the genocide July 1994
By late June the RPF had surrounded Kigali and took the capital on 4 July, followed on 18 July by the major towns of the north-west, forcing the interim government into Zaire. The RPF victory ended the genocide as well as the civil war. By the end of July 1994 Kagame’s forces held the whole of Rwanda except for the Turquoise zone in the south-west.
The international community, the UN troops on the ground and the French had done fuck-all to halt the worst genocide since the Second World War. (To be fair, Canadian General Roméo Dallaire sent his superiors in New York advance warnings he had learned from high-placed Hutu dissidents that a really huge massacre was being planned. When they ignored his warnings and actively reduced the UN presence on the ground, he and his reduced forces were at least able to provide refuge for thousands of Tutsi and moderate Hutu at its headquarters in Amahoro Stadium, at other secure UN sites, and assisted with the evacuation of foreign nationals.)
Instead the genocide ended solely as a result of the military intervention of Paul Kagame’s RPF (p.143). (Mind you, you could make the case that the genocide only came about because of the sequence of events following the RPF’s initial invasion of 1990, designed to overthrow the ‘legitimate’ Hutu government. Academics, commentators and advocates of all sides can spend the rest of time assigning blame.)
Map showing the advance of the RPF during the 1994 Rwandan genocide (source: Wikipedia)
Aftermath – flight of the Hutus
As the RPF closed in the Hutu extremists prepared not just to flee the country, but used state radio and local authorities to terrify the Hutu population into believing they too, in their turn, would be slaughtered by vengeful Tutsis. Which explains why some two million Hutu peasants took to the road and fled west into Zaire, eventually setting up huge refugee camps as big as cities.
And indeed the RPF were accused of themselves killing thousands of Hutu civilians as they took power, and of pursuing and Hutus across the border in Zaire as they tracked down members of the notorious Interahamwe. The RPF denies this was intentional but Gourevitch has Kagame admitting certain rogue elements in his army may have carried out illegal revenge attacks. He tried to restrain them, some were tried and imprisoned, but there’s a limit to his control.
But the bigger story, which Gourevitch dwells on at length, was the creation of vast Hutu refugee camps which became cities in their own right, homes to countless businesses, run with fear and intimidation by Hutu Power administrators, and funded and supported by the international community and hundreds of well-meaning aid agencies.
Ethnic cleansing in East Congo 1995 to 1996
The resulting situation in eastern Congo became chaotic with Rwandan Tutsis tracking down and massacring Hutus, and Hutu extremists regrouping in the vast refugee camps helped by Western governments and aid agencies a) launching cross-border raids back into Rwanda to murder survivors and kill witnesses and b) embarking on their own campaigns of ethnic cleansing against ethnic Tutsis who had lived in Zaire for generations, specifically in the area of Kivu around the Zairean town of Goma.
In other words, intense Hutu-Tutsi animosity, spilling over into massacres and ethnic cleansing continued for years after the genocide itself was ended by the invading RPF.
First Congo War 1996 to 1997
Gourevitch spells out how the genocide was a gift from God for Congo dictator Seko Sese Mobutu (p.281). The old bastard had been unceremoniously dumped by his Western supporters when the Cold War ended in 1990 and had gone through a lean time manipulating a succession of fig-leaf ‘democratic’ governments while he slowly lost control of the lucrative mining industries which had kept his kleptocratic state alive, inflation soared to 9,000 per cent, the economy collapsed.
But with the advent of nearly two million refugees in the far east of his country in 1994, Mobutu was suddenly the man the international community and countless aid agencies had to go through to help them and he proved a willing participant, seeing as he got to cream off significant percentages of the money passing through his capital and its crooked banks. Leading the charge was, of course, the dictator’s most loyal Western friend and the most avid supporter of the genocidal Hutus, France.
France, ever eager to bail out Hutu Power, broke ranks with the rest of what in Cold War parlance used to be called the ‘Free World’ and unilaterally restored aid to Zaire – which meant, of course, to Mobutu who shovelled the money directly into his Swiss bank accounts. (p.281)
Throughout the spring of 1996 Hutu Power militias based in the refugee camps funded by the West continued a campaign to ethnically cleanse the area of North Kivu of its native Zairean Tutsi population, Gourevitch tours the area after such cleansing, travelling through miles of devastation, meeting terrified refugees. The RPF Rwandan government demanded something be done to protect the Tutsis. Zaire protested no such cleansing was going on. The international community did precisely nothing (p.289).
Eventually Kagame was forced to consider direct military intervention into eastern Zaire where the camps were located. His ally Museveni had introduced Kagame to Zairean revolutionary and guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila. They began recruiting troops and creating networks of like-minded soldiers, militias and exiles which coalesced into the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation or AFDL.
Since North Kivu had been largely ethnically cleansed of Tutsis, Kagam predicted the Hutu Power militias would next turn on the 300,000 or so Tutsis living in South Kivu, known as the Banyamulenge after the town they were meant to have immigrated from back in the seventeenth century.
In September 1996 Hutu militias began attacking the Banyamulenge, burning houses, assassinating key officials, executing people in the street. They were fully supported by Mobutu’s army and media, who blamed the Tutsis victims for every atrocity. This was the same pattern and rhetoric which had led to the genocide. Tutsis fought back and were aided by Rwandan soldiers infiltrated into the area (p.295).
When the local Zairean governor declared that the entire Banyamulenge population had one week to vacate their homes and leave the territory, it was precisely the kind of categorical provocation Kagame had been waiting for. He immediately ordered the advance of the amalgamated forces which he, Museveni and Kabila had created into South Kivu. He tells Gourevitch he had three aims:
protect the Banyamulenge Tutsis, arm them, empower them to fight and protect themselves
to dismantle the notorious refugee camps and get their Hutu occupants to return to Rwanda where they would be treated decently
to ‘change the situation in Zaire’ i.e. remove Mobutu as an active supporter of genocidal Hutu Power and replace him with a modern, neutral figure
The AFDL advance was as disciplined and effective as the RWP invasion of Rwanda 2 years earlier. It had the decisive effect of breaking the grip of Hutu Power on the camps and forcing an estimated 700,000 refugees to abandon the camps and trek the 20 or 30 miles back across the border into peaceful Rwanda, and return to their communities. Obviously, there were all kinds of problems with this enormous reintegration into such a densely populated country and with so many divisive memories, but the wholesale massacre of Hutu refugees which the Hutu Power ideologues had terrified the refugees with never happened.
But to the wider world’s surprise the invading AFDL didn’t just invade the Hutu camps, tracking down Hutu Power exponents, freeing the majority of the Hutu refugees into returning to Rwanda – they then declared their intention of marching on Zaire’s capital, Kinshasa, approximately two and a half thousand miles west.
Fall of Mobutu May 1997
It took the AFDL a long seven months to get there, more a tribute to the shocking state of Zaire’s roads and infrastructure than to any opposition put up by the rubbish Zaire army, the FAZ (which Gourevitch describes as ‘Mobutu’s famously cowardly army’, p.256).
As Kabila’s troops approached the capital, president Nelson Mandela of South Africa flew in to try and broker a deal, but failed. Mobutu wanted to stay on the scene, if only as a figurehead president, while Kabila, leading the winning army, wanted all or nothing. Mobutu, his family and cronies fled, Kabila’s troops entered Kinshasa and on 30 May 1997 Kabila was sworn in as president. Next day Kabile changed the country’s name from Zaire to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was to be president until his assassination in 2001.
The Second Congo War 1998 to 2003
Kabila turned against his own backers, responding to the Congo public’s dislike of the occupying army of Rwandans and Ugandans and summarily expelling them all in 1998. Bad move. Rwanda and Uganda again collaborated in putting together an invasion force, this time with the aim of overthrowing Kabila and installing a more compliant president. However, the conflict ended up roping six other African nations into the fighting which degenerated into chaos.
The conflict dragged on till 2003 by which time an estimated five million people had died as a result of the conflict. Some armed groups remain active in the areas near Rwanda’s border right up till the present day, 2021.
The post-genocide period
The last hundred pages of this 350-page book cover the period after the genocide. Gourevitch describes the surprising number of Tutsis who returned from exile all over the place, not just the neighbouring countries of Uganda and Tanzania, but Europe and America, once it was clear that a democratic, mixed ethnicity and peaceful government was in place. And the inevitable tensions this led to between those who’d lived through the horror and seen family and loved ones literally hacked to death before their eyes, and returnees from abroad who moved into the many empty houses, tidied up the mess left by the departing Hutus, had barbecues, laughed and joked as if nothing had happened. Many of the survivors Gourevitch interviews find this difficult to cope with (pages 229 to 241).
He covers the massacre of Hutu refugees at the Kibeho refugee camp. He visits post-genocide prisons packed with Hutus who are strangely passive. Considering that high-profile Hutus were being assassinated on the outside, many of them were relieved to be in the relative safety of prison, regularly visited by international aid workers and monitors. He describes in detail the paradox of Hutu Power genocidaires being protected and funded by western aid agencies, at the complete inability of the international community, yet again, to intervene to stop their attacks into Rwanda and their ethnic cleansing of North Kivu and, yet again, the only thing to stop it being a military invasion organised by Paul Kagame, this time in the shape of the coalition AFDL.
At this kind of thing – specific settings and the issues arising from them – Gourevitch excels and his book will remain a valuable record and testimony to the tense, disorientated spirit of the period after the genocide and before the second Congo war of 1998, the one which degenerated into the Great War of Africa. Gourevitch thought he was covering an event which had finished but ended up recording a moment in the continual, ongoing flux of human events, the edgy post-genocide moment which has itself become part of history.
Stupid remarks
Gourevitch peppers the books with remarks which are, presumably, intended to be insightful, but as someone who did a history GCSE, A-level, history-based degree and has spent my life reading history books and attending history exhibitions, I found disappointingly obvious and trite.
Colonisation is violence and there are many ways to carry out that violence. (p.55)
Every war is unconventional after its own fashion. (p.82)
They sound good, don’t they, they create a good literary, rhetorical effect, they sound profound, but a moment’s reflection tells you they are trite or untrue. He operates on a very superficial level. When he quotes Lord Acton’s hoary dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as if it was a useful contribution to the debate about the genocide, you realise you are dealing with a child. He quotes Stalin’s alleged saying that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic, as if it’s a dazzling new discovery (p.201). Disappointing.
Worst of all, Gourevitch develops a theory of human nature based on his literary feelings, on the premise that the most important thing about human nature is the power of the imagination. Instead of seeing things in political terms, he again and again reverts to modish blah about narratives and stories and identity and returns again and again to the importance of imagination, narrative and stories. He is more indebted to Coleridge than Clausewitz. John Milton, Charles Dickens, Rilke, George Eliot, these are his terms terms of reference. It is thin stuff and wholly inappropriate to the subject matter.
He keeps writing things I profoundly disagree with.
We are, each of us, functions of how we imagine ourselves and of how others imagine us… (p.71)
(Note the prissy, attention-drawing use of commas, a rhetorical flourish to make the sentence sound more considered and profound.) I am a Darwinian materialist so I simply disagree. I would counter-suggest that we are, each of us, (sic) not at all functions of how we imagine ourselves, but functions of how our bodies work, products of our biology, of the complex interaction between our genetic inheritance and the myriad biochemical signals the environment we find ourselves in sends us or triggers in our bodies.
If I am starving to death in one of the world’s countless famines or dying of cancer or stroke or heart attack or delirious with malaria it doesn’t really matter what my imagination or anyone else’s imaginations are doing. I am a function, first and foremost, of my biology, all else is secondary.
He writes that the most basic function of power is to coerce us into its narratives. This reads to me like the modish bullshit of the English graduate. The whole approach reeks of the trend across all the humanities and high brow journalism to invoke the magic words ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ as if they explain everything about human nature and politics, but they don’t. If someone puts a gun to your head and tells you to do something or die, complex theories of meta-narrative and Coleridgean distinctions between imagination and fancy become irrelevant. When he writes:
I felt tempted, at times, to think of Rwanda after the genocide as an impossible country. (p.224)
I felt tempted to throw the book out the window. This is high-sounding bullshit. What does it even mean? A country is a country is a country, borders on a map, enforced by border police, with a government and administration and laws and a currency. Russia continues to exist after its century of Soviet tyranny, Germany is going strong, decades after the Holocaust and its violent partition, even Cambodia is still a country after the horror of the killing fields – and so on and so on. Clearly the worry that Rwanda is an ‘impossible’ country is a problem which only exists in Gourevitch’s head and shows you just how obtuse his responses can be.
There’s a lot to be written about the ideology of Hutu Power which drove the genocide and the way it shaped the actions of the génocidaires at all levels of Rwandan society, but Gourevitch doesn’t have the conceptual framework or academic training to do it. He makes repeated efforts to do so, but I found them shallow and disappointing.
The big takeaway
Leaving Gourevitch out of the equation, I think the biggest single thing to take away from study of the Rwandan genocide is that it wasn’t a one-off, inexplicable outbreak of barbarity. The one big thing you learn from studying it is that it was simply the highest point of a century-old culture of ethnic rivalry and hatred, which broke out from the 1950s onwards in repeated massacres and pogroms, exactly as the Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe were subject to centuries of persecution and pogroms way before the Holocaust.
In that sense it is far from inexplicable, it is very, very explicable. What turned the long history of minor, localised outbreaks of ethnic violence into a genocide was the hard work of the Hutu Power ideologues who set out to organise the extermination of the Tutsis by harnessing the organisation and technology of a modern state, using state radio, magazines, and every level of the highly structured administration to promulgate simple messages of hate and desperation. It boiled down to: “Kill the cockroaches before they kill us!” and hundreds of thousands of Hutus, primed by decades of negative propaganda, bought this message and acted on it (p.251).
But study of the Rwandan genocide doesn’t stop in July 1994. Like all the other accounts I’ve read, Gourevitch shows how it leads directly on to the issue of the Hutu refugee camps and the way the Hutu Power génocidaires survived and recreated their power structures there, terrorising hundreds of thousands of refugees, carrying out deadly incursions back into Rwanda, and then setting about the ethnic cleansing of east Congo. And how that led directly to the AFDL invasion of Zaire which became known as the First Congo War, and how that led on to the second invasion of Congo, by Rwandan and Ugandan forces which led to the disastrous Great War of Africa.
