Simplicissimus ....................................... The Harvard College Journal of Germanic Studies
Spring Issue 2013
Simplicissimus ........................................ The Harvard College Journal of Germanic Studies
Volume I Issue I Spring 2013
Simplicissimus Our Founding Editorial Board Cody Dales Danielle Lussi Ernest J. Doherty Michael Thorbjørn Feehly Dilia Zwart Benjamin Lopez Kevin Hong Max Zacher
Editor-in-Chief Deputy Editor-in-Chief German Editor & Treasurer Scandinavian Editor Dutch Editor Design Chair Translator Webmaster
Simplicissimus: The Harvard College Journal of Germanic Studies reviews undergraduate essays, poetry, prose, and other works written on a Germanic topic or in a Germanic language at Harvard College or a Harvard-affiliated program. Simplicissimus publishes both a print and online edition biannually for review by the wider German, Dutch, and Scandinavian communities at Harvard and other universities.
Simplicissimus also aims to foster discussion among Harvard undergraduates about the arts, literatures, and cultures of the greater Germanic world. Simplicissimus will review all submissions anonymously. All submissions and other inquiries may be sent to simplicissimus.submit@gmail.com. Submissions and inquiries may also be mailed to Simplicissimus: The Harvard College Journal of Germanic Studies, Student Organization Center at Hilles, Box 77, 59 Shepard Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. Additonal information may be found online at www.hcs.harvard.edu/simplicissimus. The opinions expressed are those of the contributors and are not necessarily shared by the editorial board. No part of this journal may be reproduced without the express consent of Simplicissimus. The Harvard name is a trademark of the President and Fellows of Harvard College and is used by permission of Harvard University. Simplicissimus: The Harvard College Journal of Germanic Studies is a registered and official student group at Harvard.
Contents Dutch 4 Translation of Louis Couperus’s “Kleopatra” 8 Twijfel 10 Het Nederlandse Dieet
Kevin Hong & Cody Dales Jelle Zijlstra Max Zacher
German 12 17 20 22 29 34 38
Abriss oder Erhalten: Das Berliner Stadtschloss Fünf Berichten aus Brandenburg Wannsee Peeling the Onion: Günter Grass and the Dilemma of German Guilt The Baltic Germans in a Changing Russian Empire The Multi-faceted Legacy of Leni Riefenstahl The Identity of Zarathustra in Ecce Homo
Michael Ardeljan Reed McConnell Michael Ardeljan Kevin Hong Samuel L. Coffin Andrew Mooney Alex Trevino
Yiddish 44 Food and Identity in “Tevye the Dairyman”
Basil Williams
Scandinavian 48 50 52 55
Leiligheten Svengelska Hitta Jultomten Accepting Fools as Heroes
Michael Thorbjørn Feehly Sarah Amanullah Nick Mimms Teresa Gaille Puguon Teo
Cover Art: Benjamin Lopez
Kleopatra
Louis Couperus Uit zijn boek Een Lent van Vaerzen Geluidenlooze stilte heerscht alom. Gelijk een zilvren sterre trilt het licht In ‘t melkwit alabaster van de lamp, En de olie barnt met zwijmlend-zwoele geuren. Het zilver-scheemrend schijnsel bleekt zoo bleek, Dat het de schaduw niet verdrijft, maar blauwt... En in de kussens der vergulde sponde Verheft zich de vorstin, heur naakten boezem Opbeurend, moede lenend op den arm, Die rank zich rondt... De blik van ‘t fulp-zwart oog, Amandelvormig, met gedoofden straal, Lonkt droomrig onder sluyerende wimpers. Het zwarte hair, zoet-riekend naar de myrrhe, Zijn warrelende paerelkluisters slakend, Omwoelt in vloeyend git heur goud-gebruinde En weelderige tors... De paerels zij gen In drup bij drup haar uit de lokken, strenglen Zich in de bloedrood-sparklende robijnen Der keetnen, om heur slanken hals geslingerd. Het purpren floers, met glanzen als doorweven, Omwolkt in zijn doorzichtig waas heur leden, Haar goudkleur tintend met een rozen gloor, Met een juweelen gordel om het middel Bevestigd... Droomend van den dood, die wenkt, Heft zich Kleopatra op hare sponde, En staart met reeds verwezen blikken in Den bloemenkorf, die bloeit aan hare voeten. Dan strekt zij plots de glanzige armen uit, Doorwoelt de bloemen... ‘t is of geur bij geur In drupplen van haar blonde vingers zijgt... Tot zij verbleekt, maar toch niet deist...
4 Spring 2013
Cleopatra
Louis Couperus, trans. Kevin Hong & Cody Dales From his book A Ribbon of Poems Soundless silence reigns everywhere. The light of the lamp, like a silver star, A milk-white, alabaster light, trembles, And the oil burns with a dizzying, sticky stench. The pale silver light, palely flickering, Does not turn shadows away, but turns them blue... And on the cushions of the gilded bed The queen rises, her naked bosom Swelling; she leans wearily on her arm, Supple and soft... Her velvet-black eye, Almond-shaped, with its ashen pupil, Gazes longingly under veiled eyelashes. Her black hair, as sweet-scented as myrrh, Loosens under its pearl-trimmed diadem, Twists in black jets around her golden, Sumptuous torso... The pearls trickle down, Drop by drop, from her hair, and her locks Intertwine with the blood-red, sparkling chains Of rubies looped around her slender neck. Her purple veil, glimmering throughout, Forms a cloud around her arms and fingers, Golden, yet tinged with a warm roseate glow, And a jeweled belt is laced around Her waist... Dreaming of the death that beckons her, Cleopatra rouses herself in bed And stares as if already turned to a ghost Into the flower basket at her feet. Suddenly she thrusts her shining arms Into the blooms, combing through them... scent after scent Falls from her blond fingers in droplets... Then she whitens, but does not shrink away...
Simplicissimus 5
Daar zwiert Met cierlijk-kronkelende bocht en ronding, Met gluiprig, flikkrend oog, en tong, zoo spits En puntig-fijn, als waar’ ze een gulden naald, Zich de emerauden slang van ‘t bed van geuren; En slingert langzaarn-slippend, zachtkens-schuiflend, Op vochten, killen buik steeds verder glijdend, Zich rond den ronden arm gelijk een spang... Een snoer smaragden mengelt zich weldra Met heur robijnen en haar blanke paerels... Het is alleen een schittrend kleinood meer, Waar zij zich mede tooit... En ‘t geurenlied Zweeft loomgewiekt, een droom des paradijzes, Bedwelmend op, en toovert vizioenen In ‘t starrenschijnsel, luchtend uit de lamp...
6 Spring 2013
There turns With elegantly twisted crooks and curves, With crafty, flickering eyes, and a tongue So pointed and pointy-fine, like a golden needle, The emerald snake; it stirs from the bed of scents, Swaying, slowly winding, softly slithering, Winding ever further on its moist, cold belly Around and up her arms like a circlet... A band of emeralds, it intermingles with Cleopatra’s rubies and her white pearls... Just a glittering trinket now, with which She adorns herself... And the scent-song Floats, lazy-winged, a dream of paradise, Drowsily, up, conjuring visions In the star-shine, in the shining air of the lamp... K
“Kleopatra” was taken from the original Dutch by Cody Dales and written into an original English translation by Kevin Hong. Kevin is the blog editor of The Harvard Advocate and a member of its poetry board; he also writes criticism for The Arts Fuse.
Simplicissimus 7
Twijfel
Jelle Zijlstra
Sigurd was de beste militaire leider in de geschiedenis van Ad-Aveland. Hij werd geboren tijdens de donkerste periode van de eindeloze oorlog tussen Ad-Aveland en Viland, terwijl grote delen van zijn land door de Vilanders bezet waren. Toen hij nog een kind was veroverde Viland Sigurds stad, Mekamond, de grootste en meest trotse stad van Ad-Aveland. Sigurd verloor zijn ouders en zijn geliefde stad en zwoer om wraak te nemen op Viland. In ballingschap in Oeraton werkte hij zich op tot opperbevelhebber van het Ad-Avelandse leger en bereidde hij een grote tegenaanval voor. Toen Sigurd eindelijk aanviel, was zijn succes groot en onverwacht: het duurde niet lang voor hij heel Ad-Aveland bevrijd had en Viland zelf binnenviel. Uiteindelijk beval de Ad-Avelandse regering Sigurd om zijn opmars te staken, bang dat het land niet in staat zou zijn om enorme delen van Viland te besturen. In een vlaag van woede besloot Sigurd om zich aan te sluiten bij het leger van Pais-Glire, een ongemakkelijke bondgenoot van Ad-Aveland, en hij leidde een tweede, even succesvolle aanval op Viland. Nu was het een moeilijke dag voor Sigurd. Hij had zijn vaderstad van het kwaad bevrijd en zijn land weer vrij gemaakt. Nooit had een generaal meer succes gehad dan hij, Sigurd van Resland, onderkoning van Mekamond. Geen vijand durfde hem nog te weerstaan. Hij was populair van het ene einde van Aveland tot het andere en daarbuiten. Nu twijfelde hij, want hij wist niet waar hij heen zou gaan. Het was bij het Bevel tot Stoppen begonnen, toen hij zijn opmars had moeten
8 Spring 2013
staken omdat een land dat zelf nog niet van een lange bezetting was hersteld het zich niet kan veroorloven meteen de halve wereld te veroveren. Toen had hij zich bij het leger van Pais-Glire aangesloten, want hij kon niet meer zonder de spanning van strijd en verovering en bovenal wilde hij zijn werk afmaken. Hij had opnieuw aangevallen, met een leger van vrijwilligers dit keer, slecht voorbereid voor de strijd maar enthousiast om onder hÊm te dienen. Succesvol was hij weer geweest; de vijand vluchtte al voor het gerucht van zijn komst. Hij had enorme gebieden voor zijn nieuwe land veroverd zonder ooit een veldslag te vechten en was van het ene einde van een continent naar het andere getrokken alsof het een wandeltocht was. Aan de Golf van Pele was hij nu gekomen, niet ver van de Oudste Stad. Hij kon naar links gaan, hij kon naar rechts gaan, hij kon een schip nemen en naar de overkant gaan. Hij moest het besluit nemen – maar hij twijfelde en wilde niet beslissen. Waarvoor deed hij het? Wat had zijn land eraan dat hij door verre gebergtes wandelde en dat veroveren noemde? Wat hadden de Vilandse dorpelingen hem misdaan die overal voor zijn nadering vluchtten? Hij dacht aan Sidu, de premier van zijn vroegere land, die had gezegd dat Ad-Aveland geen landen wilde veroveren, maar de harten van hun inwoners, zoals het ooit de harten van de Vilanders van Langavel had veroverd. Zulke zwakheid had hij veracht. Hij wilde niet de harten winnen van de Vilanders, het volk dat toen hij jong was zijn stad had veroverd en verwoest en zijn ouders vermoord, hij wilde slechts wraak, wraak tot in
de verste hoeken van de wereld voor wat hem en zijn mooie Mekamond was aangedaan. Zo dacht hij nu weer en voor een ogenblik hield hij zijn aandacht bij zijn kaarten en zijn plannen. Het duurde niet lang voor de twijfel terugkwam. Had hij zijn eigen land bevrijd om in verre landen op een almaar vluchtende vijand te jagen? Waarom woonde hij niet in Mekamond, de stad van zijn verlangen en zijn voorouders? Hij was er niet meer naartoe gegaan sinds die betreurde dag toen de stad viel en zijn ouders stierven. Slechts over zee had hij kunnen vluchten. Nu stond hij weer voor een zee. Het was een andere zee, ver van de zee die hem toen gered had, maar dat belette hem niet terug te denken aan de dag van de Val van Mekamond. Zou hij zich nu weer kunnen redden door een schip te nemen en naar de overkant te varen? Zou er daar een tweede Oeraton wachten waar hij zich kon voorbereiden op een terugkeer? Hij wist wel dat het niet zo kon zijn – aan de overkant waren slechts zandkorrels en woestijnratten – maar hij bleef erover nadenken. Toen kwam zijn secretaris binnen. Men had gevonden dat hij, de grote generaal, toch zeker wel privépersoneel nodig had om zijn zaken op orde te houden en hij had maar niet geprotesteerd. “Generaal,” zei de secretaris, “ik heb een bericht gekregen van de regering in Ils-Amis. Ze willen dat u even Tabindu verovert en dan naar het oosten afslaat en alle legers van de Vilanders naar de Ad-Avelanders in het zuidoosten drijft, zodat die het vuile werk kunnen opknappen. Ze vinden dat u daarmee wraak kunt nemen op premier Sidu voor het Bevel tot Stoppen.” Sigurd barstte in lachen uit. Nadat hij een paar dagen daarvoor uit pure baldadigheid naar de zee was gemarcheerd in plaats
van naar Tabindu, zoals hem was bevolen, hadden ze in Ils-Amis blijkbaar gedacht dat hij wel zou doen wat ze wilden als ze geen woord wijdden aan zijn insubordinatie en hun bevelen toelichtten op een infantiele wijze, alsof hij een klein kind was dat wraak wilde op die stoute Sidu. Het was ijdele hoop. Nu hij gemerkt had dat Ils-Amis het zomaar toeliet als hij zijn bevelen niet opvolgde, had hij weinig zin meer om zich nog veel van zijn superieuren aan te trekken. Maar wat zou hij dan wel doen? Zou hij naar Pele gaan en die havenstad veroveren? Het zou een mooie plaats zijn om een tijdje te blijven. Toen zag hij een kleine Vilander voor zich die op een kleine boot uit Pele wegvluchtte en zwoer zijn stad ooit terug te veroveren. Hij besloot het niet te doen. Hij zou Tabindu kunnen aanvallen of naar het oosten kunnen gaan of ergens een vloot veroveren en naar de overkant varen, maar hij had er geen zin in. Hij zou terug naar huis kunnen gaan, alleen, maar hij wilde zijn leger nu niet in de steek laten. Hij kon hier blijven en niets doen. Sigurd ging zijn staf zeggen dat hij met wie dat wilde in zee zou gaan zwemmen. “Om onze overwinningen te vieren,” wilde hij zeggen, maar deed het niet. Er waren er slechts een paar die met hem meegingen, en dan vooral omdat ze hem niet wilden beledigen. De officieren die hij om zich heen had verzameld blonken niet uit in persoonlijke moed of onafhankelijkheid. Verschillende keren bleef hij lang onder water om de zeebodem en de zeedieren te bekijken. Hij zei dat hij daarvan hield. Toen hij dat al een paar keer had gedaan, dook hij weer onder en bleef zo lang weg dat de anderen zich zorgen begonnen te maken. Pas na uren zoeken werd zijn lijk gevonden. Y
Jelle is een vierdejaars in Mather en studeert Organismische en Evolutionaire Biologie. Hij schrijft graag verhalen en computerprogramma’s. Simplicissimus 9
Het Nederlandse Dieet Max Zacher
Beschuit met lekkere suiker Eten wij voor het ontbijt Of misschien wat brood met hagelslag Voor de belangrijkste maaltijd. Voor de lunch wat plakjes oude kaas En een bak met gele vla Koffie en thee voor de kinderen Net zoals hun pa. Wees maar goed, kleintjes En dan krijg je een stukje drop Zwart en zoet en zoutig Eet het lekker op. Ik zeg altijd ja tegen mayonnaise Over mijn patat En van oliebollen en kroket Word ik echt nooit zat. Voor het avondeten, aardappels En wat plakjes worst Meng wat siroop met water Als voedsel voor je dorst. Luister goed, Amerika Want in Nederland zijn wij lang Voor wat suiker en wat vet Wees toch niet zo bang. Deze stijl van eten Heet het Nederlandse dieet Je zal gezond zijn als je als Een Nederlander eet.
10 Spring 2013
The Dutch Diet Max Zacher
A translation of the original Dutch Biscuits with delicious sugar Are what we eat for breakfast Or maybe some bread with sprinkles For the most important meal. For lunch some slices of aged cheese And a bowl of yellow custard Coffee and tea for the children Just like their dad. Be good, little ones And then you’ll get a piece of licorice Black and sweet and salty Enjoy and eat it up. I always say yes to mayonnaise Over my French fries And of fried dumplings and croquettes I really never tire. For dinner, potatoes And some slices of sausage Mix some fruit syrup with water As fodder for your thirst. Listen well, America Because in the Netherlands we are tall Of some sugar and some fat Do not be so afraid. This style of eating Is called the Dutch diet You will be healthy if you Eat like a Dutch person. 4
Max is a human developmental and regenerative biology concentrator living in Winthrop house. Outside of school he does research, is a member of the Harvard Polo Team, and is active in the Harvard Sustainable Food Project. Simplicissimus 11
Abriss oder Erhalten Michael Ardeljan