For a few months the specific genocidal Hutu Power campaign was able to be carried out with unbridled ferocity, but the killing of Tutsis had been commonplace for decades before it, and the killing of comparable numbers of Hutus (maybe as many as 100,000 Hutus were killed in all forms of revenge attack, from individual reprisals and local pogroms through to the more organised massacres in the refugee camps) followed seamlessly after it.
Gourevitch ends his book gloomily with Bill Clinton’s flying visit to Rwanda in March 1998 (he didn’t even leave the airport) but during which he acknowledged that the events of 1994 had been a genocide and that ‘the international community’ had done too little to intervene. The later sections of his book testify over and over to the complete failure of the international community, America or the UN to act either to prevent the genocide or to intervene to prevent the regrouping of the génocidaires in the camps. Gourevitch gets progressively more angry about it.
But the thing that comes over in his last few pages is the way the killings resumed inside Rwanda. During 1997 and into early 1998, as he was finalising his account, the number of murders and massacres of Tutsis by revived groups of Hutu Power génocidaires was steadily increasing. In fact the book ends with yet another grim atrocity, an account of how a group of 150 Hutu Power militia and interahamwe attacked a boarding school in Gisenyi and hacked to pieces the 17 schoolgirls and a 62-year-old Belgian nun.
In other words, as he ended the book, the tide of communal hate killing had returned and was rising. I’ll need to read other books to find out what happened next…
A correct understanding of human nature
The Rwandan genocide itself was a definable and unique historical event with a specific start and a specific end-point. Gourevitch, throughout his book, professes himself puzzled and bewildered at how it could ever have happened, incapable of imagining the motivation and mindset of ordinary people who took up machetes to hack their neighbours and own family members to pieces.
But the more you study it, the more understandable the Rwandan genocide becomes, provided you have a correct understanding of human nature.
We humans are animals, part of the animal kingdom, subject to the same constraints and urges as other animals. My son who’s just completed his Biology degree, said one of his lecturers summed up all animal activity in a snappy motto: feed, fight, fuck. That’s it. Like all animals, we humans are programmed to mate and reproduce; to do that effectively, we have to fight or compete (albeit in socially mediated and sublimated ways) for a mate. But none of this can take place unless we can feed and water ourselves on a regular basis.
For sure, the so-called ‘mind’ and ‘reason’ which well-fed philosophers have pontificated about for millennia, beginning in the slave societies of ancient Greece and Rome, is also a deep part of human nature – but most people, even the most highly educated, are fundamentally irrational and easily swayed. Humans are very suggestible and easily steered towards courses of action which let them fulfil their primal urges – hunger, lust, violence, and the more socialised wishes for praise and acceptance, wealth and power, no matter how local and fleeting. (Presumably Gourevitch has heard of Sigmund Freud. If so, why has he not learned anything from him, from the grim conclusions Freud drew about human nature based on the First World War?)
The great appeal of war for young men in less-than-perfectly-disciplined armies is that you can fulfil a lot of these really primitive urges. As well as the joy of killing alongside a closely-bonded band of brothers, war all too often provides endless opportunity for risk-free sexual violence. Hence the outbreak of mass raping during every conflict in human history, including the Rwandan genocide.
Once you align your thinking with the basic facts that humans are fundamentally irrational animals, driven by a cacophony of unconscious primitive urges, which lead them to make all kinds of irrational mistakes and, given the opportunity, behave terribly – then most of human history, including all its atrocities, make perfect sense, indeed seem inevitable.
Human nature doesn’t change, at least not on a timescale which human society registers. Give or take a few differences in social conventions, we understand the motives of medieval kings and Roman emperors just fine. And they map very well onto to the behaviour of contemporary African dictators such as Mobutu or Bokassa, just as the lickspittles and hangers-on in the court of each would be interchangeable, and just as the lives of the ordinary businessmen or urban workers or peasants doing forced labour in the fields would be recognisable in 1st century Rome or 20th century Congo.
It is only if you have a wrong understanding of human nature that you are surprised by atrocity and barbarity. Only if you assume that everybody else is as highly educated as you, as well-read in Rilke and Milton, as able to eat out in 5-star restaurants around the world on New Yorker expense accounts. If you come from this blessed background then you might be tempted to think that everyone else is as kind and generous and thoughtful and concerned about issues of gender and equality and identity and narrative as you are. So it is only if you live in this cloud cuckoo-land, liberal arts culture that you are going to be shaken to your core when you visit a country where hundreds of thousands of people undertook the systematic slaughter by hand of their neighbours and even their own family members.
The Armenian Genocide. The Russian Civil War. The Ukraine Famine. The Second Word War. The Holocaust. 20 million Russian dead. Indian Partition. The Great Leap Forward. The Chinese Cultural Revolution. Pol Pot in Cambodia. The Yugoslav wars. Has he not heard of these and many other comparable mass murders?
Why has he not learned the simple lesson that this is what humans do. In the right circumstances, whipped up by the right leaders, humans are capable of any atrocity. The Rwandan genocide wasn’t an inexplicable outbreak of madness but just the most recent example of an enduring and central aspect of human nature.
Gourevitch displays the same naive or obtuse shock every time he comes to ‘think about’ the genocide. The shock and dismay of a privileged, literature-soaked author, at the pinnacle of his liberal profession in the richest country in the world, amazed to discover what life is like in one of the poorest countries in the world (which is how Rwanda was classified by the World Bank in the immediate aftermath of the genocide, a place where the average annual wage was estimated to be $80, far less than Gourevitch and his fellow editors of The Paris Review probably used to spend on one business lunch.)
It isn’t anything ‘wrong’ in human nature or ‘wrong’ about the human imagination which he is discovering. Human nature is human nature just like gravity pulls things towards the centre of the earth, the sun rises in the morning, fire burns and so on. It is a basic fact of the world we exist in.
The reason Gourevitch is shocked is that he had such a completely mistaken view of human nature in the first place. He had read about the Holocaust but not really processed its lessons, what it tells us about what ‘ordinary’ people are capable of, namely any level of cruelty and barbarity if they think it means they and their loved ones will survive.
It is the shock of a pampered American discovering that the rest of the world is not like America, in fact it is inconceivably different. (Gourevitch is well aware of the issue of American parochialness and American ignorance. He routinely criticises the sparse and uninformed commentary on the situation in Rwanda and Zaire which he reads in even leading American newspapers like the New York Time and Washington Post, e.g. pages 297, 343. What’s the title of the Green Day song, American Idiot.)
Because he has diametrically the wrong view of human nature, Gourevitch at various points describes the genocide and the killings which followed it as a kind of failure of political and cultural imagination (p.206).
On the contrary, from my point of view, the Rwandan genocide was a kind of fulfilment of the profound and bestial aspects of human nature which I’ve described – albeit carefully whipped up, legitimised and organised by the Hutu Power propagandists. The genocide is explicable because it derives from understandable, analysable aspects of human nature. Have you not read any human history? Do you not know it amounts to a catalogue of massacres and genocides?
The common objection people make to my view of human nature, starting with my own kids, is: “Well, it’s not like that where I live. Where I live everyone is nice and friendly and caring. If what you say is true, how come everyone isn’t at everyone’s throats all the time?”
But the answer is simple: we in the West are well fed. Really well fed. The biggest medical problem in the West is the epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Fat people don’t fight. Even the most casual knowledge of history shows a direct correlation between hunger and social upheaval. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the rise of the Nazis took place in societies pushed to the brink by famine, hunger and extreme social stress; in Weimar Germany mass unemployment meant people were literally starving.
In these circumstances, the most basic human drives come to the fore and can be manipulated and directed by those who understand how: Danton, Lenin, Goebbels, Pol Pot and, in Rwanda, the exponents of Hutu Power such as Hassan Ngeze and Colonel Théoneste Bagosora.
It follows that the fundamental aim of any government should be to manage the economy in such a way as to ensure that most of its citizens are fed, not only as a good in itself but as the basic protection against social collapse and reversion to barbarism. To take a leaf from Gourevitch’s book and quote a famous literary figure, it was Bertolt Brecht who wrote: “Food first, then fancy talk about morality”. (“Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral” The Threepenny Opera).
Feeding your population, ensuring security of food, then of housing, then of work which is rewarded with a stable currency, are probably any modern government’s top priorities.
Gourevitch’s assembly of all the facts and his narrative of the deep history, build-up to and then catastrophic events of the Rwandan genocide are thorough and authoritative, and he has obviously interviewed an enormous variety of people who shed light on all levels of events, victims and perpetrators, as well as numerous UN and aid officials, ministers, government spokesmen, including president Kagame of Rwanda and president Museveni of Uganda. It’s a hugely impressive roster. He had tremendous, what the journalists call “access”.
For all these reasons his book tells a searing story and will remain important evidence. But every time he stops to ‘think’ about what he’s describing, he displays a regrettably low level of awareness about human nature, society and history. He demonstrates that he is an idealistic American unprepared for a world which is mostly not populated by well-read, New York liberals. His bewilderment is sometimes so total I wish I found it funny, but it ended up being deeply irritating and marring my admiration for the extensive and very impressive factual sections of his book.
Cecile Kayirebwa
We are animals, bound by the same fundamental facts and constraints of biology as all other life forms on earth. And yet we belong to a freak line of evolution which has led us to develop language, speech, writing, mathematics and technology, and create an impenetrably complex labyrinth of cultural artefacts. One among billions of these human artefacts is this song written by Rwandan poet and singer, Cecile Kayirebwa, which laments the victims of the Rwandan genocide.
Credit
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1998. All references are to the 2000 Picador paperback edition.
This is another very short book, one of the popular Seminar Studies in History series. These all follow the same layout: 100 or so pages of text divided up into brisk, logical chapters, followed by a short Assessment section, and then a small selection of original source documents from the period. It’s a very useful format for school or college students to give you a quick, punchy overview of a historical issue.
This one opens by summarising the central challenge faced by the Austro-Hungarian Empire as it entered the twentieth century: how to take forward a fragmented, multi-cultural empire based on traditional dynastic and semi-feudal personal ties into the age of nationalism and democracy where every individual was, in theory at least, a citizen, equal before the law.
On page one Mason locates four key failures of late imperial governance:
the failure to solve the Czech-German conflict in the 1880s and 1890s
the failure to develop a genuine parliamentary government in the late 1890s
failure to solve the Austro-Hungarian conflict in the early 1900s
failure to solve the South Slav conflict in the decade before World War One
PART ONE The background
1. The Hapsburg Monarchy in European History
The Hapsburg monarchy lasted 640 years from 1278 to 1918. It was a dynastic creation, never attached to a specific country. In 1867 (following Hungary’s defeat to Prussia in the war of 1866) the state was organised into the so-called Dual Monarchy, with the Hapsburg ruler titled the Emperor of Austria and the King of Hungary. This gave Hungary more autonomy and respect than it had previously had.
The name ‘Hapsburg’ derives from Habichtsburg meaning ‘Castle of the Hawks’, located in what is now the Swiss canton of Aargau. During the eleventh century the knights from this castle extended their power to build up a position of growing influence in south Germany.
Meanwhile, the eastern March – the Oster Reich – of Charlemagne’s massive empire was granted to the Babenberg family in the tenth century and they held it for the next 300 years.
In 1273 the electors of the Holy Roman Empire elected Rudolf of Hapsburg to the office of Holy Roman Emperor. In the 14th century the Hapsburgs acquired Carinthia, Carniola, Tyrol, Istria and Trieste to their domain. In the 15th another Hapsburg was elected emperor and from 1438 till the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved by Napoleon in 1806 the Crown remained almost continuously in their house.
When King Louis II of Bohemia and Hungary died without issue in 1526, both his crowns passed to the Hapsburgs. This marked a turning point because up till then all Hapsburg land had been German-speaking. Now the Hapsburg administration had to take account of various non-German nations with their own independent histories.
This leads to a Big Historical Idea: just as the countries of the West were beginning to develop the idea of the nation state, central Europe was going down a different path, towards a multi-national empire.
Even more decisive was the role the Hapsburgs played in defending Europe from the Turks. Twice, in 1529 and 1683, the Turks laid siege to Vienna, a very under-reported and under-appreciated part of European history.
The Turkish threat had effectively been repulsed by the start of the 18th century and the Hapsburgs embarked on their new role in Europe which was to act as a counterweight to ambitious France, starting with the War of Spanish Succession (1702-14).
The long rule of the Empress Maria Theresa (1740-80) saw her undertake reform and centralisation of the administration. But her power in central Europe was challenged by Hohenzollern Prussia under Frederick the Great (1740-86). During this period, Poland was partitioned and Austria was given from it the southern province of Galicia, which she retained right up till the end of the Great War.
The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (1789-1815) unleashed the ideas of nationalism and democracy across Europe, both of which struck at the heart of the multi-ethnic and hierarchical structure of the Empire.
Under Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II, Austria had arguably been part of the continent-wide movement of reform associated with the Enlightenment, take for example their legislation to remove many of the restrictions placed on the Jewish population.
But the twin forces of nationalism and democracy were such a threat to a multinational polity that from this point onwards the Hapsburgs and the empire they led, became a reactionary force, embodied in the machinations of their legendary Foreign Minister, Klemens von Metternich (foreign minister from 1809 to 1848).
In 1848 revolutions took place all across Europe, with no fewer than five in capitals controlled by the dynasty – in Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Croatia and in northern Italy (territory which the Hapsburgs had seized after the defeat of Napoleon). Hapsburg forces put down the revolutions in four of the locations, but it required the intervention of the Russian army to defeat the revolutionary Hungarian forces. The Magyars never forgot this bitter defeat.
In the Crimean War (1853-6) Austria kept neutral from both sides (Britain & France versus Russia) which weakened her role in Europe. In 1859 France supported the desire for independence of Piedmont, the north Italian state ruled by the Hapsburgs since the defeat of Napoleon, and hammered the Austrians at the Battles of Magenta and Solferino. In response the Hapsburgs introduced some administrative reforms, but in 1866 lost another war, this time against Prussia under Bismarck, decided at the Battle of Sadowa.
Seriously weakened, and now definitely deprived of all influence in a Germany unified under Prussian rule, the Emperor’s politicians were compelled to bolster the Empire’s authority be devising a new agreement with the large Kingdom of Hungary to the East.
2. The Austro-Hungarian Compromise
Hence the Compromise or Ausgleich of 1867 which recognised the sovereign equality of two states, Austria and Hungary, bringing them under the rule of one man, Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. The dual monarchy wasn’t the same as a federation, constitutionally it was unique. But it bolstered the Hapsburgs a) territory b) manpower. Crucially it provided a bulwark against the Slavs in the Balkans, quelling pan-Slavic sentiment.