Architektonische Kulturpolitik und das Berliner Stadtschloss Beim Auseinandersetzen damit, was mit dem gegenwärtigen Berliner Schlosswiederaufbau passieren soll, streiten sich Akademiker, Künstler, Politiker sowie Berliner nicht nur darum, ob es vernünftig sei, bloß eine gleiche Wiedergestaltung des alten königlichen Palastes zu schaffen, sondern auch darum, was die kulturelle Identität der Stadt sein solle und inwiefern eine Erhaltung oder Ablehnung des geschichtlichen Entwurfs sich darauf auswirken könne.1 Das Schloss und seine Geschichte wurden von vielen verschiedenen Architekten und architektonischen Epochen, wie zum Beispiel der Renaissance, dem Barock und anderen geprägt und kamen plötzlich zu Ende wegen des Beschlusses der DDR, es 1950 sprengen zu lassen.2 Nach einundsechzig Jahren hat sein ehemaliger Standort viele Verwandlungen erlebt, nämlich den Aufbau und späteren Abriss des Palastes der Republik.3 Geschichtlich betrachtet tritt die wiedervereinigte Stadt derselben Lage wie im Jahre 1950 entgegen, weil sie sich entschließen muss, wie sie sich an diesem genauen Platz durch ihre Architektur und kulturelles Erbe darstellen möchte. Durch eine Analyse dieser Debatte und der Geschichte dieses Geländes in Stadtmitte wird es klar, dass der Bundestag den Palast der Republik nicht hätte abreißen sollen und darüber hinaus, dass etwas Neues statt des geplanten Baus errichtet werden soll, um ein Wahrzeichen der Stadt im 21. Jahrhundert einzuführen. Im Streit um den Wiederaufbau des ehemaligen Berliner Schlosses gibt es Gegner, die sich ihm aufgrund Finanz- und Nutzungsbedenken entgegensetzen. Zum Beispiel sind einige Anliegen, dass es widersprüchlich scheine, wie ein ansonsten für öffentlich gehaltenes Projekt, das heißt, mit dem sich das Publikum sehr tief beschäftigt, einigermaßen privat finanziert wird – obwohl der Bundestag 440 Millionen Euro zur Kosteneinschätzung, die von 552 auf 590 Millionen gestiegen ist, beitragen wird, werden die äußeren Fassaden von insgesamt 80 Millionen Euro Spenden unterstützt.4 Der Gedankengang der Gegner ist, dass die Interessen von anonymen und einflussreichen Wohlhabenden das Schicksal des Aufbaus festlegen könne, ohne Rücksicht auf öffentliche Meinung oder Wünsche zu nehmen.5 Darüber hinaus sei es verwirrend, dass der Bundestag als Stellvertreter des Volkes den Beschluss 2002 sehr schnell „Pro Schloss Argumente,“ zugegriffen 11 Dezember 2011, www.berliner-schloss.de/die-schlossdebatte/ pro-schloss-argumente/ und „Contra-Schloss Argumente,“ zugegriffen 11 Dezember 2011, www.berliner-schloss.de/ die-schlossdebatte/contra-schloss-argumente/. 2 Phillip Oswalt, „Identitätskonstruktionen im Digitalen Zeitalter,“ in Fun Palace 200X – der Berliner Schlossplatz: Abriss, Neubau oder grüne Wiese? (Martin Schmitz Verlag, 2005), 41 und Wilhelm von Boddien, „Vorwort,“ in Das Schloss? Eine Ausstellung über die Mitte Berlins (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn Verlag, 1993), 7. 3 Nikolaus Bernau, „Der Ort des Souveräns,“ in Das Schloss? Eine Ausstellung über die Mitte Berlins (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn Verlag, 1993), 77 und Phillip Misselwitz und Philipp Oswalt, „Einführung zum Stadtschloss,“ in Fun Palace 200X – der Berliner Schlossplatz: Abriss, Neubau oder grüne Wiese? (Martin Schmitz Verlag, 2005), 32. 4 „Der Architektenwettbewerb 2008,“ zugegriffen 11 Dezember 2011, www.berliner-schloss.de/neues-schloss-humboldt-forum/der-architektenwettbewerb-2008/ und „Stadtplanung – Neumann verteidigt steigende Kosten für Stadtschloss,“ zugegriffen 11 Dezember 2011, www.berliner-schloss.de/pressespiegel/stadtplanung-neumann-verteidigt-steigende-kosten-fuer-stadtschloss/#comment-39. 5 Misselwitz und Oswalt, „Einführung zum Stadtschloss,“ 33. 1
12 Spring 2013
gefasst habe den Palast der Republik abreißen zu lassen, nur um danach die Verantwortung der Finanzierung überhaupt derartigen Parteien zu überlassen.6 Zusätzlich dazu meinen Gegner eines wiederaufgebauten Schlosses, dass das Bauen nicht angefangen werden solle, bevor der Entwurf des Projekts im Einvernehmen mit den inneren Nutzungen sei; nämlich sollen die Fassaden und Funktion des Gebäudes zusammen festgelegt werden, bevor man fortfahre, und vielleicht verkörpere das Aussehen des Schlosses mögliche Nutzungen nicht.7 Diese entgegengesetzten Argumente sind aber am Ende irrelevant in Bezug auf die Frage, was mit dem Aufbau in einer architektonischen Hinsicht passieren soll. Das heißt, Überlegungen bezüglich der Finanzierung und der endgültigen Nutzung der Struktur sind wichtig für die Bevölkerung und die Regierung allgemein zu besprechen, aber sie sollen das eigentliche Problem an der Schlossdebatte nicht bestimmen; es gibt zahlreiche Beispiele von den vergangenen Zwecken, zu denen sowohl das königliche Schloss als auch der Palast der Republik in den Jahren ihrer Existenz dienten. Nach dem Ende des Ersten Weltkriegs und der Revolution in Berlin gegen den Kaiser 1918 bis zur Sprengung 1950 wurde das Schloss unter anderem in ein Museum, eine psychologische Fakultät sowie eine Studentenmensa umgewandelt.8 Diese unterschiedlichsten und neuen Nutzungen des Bauwerks wurden erst sehr spät nach der ursprünglichen Errichtung im Jahre 1442 und mehreren Umbauen des Schlosses geschaffen, beziehungsweise die Form und Funktion der Struktur mussten nicht zusammen festgelegt werden.9 Zusätzlich dazu erlebte der spätere Palast der Republik verschiedene Nutzungen, da er in seiner kurzen Geschichte zwischen 1976 und 1990 einerseits den Machtsitz der DDR vertrat, doch andererseits gleichzeitig als Ort von kulturellen Veranstaltungen, wie zum Beispiel Musikkonzerten, diente.10 Deswegen soll es sich in der Debatte nicht darum handeln, ob die Finanzierung und die Nutzung des beabsichtigten Schlosswiederaufbaus nicht vereinbar sind und deswegen das Schloss nicht reproduziert werden solle. Es ist eigentlich eine Frage der Kulturpolitik. In diesem Zusammenhang ist mit dem Begriff Kulturpolitik gemeint, dass Architektur und Geschichte einander beeinflussen und widerspiegeln – sei es von Bevölkerungen, Städten, Regierungen: Gruppen in Gesellschaften bestimmen Architektur als eine bewusste Entscheidung, um sich für sich und spätere Generationen darzustellen. Die Architektur einer Gesellschaft repräsentiert zeitgenössische künstlerische Ideen, Geschmäcker und politische Einstellungen. Sie ist das Vermächtnis einer Gesellschaft an zukünftige Generationen, und sie ist deswegen tief geprägt von politischen Motivationen. Um besser verstehen zu können, wie das sich auf die Schlossdebatte bezieht, kann man die architektonischen Entwicklungen durch Geschichte an diesem betroffenen Ort in der Berliner Stadtmitte, wo das Schloss einst stand, als Beispiel nehmen. Das königliche Schloss war das eklektische Ergebnis von hunderten Jahren Umbau und war das Wahrzeichen Berlins als politisches Machtzentrum der Hohenzollern. Erst im Jahre 1442 verlangte der Kurfürst Brandenburgs Friedrich II. den Bau einer festen Zwingburg in der Ibid., 33-4. Wilhelm von Boddien, „Nutzungsvorschläge für ein wiederaufgebautes Schloss,“ in Das Schloss? Eine Ausstellung über die Mitte Berlins (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn Verlag, 1993), 94. 8 Bernau, „Der Ort des Souveräns,“ 71. 9 Goerd Peschken, „Schloss und Stadt,“ in Das Schloss? Eine Ausstellung über die Mitte Berlins (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn Verlag, 1993), 23. 10 Bernau, „Der Ort des Souveräns,“ 77. 6 7
Simplicissimus 13
Stadt Cölln, um seine politische Wichtigkeit zu gründen und sichtbar zu machen.11 Mit wachsendem Einfluss zogen die Hohenzollern Kurfürsten während der Reformation in die Burg ein, von der aus sie ihr Territorium beherrschten. Als Kurfürst Joachim II. eine Schlosskirche, in die er die Gebeine seiner Vorfahren brachte, dem Bauwerk einfügen ließ, wurde das entstehende Schloss die Hauptresidenz der Brandenburger Kurfürsten über allen anderen, womit Berlin selbst Landeshauptstadt der Hohenzollern wurde.12 Demzufolge musste das Schloss auf eine Art „un-militaristisch“ nach dem Stil der Nordischen Renaissance umgebaut werden.13 Spätere Umbauten bestanden in Veränderungen unter der Herrschaft von dem Großen Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm, der die Schönheit des Geländes um das Schloss herum mit Gärten und Promenaden steigern ließ – nach dem Dreißigjährigen-Krieg war das die billigste und einzige mögliche Wahl.14 Am bemerkenswertesten waren die vom Barock beeinflussten Umbauten Andreas Schlüters, der vom Kurfürst Friedrich III. beauftragt wurde, das Schloss zu modernisieren und als Stadt- und Landzentrum der Preußen darzustellen.15 Mit jeder Generation gab es neue Architekten, Künstler, Bildhauer und so weiter, die für die Könige das Schloss im Äußeren wie im Inneren entwickelten. Eine der letzten großen Veränderungen kam mit dem von August Stüler entworfenen Einfügen einer Kuppel 1850.16 Das Schloss war die größte Struktur in der Stadt, lag am Ende von Unter den Linden in Stadtmitte, und ließ den Rest der Stadt um sich herum entfalten; am Schloss waren die architektonischen Werke aller Epochen ausgerichtet.17 Dies war eine Folge der Kulturpolitik der Hohenzollern, die es sich vorgenommen hatten, ihre Residenz und die Gegend in Berlin so zu entwickeln, dass alle erkennen könnten, wie mächtig sie waren. Dementsprechend nahmen Walter Ulbricht und die DDR-Regierung es auf sich, dieses Schloss 1950 zu sprengen und letzten Endes mit dem Palast der Republik zu ersetzen. Für die kommunistische Regierung der DDR repräsentierte das Bauwerk, besonders angesichts der Geschichte der Nationalsozialisten gerade davor, alles Militärisches, Preußisches und Veraltetes, wogegen sie sich politisch einsetzen wollten.18 Das soll aber nicht heißen, dass alle das Schloss zerstören wollten – zum Beispiel gab es Einsprüche von DDR-Abgeordneten wie Karl Liebknechts Neffe, der sich äußerte, dass das Schloss Teil des deutschen Erbes sei sowie das Produkt deutscher Arbeiter.19 Doch benutzte er selbst in dieser Verteidigung des Schlosses eine bestimmte Sprache, um Elemente wie Arbeiter und Gesellschaft zum Entsprechen der kommunistischen Ideologie des Lands zu betonen – die Politik der Zeit wirkte auf Gespräche bezüglich der Architektur Berlins. Trotz solcher Meinungen setzte die Regierung den Abriss um und bis
11 Bodo Rollka und Klaus-Dieter Wille, Das Berliner Stadtschloss: Geschichte und Zerstörung (Berlin: Haude & Spenersche, 1993), 11. 12 Peschken, „Schloss und Stadt,“ 25. 13 Ibid., 23. 14 Ibid., 25. 15 Phillip Misselwitz, Phillip Oswalt, „Einführung zum Stadtschloss,“ 43 und Wilhelm von Boddien, „Vorwort,“ in Das Schloss? Eine Ausstellung über die Mitte Berlins (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn Verlag, 1993), 7. 16 Wolf Jobst Siedler, „Das Schloss lag nicht in Berlin,“ in Das Schloss? Eine Ausstellung über die Mitte Berlins (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1993), 14. 17 Wilhelm von Boddien, „Architektur ist der Genius des Planes – von Baumeistern in Materie umgesetzt,“ in Das Schloss? Eine Ausstellung über die Mitte Berlins (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn Verlag, 1993), 82. 18 Siedler, „Das Schloss lag nicht in Berlin,“ 15. 19 Ibid.