The drawback of the Compromise was that it was essentially a personal agreement between the Emperor Franz Josef and the Magyar ruling class. Even liberal and progressive German-speaking Austrians felt left out, and that’s before you consider the numerous other nationalities contained within the empire.
PART TWO Domestic affairs
3. The Nationality Questions
The Treaty of Versailles entrenched the idea of national self-determination preached by American President Woodrow Wilson, and resulted in the break-up of the empire into a host of new nation states based on ethnicity. Viewed from this angle, it looks as though the Austro-Hungarian Empire was foredoomed to collapse. But all the histories I’ve read there was no such inevitability. This one wants to scotch two assumptions –
that all the nationalities thought they’d be better off outside the empire (many realised they wouldn’t)
that all the nationalities were ‘at war’ with imperial authorities; many weren’t, they were in much sharper conflict with each other
In the West the state and the nation were closely aligned; but in the East you can see how they are in fact distinct ideas. The state is an administrative unit and in Central and Eastern Europe was based on ancient rights and privileges of rulers, often going back to medieval origins.
From the mid-nineteenth century these traditional ideas were challenged by a concept of ‘nation’ based on ethnicity, culture and language. Otto Bauer the Austrian Marxist made a famous categorisation of the peoples of the empire into ‘historic’ nations, those which had an aristocracy and bourgeoisie and an independent national history;
Germans
Magyars
Poles
Italians
Croats
and those who don’t:
Czechs
Serbs
Slovaks
Slovenes
Ruthenians
Romanians
Most modern commentators include the Czechs in the list of ‘historic’ nations.
The Germans
In the western half of the empire the Germans made up 10 million or 35% of the population of 28 million. Nonetheless the administration was thoroughly German in character. The official language of the empire was German. The great majority of the civil servants were German, 78% of the officers in the army were German. The cultural life of Vienna, the capitalist class and the press were overwhelmingly German. Three political parties dominated from 1880 onwards, which adopted the three logical policies:
The Pan-Germans looked beyond Austria to a nationalist union of all German peoples under Bismarcks Prussia
The Christian Socialist Party under Karl Lueger aimed to unite all the nationalities under the dynasty
The left-wing Social Democrats aimed to unite the working class of all the nationalities, thus dissolving the nationalities problem
The Czechs
Third largest ethnic group (after the Germans and Hungarians) with 6.5 million or 12% of the population. In Bohemia roughly two fifths of the people were German, three fifths Czech.The Czechs were the only one of the minorities which lived entirely within the borders of the empire, and some they were bitterly disappointed by the Compromise of 1867, which they thought should have recognised their identity and importance. Czech nationalists thought the deal left them at the mercy of German Austrians in the West and Hungarians in the East.
From the 1880s the struggle between Czech and German expressed itself in the issue of the official language taught in schools and used in the bureaucracy. The Czech population increased dramatically: Prague was an overwhelmingly German city in 1850 but 90% Czech by 1910. Germans found it harder to dismiss the Czechs as peasants Slavs, as Bohemia rapidly industrialised and became the economic powerhouse of the empire.
The Poles
The Poles were the fourth largest group, in 1910 4.9 million or 17.8% of the western part of the empire, most of them living in Galicia. Galicia was a) a province of Poland which had been obliterated from the map when it was divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria in the 18th century b) at the north-east fringe of the empire, beyond the Carpathian mountain range.
The Austrians needed the support of the Poles to make up a majority in the parliament in Vienna, and so made so many concessions to the Polish Conservative Party in Galicia that it enjoyed almost complete autonomy, with Polish recognised as the official language, Polish universities and so on.
The Ruthenians
Only three fifths of the population of Galicia was Polish; the other two-fifths were Ruthenians. The Ruthenians belonged to the same ethnic group as the Ukrainians but were distinguished by adherence to the Latin/Greek Uniat church. The Ruthenians were the most socially backward group in the empire and very much under the thumb of the politically advanced Poles, responding by setting up a peasants’ party.
Conservative ‘Old Ruthenians’ gave way to ‘Young Ruthenians’ in the 1880s, who sought union with the 30 million Ukrainians living to their East. The more concessions the central government made to the Poles, the more it alienated the Ruthenians. After 1900 Ruthenians and Poles clashed over electoral or educational issues, sometimes violently.
The Slovenes
1.25 million or 4.4 per cent of the population of the Austrian half of the empire, the Slovenes were scattered over half a dozen Crownlands, and lacked even a written literature in their own land. Even mild efforts at nationalism, such as setting up a Slovene-speaking school, were fiercely opposed by the German majorities in their regions.
The Italians
770,000, the smallest national group in the empire, with Italian-speaking areas in the Tyrol and along the Adriatic coast, which had quite different concerns. In the Tyrol the Italians fought against the dominance of the Germans. Along the Adriatic they were a privileged minority among a Slav majority.
In May 1915 Italy betrayed its treaty promises to Germany and Austria-Hungary and joined the Allies because Britain and France promised Italy possession of the Tyrol and the Adriatic Littoral (and money).
The Magyars
10 million Magyars formed 48% of the population of Hungary. The Magyars dominated the country, owning, for example 97% of joint stock companies. It was dominated by ‘Magyarisation’ meaning fierce determination of the magyar ruling class to impose uniformity of language across the territory. If minorities like Romanians or Slovenes agreed to teach their children Hungarian and support Magyar rule, they could become citizens; otherwise they were subject to fierce discrimination. The Magyars didn’t want to exterminate the minorities, but assimilate them into oblivion.
Budapest was three quarters German in 1848 and three quarters German in 1910. Mason tells us that all attempts to reform the Dual Monarchy ultimately foundered on Hungary’s refusal to abandon its unbending policy of Magyarisation.
The Romanians
The largest non-Magyar group in Hungary, about 3 million, their aspirations were ignored in the 1867 Compromise, and the Hungarians’ intransigent policy of Magyarisation drove more and more to think about joining the independent Kingdom of Romania, just across the border from Hungarian Transylvania, and the forming of a National Party in 1881, which slowly poisoned Austria’s relations with Romania.
The Slovaks
The Slovaks were the weakest and least privileged group in the Hapsburg Monarchy, 9% of the population, a peasant people who had lived under Magyar domination for a thousand years. The 1867 Compromise made the Czechs and Croats second class citizens but condemned the Slovaks to cultural eradication. From the 1890s they started co-operating with the Czechs and slowly the idea of a combined Czech and Slovak nation evolved.
The Croats
9% of the population of Hungary. They had a national history and a strong aristocracy and considered themselves in direct touch with the Hapsburg monarchy. By an 1868 compromise Croatia received autonomy within the Hungarian state, but the head of the Croat state was imposed by the Hungarian government and the rule of Count Khuen-Héderváry was so repressive that Croatia became the seat of a movement to unite all the empire’s South Slavs.
The Serbs
About 2 million Serbs lived in the empire, divided between Dalmatia, Hungary, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. They didn’t have an independent national history until 1878 when the Congress of Berlin created a small state of Serbia independent of the Ottoman Empire, from which point every perceived injustice against the Serbs prompted calls for a pan-Slave movement, and/or for a Greater Serbia. The biggest incident on the road to collapse was the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, the majority of whose population were Serbs.
The Jews
The Jews made up about 5% of the population in both Austria and Hungary. From 1850 Jews moved in large numbers into Lower Austria, overwhelmingly from poor rural Galicia (Poland), a large number of them migrating to Vienna, where they came to dominate cultural activity out of proportion to their numbers.
The Jews became so prominent in the Hungarian capital that some called it Judapest. The Jewish journalist Karl Kraus joked that ‘the Jews control the press, they control the stock market, and now [with the advent of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis] they control the unconscious’.
The success of Jews in business and the stock market and banking created an association between ‘Jew’ and ‘capitalist’ which complicated class conflict and led to an easy demonisation of the Jews as responsible for much of the exploitation, low wages and fat profits of capitalism.
4. The economy
The Hapsburg Empire was behind Germany, France and Britain in industrialisation. It didn’t have large stocks of coal, it had no large ports, parts of it (like Galicia) were split off from the empire by high mountains; the great Hungarian Plain was designed for agriculture not industry.
It was a predominantly agricultural economy: in 1910 agriculture made up 50% of the Austrian economy, two-thirds of the Hungarian. Most of the trade was between Hapsburg regions and nations; the 1867 Compromise established a free trade area throughout the empire. Only a small percentage of GDP came from exports.
In Hungary serfdom was only abolished in 1848. For most of the period, Hungary was characterised by Magyar landlords, sometimes with very extensive holdings, lording it over illiterate peasants of the various nationalities. That’s one reason why nationalist grievances became mixed up in economic ones. Only in the decade before the war did Hungary begin to industrialise.
Industrialisation was funded by banks which remained firmly in German and Hungarian hands. The industrial heartland of the empire was the Czech Crownlands (Bohemia and Moravia) which developed a strong textiles industry and then iron and steel, metallurgy and engineering. This became another source of tension between Czechs and Germans, because many of the industries remained in the hands of German managers, backed by German hands.
(Remember the passage in Ernst Pawel’s biography describing the end of the Great War, the declaration of independence, and the way the new Czech government immediately a) renamed all its businesses and industries in Czech and b) undertook a wholesale replacement of all German bureaucrats and business men with Czech replacements.)
The late 1860s saw a mounting fever of speculation which led to a stock market crash in 1873 and a prolonged depression afterwards. This led to low growth, and poverty among the urban proletariat and among rural peasants, which led to the rise of nationalist and populist parties.
5. The politics of Dualism
The Austrian (i.e. German-speaking) Liberal Party ruled after the 1867 Compromise. But that compromise had alienated the Czechs whose MPs didn’t even attend the parliament. But it was the massive financial crash of 1873 which ruined the Liberal Party, associated as it was with business and the banks.
In 1871 there was an attempt by the conservative aristocrat Count Hohenwart to reform the monarchy and turn it into a federation, who drafted some ‘Fundamental Articles’ which were intended to give the Czechs parity with the Hungarians, but this was fiercely opposed by the Hungarian prime minister, Count Andrássy. The Czechs never trusted the dynasty after that, and boycotted the Vienna parliament.
In 1879 Franz Joseph asked his boyhood friend Count Taaffe to form a new government and Taaffe went on to govern till 1893, passing a series of reforms which echoed those of Bismarck in Germany, such as extending the franchise, workers health and accident insurance, limiting the working day to 11 hours etc.
But when he tried to tackle the German-Czech issue by breaking up Czech provinces into smaller units based along ethnic lines, his plans were scuppered by the Poles, the Clericals and the Feudals, and the German Liberals and he was forced to resign. Over the next twenty years three parties emerged:
The Social Democrats
This left-wing party emerged from the trade union movement in 1889 and its soft Marxist outlook focused on economic and social reform cut across ethnic lines and so was a force for keeping the empire together. At the Brünner Conference of 1899 they called for the transformation of the empire into a democratic federation of nationalities.
The Christian Socials
Founded in 1890 by the phenomenally popular Karl Lueger who became mayor of Vienna 1897-1910, based around a devout Catholicism which linked democratic concern for ‘the small man’, responsible social reform, anti-semitism and loyalty to the dynasty. Turning artisans and small shopkeepers into a strong anti-socialist, anti-capitalist, pro-Hapsburg bloc.
The Pan-Germans
The extreme anti-semitic Pan-German Party founded by Georg von Schönerer. Starting as a liberal he grew disenchanted and wanted a) to separate out the German-speaking areas from their Slav populations and b) unite with the Reich. In 1884 he led a battle to nationalise the Nordbahm railway which had been financed by the Rothschilds. He failed, but gained wide support for presenting the plan as a battle of the Jews versus the people. Although small in numbers, the Pan-Germans spread vicious racist ideas and their supporters were prone to violence.
The end of parliamentary governance
The next government of Alfred III, Prince of Windisch-Grätz, was brought down after two years because it agreed to allow a German secondary school in southern Styria to have parallel lessons in Slovene at which point the German National Party rejected it, voted against it, and brought down the government.
The next government was led by a Pole, Count Kasimir Felix Badeni. In 1897 he tried to settle the perpetual conflict between Czechs and Germans by moving a law that said that from 1901 no official should be employed in Bohemia or Moravia who wasn’t fluent in German and Czech. Since most Czechs spoke German, this was no problem for them, but hardly any Germans spoke Czech and there was uproar in parliament, with all kinds of tactics used to stall the passage of the bill, riots broke out on the streets of Vienna and then Prague. Franz Joseph was forced to accept Badeni’s resignation, and the Vienna parliament never had the same prestige or power again.
It couldn’t function properly and legislation was from 1897 passed only by emergency decree via Article 14 of the constitution. Government was no longer carried out by politicians and ministers but by civil servants. The Germans and the Czechs continued to obstruct parliament
Several more ministries tried and failed to solve the nationalities problem, while the emperor accepted advice that extending the franchise to the working class might help create a mood of social solidarity. So a bill was passed in 1907 giving the vote to all men over 24. But it was irrelevant. By this stage parliament didn’t govern the empire, bureaucrats did. Extending the franchise brought in a new wave of socialist parties, which combined with the nationality parties, to make governing impossible. During the parliament of 1911 no fewer than 30 parties blocked the passage of all constructive measures in parliament.
6. Vienna – Cultural centre of the Empire
Traditional liberal culture was based on the premise of rational man existing within as stable, civic social order. By the 1890s this society was beginning to disintegrate…
The political crisis in late nineteenth-century Austria-Hungary was caused by the bankruptcy of liberalism. The result was the sudden growth of a number of anti-liberal mass movements. In the cultural sphere the consequence of the breakdown of liberalism were no less dramatic…
Mason distinguishes three phases or artistic eras in this period:
1. The 1870s
In the 1870s students formed the Pernerstorfer Circle, seeking an alternative to liberalism, which they rejected and found inspiration in early Nietzsche, his writings about the imagination and the Dionysian spirit, leading to veneration of the music dramas of Wagner. The most famous member was the composer Gustav Mahler.
2. The 1890s – Young Vienna
Aestheticism and impressionism, focus on the fleeting moment, in-depth analysis of subjective psychology. A moment’s reflection shows how this is a rejection of rational citizens living in a stable social order, and instead prioritises the non-stop swirl of sense impressions. The leading writers of the Young Vienna literary movement were Hugo von Hofmannstahl and Arthur Schnitzler, with his frank depictions of the sex lives and moral hypocrisy of the Viennese bourgeoisie.
3. After 1900 – Kraus, Loos and Schoenberg
The Jewish journalist Karl Kraus published a fortnightly magazine, Die Fackel, in which he flayed all political parties and most of the writers of the day. He carried out a one-man crusade against loose writing, sentimentality and pomposity. Mason doesn’t mention something Ernst Pawl emphasises in his biography of Kafka, which is that plenty of Kraus’s journalism railed against the Jewish influence on German prose, criticising its importation of Yiddishisms and other impurities. It was this attitude which led Pawl to diagnose Kraus as a leading example of the ‘Jewish self-hatred’ of the period.
Adolf Loos was a radical architect who despised any ornament whatsoever. He designed a starkly modernist house which was built in 1910 opposite the imperial palace and was a harsh modernist critique of the wedding cake baroque style of the empire.
Arnold Schoenberg thought Western music had reached the end of the road, and devised an entirely new way of composing music based on giving each note in the scale an equal value i.e. leaving behind traditional notions of a home key or key tones, i.e. 500 years of tradition that a piece of music is composed in a certain key and will develop through a fairly predictable set of chords and other keys closely related to it. Schoenberg demolished all that. In his system all notes are equal and their deployment is based on mathematical principles. Hence his theory came to be known as ‘atonality’ or the ‘twelve tone’ system.
And looming behind these three was one of the most influential minds of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud, the conservative and urbane Jew who did more than almost anyone else to undermine the idea of the rational, citizen or the rational human being. In Freud’s theory most of the activity of the human mind is unconscious and consists of a seething mass of primitive drives and urges. For the early period, from his first formulation of psychoanalysis in 1895 through to the outbreak of the First World War, Freud concentrated on the sexual nature of many or most of these urges, and the psychic mechanisms by which human beings try to repress or control them (via psychological techniques such as displacement or repression).
But the experience of the Great War made Freud change his theory in recognition of the vast role he now thought was played by violence and a Death Drive, which matched and sometimes overcame the sex urge.
Whatever the changing details, Freud’s theory can be seen as just the most radical and drastic attack on the notion of the sensible, rational citizen which were widespread in this time, and at this place.
Leading not only Mason but countless other critics and commentators to speculate that there was something about the complexity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and something about the thoroughness with which it collapsed, which led to the creation of so many anti-liberal and radical ideologies.
All the art exhibitions I’ve ever been to tend to praise and adulate 1900s Vienna as a breeding ground of amazing experiments in the arts and sciences. Many of them praise the artistic radicalism of a Loos or Schoenberg or Egon Schiele as a slap in the face to boring old bourgeois morality and aesthetics.
Not so many dwell on the really big picture which is that all these artistic innovations were the result of a massive collapse of the idea of a liberal society inhabited by rational citizens and that, in the political sphere, this collapse gave rise to new types of political movement, anti-liberal movements of the extreme left and extreme right, to the Communism and Fascism which were to tear Europe apart, lead to tens of millions of deaths and murder and torture, and the partition of Europe for most of the twentieth century.
PART THREE Foreign affairs
7. The Dual Alliance
In international affairs the thirty-six years between the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and the start of the Great War in 1914 were dominated by the Balkan Problem or the South Slav Question.
In the 1600s the Muslim Ottoman Empire had extended its reach right up to the walls of Vienna. The Ottomans were held off and pushed back so the border between Christendom and Islam hovered around south Hungary and Bulgaria. But the Balkans contained many ethnic groups and nationalities. Slowly, during the 19th century, Ottoman rule decayed causing two things to happen:
individual ethnic groups or nations tried to assert their independence from the Ottoman Empire
each time they did so tension flared up between Russia, who saw herself as protector of all the Slavs in the Balkans, and Austria-Hungary, who feared that the creation of a gaggle of independent states in the Balkans under Russian control would inflame her own minorities and undermine the empire
The Congress of Berlin was held in 1878 to try and adjudicate between the conflicting claims of Russia and Austria-Hungary, and the host of little countries who wanted independence from the Ottomans.
This section details the long history of the complex diplomatic policies adopted by successive foreign ministers of the empire, which all had more or less the same goal – to preserve the integrity and security of the empire – but changed in the light of changing events, such as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, and so on through to the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, the Young Turk revolution of 1908 which led to the Bosnian Crisis of the same year, and the Balkan Wars of 1912-13.
What’s striking or piquant is that the three autocracies – Prussia, Austria-Hungary and Russia – had a really profound interest in maintaining their semi-feudal reactionary regimes, and this was highlighted by the fact that they periodically signed variations on a Three Emperors Alliance (1881) – but that they kept allowing this fundamental interest to be decoyed by the festering sore of countless little conflicts and eruptions in the Balkans.
So that by 1907 Germany came to see its interests as tied to a strong Austria-Hungary which would prevent Russian expansion southwards; while Russia came to see itself as faced by a Germanic bloc and so sought alliance with France to counterweight the German threat. And so Europe was divided into two armed camps, an impression cemented when Italy joined a pact with Germany and Austria-Hungary, despite historic antagonism to Austria, with whom she had had to fight wars to regain territory in the north.
8. The Drift to war
One way of thinking about the First World War was that the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the crown, was without doubt a scandalous event but that it gave the Austro-Hungarian Empire a golden opportunity to smack down cocky little Serbia and thus re-establish the empire’s authority in the Balkans, which had been steadily slipping for a generation as a) more Balkan states became independent or b) fell under the influence of Russia.
After all, the empire had intervened in 1908 to annex Bosnia-Herzegovina with a view to creating a South Slav bloc of nations under her protection. Seen from her angle, this was one more step of the same type. Although, admittedly, a risky one. Her annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 led to a six-month-long diplomatic crisis which nearly sparked a European war, and there had been further, limited, Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913. Most people thought this was more of the same.
So Austria issued a fierce ultimatum which was impossible to fulfil and prepared for a quick brutal suppression of Serbia. But she hadn’t anticipated that Russia would mobilise in favour of what was, after all, a small nation, with the result that the German military weighed in giving Austria-Hungary a promise of unconditional support; and when both of them saw Russia proceeding with its war mobilisation, the Germans mechanically and unthinkingly adopted the dusty old plan which had been perfected decades earlier, a plan to knock France out of any coming conflict with a quick surgical strike, just as they had back in 1870, before turning to the East to deal with a Russia they were sure was enfeebled after its humiliating defeat against Japan in 1905.
But the quick surgical strike against France failed because a) the French were supported by just enough of a British Expeditionary Force to stall the German advance and b) the Russians mobilised, attacked and advanced into East Prussia quicker than the Germans anticipated so that c) the German Chief of Staff Moltke made one of the most fateful decisions of the 20th century and decided to transfer some infantry corps from the Belgian wing of the German attack across Germany to staunch the Russian advance. Thus contributing to the German sweep across northern France coming to a grinding halt, to the failure of the Schlieffen Plan, and to four years of grinding stalemate.
All the parties to the war miscalculated, but it was arguably the Germans – with their bright idea of a quick strike to knock France out of the war – who did most to amplify it from yet another in a long line of Balkan Wars to an international conflagration.
What comes over from this section is the hopeless inability of historians to come to a clear decision. Some historians, apparently, think Austria-Hungary’s foreign policy in the decade leading up to war was aggressive; others think it was impeccably defensive.
There is no doubt that the emperor was devoted to peace. Franz Joseph ruled the empire from 1848, when he was 18, to 1916, when he was 86, and if there was one thing he’d learned it was that whenever Austria went to war, she lost. And he was proved right.
9. War Guilt and the South Slav Question
On one level the problem was simple: about twice as many Slavs lived inside the empire (7.3 million) as outside (3.3 million). In the age of nationalism it was unlikely that the ultimate unification of these Slavs could be prevented. The question was: would this unification take place within the empire’s border i.e. at Serbia’s expense; or outside the empire’s borders, under Serbian leadership a) at the cost of the empire losing land (including most of its coastline in Dalmatia) and Slav population to Serbia b) the new Serbian state itself coming under the strong influence of Russia.
Mason discusses how this threat could possibly have been averted if the empire had made any sort of overtures to the Serbs, had courted the South Slavs. All Serbia wanted was better terms of trade and access to the sea. Refusal to countenance even this much resulted from the Austria-Hungarian Monarchy’s internal tensions, above all from the entrenched but anxious rule of the Germans and Magyars, nearly but not quite majorities in their own domains. Their inflexibility brought those domains crashing down around their ears.
10. World War One and the Collapse of the Empire
The book goes on to emphasise that, just because the empire collapsed suddenly at the end of the Great War, doesn’t mean it was doomed to. In fact for most of the four year war onlookers expected it to last, and spent their time speculating about the territorial gains or losses it would have made, but not that it would disappear.
He gives a military account of the war which emphasises the simple fact that the much-vaunted Austro-Hungarian army was simply not up to the task its politicians had set it. Chief of the General Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf intended at the outbreak to take out Serbia with a lightning strike, then move his corps north to Galicia to face the Russians who it was expected would mobilise slowly. But the Austro-Hungarians were repelled by ‘plucky Serbia’ and Conrad moved his forces north too slowly to prevent disastrous defeats to the Russians, who seized Galicia and Bukovina before Christmas.
In the first few months the empire lost 750,000 fighting men and a high percentage of their best officers. It’s a miracle they were able to carry on which they did, but at the cost of taking injections of better trained, better-armed German troops (remember the proud, tall, well dressed, well-fed Reich German soldiers lording it over their starving Austrian allies in the final chapters of The Good Soldier Svejk) and coming more or less under German military command.
Amazingly, in spring the following year, 1915, combined Austrian-Germany forces drove the Russians out of Galicia and seized most of Poland, defeated the numerically stronger Italian army along the Isonzo River. By 1916 the Alliance powers controlled a substantial slice of foreign territory (Poland, Russia, parts of the Balkans) and seemed to be sitting pretty.
The Austrian Social Democrat Otto Bauer wrote a book about the collapse of the empire, The Austrian Revolution, in 1925 which argued that the empire defined itself by its opposition to Tsarist Russia and dependency on Hohenzollern Germany. Certainly when the Bolsheviks seized power in St Petersburg and sued for peace, half the reason for fighting – and even be scared of the Slav menace – disappeared at a stroke.
Internal collapse
As we’ve seen, the Austrian parliament ceased to function properly before 1910 and government was run by civil servants and made by decree (the background to the novels of Franz Kafka with their infinitely complex and incomprehensible bureaucracies). Parliament was suspended from March 1914 to May 1917 because the ruling classes feared it would simply become a forum for criticism of the Crown. In 1916 the prime minister Count Stürgkh was assassinated. On November 1916 the Emperor Franz Joseph died and the crown passed to his great-nephew Archduke Charles, aged 29. The change in leadership gave an opportunity for the central powers to approach the Entente with suggestions for peace in December 1916, which, however, foundered on Germany’s refusal to cede territory back to France.
When Charles was crowned in Hungary he missed the opportunity to force the Hungarian prime minister to consider reforms, to extend the franchise, to give more rights to the non-Magyar minorities, and generally to compromise. On one level, the failure to effect any reform at all in the basic structure of the Dual Monarchy, led to its collapse.
But the most important event was the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty. If the Romanovs, why not the Hapsburgs? When Charles allowed parliament to sit again in summer 1917 initially the calls weren’t for dissolution, but for reform which gave the nationalities autonomy and rights. But during the summer Czech radicals published a manifesto calling for an independent Czech-Slovak state.
The winter of 1917-18 was harsh with widespread food shortages. There were widespread strikes. In the spring Czech prisoners of war began returning from Russian camps bearing revolutionary ideas. But the Hapsburgs were not overthrown. Mason suggests this is because what in Russia were clear, class-based animosities and movements, in Austria-Hungary were diverted into nationalist channels.
Even when America joined the war in April 1917, the Allies still didn’t call for the overthrow of the empire but its reform to give the nationalities more say. According to Mason what finally changed the Allies mind was the German offensive in Spring 1918. It became clear Austria-Hungary wouldn’t or couldn’t detach itself from Germany, and so the Allies now threw themselves behind plans to undermine the empire from within i.e. supporting Czech, Polish and Slav politicians in their calls for the abolition of the monarchy. In the summer they supported the Czechs. In September 1918 they recognised a Czech-Slovak state. Unlike the other minorities the Czechs existed entirely inside the empire, to recognising their independent state was effectively recognising the dismemberment of the empire.
The failure of the German spring offensive in the West, and the Austrian summer offensive against Italy spelled the end. In September Bulgaria sued for peace. In October Austria and Germany asked President Wilson to intervene. At the end of October the Czechs and Yugoslavs proclaimed their independence, followed by the Magyars and the Poles. On 11 November 1918 Emperor Charles abdicated. The Hapsburg Monarchy ceased to exist.
PART FOUR Assessments
Mason recaps some of the arguments about the fate of the Austro-Hungarian Empire which, by now, I feel I have heard hundreds of times. For example, that right up to the end most commentators did not expect the empire to collapse but for the strongest minorities, such as the Czechs, to successfully argue for parity with the Magyars, for more rights and privileges. Karl Marx thought the nations without history needed to be tutored and guided by the more advanced ones i.e. the Germans.
One school sees the collapse as due to the internal contradictions i.e failure to address the nationality question i.e. failure for any serious politician at the top, even Franz Ferdinand, even Charles, to do anything to palliate the nationalities demands which would have meant diluting the stranglehold of the German-Magyar ruling elites. The elites never accepted the nationalities question as a fundamental issue, but always as a problem which could be temporarily dealt with by clever tactics.
A completely opposite view holds that it was the First World War and the First World War alone which led to the collapse of the empire. Supporting this view is the fact that even radical critics and keen slavophiles like the Englishmen Seton-Watson and Wickham Steed as late as 1913 thought the empire was growing, and simply needed to be converted into a federal arrangement of more autonomous states, maybe like Switzerland.
PART FIVE Documents
Nineteen documents kicking off with hardcore economic tables showing, for example, populations of the various nationalities, index of Austrian industrial production, Austria’s share of world trade, steel production, harvest yields.