14 Spring 2013
in die 1970er blieb der Platz leer.20 Dann wurde die Entscheidung getroffen, den Palast der Republik vom Architekten Heinz Graffunder als „Gebäude der Partei für das Volk“ mit starkem Ausdruck der Arbeiter der DDR zu errichten.21 Wie die Hohenzollern hatte die DDR ihre eigene politische Kultur, die sie durch Architektur an diesem wichtigen Ort in der Mitte der Hauptstadt darstellen wollte. Am 4. Juli 2002 beschloss der Bundestag des wiedervereinigten Deutschlands, den Palast der Republik abzureißen und das alte Schloss wieder aufzubauen, womit er Geschichte wiederholte. Als Teil der Kulturpolitik des modernen Lands im 20. Jahrhundert hielten Leute das DDR-Gebäude für ramponiert, hässlich: ein kommunistisches Scheitern, das die architektonische Landschaft Berlins ruiniert habe.22 Gleichzeitig gab es die, die mit zärtlichen Erinnerungen den Palast erhalten wollten. Er war Teil der Identität von DDR-Bürgern.23 Am Ende gewann die Ansicht derer, die auf das Erbe der DDR verzichten wollten. Die Schlossdebatte ist eigentlich ein ideologischer Kampf um dieselben Prinzipien wie jemals. Wenn man den Beschluss der DDR, das Schloss an erster Stelle abzureißen, kritisieren möchte, da das die Zerstörung eines Teils der deutschen Kultur und Geschichte war, dann soll man zur gleichen Zeit einsehen, dass der Abriss des Palasts der Republik nicht hätte passieren sollen. Der Bundestag zerstörte ebenfalls ein anderes Wahrzeichen deutscher Geschichte. Obgleich argumentiert wird, dass die Wichtigkeit und Schönheit des Schlosses größer als die des Palasts waren, stimmt es, dass die Gründe aus denen den Palast abgerissen wurde – die Restaurierung der Schönheit in Stadtmitte, die Rückführung der deutschen Geschichte vor der DDR und so weiter – die falschen Gründe waren.24 Nur wegen des Asbests oder hoher Kosten der Sanierung des Palasts hätte man argumentieren können, es wäre vielleicht vernünftiger, das Gebäude zu ersetzen.25 Doch die Tatsache, dass eine Reproduktion des Schlosses jetzt anstelle vom Palast erbaut werden soll, weist darauf hin, dass diese Entscheidung ein Fortfahren der Kulturpolitik gewesen ist. Aber selbst wenn man annimmt, dass der Abriss des Palasts der Republik unvermeidlich gewesen wäre, sollte man das neue Schloss nicht aufbauen, jedoch nicht aufgrund finanzieller oder logistischer Bedenken. Es ist alles Teil der Kulturpolitik, die bisher von der DDR und dem Bundestag nicht richtig benutzt worden ist. Bei einem Architekturwettbewerb 2008 gewann Professor Franco Stella von Italien; sein Entwurf besteht aus Elementen des alten Schlosses, wie zum Beispiel den alten Barockfassaden – außer einer „modernisierten“ Außen- und Innenfassade – und dem Schlüterhof in der Mitte.26 So möchte er, nach den Vorgaben des Bundestags, das traditionelle Schloss mit seinen eigenen Beiträgen wieder errichten.27 Die Probleme Obwohl es wichtig zu erwähnen ist, dass Portal IV des Schlosses im Staatsratsgebäude der DDR zum Gedenken an die Revolution 1918 und Karl Liebknechts Ausruf der sozialistischen Republik eingefügt wurde. Preußische Symbole wie der Adler wurden beseitigt, aber dies zeigt, dass die DDR Kulturpolitik konnte etwas vom Schloss bewahren, solange es gemäß ihrer Ideologie war. Von Wilhelm von Boddien. „Vorwort,“ 7-8 und Nikolaus Bernau, „Der Ort des Souveräns,“ 77. 21 Nikolaus Bernau, „Der Ort des Souveräns,“ 77. 22 Wolf Jobst Siedler, „Das Schloss lag nicht in Berlin,“ 18. 23 Nikolaus Bernau, „Der Ort des Souveräns,“ 79. 24 „Wo stehen wir heute – der Sachstand,“ zugegriffen 11 Dezember 2011, http://berliner-schloss.de/aktuelle-infos/ wo-stehen-wir-heute-der-sachstand/. 25 Nikolaus Bernau, „Der Ort des Souveräns,“ 79. 26 „Wo stehen wir heute – der Sachstand,“ zugegriffen 11 Dezember 2011. 27 Ibid. 20
Simplicissimus 15
daran sind aber zweierlei: einerseits stammt der Wert und die bestimmte Qualität des Schlosses vom eklektischen Hintergrund der Umbauten, deren ursprüngliches Wesen nicht durch eine bloße Reproduktion erfasst werden kann, und andererseits würde das Schloss die zeitgenössische Kulturpolitik heutzutage nicht richtig vertreten. Da es wohl stimmt, dass Architektur und Geschichte sich aufeinander auswirken, ergäbe es viel mehr Sinn, wenn der heutige Bundestag stattdessen beschließen würde, etwas Neues als Wahrzeichen der wiedervereinigten Stadt und des neuen Lands am Anfang eines neuen Jahrhunderts an einem der wichtigsten Plätze in Berlin errichten zu lassen. Zumindest würde das dem Ort selbst und seiner Wichtigkeit durch Berliner Geschichte gerecht. Z Dieser Aufsatz wurde im Herbst 2011 für Professor Matthias Pabsch und das Duke in Berlin Programm geschrieben.
Michael Ardeljan ist der jüngste Sohn von zwei im ehemaligen Jugoslawien geborenen Rumänen. Er kommt aus New York City und fing am Ende von High School damit an, Deutsch zu lernen. Sein Auslandsstudium im Herbst 2011 in Berlin diente zur Entwicklung seiner These über deutsche Geschichte während des Deutsch-Französischen Krieges. In seiner Freizeit spielt er gerne Saxofon und Gitarre, macht Filme und liest viel. Im kommenden Herbst wird er mit seinem Jurastudium anfangen. 16 Spring 2013
Fünf Berichten aus Brandenburg Reed McConnell
Die Gärtnerei The first thing he does is take me down a tiny forest path to show me my Bauwagen, which is set apart from the rest of the farm. Later I will try to explain it in an email to my mother and find myself at a loss for words, because the only way I can think to describe it is as a gypsy wagon, and I don’t like using the word gypsy. But the word “Roma” does not evoke the same images, it requires explanation, it does not suffice. So already I am conflicted, already I am confused and already I am going to be sleeping somewhere untranslatable. There’s a lightning storm three nights in and I have never known fear like this. The lightning strikes more frequently than I can process, illuminating the trees outside my window in an eerie purple-white light as they sway so violently I feel that it is just a matter of time before one crashes through my window, or through the top of my Bauwagen. My little home is wooden. It is fallible. I weep uncontrollably and call my mother on my cell phone, even though I know that the calls cost far too many cents a minute. But when I hang up the storm is still raging and I don’t feel any better. I am scared and I am alone, and my last thought as I fall asleep is that this must be what it’s like to be an adult. Die Küche At night sometimes he drinks too much and his face gets all flushed, his thinning blonde hair standing out in tufts against his reddened scalp. He eats his food with a knife, and sometimes he starts talking really quickly and waving the knife around. This is always a
bit scary, both because I can’t understand him and because the knife is large. One night he gets stuck on this idea that I should take a walk to the nearest town to buy ice cream, because it’s the only store reachable by foot. “Ein recht schöner Spaziergang,” he says vehemently, banging the butt of the knife against the table. He takes me out into the hallway where he has maps hanging and uses the tip of the knife to trace the route from the farm through the woods, emphasizing that the trip should only take me half an hour, tops. “Morgen,” he says. “Morgen soll ein schöner Tag sein.” I want to ask him to put the knife down, if he’s ever taken the walk himself, if it’s easy to get lost. I want to express that I’m nervous, both in the present and for this future walk, but I don’t have the words. They are all caught up in my throat, or they are unknown to me, and he is speaking too fast for me to understand. “Ja,” I say. Der (Ur)Wald I have been in forests before. This is not a forest. This is primeval: these trees whisper, the vegetation generates mist. The day is warm, but it is cold here. I am the only person in this place, the only animal, even, and I am armed with nothing but an old camera, three rolls of film, a thin sweater, and a cell phone that I realize about a mile into the forest is not getting service. I could die here and no one would ever know. I have never in my life felt so small. Yet I keep walking, driven by a weird mixture of masochistic determination and a
Simplicissimus 17
desire for ice cream. When I reach the first fork in the road, I have already been walking for nearly twenty minutes, and by the time I reach the second, nearly an hour. The sky begins to cloud over and I remember the lightning storm a few days before. It is only now that I turn around and walk back as fast as I can, praying to all the gods I can think of, running running running as I near the farm and, when I finally reach the farmhouse, collapsing onto the couch in the kitchen, a mess of tired limbs and visceral relief. There will be no ice cream today. Berlin/James I have reached a breaking point. Call it culture shock or whatever you like, but I am suffering from a strange sort of sensory deprivation. I am a city kid bewildered by the quiet of the countryside. The lack of public transportation, the lack of destinations, the lack of people, the lack the lack the lack is becoming too much and I have no recourse. I have little money, and really nowhere to stay in the big city, as close as it might be. And then, as if by divine intervention, here is Ilse, beautiful wonderful magnanimous English-speaking Ilse, offering me her apartment in Berlin for the weekend. She stands in front of the little farmhouse, eyes twinkling, chickens pecking at the grain scattered in the grass around her feet. “Die Schlüssel,” she says, holding out the keys, smiling knowingly. “Make yourself at home.” And then everything happens too fast to recount or remember properly, I am on a train, and then in the vaulted train station, and then walking up a narrow flight of stairs in Kreuzberg. The apartment is beautiful. High European ceilings, windows that look out onto a courtyard, and it is all mine for three days. So I play house, I buy groceries from a corner market, I find a boy and bring him back to my new living room and make him lunch. 18 Spring 2013