More interesting to the average reader are:
Mark Twain’s eye witness account of the army marching into parliament to suspend the sitting discussing the 1897 legislation to make Czech equal with German in Bohemia and Moravia, which spilled out into riots in Vienna and Prague
Leon Trotsky’s impressions of the Austrian socialist leaders i.e they are smug and self satisfied and the extreme opposite of revolutionary
an extract from the memoir of George Clare who was a Jew raised in Vienna and gives a vivid sense of the frailty of Jewish identity, the assimiliated Jews’ shame about his caftaned, ringleted Yiddish cousin but also his sneaking envy for their authenticity – this is exactly the sentiment expressed by Kafka in his reflections on the Jews
the impact of Vienna on the young Adolf Hitler, who lived in Vienna from 1908 to 1913 and a) hugely respected the anti-semitic mayor Karl Lueger and b) loathed the multi-ethnic culture and especially the ubiquity of Jews
memoirs of the Jewish socialist leader Julius Braunthal, who emphasises the peculiarly powerful fermenting role played by Jews in all aspects of Austrian life, society and culture
a society hostess describing the meeting in 1902 between Rodin and Gustav Klimt
And then excerpts from more official documents, being a letter from the leader of the 1848 revolution, the key articles from the Dual Alliance of 1879, prime minister Aehrenthal’s proposed solution to the South Slav problem, census figures about Slavs inside the empire, a report on relations between Serbia and Austria-Hungary,
‘What do I have in common with the Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.’
(Franz Kafka, 8 January 1914)
This is a hugely enjoyable biography of Franz Kafka, chiefly because it is itself so unKafkaesque, so informative and logical and entertaining.
Although the subject matter and settings of Kafka’s novels and short stories vary, what all Kafka’s works have in common (well, apart from the really short stories) is the long-winded and often convoluted nature of his prose which seeks to reflect the over-self-conscious and over-thinking paranoia, anxiety and, sometimes, terror of his protagonists, narrators or characters.
Pawel’s book, by contrast, is a wonderfully refreshing combination of deep historical background, penetrating psychological insights, fascinating detail about the literary and cultural world of turn-of-the-century Prague, and hair-raising quotes from Kafka’s diaries, letters and works, all conveyed in brisk and colourful prose. Pawel is about as variedly entertaining as prose can be, which came as a huge relief after struggling through the monotone grimness of a story like The Burrow.
Three ethnicities
If you read any of Kafka’s works it’s difficult to avoid blurbs and introductions which give away the two key facts of his biography – 1. his lifelong fear of his father, Herrmann, and 2. how he spent his entire working life in a state insurance company, itself embedded in the elephantine web of Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy.
The Workmen’s Accident and Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia was an integral part of the pullulating Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy that, like a giant net of near-epic intricacy, covered the entire Hapsburg domain. (The Nightmare of Reason, page 183)
Between them these two facts can be used as the basis of entry-level commentaries on Kafka’s stories, interpreting them as being about either:
anxiety and dread of some nameless father figure who inspires an irrational sense of paralysing guilt
or (as the two famous novels do) as unparalleled descriptions of vast, impenetrable bureaucracies which the helpless protagonists can never understand or appeal to
So far, so obvious. What I enjoyed most in this biography was all the stuff I didn’t know. First and foremost, Pawel gives the reader a much deeper understanding of the history, the politics and, especially, the ethnic make-up of Bohemia, where Kafka was born and lived most his life, and of its capital city, Prague – and explains why this mattered so much.
What comes over loud and clear is the tripartite nature of the situation, meaning there were three main ethnic groups in Bohemia, who all hated each other:
1. The majority of the population of Prague and Bohemia was Czech-speaking Czechs, who became increasingly nationalistic as the 19th century progressed, lobbying for a nation state of their own, outspokenly resentful of the Austrian authorities and of their allies in the German-speaking minority.
2. A minority of the population, around 10 to 15%, were ethnic Germans. They regarded themselves as culturally and racially superior to the Czechs, who they thought of as inferior ‘slavs’. The Germans were bolstered 1. by their proximity to Germany itself, with its immense cultural and literary heritage, and 2. because they spoke the same language as the Austrians who ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Most schools in Bohemia taught German as the official language, resulting in a state of civil war between the two languages and low level conflict between the two cultures – Pawel describes it as an ‘abyss’ (p.140).
Kafka, for example, although he was complimented on his spoken Czech, never considered himself fluent in it, and was educated, preferred to speak and wrote in German. In reference books he is referred to as a master of German prose.
3. And then there were the Jews. Pawel goes into great detail and is absolutely fascinating about the position of Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Bohemia in particular. He goes back to the Emperor Joseph II’s 1781 Patent of Toleration, which allowed Jews and Protestants for the first time to practice their religion in the Empire, and the charter for religious freedom granted the Jews of Galicia in 1789. From these statutes dated a series of other laws enacted throughout the nineteenth century designed to ’emancipate’ the Jews from a range of medieval laws which had placed huge restrictions on how they could dress, where they could go, what jobs they could hold.
But this so-called emancipation was a double-edged sword, because it also abolished the communal autonomy which the Jews had enjoyed, it forbad the wearing of traditional Jewish clothes, and it enforced the Germanisation of Jewish culture.
The effect of all this was that, through the 19th century, successive generations of Jews tried to break out of the squalor and poverty of their predominantly rural settlements, emigrated to the big cities of the Empire, dropped their traditional clothing and haircuts, learned to speak German better than the Germans, and in every way tried to assimilate.
Both [Kafka’s] parents belonged to the first generation of assimilated Jews. (p.54)
Unfortunately, this ‘aping’ of German culture mainly served to breed resentment among ‘true’ Germans against these cultural ‘impostors’, with the net result that, the more the Jews tried to assimilate to German culture, the more the Germans hated them for it.
Thus, in a bitter, world-historical irony, an entire generation of urbanised, secular Jews found themselves in love with and practicing a Germanic culture whose rightful ‘owners’, the Germans, hated them with an unremitting anti-semitism (pp.99, 149).
And these hyper-intelligent Jews were totally aware of the fact, bitterly reminded of it every time another anti-semitic article was published in their newspapers or anti-semitic ruit took place in their towns. And so it helped to create a feeling that if only they weren’t Jews everything would be alright. It helped to create the phenomenon known as Jewish self-hatred, a condition Pawel thinks Kafka suffered from, acutely, all his life (p.108).
(Though not as much as the journalist Karl Kraus. In a typically fascinating digression, Pawel devotes an excoriating passage to Kraus, a secular Jew born into a wealthy industrialist family, who became a leading satirical writer and journalist, and devoted his flaming energies to protecting the ‘purity’ of the German language, and – according to Pawels – castigating ‘the Jews’ for importing provincial jargon and Yiddishisms. Kraus was, in Pawel’s view, ‘the quintessential incarnation of Jewish self-hatred’ (p.226).)
And don’t forget that, all the while they were the subject of German anti-semitism, the Jews also got it in the neck from the other side, from the nationalist Czechs, the more Germanic the Jews strove to become, the more the Czech nationalists hated them for sucking up to their oppressors. The Jews got it from both directions.
I knew about Austrian anti-semitism, not least from reading biographies of Freud. But I didn’t know anything about the distinctive dynamic of Czech anti-semitism.
The emancipation of the Jews
Pawel describes all this in such depth and detail because it explains the impact on Kafka’s own biography – namely that Franz’s father, Herrmann, was one of that generation of Jews who, in the mid-nineteenth-century, escaped from the grinding poverty of the rural shtetl, migrated to the city, and finagled the money to set himself up in business, to try to rise in the world.
One of the best-known things about Kafka is how he lived in abject fear of his father, who instilled a permanent sense of terror and anxiety in him, but Pawel explains brilliantly how Kafka senior was a highly representative figure, just one among a great wave of Jews of his generation who escaped rural poverty, migrated to the city, became more or less successful businessmen and… sired sons who despised them.
He wasn’t alone. Pawel shows how it was a pattern repeated across educated Jewry (p.98).
Seen from this historical perspective, Sigmund Freud (born 1856 in Příbor in what is now the Moravian province of the Czech Republic) is a kind of patron saint of his and the slightly later generation (Kafka was born in 1883) for Freud’s father, Jakob, was the son of devout Hasidic Jews, who, in the classic style, moved from his home district to the big city of Vienna where he struggled to run a business as a wool merchant, rejecting along the way all the appurtenances of the rural Judaism which were so associated with poverty and provincialism. It was as a result of Jakob’s deracination, that his son decisively broke with any religious belief, and became the immensely successful and highly urbanised founder of psychoanalysis.
Same or something similar with a whole generation of Jewish-German writers artists and composers – Kafka, Brod, Hermann Broch, Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, Walter Benjamin, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and so on (pp.98, 99). It was a world of staggering artistic brilliance – this was the generation which contributed to and helped define the whole idea of Modern Art. But it was all built on a volcano, the fierce hatred of ‘genuine’ Germans for the ‘cosmopolitan’ Jews who (they thought) were appropriating their culture.
This was the atmosphere of Kafka’s world, dense with hate. (p.44)
Judaism is replaced by literature
A further consequence emerges from Pawel’s historical approach which is that this generation, the first generation of truly urbanised Jews, which had largely lost its religious faith in the process, nonetheless continued, like their rabbinical forefathers, the Jewish obsession with the written word.
Only instead of devoting their lives to interpreting the Holy Scriptures as their Hasidic forefathers, rabbis and holy men had – these largely irreligious urbanites now nagged and worried about secular types of writing – namely literature and philosophy and criticism and aesthetics. God may have been declared dead and words no longer used to pray and worship – but instead, the endless finagling of rabbis and commentators was now applied to existence itself, to a scrupulous cross-examination of modern life in the hurly-burly of hectic cities.
The Jewish intelligentsia on the whole remained isolated, inbred and inward looking…Theirs was a paradoxically communal shtetl of cantankerous individualists huddled in the warrens of their self-absorption, with literature as their religion and self-expression their road to salvation. (p.153)
As Pawel puts it with typically colourful rhetoric:
Kafka’s true ancestors, the substance of his flesh and spirit, were an unruly crowd of Talmudists, Cabalists, medieval mystics resting uneasy beneath the jumble of heaving, weatherbeaten tombstones in Prague’s Old Cemetery, seekers in search of a reason for faith. (p.100)
The same intense scrutiny the forefathers paid to every word and accent of the Talmud, their heirs now devoted to the production of texts exploring the experience of the modern world which boiled down, again and again, in the hands of its most dogged exponents, to an investigation of language itself.
And so we find Kafka in December 1910 making one of the hundreds and hundreds of diary entries he devoted obsessively to the subject of writing, of words, of prose, of literature:
I cannot write. I haven’t managed a single line I’d care to acknowledge; on the contrary, I threw out everything – it wasn’t much – that I had written since Paris. My whole body warns me of every word, and every word first looks around in all directions before it lets itself be written down by me. The sentences literally crumble in my hands.
‘Every word first looks around in all directions before it lets itself be written down by me’! In Kafka’s hands, even language itself is gripped by fear.
Kafka’s diet
Kafka was a lifelong hypochondriac who also happened to suffer from actual illnesses and conditions. From early in adulthood he experimented with a variety of cures from surprisingly silly quack doctors. He became obsessed with diet, first becoming a vegetarian, and then implementing an increasingly complicated regime of diets, which Pawel describes in detail.
But once again Pawel uses this to make the kind of socio-psychological point for which I really enjoyed this book, when he points out the following: In the Jewish tradition, strict adherence to kashrut or traditional Jewish dietary law linked the individual to the community, made him one with a much larger people and their heritage – whereas the dietary rituals Kafka made for himself completely cut him off not only from the Jewish tradition, but even from his own family, and ultimately his own friends. Later in life Kafka:
gradually got into the habit of taking all his meals by himself and intensely disliked eating in anyone’s presence. (p.209)
Like everything else in his life, even eating became a source of anxiety and dread and shame.
Hermann Kafka and his family
Although Pawel records the lifelong terror and feeling of humiliation which Herrmann inculcated in his over-sensitive son, he injects a strong dose of scepticism. As you read Franz’s Letter to his Father, the sustained thirty-page indictment of Herrmann which poor Franz wrote at the age of 36, you can’t help beginning to feel sorry a bit sorry for Herrmann. It wasn’t his fault that he emerged from grinding poverty all but illiterate and had to work hard all his life to support his family. Whereas Franz enjoyed 16 years of education and wangled a cushy job at the Workers Insurance Company thanks to a well-connected uncle. From one point of view, Franz is the typically ungrateful, spoilt son.
And in a subtle reinterpretation of the traditional story, Pawel wonders if it wasn’t Kafka’s mother, Julie, who did most damage to her son. How? By being totally aware of young Franz’s hyper-sensitive nature, but doing nothing about it – by effectively ignoring his hyper-sensitive soul in order to suck up to her bullying husband.
Because, as Pawel points out, Kafka gave the notorious Letter to His Father to his mother to read and then pass on to the family ‘tyrant’. She certainly did read it but never passed it on, returning it to Franz after a week and, well… Franz could easily have handed it over to his father by hand – or posted it. But he chose not to. That, Pawel speculates, is because the letter had in fact achieved its purpose. Not to address his father at all, but successfully implicating his mother in his childhood and teenage trauma. After all:
All parents fail their children, and all children weave their parents failure into the texture of their lives. (p.82)
As this all suggests, Kafka’s story was very much a family affair, a psychodrama played out in the claustrophobic walls of the Prague apartment he shared with his mother, father and three sisters.
Indeed it is a little staggering to read Pawel’s description of the apartment the family moved to in 1912, whose walls were so thin that everyone could hear everyone else cough or sneeze or open a window or plump a book down on a table – let alone all the other necessary bodily functions. What a terrible, claustrophobic environment it was (and we know this, because we have hundreds of diary entries made by Franz moaning about it) and yet – he didn’t leave.
More than once Pawel suggests there is something very Jewish about this smothering family environment and the way that, although he could easily have left once he had a secure job, Kafka chose to remain within the bosom of his smothering family.
It’s aspects of Kafka’s psychology and life like this which drive Pawel’s frequent comparisons and invocations of Freud, dissector and analyst of the smothering turn-of-the-century, urban, Jewish family, investigator of the kind of family lives that the young women of his case studies made up hysterias and neuroses, and the young men made up violent animal fantasies, to escape from.
But here, as in other ways, Kafka stands out as taking part in a recognisable general trend – but then going way beyond it – or moulding it to his own peculiar needs – because at some level, deep down, he needed to be smothered.