I am a shabby housewife, one who not only does not know how to cook but also only has a can of chickpeas, a cucumber, and a loaf of flatbread to work with. Neither of us care, though. We are elated to be free, we are elated to be in Berlin, we are bumming around Europe and improvising and wandering and we would be happy to eat nothing but bread for days. So we explore. Alexanderplatz Kurfürstendamm Oranienberger Straße Potsdamer Platz every center every corner of the city we can possibly reach before the sun sets. We end up in a park in Kreuzberg, where James promises he has something to show me. I am growing tired and my patience is thinning. “Just a bit more,” he keeps promising, striding ahead cheerfully, energy unflagging. And just when I am about to turn around, give up the whole attempt, risk an argument with my only friend in this entire goddamned country because I just can’t lug this bag any higher up this hill, we are there. We climb the final flight of stairs up to the enormous monument in the center of the park, a war memorial topped with a giant cross. “Und deshalb Kreuzberg,” he says, smiling. Up here we are on top of the world and the city is spread out beneath us, an endless expanse of tiny buildings and tiny parks. The Radioturm rises up up up into the sky and is thrown into relief against the impossible sunset, and this is Berlin, and I am no longer alone. My heart unclenches. “Come back to the farm with me,” I say. “I’ve missed you.” Chems I have known James for about three years now. We met through a mutual friend and immediately fell into a sort of intimacy that is rare for me, a sort of ease that usually only comes with years and trials and time. But he is like that, he does that to people, makes lifelong friends in the course of minutes and
has existential conversations with strangers. And while I grew up in the city, learning to navigate the T and fit my life into timetables, he grew up in rural New Hampshire, climbing trees, learning how to get lost in forests and have that be okay. So he feels at home on the farm in a way that is coming to me only slowly. He likes to go about his daily business barefoot, even though all the people staying here--all these city dwellers on their summer holidays--think he’s crazy. They tease him, wonder at him, don’t understand how he can adapt like he does. But their kids worship him and will not let go of his hands. To them he is Chems because German doesn’t have a voiced palatal affricate, or otherwise just because love across difference is always a little messy. So he runs around the farm followed by a trail of screaming children, a benevolent pied piper who is happy to attend to their every need, listen to them patiently, answer all of their questions about life and the universe and Amerika. And they adore him to a point where little three-year-old Maxi starts crying when his mom tells him that no, he cannot sleep in James’ bed. One night there is a campfire and even as I am living it, it is like something out of a memory. I finish dinner and bring some wine outside with me in a small tulip-shaped glass, sit and watch the flames grow and throw shadows on the holiday guests who’ve gathered for the warmth and the warm soft light. The kids are playing hide-and-seek and of course James has joined them, and all of them are shadows flitting through the trees, shrieking delightedly from time to time when they discover someone new. And it’s a cool summer night and the fire is driving away the ev-
er-present mosquitoes and the wine is warming my very heart and I think to myself Good God I could relive this moment forever and ever and it would always be enough. But James only stays for a week, and the week goes by too fast. Friday Markus drives us to the train station in his rattly old car with the red doors and blue siding and I am disconsolate, panicked, unable to see James go. He has become my source of stability. We get out of the car and James puts on his backpack, a monstrous thing that nearly engulfs his already large frame. We hurry to Gleis 11 and he turns to me with that manic grin of his, his nearly constant expression of excitement for whatever he might encounter next, this boy who sees the world as a puzzle and his life as an adventure. Bye, he says. Tchüss, my friend. And then I hug him and he is gone, verschwunden, rushing off to catch his train to the next city, next country, next adventure, next life. I close my eyes, and open them slowly. It is a beautiful Friday afternoon. I have the whole weekend ahead of me, and then the whole summer, and then the whole of time, and everything will be okay. I will be okay. 3
Reed is a sophomore social anthropology concentrator living in Quincy House. She is co-editor-in-chief of Harvard College Manifesta Magazine and an editorial board writer for The Harvard Crimson. Simplicissimus 19
Wannsee
Michael Ardeljan
Ein strahlend blauer Himmel sowie Strähnen von Wolken zogen meinen Blick aufwärts, als ich auf der S1 Richtung Wannsee saß und darüber nachdachte, was mein Ziel für die meisten Leute darstellt und wie ich mich dort fühlen würde. Das Haus, die anrüchige Geschichte, das Ereignis, von dem ich schon viele Male gelernt hatte. Endlich persönlich da zu sein. Und wie hatte ich mir vorgestellt, wie das Gebiet aussehen sollte? In meinen Gedanken als 15-Jähriger war Wannsee sehr weit entfernt von Berlin, fast nicht identifizierbar auf einer Landkarte, sehr heimlich, weggesteckt in einem Winkel Deutschlands. Ganz im Gegenteil: Wannsee ist stattdessen Teil der heutigen Stadt – ich sage heutig, weil ich vermute, dass der Ort vor etwa 70 Jahren zurückgezogener war. Heute ist alles so normal, ruhig, ich darf wohl sagen, dass es heute langweilig ist. Aber langweilig ist gut und wird immer besser als gewalttätig sein. Das sind die Gedanken, die mir in den Sinn kamen. Nachdem die anderen Studenten und ich mit dem Bus vom Wannsee Bahnhof noch weiter fuhren und wieder ganz in der Nähe vom Haus ausstiegen, bemerkte ich sofort, was für ein wunderschöner Tag es war und wie frisch die Luft war. Jeder Atemzug, den ich holte, füllte mich mit Energie und erinnerte mich daran, wie glücklich wir heutzutage sind. Ironisch, dass sowohl der Tag als auch der Ort so schön waren, denn die Verbindung des Orts zur Geschichte ist so grausam. So war meine Geistesverfassung beim Eintreten in das Haus, das gegen 1914 erbaut wurde, was einem sehr schnell wegen der alten ausführlichen Architektur auffällt. Die Ausstellung im Haus, das heute ein Museum ist, handelte von der Ermordung der europäischen Juden. Obwohl einige Teile der Ausstellung näher auf das gesamte Bild der Opferwahl einging, hatte ich unmittelbar ein Problem mit dem Titel der Ausstellung, weil ich mich als Historiker immer darum bemühe, eine umfassende und wahre Interpretation der Geschichte des Holocausts zu fördern, beziehungsweise dass die Opferzahl tatsächlich größer war und aus mehreren ethnischen, religiösen und politischen Gruppen bestand. Beim Betrachten aller Informationen, die ausgestellt waren, lernte ich aber präzisere Tatsachen über die Geschichte des Dritten Reichs sowie Deutschlands in den Jahren vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Mit Bildern, die ich nie zuvor gesehen hatte, wurde die Geschichte greifbarer. Bestimmte Sachen wusste ich schon – zum Beispiel der Befehl an alle in Serbien stationierten deutschen Soldaten, dass sie 100 Personen für jeden getöteten deutschen Soldaten töten sollten. Mein Urgroßvater erzählte mir vor drei Jahren von der Liquidierung eines Dorfs zehn Kilometer entfernt von seinem Heimatort. Am bemerkenswertesten für mich war ein Foto von einem Wehrmachtsoffizier, namens Hellmuth Stieff, der anders als die anderen aussah und dessen private Gedanken von einem seiner Briefe an seine Frau da auf einem Plakat zu lesen waren. Wie er sich schämte, Deutscher zu sein, fand ich unglaublich. Gerade am Anfang des Kriegs gestand dieser Mann seine Vorbehalte über die Taten der Armee in Polen gegen die ganze Bevölkerung. Und ich sah es in seinen Augen, die auf eine Art empfindlich waren, in seinem Antlitz. Wenn nur mehr so anders gewesen wären… Dann ein anderes Plakat, das von einem anderen Offizier handelte, der wirklich der
20 Spring 2013
Großvater eines meiner Freunde war. Als mein Großvater ein Baby in besetztem Jugoslawien war, war der meines Freunds auch in Osteuropa – mit den Einsatzgruppen. Unglaublich zu beobachten. Ein anderer Saal stellte viele Zitaten von Hitler dar, die die Wände bedeckten und von Filmmaterialien begleitet waren. Zuletzt das Zimmer, in dem die Wannsee Konferenz stattfand und wo die Endlösung besprochen wurde. Ich stand an der Stelle, wo einige der wichtigsten Nationalsozialisten saßen und beim Mittagsessen das Schicksal von Millionen Leute sehr gelassen festlegten. Ich muss zugeben, ich war ziemlich überrascht beim Blicken auf das Protokoll der Besprechung, als ich erfuhr, dass Hitler nicht dabei war. Noch ein Zeichen dafür, dass das Dritte Reich eine ausbreitende Bürokratie und Waffe einer unaufhaltsamen Massenbewegung war. Ich verließ das Haus kenntnisreicher und melancholischer, versunken in Gedanken. Ich dachte über Stieffs Augen, Battels kleinen Widerstand, die tapfere Belskis und die anderen Seelen nach. Wenn es nur mehr gegeben hätte. Q
Simplicissimus 21
Peeling the Onion Kevin Hong
Günter Grass and the Dilemma of German Guilt Eric Santer’s essay “History beyond the Pleasure Principle: Some Thoughts on the Representation of Trauma,” published in 1992, posits a problem in modern German society; it asks if the recent reunification of East and West Germany has promoted a narrative of the German struggle against Marxism-Leninism at the expense of the story of the horrors of the Holocaust. Germans now face the task of “having to constitute their Germanness in the awareness of the horrors generated by a previous production of national and cultural identity.” 1 Santer’s concern is that cumulative layers of history may cause German society to forget the massive trauma that Nazism and the Final Solution caused; he wants to include trauma in the effort to reconstruct the German identity. Santer uses Freud’s theories on trauma to suggest the implementation of “works of mourning” that would reject the “‘pleasure of historical narration’” and perpetuate the shock of the event.2 The German must keep the events of the Second World War in his memory in order to integrate fully and attempt to make sense of its ruination. However, memory is a capricious creature, as we well know. Santer’s idea of the work of mourning is well intentioned, but we must take into consideration that time marches on. Robert Moeller, in his essay “Germans as Victims,” discusses the changing “framework within which discussions of history, memory, politics and the war’s end take place.”3 Most striking is the fact that eighty percent of German citizens in 2005 were born after 1945; the same sentiments and conflicts that plagued the generation that suffered through the war are simply not as strong and as contentious as they were in previous decades, before the Berlin Wall had fallen. It is a fact that we become more distant from our pasts, however troubled they may be. The collective memory of Germany adapts. I turn now to Günter Grass and his recent memoir Peeling the Onion to deal with the subject of German memory. The dominant metaphor in the work is the onion: “memory is like an onion that wishes to be peeled so that we can read what is laid bare letter by letter... And each skin sweats words too long muffled.”4 The more Grass peels the onion, the more truth the onion speaks. Truth, then, is mutable, renewing itself each time the author uncovers another layer. This layering of memory is the same layering that worries Santer; Grass too believes in the value of recalling what happened, reliving the shame that he lived through, but the motivation for Grass’s recollections seems to be different from Santer’s; in peeling the onion, the author asserts his individual memory as an indispensable part of German history. Grass opens his work with urgency: Because this as well as that deserves to be part of the record. Because something flagrantly significant could be missing. Because certain things at certain times fell into the well before the Eric L. Santer, “History beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution,’” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992), 145. 2 Ibid., 149. 3 Robert G. Moeller, “Germans as Victims?,” History & Memory 17.1-2 (2005): 25. 4 Günter Grass and Michael Henry, Peeling the Onion (Orlando: Harcourt, 2007), 3. 1
22 Spring 2013
lid went on: the holes I left uncovered until later, growth I could not halt, the linguistic giveand-take I had with lost objects. And let this too, be said: because I want to have the last word.5
By “something flagrantly significant,” Grass is perhaps referring to his admission that he was a member of the Waffen SS during the Second World War; Grass made this admission on August 12, 2006, four days before the publishing of Peeling the Onion, and it provoked a storm of controversy. In this light, we read “I want to have the last word” as defensive; Grass sets down his story as only he knows it, and as only he can tell it so that nothing can corrupt it. However, critics in 2006 also wondered why it took Grass so long to admit such an important part of his life. Had Grass, the supposed moral compass of Germany, compromised his morals by not admitting his involvement in the Waffen SS much earlier? Part of the reason the confession came so late was likely the post-war climate, in which a fear to speak out must have been quite severe. Moeller writes about the lack of sympathy for German society as a group of victims who suffered from the war as well: “calls for Germans to remember their losses triggered vehement responses who claimed that any attempt to tell the story of German victims would inevitably lead in the direction of apologia.”6 There was a fear that presenting the German side of suffering would somehow upset the scales of justice, that Germans would suddenly feel that they had been relieved of guilt and responsibility and could leave the past behind. Grass, as a prisoner of war, underwent starvation about which he writes, “the only hunger I can put into words is my own... I am the only one I can ask, How did it feel?”7 Only recently have the political and social climates change so that Germans feel that they can bring memories outside of their perpetrator history into the historical sphere. Grass’s situation is also worth noting because he did not consciously take part in the genocide. In his memoir, he learns of it after the war, when an American “education officer” presents him with evidence: “I saw the piles of corpses, the ovens; I saw the starving and the starved, the skeletal bodies of the survivors from another world. I couldn’t believe it.”8 Grass only believes the war’s atrocities when Baldur von Schirach, the former Hitler Youth leader, admits his awareness of the mass extermination of Jews. Thus, Grass’s guilt – and the guilt of many other Germans – is retrospective, a guilt they did not know they were a carrier of until it was too late to escape. “It was [some time],” Grass writes, “before I came gradually to understand and hesitatingly to admit that I had unknowingly – or, more precisely, unwilling to know – taken part in a crime that did not diminish over the years and for which no statute of limitations would ever apply, a crime that grieves me still.”9 If this is true, to what extent can a perpetrator such as Grass experience the guilt of a crime he unconsciously committed? Indeed, the writer questions the genuineness of his shame soon after he learns of the realities of the Holocaust: Were my sufferings limited to my own person or did they extend to the state of the world? More specifically, did I partake in what was beginning to be called, with and without quotation marks, German collective guilt? Can it be that my grief encompassed not only my loss of house, home,
Ibid., 2. Moeller, “Germans as Victims?,” 4. 7 Grass and Henry, Peeling the Onion, 161-162. 8 Ibid., 195. 9 Ibid., 196. 5
6
Simplicissimus 23
and family and nothing more? What other losses might I have mourned?10
We see here that Grass cannot yet fathom the extent and the magnitude of the Final Solution. In response, Grass’s onion answers, “Nor did I feel any guilt.”11 The young Grass is concerned with his own survival, not with questions of “the state of the world,” and it is probably too much to ask of him to partake in German collective guilt without even knowing the whereabouts of his family or how he is going to rebuild his life. Grass describes himself as an “aimless wanderer amidst ruins and rubble”; this is neither the time nor place to consider one’s place in an event one knows relatively little about.12 We may historicize this idea by the “certain silence around memories of National Socialism” after the war. One argument that Moeller acknowledges is the notion that “keeping silent about the past was essential for permitting West Germans to construct a functioning civil society after 1945, a virtue, not a vice.”13 By focusing on their own status as victims, Germans were able to form a “community of survivors” that was “ready to preserve and rebuild what remained of the good Germany.”14 Perhaps the avoidance of political and criminal accusations did allow for a faster recovery from the carnage of the war. The opposite argument, that “more memory, not less,... would have fostered a positive collective self-conception among Germans,” is palpable, but, after “the politics of memory became the politics of resentment and revenge” after the First World War, we should reassess this argument.15 Grass’s self-concern was the same concern felt throughout the nation as a need to raise Germany from ruin, and perhaps German collective guilt suffered because of this. And just as the silence about Nazi crimes could be a noisy business – the victimization of Germany created enough hullaballoo to mask the responsibility of the Third Reich – Grass distracts himself in Peeling the Onion with the dance hall: “We needed to celebrate our survival and forget the chance scenes staged by war. What was shameful or horrific we left to lurk below the surface.”16 How, then, does Günter Grass the perpetrator finally subscribe to his guilt? His attempt to retrospectively embed it into his childhood self fails: I try to calm him down and ask him to help me peel the onion, but he rejects all entreaties and refuses to let himself be exploited as my early self-portrait. He denies me the right to – as he puts it – do him in and from your high horse to boot. 17
Grass is unapologetic of his childhood. He – or rather his younger self – is right to see the implantation of guilt as an exploitation: to change the image of oneself would be a lie and a corruption of memory; “time lays layer upon layer,” Grass writes. “My cares are not his: what he fails to see as disgraceful, that is, what makes him feel no shame, I, who am more than related to him, must somehow grapple with. Sheet upon sheet of consumed time lies between us.”18 To relate this idea back to Santer’s essay, Grass cannot commemorate the trauma Nazism caused if he did not truly observe it. Santer’s goal is to “include the traumatic event in one’s Ibid., 206. Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Moeller, “Germans as Victims?,” 18. 14 Ibid., 19. 15 Ibid. 16 Grass and Henry, Peeling the Onion, 270. 17 Ibid., 29. 18 Ibid., 42-43. 10 11
24 Spring 2013
efforts to reformulate and reconstitute identity,” and Grass tries to do so by injecting shame into his early self-portrait, but this turns out to be just as serious a transgression because the shame is not real; 19 “I can take care of the labeling and branding myself,” Grass writes. “As a member of the Hitler Youth I was, in fact, a Young Nazi. A believer till the end.”20 Unable to pawn guilt off on his childhood, Grass must rely on something else to satisfy his need to get closer to what he could not experience. Thus he turns to art. The Tin Drum, a book about a drum-playing man named Oskar Matzerath who refuses to grow beyond the age of three, is written. “It was Oskar who compelled me to haunt the misty corners of my early years,” Grass writes. Oskar, by some magic, overtakes the power of the author himself. “He determined who was to die, who to be granted miraculous survival ... He, the twisted metaphor personified, taught me to view everything twisted as beautiful.”21 Then, the character enters reality itself, supplanting Günter Grass: Even if an author eventually becomes dependent upon the characters he creates, he must answer for their deeds and misdeeds. And if on the one hand Oskar was clever enough to use me, on the other hand he had the generosity to leave me the copyright to everything that occurred in his name. If you write, you renounce your self. Only tax officials refuse to accept the fact that an author’s existence is mere say-so, that is, fiction, and therefore nontaxable.22
How fascinating that one of Grass’s own creations usurps him, the author who was previously unable to penetrate even his younger self! At some point, Oskar stops existing at the author’s expense – or perhaps he never did. Is it possible that the author renounces himself to something that is at once artificial and more real? If so, Oskar is the impetus and inspiration that allows Grass to explore and relive all things. The writer’s belief in aestheticization bookends his memoir. He ends with the writing of The Tin Drum, and begins by remarking, “An imprecise memory sometimes comes a matchstick’s length closer to the truth, albeit along crooked paths.”23 We should be startled at this suggestion, because Grass’s project is to peel his memory, and in doing so, move closer to the truth; slyly, though, he excuses himself of “truth” as we know it – for indeed, truth is fickle and multifarious – in favor of a greater truth, an aesthetic truth: If you can still feel your mother’s barrettes or your father’s handkerchief knotted at four corners in the summer heat or recall the exchange value of various jagged grenade- and bomb splinters, you will know stories – if only as entertainment – that are closer to reality than life itself.24