Anti-Semitism and Zionism
And all around them, surrounding the anxieties of family life, were the continual ethnic tensions which regularly broke out into actual violence. Sometimes it was Czech nationalists rioting against their Austro-German overlords in the name of Czech nationalism – as they did in the so-called Prague Pogrom of 1897 when Czech nationalists started off by ransacking well-known German cultural and commercial establishments, but ended up devoting three days to attacking Jewish shops and synagogues and anyone who appeared to be a Jew.
Slowly, over his lifetime, Kafka noted the situation getting steadily worse. Fifteen years later, the 60th anniversary of the accession of the Emperor Franz-Joseph led to violent attacks organised by the Czech National Socialists on German properties, which led to troops being sent in and the imposition of martial law (p.298).
But whether it was the Germans or the Czechs, and whether it was the journalistic or bureaucratic attacks of the intelligentsia, or crude physical attacks on the street (and street fighting occurring on an almost weekly basis, p.205):
The extremist demagogues prevailing in both camps were equally vocal in their common hostility to the Jews.
This pervasive fearfulness among Jews helps explain the origins of Zionism, first given theoretical and practical expression by Theodor Herzl, another urbanised and ‘assimilated’ Jewish son of poorer, more rural parents, from the same generation as Freud (Herzl was born a year later, in 1860).
In 1896, deeply shocked by the anti-semitism revealed by the Dreyfus Affair in France (1894-1906), Herzl published Der Judenstaat, in which he argued that anti-semitism in Europe couldn’t be ‘cured’ but only avoided altogether, by leaving Europe and founding a state solely for Jews.
The theme of Zionism looms large in Kafka’s life. Many of his school and university friends became ardent Zionists – including his good friend and literary executor, Max Brod, who managed to escape Prague on the last train before the Nazis arrived, and successfully made it to Palestine. Zionism it was one of the big socio-political movements of the time, along with socialism, anarchism, and Tolstoyan pacifism. (pp.61, 290)
And it was a practical movement. The Bohemian Zionists didn’t just campaign for the establishment of a foreign homeland; closer to home they organised the community, publishing a weekly magazine named Self Defence edited by Kafka’s friend Felix Weltsch (one of the many writers, journalists, critics and poets who Pawel tells us about).
Above all, they preached the idea that all the Jewish hopes for ‘assimilation’ were a fantasy: the Jews who worshipped German culture were adulating their abuser. There could never be full assimilation and the sooner the Jews realised it and planned for their own salvation the better. Tragically, the Zionists were to be proved entirely right.
So from Kafka’s twenties onwards, Zionism was one of the half dozen cultural and political themes of the day. Late in life Kafka encouraged his sisters to develop agricultural skills preparatory to emigrating to Palestine. It was a constant possibility, or dream of his, mentioned in diaries and letters although, being Kafka, he knew it was not a dream he would ever live to fulfil.
Multiple reasons to be afraid
Thus it is that Pawel’s book brilliantly conveys the multiple levels or sources of Kafka’s terror.
He was born over-sensitive and anxious and would have had a hard time adapting to real life anywhere. He was painfully shy and morbidly self-aware.
His father was a philistine bully who ridiculed his son’s weakness and intellectual interests, exacerbating the boy’s paranoia and anxieties in every way.
In newspapers and even in lectures at the university he attended, Kafka would routinely read or hear the most blistering attacks on the Jews as enemies of culture, emissaries of poverty and disease from pestilent rural slums, Christ-killers and followers of an antiquated anti-Enlightenment superstition.
And then, in the streets, there would be periodic anti-Jewish riots, attacks on individual Jews or smashing up Jewish shops.
In the midst of explaining all this, Pawel makes a point which it is easy to miss. He notes that in Kafka’s surviving correspondence with Max Brod or with his three successive girlfriends, Kafka rarely if ever actually alludes to anti-semitism, or to the street violence, clashes, public disorders and growing power of the anti-semitic nationalist parties in Prague. Pawel makes what I thought was a really powerful comment:
It was only in his fiction that he felt both safe and articulate enough to give voice to his sense of terror. (p.204)
An insight I thought was really worth pondering… something to do with the way fiction, or literature, can be a way of controlling and ordering the otherwise chaotic and overwhelming, the personally overwhelming and the socially overwhelming…
Anyway, that’s a lot of sources of fear and terror to be getting on with, before you even get into Franz’s more personal anxieties – not least about sex and everything sexual, which sent him into paroxysms of self-disgust.
Sex
I had no idea that Kafka was such an habitué of brothels. I mean not now and then. I mean routinely and regularly, as well as having sexual escapades with all sorts of working class girls, serving girls and servants and waitresses and barmaids and cleaning women in the many hotels he stayed at on his business trips. We know this because it is all recorded in the copious diaries he kept, and in his extensive correspondence with Max Brod and he even mentions it in letters to his various fiancées.
The subject prompts another one of Pawel’s wide-ranging cultural investigations which I found so fascinating, this time a lengthy description of the way the madonna-whore dichotomy experienced a kind of ill-fated, decadent blossoming in turn of the century Austro-Hungary – in the Vienna we all know about with its Klimt and Schiele paintings, but also in Germanic Prague.
Sex… was the sinister leitmotif dominating literature, drama, and the arts of the period. And beyond the poetic metaphors loomed the brutal real-life affinity of sex and death – botched abortions, childbed fever, syphilis, suicides. (p.77)
All his friends were at it, they all slept with prostitutes: we learn that Max Brod’s marriage got into trouble because he simply refused to carry on sleeping with every woman he could. The women – we learn – came in different grades, from professionals in brothels, to semi-pros in doorsteps, to amateurs – cleaners and suchlike – who would give you a quick one for cash.
All of which exacerbated the aforementioned Madonna-Whore complex, whereby women were divided into two categories – the generally working-class whores you paid to have dirty sex with – and the pure, high-minded and chaste young ladies you accompanied to concerts and were expected to marry (p.180).
To an astonishing extent, Kafka was a fully paid-up member of this club and had an extraordinary number of casual sexual partners – innumerable encounters which he then followed up with the predictable paroxysms of self-loathing and self-hatred. In this respect he was surprisingly unoriginal.
There is a lot more to be said about the relationship between Kafka’s intense but guilt-ridden sex life and the peculiar relations his two key protagonists have with women (in The Trial and The Castle) but that’s for others to write about. I’m interested in history, and language.
The Workmen’s Accident and Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia
It is a revelation to discover that Kafka was good at his job in this insurance company. Not just good, vital. His quick intelligence and pedantic attention to detail were just what was needed. He was tasked with auditing safety regulations about a whole range of industrial processes, a job which required him to travel extensively around the country, staying in hotels (shagging chambermaids if possible) and visiting a huge range of factories and workplaces.
His annual reviews still survive and glow with praise from his superiors and colleagues. He started work at the company’s offices in 1908, was promoted within a year, given full civil service tenure in 1910, advanced to Junior Secretary in 1913, to Secretary in 1920, and senior Secretary in 1922. His immediate superior, Chief Inspector Pfohl, wrote that without him the entire department would collapse. He was a model employee, prompt, intelligent, diligent and polite, as all the testimony from his colleagues confirms.
Fourteen years of following bureaucratic procedures in an institute which was itself part of the wider bureaucratic Empire. And of writing official reports in the tone and style of a senior bureaucrat. You’d have to be quite dense not to link these factors with a) the visions of a vast topless bureaucracy which form the core of the two great novels, and b) with the parody of official, academic-bureaucratic style which is so omnipresent, especially in the later stories.
Kafka’s officialese
Commenting on the contradiction between Kafka the florid hypochondriac and Kafka the smartly turned-out insurance inspector, a contemporary Prague’s literary circle, Oskar Baum, is quoted about how the mental or intellectual structures of the workplace, of its official and stern prose, mapped very handily onto Kafka’s intensely personal obsessions with writing.
By nature he was a fanatic full of luxuriating fantasy, but he kept its glow in check by constantly striving toward strict objectivity. To overcome all cloying or seductive sentimental raptures and fuzzy-minded fantasising was part of his cult of purity – a cult quasi-religious in spirit, though often eccentric in its physical manifestation. He created the most subjective imagery, but it had to manifest itself in the form of utmost objectivity (quoted on page 133)
It’s easy to overlook, but this is a profoundly distinctive aspect of Kafka’s art which is easy to overlook: that all these delirious and often visionary stories are told in very formal and precise prose, and in a style which, in the later stories, becomes really heavily drenched in bureaucratic or academic or official rhetoric.
Pawel’s lurid style
So I found the way Pawel’s factual information about the social, economic and political changes in Bohemia leading up to Kafka’s birth – specifically the changing role of Jews in Bohemian culture – and then his detailed account of Franz’s family life and how that was woven into the complicated social and intellectual currents of the time, really built up a multi-layered understanding of Kafka’s life and times.
But curiously at odds with all this is Pawel’s own very uneven style. One minute he is describing statistics about industrial production or the percentage population of the different ethnicities in the tone of a government report or Wikipedia article:
Prague’s German-speaking minority was rapidly dwindling in proportion to the fast-growing Czech majority, from 14.6 percent in 1880, when the first language census was taken, to 13.6 percent in 1889, Kafka’s first school year. The city’s population totaled 303,000 at the time; of these, 41,400 gave German as their first and principal language. (p.31)
Or:
Between 1848 and 1890, Bohemia’s share in the total industrial output of the monarchy rose from 46 to 59 percent. By 1890, Bohemia and Moravia accounted for 65 percent of Austria’s industrial labour force. (p.37)
The next, he is writing wild and extravagant similes which seem to belong to another kind of book altogether. Here he is describing one of Kafka’s teachers:
Gschwind, author of several studies in linguistics, was rightfully regarded as an eminent classicist, and one can only speculate on the reasons that led him to waste his scholarly gifts and encyclopedic knowledge on a gang of recalcitrant teenagers who, as a group, progressed in classical philology with all the speed and enthusiasm of a mule train being driven up a mountain. (p.73)
Here he is describing Kafka’s anxiety about his end-of-school exams:
The prospect of those apocalyptic trials turned the final school years into a frenzied last-ditch effort to shore up the crumbling ramparts of knowledge, retrieve eight years of facts and figures, and prepare for a bloodbath. (p.76)
Once he starts engaging with Kafka’s stories, Pawel often adopts their phraseology, or at least their worldview, in over-the-top descriptions which could have been penned by Edgar Allen Poe.
Kafka’s impulse was basically sound – that of a trapped, starving animal wanting to claw its way out and sink its teeth into a solid food. (p.114)
Here he is describing the ferociously competitive literary world of Edwardian Prague:
In their panic it was every man for himself, a wild stampeded of gregarious loners grappling with monsters spawned in their own bellies. (p.155)
Or describing the detailed and self-punishing diaries Kafka kept all his adult life.
These so-called diaries assumed many forms and functions, from the writer’s version of the artist’s sketchbook to a tool for self-analysis; they were a fetishistic instrument of self-mutilation, a glimpse of reason at the heart of madness, and an errant light in the labyrinth of loneliness. (p.213)
In fact you can watch Pawel’s style go from sensible to overblown in just that one sentence.
I’ve read criticisms of the book which ridicule Pawel’s purple prose and certainly, from a po-faced academic point of view, much of his writing can sound a bit ludicrous. But as a reader I found it deeply enjoyable. It made me smile. Sometimes it was so over the top it made me laugh out loud.
I liked it for at least two reasons: after struggling with the long-winded and often very official and bureaucratic prose of late Kafka, reading Pawel’s juicy similes and purple paragraphs was like going from black and white to colour.
Secondly, it matches Kafka’s own hysteria. Kafka really was a very, very weird person. His letters abound in the most extreme language of paralysing fear and inchoate terror and crippling anxiety.
My fear… is my substance, and probably the best part of me.
He describes not being able to stand up for fear, not being able to walk for fear, not being able to face people or say anything because of the terror it caused him.
This craving I have for people which turns to fear the moment it reaches fulfilment (letter of July 1912)
– all symptoms of what Pawel calls his ‘near-pathological sensitivity’.
Kafka describes the way words crumble at his touch, his heart is going to explode, his head is too heavy to carry. He talked and wrote regularly about suicide (except that, in typical Kafkaesque fashion, he wrapped it round with paradoxes and parables).
Always the wish to die, and the still-just-hanging on, that alone is love (Diary, 22 October 113)
In other words, much of Pawel’s lurid and melodramatic writing, while not in the same league as Kafka’s, while much more obvious and pulpy and sometimes quite silly – nevertheless is not an unreasonable way to try and catch the permanent atmosphere of extremity and hyperbole which Kafka lived in all the time. I thought it was a reasonable attempt to translate Kafka’s own worldview from Kafkaese into phraseology which is easier for you and me to process and understand.
Fear, disgust, and rage were what this recalcitrant bundle of taut nerves, brittle bones, frail organs and coddled flesh had aroused in him from earliest childhood.
And sometimes Pawel’s phrases are so colourful and exaggerated that they’re funny. And humour, real laugh-out-loud humour, is in short supply in this story.
From the 1920s to the 1960s György Lukács was one of the leading Marxist philosophers and literary critics in Europe.
Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1885, the son of a very affluent Jewish banker, he benefited from a superb education and was a leading intellectual at Budapest university, combining interests in literature and (Neo-Kantian) philosophy, and founded a salon which featured leading Hungarian writers and composers during the Great War.
The experience of the war (although he was himself exempted from military service) radicalised Lukács and he joined the Hungarian Communist Party in 1918. His cultural eminence led to him being appointed People’s Commissar for Education and Culture in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic which lasted from 21 March to 1 August 1919 and took its orders directly from Lenin. Lukács was an enthusiastic exponent of Lenin’s theory of Red Terror.
When the Republic was overthrown by army generals who instituted the right-wing dictatorship which was to run Hungary for the rest of the interwar period, Lukács fled to Vienna where he spent the 1920s developing a philosophical basis for the Leninist version of Marxism.
In 1930 he was ‘summoned’ to Moscow to work at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, although he soon got caught up in Stalin’s purges and was sent into exile in Tashkent. But Lukács was fortunate enough to survive – unlike an estimated 80% of Hungarian exiles in Russia, who perished.
At the end of the Second World War Lukács was sent back to Hungary to take part in the new Hungarian communist government, where he was directly responsible for written attacks on non-communist intellectuals, and took part in the removal of independent and non-communist intellectuals from their jobs, many being forced to take jobs as manual labourers.