The writer’s emphasis in this passage is on detail; the evocation of the father’s handkerchief is so vivid that it evokes the motion of the father’s hand wiping his sweaty brow. To focus on a mother’s barrettes, an object usually so simple and banal, is to lift that object from obscurity and transform it into an object of adoration; the care of the writer to mention the barrettes is the same care he has for the mother herself, and this attention to detail conjures a nostalgia for the past, the times when we played with our mother’s hair as we sat on her lap. The aestheticization of life, whether it is true or not, captures an element of reality that resonates with us all. To give an example of a life event transformed into an aesthetic reality, we may look Santer, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 152. Grass and Henry, Peeling the Onion, 35. 21 Ibid., 312. 22 Ibid., 313. 23 Ibid., 4. 24 Ibid., 4-5. 19
20
Simplicissimus 25
at an image that occurs both in Grass’s memoir and his novel: While outside the ack-ack gunfire hammered on and bombs dropped far and near, they carried on their show: a dwarf juggler who kept ninepins, balls, and colored hoops all in the air at one time had us mesmerized... a dainty little lady tied herself gracefully in knots while blowing kisses to the wildly applauding crowd. The troupe, whose job it was to entertain front-line soldiers, was led by a tiny old man who performed as a clown. He also coaxed a sweet, melancholy music out of a row of empty to full glasses by stroking their rims with his fingers, the smile never leaving his rouged lips. An image that has stuck with me.25
The reader may recall Grass’s depiction of this same scene in The Tin Drum, in which Oskar, Bebra, and company travel on a crowded train and take refuge in a cellar during an air raid. Bombs and gunfire bombard the audience members of both scenes from above, but in The Tin Drum, the descriptions of the projectiles become descriptions of laughter. “Our offering... entertained the men, it made them forget the front and the furlough that was ended, and it made them laugh and laugh,” Oskar Matzerath writes. The laughter becomes “volleys of laughter,” echoing the torpedoes that are “burying the cellar and everything in it.”26 The applause of the audience, too, is “thunderous, mingled with the sounds of a major air raid on the capital.”27 This confusion of laughter and destruction signifies that not only shells bury the soldiers in the cellar, but also their ignorance. Their self-destructive laughter condemns them to this dark ignorance; the cellar transforms from a place of refuge into a stifling coffin. Grass’s indictment of ignorance in the novel is similar to his discussion of ignorance in Peeling the Onion, but they operate quite differently in the reader’s mind. In his memoir, Grass contemplates ignorance in hindsight. Writing about a school friend who mysteriously vanished, the author reflects: “I had been content to know nothing or to believe false information, because I had used my status as a child to play dumb... and once more dodged the word why, so that now, as I peel the onion, my silence pounds in my ears.”28 Grass’s analysis of himself is helpful, and probably true, but it is necessarily distant from reality; the author places himself on a promontory and is able to look down at his past self-portraits, critical and perplexed. The scene in The Tin Drum, on the other hand, is an experience of ignorance itself, of the oblivion that the German soldiers bury themselves with as Bebra’s troupe distracts them, a momentary stay against confusion. Oskar himself participates in the ignorance as well; there is no moral instruction imposed upon the scene by the author. Rather, by imagining this scene, the reader ingests a multi-sensual image of the senselessness that Grass wishes to convey. In his essay “German Memory, Judicial Interrogation and Historical Reconstruction: Writing Perpetrator History from Postwar Testimony,” Christopher Browning posits that “historians of the Holocaust, in short, know nothing – in an experiential sense – about their subject.”29 He asks whether one could write an experiential history of the “little men” who participated in the Holocaust by carrying out the orders of the higher-ups: “Can one recapture ... the Ibid., 109. Grass, The Tin Drum, 327. 27 Ibid. 28 Grass and Henry, Peeling the Onion, 18. 29 Christopher R. Browning, “German Memory, Judicial Interrogation, Historical Reconstruction,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution,’” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992), 25. 25
26
26 Spring 2013
choices they faced, the emotions they felt, the coping mechanisms they employed, the changes they underwent?”30 This kind of desire for experiential history is perhaps the same kind of desire that Grass would describe as his “hunger for art.” He writes: Oskar must always be first, Oskar knows all and tells all, Oskar laughs at my porous memory. For him, as is plain for all to read, the onion performs a different function, has a different meaning.31
Where Grass’s motivation for peeling the onion is to move closer to a kind of truth, Oskar’s is that of the visceral, that of the experience. Experience must always be first; experience knows all and tells all. Oskar prefers to cut the onion rather than to peel it, as we see when he performs in the Onion Cellar, a place where customers chop onions in order to cry. This artificial stimulus provokes a visceral response, in the same way that Oskar’s art brings all of the guests back their blissful childhoods, in the same way that The Tin Drum brings us into the surreal world of post-war. Browning complicates his argument by presenting two issues that arise with experiential history: the first is that of the dangers of Alltagsgeschichte, or the history of everyday life, and the second is that of the dangers of empathy in writing this history. The history of everyday life threatens to “normalize the image of the Nazi regime by concentrating on the mundane, everyday aspects of life that continued relatively undisturbed.”32 However, we can see this idea in its greatest magnitude in a passage of Peeling the Onion, in which Grass reflects upon Hitler’s death: He was gone as if he had never been, had never quite existed and was not to be forgotten, as if you could live perfectly well without the Führer... Now you could even make jokes about him ... Much more tangible than his figure, wherever he may have been, was the lilac blossoming in the hospital garden in early May.33
This section is deeply unsettling in its neutralization of the Führer’s death. Life goes on for Grass, whom the politics of the time never so greatly affected for him to ask the question Why. The lilac blossoming in the garden occupies his mind more than the end of the man who orchestrated the mass murder of the European Jews. In this case, the Alltagsgeschichte does normalize the image of the Nazi regime, but in doing so, it calls attention to the vacuum in Grass’s conscience. Our knowledge of this vacuum is critical to our understanding of the little-man’s psyche, and thus to the psyche of a whole kind of German. The issue of empathy, Browning admits, “requires a rejection of demonization,” an acceptance that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were human beings.34 This acceptance demands an effort to empathize, but Browning makes a clear distinction between empathizing and forgiving. No one is excusing anything, but “the notion that one must simply reject the acts of the perpetrators and not try to understand them would make impossible ... any perpetrator history that sought to go beyond one-dimensional caricature.”35 Grass’s reliance on Oskar Matzerath illustrates this same attempt to empathize. I repeat his words in Peeling the Ibid., 27. Grass and Henry, Peeling the Onion, 313. 32 Browning, “German Memory,” 35. 33 Grass and Henry, Peeling the Onion, 160. 34 Browning, “German Memory,” 36. 35 Ibid. 30 31
Simplicissimus 27
Onion for emphasis: “But the only hunger I can put into words is my own: it is the only hunger inscribed in me, so to speak. I am the only one I can ask, How did it feel?” These words are as much Grass’s assertion of the importance of his individual memory as they are a plea to the reader to empathize with him, to make an effort to comprehend his cowardice, his ignorance, his hesitation. The noble I want to have the last word in the beginning of the memoir becomes here animalistic; the author hungers to be understood. Günter Grass’s struggle to know and to mark his place in history is evident in the dialectic between his life and his art. An inability to grasp the significance of what he failed to ask in his youth and what he participated in during the war resulted in an artistic output in which the author ceded control to his pseudo-autobiographical character, Oskar Matzerath, in an attempt to reach a reality of the era that Grass had, in his ignorance, not investigated. Readers may see The Tin Drum as Grass’s approach to Santer’s “work of mourning”; Oskar’s reentry into the world after his spell in the insane asylum is not unlike German society’s integration of the trauma of World War II into its collective memory. At the same time, Grass’s individual story as told in Peeling the Onion is representative of a change in modern society, an increasing openness to, as Robert Moeller writes, “a history that [does] not shy away from seeing the past from many different perspectives... different modes of commemoration and remembrance, many histories, not one single history.”36 Grass’s record of his time in the Waffen S.S. and his resulting shame is one story in many hungering to become part of Germany’s public memory. It has a place in the greater story of German perpetration and victimization, but Grass’s plea to the reader to feel how he feels turns his story into an experiential history that should be in contact with other works in order to create landscapes of memory that put forth new approaches to dealing with guilt and breaking the silence. Ultimately, Grass’s memory is fallible, but because of this, valuable; it is commemorative of a greater movement of history but also proof of his individual and meaningful experience. T This essay was written in December 2011 for Sarah Cole and her course History & Literature: 90ae Border Crossings.
Moeller, “Germans as Victims?,” 32.