Lickspittle apparatchik though that makes him sound, Lukács in fact trod a careful line which managed to be critical of Stalinism, albeit in coded and often abstruse philosophical phraseology. Due to his experience and seniority, Lukács was made a minister in the government of Imry Nagy which in 1956 tried to break away from Russia’s control during the so-called Hungarian Uprising. Nagy’s government was suppressed by the Soviets, and Lukács along with the rest of the Nagy government was exiled to Romania. Nagy himself was executed, Lukács only just escaped that fate. Yet again Lukács had experienced at first hand the brutal and repressive force of Soviet tyranny.
He was allowed back to Budapest in 1957 on the condition that he abandoned his former criticisms of the Soviet Union, engaged in public self-criticism, and on this basis was allowed to keep his academic posts, to continue writing and publishing his theoretical and critical works, up to his death in 1971.
His was a highly representative life of a certain kind of Central European intellectual in the twentieth century. He was reviled at the time by the people whose lives he blighted and by a wide range of liberal and conservative opponents.
Modernism as a symptom of capitalist society
In 1955 Lukács delivered a series of lectures on the clash between Realism and Modernism and a year later the lectures were published in essay form in a short book titled The Meaning of Contemporary Realism.
The message is simple: Realism good, Modernism bad. Simple enough, but the interest and, for me at any rate, the great pleasure to be had from reading this book is in the secondary arguments, in the clarity with which he presents his premises and works through the ideas and theories which support his case.
Lukács begins with a sweeping premise: the era we live in is dominated by the conflict between capitalism and socialism. Looking back at the nineteenth century we can see how Realism in the arts emerged with the newly triumphant bourgeoisie, and was a result of the new social conditions brought about by their rise and overthrow of the last vestiges of power of the European aristocracy.
(Realist authors would include Stendhal, Balzac and early Flaubert in France, Tolstoy in Russia, George Eliot in England, Mark Twain in America.)
Realism in literature was followed by Naturalism in the final third of the nineteenth century, which paid more attention to the grim social conditions of mature capitalist society but also, in the hands of a novelist like Zola, began the process of reducing human beings to ciphers worked on by malign environments. Darwinism, when applied to society by right-wing theorists, could be made to make people appear simple tools of their genetic inheritance, while late-Victorian socialist theories could make people appear pawns and slaves of their working environments.
Émile Zola (1840 to 1902) was the chief exponent of Naturalism. He regarded his novels as sociological experiments. In Lukács’s opinion, Zola abandoned the tricky balance which the realist novelists maintained between character and ‘type’, in favour of the latter: he created countless social types, which helps explain why Zola wrote nearly forty novels without a single memorable character in any of them.
(Naturalist authors are spearheaded by Zola in France, with maybe Jack London in America, George Gissing and Arthur Morrison in England.)
By the end of the century (during the 1890s) a shoal of literary movements developed which prioritised an interest in decadence, perversion, the macabre and gruesome, the so-called Decadent movement and the gloomy atmosphere of Symbolism.
This brings us to the eruption of Modernism about the time of the First World War, the movement which, Lukács claims, is still praised and defended by bourgeois capitalist critics at the time he’s writing (1955). But for Lukács, Modernism represents a colossal failure of humanity. Modernism turns its back on history and society, its protagonists are almost all loners undergoing nervous breakdowns, hopelessly alienated from societies which are portrayed as stuck, static, incapable of change or improvement.
From T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land to Samuel Beckett in Waiting For Godot, Modernist writers depict complete psychological collapse, in Beckett’s case the degradation of human beings into mumbling vegetables. He backs it up with references to Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and other European works which foreground hopelessness and despair, and he was, of course, writing during the heyday of French existentialism, which became a byword in the 1950s for black sweaters and anguish.
All of these Modernist works and writers, Lukács argues, are symptoms of the alienating effect of living under Western capitalism. All these writers, artists and composers bear out Marx’s insight that in the capitalist system people are alienated from each other and from themselves.
Specific points
This makes Lukács sound like a cumbersome Stalinist commissar, but in fact the book is a pleasure to read from start to finish because:
it moves relatively quickly, not belabouring the points
it makes references to all kinds of writers, most from the European and not the Anglo-Saxon tradition so which we Brits are not very familiar with
it features a whole series of thought-provoking ideas
Time
There is a fascinating discussion of subjective versus objective time, and how Modernists of all stripe, including Modernist philosophers, became fascinated by trying to describe the undifferentiated flow of sense impressions and ideas which became known as stream-of-consciousness, most famously in the works of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
Lukács compares and contrasts Joyce and Woolf’s approaches with the way Thomas Mann uses what, at first sight, is also stream of consciousness to capture the thoughts of the poet Goethe in his novel Lotte in Weimar (1939). Mann is a realist writer and so, in Lukács’s opinion, when he uses stream of consciousness it is as a tool to help particular individuals and events emerge against a clearly defined social backdrop.
Static Modernism versus dynamic Realism
Joyce’s worldview is static. More than one critic has pointed out how Ulysses portrays a Dublin trapped in stasis and his masterpiece, Finnegan’s Wake, portrays a vast circular movement. But, says Lukács, human beings only achieve their personhood, only become fully human, by interacting with other humans in a constantly changing, dynamic society. Realist authors select characters and details to portray their understanding of this ceaseless dialectic between the individual and society.
Solipsism and nihilism
A full and proper understanding of society in all its relations is empowering, an analysis and understanding which gives people the confidence to mobilise and change things. By contrast, Lukács accuses Modernists of turning their backs on a healthy interaction with the world, of rejecting society, and rejecting a historical understanding of how societies change and evolve.
And it is no great leap for Modernists, in Lukács’s view, to pass from the belief that nothing ever changes, to despair. Rejecting society and history leads the protagonists of Modernist fictions to:
be confined within the limits of their own subjective experiences (Joyce, stream of consciousness, Beckett’s monads)
ultimately deprive the protagonist of even a self – a personal history, since that history is (in a normal person) largely a record of the interaction between themselves and the host of others, starting with their family and moving outwards, which constitute society
As Lukács puts it:
By exalting man’s subjectivity, at the expense of the objective reality of his environment, man’s subjectivity is itself impoverished. (page 24)
Man is reduced to a sequence of unrelated experiential fragments. (page 26)
Heidegger versus Hegel
In this context, Lukács invokes the teachings of Heidegger, the godfather of 20th century existentialism, with his fundamental idea of Geworfenheit ins Dasein, that human beings have been ‘thrown-into’-Being’, abandoned in a godless universe etc etc, all the self-pitying tropes which have been promoted by existentialist philosophers, critics, playwrights, novelists, film-makers, rock stars and millions of teenagers in their lonely bedrooms ever since.
The individual, retreating into himself in despair at the cruelty of the age, may experience an intoxicated fascination with his forlorn condition. (page 38)
By contrast, Lukács goes back to the origins of Western philosophy to invoke the fundamental insight of one of its founders – Aristotle – that man is a social animal: we only fully live and have our being in asocial context. This insight recurs in various Western thinkers and finds its fullest modern embodiment in the vast system of Georg Hegel (1770 to 1831) who, in the early nineteenth century, applies his theoretical model of the dialectic to the continual interplay between the healthily-adjusted individual and the society they find themselves in.
How does this play out in fiction? Well, the realist novelist such as George Eliot or Tolstoy chooses representative types, puts them in a narrative which represents realistic actions which capture the possibilities of their society, and selects details which highlight, bolster and bring out these two aspects. By and large things change in a realist novel, not least the characters, sometimes against the backdrop of dramatic social events (Middlemarch and the Great Reform Bill, War and Peace and the Napoleonic War).
It is the realist’s interest in the interplay between a character and his or her fully realised environment – from Homer’s Achilles to Thomas Mann’s Adrian Leverkuhn – which gives us a fully developed sense of character and, deeper than this, a dynamic sense of human potential. At bottom, the subject of the realist author is human change and development.
Moreover, Lukács goes on to point out that all literature is, at some level, realistic. It would be impossible to have a totally non-realist novel (whereas you can, for example, have an utterly abstract work of art). More to his point, about the value of society and history:
A writer’s pattern of choice is a function of his personality. But personality is not in fact timesless and absolute, however it may appear to the individual consciousness. Talent and character may be innate; but the manner in which they develop, or fail to develop, depends on the writer’s interaction with his environment, on his relationships with other human beings. His life is part of the life of his times; no matter whether he is conscious of this, approves or disapproves. He is part of a larger social and historical whole. (page 54)
So much for the Realist worldview, then.
The Modernist, on the other hand, rejects all this. More often than not Modernist characters are extremes, psychopaths, neurotic, going mad. Lukács points to all of Samuel Beckett’s characters, trapped in the cage of their solipsism, but also the many mentally challenged characters in William Faulkner, or of the man adrift on a sea of phenomena in Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities.
Details are chosen not to highlight the characters’ representativeness but to bring out the freakishness of themselves and the uncanny world they inhabit. And the plot or story is often sick and twisted (Faulkner), or barely exists (Joyce), or revels in degradation and decline (Beckett).
(I laughed out loud when he described the way Beckett stands at the end of this tradition, as an example of ‘a fully standardised nihilistic modernism’, making him sound like a standard edition family saloon or an entry-level fridge freezer, page 53)
In a striking manoeuvre Lukács invokes Freud as a godfather to Modernism, pointing out that Freud himself openly declared that his way of gaining insight into the structure of the ‘normal’ mind was via study of a colourful array of neurotics, obsessives and phobics. In other words, one of the major planks of thought underlying all Modernist psychology, Freudianism, is based on generalisations from the morbid and the unnatural (page 30).
Franz Kafka
Which brings us to Kafka. Kafka, for Lukács, even more than Beckett, for all his genius, represents the acme of the sickness that is Modernism. He points out a detail I’d forgotten which is that, as Joseph K is being led away to be executed, he thinks of flies stuck on flypaper, tearing their little legs off. This, Lukács says, is the vision at the heart of all Kafka’s fiction and at the heart of the Modernist worldview – humans are helpless insects, totally impotent, paralysed in a society they don’t understand, trapped in unintelligible situations.
Kafka’s angst is the experience par excellence of modernism. (page 36)
Lukács dwells on Kafka’s brilliant way with details, his eye for the telling aspect of a person or situation which brings it to life. But Lukács uses this fact to bring out the world of difference between the realistic detail in a realist fiction –which has been chosen because it is representative of the real world, properly conceived and understood – and the details in Kafka, which he selected with absolute genius in order to convey his crushing sense of the utter, paralysing futility and nonsense of existence.
Kafka’s fictions are absolutely brilliant allegories, but allegories of nothing, allegories of emptiness (pages 44 to 45).
Thoughts
Pros
This is just a selection of some of Lukács’s insights in this short and, for the most part, very readable book. He may have been a slimeball, he may have been a criminal, he may have been a hypocrite, he may have been a toady to power – but there is no denying he was a very clever man, very well read, and he conveys his learning fairly lightly. He doesn’t set out to be impenetrable, as most French theorists do.
And he’s candid enough to admit that many of the experiments and new techniques and works written by the Modernists were dazzling masterpieces, and to concede that much of the stuff written under the aegis of Stalin’s doctrine of Socialist Realism was tripe. He’s too sophisticated to defend rubbish.
But his basic critique that the Modernist works which Western critics, to this day, tend to uncritically adulate, do tend to foreground the outsider, the alienated, the loner, often with severe psychological problems, in fictions which often lack much plot or any interaction with other characters, and in which both hero and author have largely turned their back on wider society – this is very insightful. His analysis of these aspects of Modernist fiction is useful and stimulating.
And, having just read Kafka’s biography, his diagnosis of Kafka’s writings as the brilliant masterpieces of a very sick mind are completely spot on. I like the way he brings out the important of the just-so detail in Kafka’s works, the precise details which tip the whole thing over into paranoid nightmare.
Cons
However, all this good stuff is in the first part of the book. As the book progresses an increasingly more dogmatic tone emerges. What are at first scattered references early in the book to the Cold War and the Peace Movement coalesce into a sustained political polemic. Lukács links his concept of the Good Realist writer directly with the 1950s Peace Movement, which was strongly promoted by the Soviet Union amid disingenuous claims to want to end the Cold War (while all the time retaining a vice-like grip on Eastern Europe and funding destabilising communist insurgents around the world).
By contrast, Lukács explicitly links some of the philosophers and authors of angst (most notoriously Heidegger) with Nazism and so tries to tar all Modernist authors with the taint of Fascism, which is clearly not true, think of Kafka, and Joyce and Faulkner.
In other words, Lukács disappoints by dropping the insights of the early part in order to make a direct and crude connection between a writer’s underlying worldviews and current developments in international politics. He is not crude enough to blame individual writers for Fascism or capitalism – but he does point out repeatedly that they base their works on the same worldview that accepts the exploitation and alienation implicit in the capitalist system.
For most of the first half I enjoyed Lukács’s dissection of the psychopathology of Modernism. But when he began to directly relate it to capitalist-imperialism and to lecture the reader on how it led to The Wrong Side in the Cold War, the book suddenly felt crude, simplistic and hectoring. When he suddenly states that:
The diabolical character of the world of modern capitalism, and man’s impotence in the face of it, is the real subject matter of Kafka’s writing (page 77)
I thought, How can such a clever, well-read man write something so crude, and I immediately thought of counter-arguments:
Kafka’s visions of human life crushed by a faceless and persecuting bureaucracy could equally well have come out of Czarist Russia with its notorious secret police or, indeed, Stalin’s Russia.
Kafka didn’t in fact live in an advanced capitalist society such as America, Britain or Germany – the endless, useless bureaucracy lampooned in his books is precisely not that of snappily efficient America or dogmatically thorough Germany, but precisely that of provincial Bohemia, a sleepy backwater entangled in the vast and impenetrable civil service of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
And Kafka would have been horribly out of place in any social system, at any time, as his biography brings home with startling force.
Worst of all, when, in the middle of the book, Lukács says that what counts about a writer isn’t their actual works, not their words or pages or techniques or style, but the general tendency of their thought… the implication is that this tendency can be measured by a communist commissar like himself – and suddenly I could hear the tones of Zhdanov and the other Soviet dictators of culture, whose crude diktats resulted in countless artists and writers being arbitrarily arrested and despatched to die in the gulag, crying out as they went that they meant no offence – while the apparatchiks calmly replied that they weren’t being punished for anything they’d actually said or done: they were being condemned to ten years hard labour for the tendency of their work.
At moments like this in this suave and sophisticated book, you suddenly glimpse the truncheon and the barbed wire of actual communist tyranny, which gives it a sudden thrill and horror not normally encountered in a genteel volume of literary criticism.
So it’s a complicated business, reading Lukács – at one moment, immensely rewarding, at the next genuinely disgusting.
A Small Yes and a Big No by George Grosz (1946) Grosz was a communist party member in the 1920s. His autobiography includes an account of a trip to Soviet Russia in 1923 where he met Lenin and was put off communism by the atmosphere of bullying and poverty
Communism in Poland
Warsaw 1920 by Adam Zamoyski (2008) How the Polish army stopped the Red Army’s advance into Poland in 1920 preventing them pushing on to support revolution in Germany
The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953) A devastating indictment of the initial appeal and then appalling consequences of communism in Poland: ‘Mass purges in which so many good communists died, the lowering of the living standard of the citizens, the reduction of artists and scholars to the status of yes-men, the extermination of entire national groups…’
The Rebel by Albert Camus (1951) Camus’s comprehensive rejection of communism in which he seeks to prove that communist rule will be necessarily tyrannical
Communism in Spain
The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor (2006) Comprehensive account of the Spanish civil war with much detail on how the Stalin-backed communist party put more energy into eliminating its opponents on the Left than fighting the fascists, with the result that Franco won
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938) Orwell’s eye-witness account of how the Stalin-backed communist party turned on its left-wing allies, specifically the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification which Orwell was fighting with, and how he only just managed to escape arrest, interrogation and probable execution
The complex of feelings and responses I have called ‘the hunger for wholeness’ turns out on examination to be a great regression born of fear: fear of modernity. The abstractions that Tönnies and Hofmannsthal and the others manipulated – Volk, Führer, Organismus, Reich, Entscheidung, Gemeinschaft – reveal a desperate search for roots and for community, a vehement, often vicious repudiation of reason accompanied by the urge for direct action or for surrender to a charismatic leader. (Weimar Culture p.100)
It took me a while to figure out what this book was for, what it’s about. I had to read the first half twice before the penny dropped.
It’s a relatively short book, 150 pages in the old Pelican paperback edition which I’ve got, and is divided into six chapters, with a 20-page historical overview at the end. The need for this appendix highlights the main thing about the text: it is emphatically not a history of the Weimar Republic. It is not even, despite the title, a history of Weimar culture. It is a series of six essays showing how certain highly specific, and limited, aspects of Weimar culture helped to fatally undermine it.
The chapters are:
The Trauma of Birth: from Weimar to Weimar
The Community of Reason: Conciliators and Critics
The Secret Germany: Poetry as Power
The Hunger for Wholeness: Trials of Modernity
The Revolt of the Son: Expressionist Years
The Revenge of the Father: Rise and Fall of Objectivity
Analysis of chapter 2
To take a sample chapter, the ‘Community of Reason’ chapter is not about intellectual life as a whole in the Weimar republic: it focuses on the founding of several important institutes outside the established universities, including the German Academy for Politics (1920), the Warburg Institute (1921), The Institute for Social Research (1923) and the Psychoanalytic Institute in Berlin (1910). (Gay has a special interest in psychoanalysis and is the author of a major biography of Sigmund Freud.)
The stories behind each of these organisations is fairly interesting, in a gossipy sort of way (Warburg was a borderline psychotic, apparently), but it’s only at the end of the chapter that Gay makes his point, which is that – although these are the bodies which went into exile when the Nazis came to power and therefore had a large influence abroad – at home they were relatively little known and had little or no impact.
This point only really becomes obvious in the last few pages where he contrasts the modernising innovativeness of this handful of institutes with the prevailing worldview of most academics and further education institutions in the Weimar republic, which were incredibly conservative and close-minded. We tend to think of students as fairly radical and subversive. Not in Weimar Germany, apparently.
Gay describes a widespread phenomenon known as Vernunftrepublikaners or ‘rational republicans’. This was the label given to intellectuals who only reluctantly gave assent to the establishment of the Weimar Republic, who supported it with their heads, while their hearts and souls continued to lie elsewhere.
So the ‘Community of Reason’ chapter amounts to a gossipy surf through the sector, with a conclusion that the most interesting thinkers in this area were ineffectual or irrelevant, while the majority of academics and students remained resolutely against the new liberal government.
Analysis of chapter 3
The same sort of structure is used for chapter three, ‘The Secret Germany: Poetry as Power’.
This takes the form of a sequence of shortish sections each describing a German poet who lived during – or was revived during – the Weimar period, being: Stefan George (1868-1933), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), the Romantic poet Hölderlin (1770-1840), Kleist (1777-1811) and the playwright Büchner (1813-1827).
The pen portraits of each writer read much like the short introductory essays you used to get in old-fashioned student introductions to literature, books with titles like ‘An introduction to German poetry’ – short intros with a smattering of biographical facts, some generalisations about the work of their circle (the George circle seems to have been a particular phenomenon of Weimar). But Gay doesn’t actually quote or analyse any of their poetry, so you are left none the wiser about their abilities or styles.
Again it is only at the end of the chapter that we come to the point: all these writers were emphatically anti-rational, their writings over and over emphasising the importance of spirit and sensibility, community and authenticity – in both the writers and the style of their critics and readers.
Rilke became the dubious beneficiary of German literary criticism, a kind of writing that was less a criticism than a celebration, intuitive in method and overblown in rhetoric, a making and staking of grandiose claims, a kind of writing mired in sensibility and pseudo-philosophical mystery-making. (p.54)
Gay finds in the popularity of living poets like Rilke and George, and in the revivals of Hölderlin and Kleist, a morbid obsession with death, unreason, an ‘exaltation of irrationality, a blissful death wish’ (p.66). The blurring of the dividing lines between passion and religion led to ‘shapeless but impassioned religiosity’. It fatally led to poets being placed above thinkers or, as in Heidegger’s case, thinking itself becoming a kind of poetry, a kind of rousing rhetoric. Obscure but impassioned, it paved the way for fanatic barbarism.
It was only by reading the opening chapters twice that I realised Gay’s intention is not at all to give a panoramic overview of Weimar culture. It is not even to explore particular sectors, like poetry or film. It is to build up a collective indictment of the way leading intellectuals, institutions, writers and poets, historians and philosophers, refused to embrace the values of modern urban democracy – and so paved the way for Nazism.
Martin Heidegger
Take the notorious Martin Heidegger, notorious because he was both one of the seismic philosophical presences of the century, and because he undoubtedly gave help and support to the Nazis. Difficult and obscure though his work is (and he wrote it using words and terminology which he invented solely for the purpose) its central themes are comprehensible enough: rejection of the city, of urban life, of business, of politics, of democracy. Embrace of primitive being, primal existence, preference for living (as Heidegger did) a primitive existence in a retired rural area, wearing peasant costume, thinking weighty troubled thoughts.
Gay gives a pen portrait of Heidegger not to offer any analysis of his work or importance as a philosopher, but to show that a direct line links him with the anti-Enlightenment Romanticism of Holderlin; to show how deep and powerful the anti-modern, anti-democratic spirit was in German cultural life.
As a tiny symptom of this prevailing mood Gay points out that the Nazi Party was, of course, a political party, but it always referred to itself as a movement, a mass movement of spiritual and cultural regeneration and purification. Something above party and politics.
And this rhetoric fell right into line with the rhetorics of poets like Hölderlin and philosophers like Heidegger.
What Heidegger did was to give philosophical seriousness, professorial respectability, to the love affair with unreason and death that dominated so many Germans in this hard time. (p.85)
Summary
So: I thought this book would be an introduction to the cultural life of the Weimar Republic, but it really, really isn’t. Much the reverse: Gay shows how intellectual trends like a yearning for the order and hierarchy of the old Empire, combined with a widespread revulsion against modern urban life, and the cult of nature, primitivism, the rejection of the intellect and worship of ‘authenticity’, ‘depth’ and rhetorical power – how all this created an intellectual and cultural environment which was tailor-made for the advent of Hitler, with his appeal to people’s deeper, more ‘authentic’ emotions, his dismissal of foreign democracy and decadent cosmopolitanism, his appeal to the ‘true’ German spirit, founded in blood and suffering – his demand for unquestioning devotion.
And the remaining chapters ram this message home.
There is a long section about German historians of the 1920s (of pretty limited interest to anyone who isn’t themselves a professional historian) which indicts them for tending to glorify great Leaders of the past (Frederick the Great) as embodying German values of Kultur, an idea which German intellectuals considered superior to the decadent tinsel of Paris culture, and to Britain’s shopkeeper mentality.
The Weimar years saw the tremendous growth of the ‘Wandervogel’, community groups for the young which promoted outdoor activities and folk culture. Although some were supposedly socialist, Gay emphasises that their politics was shallow: it was a great surf of emotional enthusiasm looking for a direction, for a Leader.
Later chapters deal, in the same brief manner, with a number of other cultural peaks. The famous film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, is taken as typical of the confusion of aims and objectives common among Expressionist artists and film-makers. They too wanted a return to nature, a breakthrough to a more spiritual world – and yet they specialised in conveying confusion, fear, ugliness and extreme emotions. These weren’t attitudes suited to the calm, business-like give and take of democratic politics.
Gay has a longish discussion of Thomas Mann’s most famous novel, The Magic Mountain, whose main thrust seems to be that the novel is a working-through of Mann’s conflicted emotions about culture and democracy. The characters of the novel, living high in an Alpine sanatorium for patients with tuberculosis, on the face of it want to recover and live — but there is a tugging undercurrent romanticising death, with characters romantically attracted to extinction, to vaporous fantasies about ceasing upon the midnight with no pain. Even for so sensible a figure as Mann, death is just so much more glamorous and interesting than humdrum existence.
In fact, Mann is taken as a paradigm of Weimar attitudes: he had written patriotic gush when Germany had entered the Great War, had slowly become disillusioned as the war ground on, had been one of the early ‘rational republicans’ giving reluctant support to the Republic and, by the end of the 20s, had come to appreciate its virtues and to be an active supporter of democracy.
But it was too little, too late. Gay shows how outnumbered he was.
Gay’s thesis
In each chapter, in each movement and sector he looks at, Gay discerns the same underlying pattern: worship or glorification of the irrational, savage criticism of urban life, of business, of politics. Grosz et al tend to be admired nowadays for their scathing satires on political corruption. Gay interprets them as banging another nail in the coffin, with their communist, anti-republican propaganda.
For a democracy to work a culture must believe in it, must want it. It must have enough functioning civil servants and politicians who believe in its structures and institutions, who support its values and ideas, to keep it working.
Gay singles out the second-phase Bauhaus under the influence of László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers from about 1925 onwards, determined to work with modern materials and confront modern design challenges, as an epitome of what should have been happening.
What Gropius taught, and what most Germans did not want to learn, was the lesson of Bacon and Descartes and the Enlightenment: that one must confront the world and dominate it, that the cure for the ills of modernity is more, and the right kind of modernity. (p.106)
But Gropius was opposed, even within his own school, by more radical voices, communists who wanted to overthrow the existing system. Meanwhile from the outside, the Bauhaus faced right-wing nationalist opposition throughout its existence and was, finally, closed down by the Nazis soon after they came to power.
Gay’s book shows how, from top to bottom, from university historians to avant-garde film-makers and artists, from arcane philosophers to youth movements, from its architects to many of its leading politicians, the majority of the Weimar Republic’s intellectuals despised it, hated its ‘shallow’ urban values, despised the business-like compromises and deals which democracy requires.
Being passionate artists or historians entranced with Germany’s military past or philosophers of ‘Authenticity’, they preferred passion, blood, Kultur, das Volk, intuition… almost anything except reason and moderation.
Basically, the book could have been better titled The Weimar Republic and its Enemies. Or maybe The Weimar Republic: The Enemies Within. Or The Intellectual Malaise of the Weimar Republic.
After Hitler came to power it was common for foreigners to say, ‘How can Hitler and his gang of thugs have taken over the country of Bach and Mozart?’
Gay’s book goes to show how little the people who said that understood the Germany of the 1920s and 30s. His book explains the failure of intellectuals not so much to oppose Hitler (there were plenty of communist intellectuals who wrote, painted or acted against Hitler) but to do the more practical and needful thing – to actively support the Weimar democracy.
His book shows how the lack of support, indeed the widespread lack of understanding of what is required for a functioning democracy, goes a long way to explaining why the Weimar republic collapsed: not enough influential people believed in it or wanted it. They didn’t necessarily support Hitler but – on the evidence Gay presents here – for all sorts of reasons, they actively opposed the republic and the spirit of modern, secular, urban democracy which it represented.
Gay’s authority
And Gay speaks with more than academic authority. Peter Joachim Fröhlich was born in Berlin in 1923, at the height of the hyper-inflation which racked the Weimar Republic in that year. In 1941 he emigrated to America where he changed his surname to Gay, a close translation of Fröhlich which means ‘cheerfully’.
Gay studied history at the university of Denver, gained a PhD at Columbia, and then taught at Yale University from 1969 until his retirement in 1993. He wrote 25 history books, several of them becoming bestsellers, including a massive biography of Sigmund Freud (1988), and this study of Weimar culture.
So Gay was German, his friends and family were German. He was an impressionable teenager in the world he’s describing, and he mentions that some of his conclusions are drawn from direct conversations with key players in Weimar – Hannah Arendt (formidable intellect in her own right and one-time partner of Martin Heidegger), Walter Gropius, first director of the Bauhaus, and so on.
Reading through Gay’s systematic indictment of the leading minds of the Weimar Republic, marvelling at all the ways that German intellectuals failed to support, or actively undermined, their nation’s first attempt at democracy, tends to:
profoundly worry you about the German national character
make you distrust carping, sneering, ‘subversive’ public intellectuals even more than you already did
As I read the very last page with its poetic oration for the exiles forced to flee the advent of Hitler, I had a thought which Gay doesn’t mention. Maybe all the famous exiles from Hitler’s Germany, from Einstein to Brecht, from Schoenberg to Koestler, from Kurt Weill to Billy Wilder – if, as Gay suggests, they simply weren’t capable of supporting a sensible modern culture, well then maybe they could only thrive abroad in the stable environment provided by capitalist, democratic America. They were quite literally not capable of running a country of their own.
Books & Boots 