36
28 Spring 2013
The Baltic Germans in a Changing Russian Empire Samuel L. Coffin
Since the arrival in 862 of Rurik the Varangian to rule over the Rus’ tribes, Russia has had a complex relationship with the Germanic peoples. Although the two World Wars would devastate Russo-German relations, Germans within the Russian Empire lived in a unique situation in society as some of the most successful and loyal of the non-Russian peoples. The changing status of the Baltic Germans within the empire demonstrated the conflict between the traditional multi-ethnic imperial order and the rise of Russian nationalism, while the survival of Baltic German primacy showed how practicalities of state slowed implementation of a Russian nationalist agenda. Although Russia would not contain significant pockets of German population until the th 18 century, the circumstances that would lead to a Baltic German enclave in Russia began hundreds of years before the Russian Empire. As early as the 1200s, knights from the German states engaged in a crusade that Pope Innocent III sponsored against the Baltic tribes’ paganism.1 By 1300, what is today Estonia and Latvia existed under the control of various ecclesiastical and secular rulers united under the Livonian Confederation. During the 16th century, the Reformation’s spread to the Baltic severely weakened the structure of authority, and by 1554 many of the original crusader orders had converted to Lutheranism and guaranteed freedom of Lutheran practice within their realms.2 More immediately, the weakening of the church in the Baltic contributed to the significant instability the Livonian War of 1557-1583 caused.3 Sweden, the Muscovite State, and Poland-Lithuania all fought for dominance in the region, and the Russians in this case were shut out. Poland gained control of the Duchy of Courland and parts of Livonia, while Sweden captured the rest of the Baltic.4 In an attempt to centralize control, the Swedish government used “a system-wide reexamination of the titles to landed estates… and in those cases where the appropriate criteria were not met, the estate ‘reverted’ to the Swedish crown.”5 On the eve of Russian conquest, the Baltic German elite found itself disenfranchised by the Swedish king, leaving open the possibility for a new, more generous master. The interaction between the Russian Empire and Baltic Germans began during the Great Northern War, when Peter the Great finally achieved the Russian ambition of a window to the Baltic. The unique situation of the Baltic would require a correspondingly unique method of rule by the Russians. Peter the Great demonstrated a particular shrewdness by not only recognizing this necessity but also going above and beyond to win over the Baltic German nobility. During the war, “the Russian commander-in-chief Sheremet’ev in 1710 guaranteed the full pre-Caroline plenitude of privileges and autonomy”6 to the Baltic German nobility, and the Andrejs Plakans, A Concise History of the Baltic States (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), 36. Ibid., 85. 3 Ibid., 86. 4 Ibid., 88. 5 Ibid., 109. 6 Roger Bartlett, “The Russian Nobility and the Baltic German Nobility in the Eighteenth Century,” Cahiers du Monde russe et sovietique 34 (Jan-Jun 1993): 233-234. 1
2
Simplicissimus 29
1721 Treaty of Nystadt codified these concessions to the Baltic Germans. Chief among these privileges were the establishment of the Lutheran church as spiritual authority over the Baltic Germans and native Balts, restoration of the authority and lands taken by the Swedish crown, and primacy of the German language in courts and education.7 Nystadt for the Baltic Germans represented the solemn pact that their loyal service to the Tsar would be returned with a respect for their traditional means of rule. During the 18th century, a general pro-German attitude among the Russian state and the prominence of Germans within Russian society demonstrated the effectiveness of this compact. Peter the Great began a tradition among the Russian government of heavily recruiting Germans not only from the Baltic region, but also from other German states, into the Russian government and military. Even the use of “Sankt” in “Sankt Peterburg” and the titling of Peter’s palace as “Peterhof” demonstrate the extent to which Peter personally sought German influence within his empire. Peter’s admiration of German traditions extended to the practical administration of the empire, and the Baltic nobles, “educated in the German tradition, found ready access…to the Imperial officer corps or the civilian administration.”8 Under the German-born Catherine, the state attitude of Baltic German privilege remained broadly pro-German. Like Peter, Catherine saw great benefits in the particular structure of Baltic nobility. Within the Baltic Germans, particular noble families could participate in the Landtag, a sort of legislative body with the individual Landrat pledged to service for a certain amount of time.9 While such institutions did not become permanent fixtures of Russian administration, Catherine did seek to emulate Baltic practices of governance in her reforms. The status of Baltic Germans would continue to grow through the end of Catherine’s reign, and the Russian state began to expand the incorporation of Baltic Germans in the Russian administration to further the colonization of German emigrants as a positive influence.10 As these Germans, along with the Baltic Germans, prospered in the empire, Russian culture fostered a particular archetype of the German. Pushkin inserted lines in Eugene Onegin about the “German baker, punctilious in his cotton cap,” and Queen of Spades discusses how “Herman is a German; he is prudent – that’s all!”11 Many Germans seemed to enjoy the positive stereotyping of themselves. A sardonic song of the German colonists, composed after their privilege of exemption from military service was ended, claimed that “The Germans are loyal/The Russians have lice/That is why he has called us/To join his cavalry.”12 Concepts of nationhood remained hazy at this time, but that which did exist elevated German to a positive stereotype. In this context, the Baltic Germans enjoyed the 18th century as a time of freedom in their home region and great influence over all of Russia. However, the continued development of Russian national thought in the 19th century would lead to significant changes in the status of Baltic Germans as a privileged group. Religion became the first point of conflict, as the Baltic had remained steadfastly Lutheran in the face of Russian Orthodoxy. In 1832, Russia subsumed local control of the Lutheran church as Adam Giesinger, From Catherine to Khrushchev (Winnipeg: Marian, 1974), 140. Bartlett, “The Russian Nobility,” 238. 9 Ibid., 234-235. 10 Ibid., 41. 11 Irina Mukhina, The Germans of the Soviet Union (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), 24. 12 Wesley Berg, “Bearing Arms for the Tsar: The Songs of the Germans in Russia,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 17 (1999): 183. 7
8
30 Spring 2013
“the nation-wide General Evangelical-Lutheran Consistory was formed in Russia, which codified the position of Lutherans in Russia.”13 In a similar fashion, the 1832 reorganization clamped down on Lutheran proselytizing to the Orthodox faith and subsumed Baltic law codes into the general Russian legal structure. Contemporaries, such as “J.F. Wittram, a Hanoverian who came to teach in the Baltic provinces in the 1830s, noted in his correspondence the anxieties felt about the growing influence of Orthodoxy and the threat of Russification hanging over the educational system.”14 Orthodoxy often stood for Russian influence in the Baltic, and the first erosions of the Nystadt privileges would foreshadow a greater conflict of religion. The friction between Baltic Germans and Russian nationalism under Nicholas I underscored the inherent conflict in the conservative aims of maintaining the imperial order and the aims, conservative in a different sense, of elevating Russian nationality and Orthodoxy as the guiding nation and religion of the empire. After 1832, the Russian Orthodox Church began tentative steps towards conversion of the native Baltic peoples by establishing training and printing religious material in Estonian and Latvian.15 The first major conversion drive would begin in 1841, when landless peasants, seeking to get land grants in other parts of Russia, sought to convert to Orthodoxy. This conversion push did stop when “governor-general Baron Karl Magnus von der Pahlen and the Ritterschaft worked closely with the minister of the interior A.G. Stroganov and the head of the notorious third department of the emperor’s own chancery, General A.K. Benckendorff (a Baltic German), to nip any potential conversion movement in the bud.”16 Although Nicholas I, author of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality,” might be inclined to support an expansion of the Orthodox faith, the clear strife that mass conversion would cause between the Baltic Germans and the other Baltic peoples would temper any Russification under Nicholas. Nicholas’s attitudes would seem benign compared to what subsequent emperors did to erode Baltic German privilege. The conflict between maintaining the multi-ethnic imperial order and the rise of Slavophile sentiment would explode in the 1860s, sharply impacting Baltic Germans. In 1868, the nationalist Yuri Samarin published Okrainy Rossii (Borderlands of Russia), which demanded that Russia use Orthodoxy as a means to turn Latvians and Estonians into Russians and oppose general German incorporation of those people into a German identity.17 Prussia’s wars for German unification fanned the fears of Samarin and other Slavophiles that Germany would seek to annex its fellow people in the Baltics.18 While previous anti-German sentiment had been purely ideological, the political development of Germany gave practical reason to nationalists for Russification. It would be no coincidence that in 1870, Alexander II would decree that the Russian language must be used for all official business, thus eliminating one of the dearest of Baltic German privileges from Peter.19 While Baltic Germans remained cultural elites in the Ibid., 17. D.G. Kirby, The Baltic World, 1772-1993: Europe’s Northern Periphery in an Age of Change (London, New York: Longman, 1995), 103. 15 Haltzel, Lundin, Plakans, Raun, and Edward C. Thaden, Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 18551914, ed. Edward C. Thaden (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981), 122. 16 Kirby, The Baltic World, 101-105. 17 Edward C. Thaden, “Samarin’s ‘Okrainy Rossii’ and Official Policy in the Baltic Provinces,” Russian Review 33, no. 4 (Oct. 1974): 409. 18 Haltzel et al., Russification in the Baltic Provinces,141. 19 Ibid., 140. 13 14
Simplicissimus 31
region, their Nystad legal privileges were rapidly waning in the fear that fostering German identity would drive the Baltic Germans to the Reich. In the reign of Alexander III, Baltic Germans suffered even more concerted Russian efforts to supplant the German cultural influence with a Russian one. Such efforts focused specifically on education and religious matters. In 1887, the Russian state enacted an edict requiring all schools to instruct in Russian,20 and in 1893, an edict hollowed out the German character of Dorpat University, requiring Russification and the renaming of the school to Yuriev University.21 These efforts were directly designed to bring Latvians and Estonians out of the German cultural orbit and into a Russian identity, as such a move was seen to be the best way to Russify the entire region. Religious matters were strongly affected by the ascension of Konstantin Pobedonostsev to the position of Procurator of the Holy Synod. Having declared that “’The key to the so-called Baltic Question’ lay in the conversion of the ‘local peoples’ to Orthodoxy,” Pobedonostsev enacted policies that aggressively promoted Orthodoxy in the Baltic region and “prohibited the building of Protestant or Catholic places of worship without special permission.”22 By the late 1880s, the Russian state embarked fully on a course intended not only to strip the Baltic Germans of their old privileges but also push them and the native Baltic peoples on the path to Russification. However, the final chapter of the Baltic German story in Imperial Russia would be decided by the worst manifestation of the conflict between unleashing popular national sentiments and maintaining order within the empire. In a practical sense, Baltic Germans remained too valuable economically to be totally marginalized. Baltic German economic primacy can be shown by the fact that “the three big banks in Riga were all founded and managed by local Germans, and they invested extensively throughout the empire… Of thirty-seven Riga firms with an annual turnover of more than half-a-million roubles in 1890, thirty-one were German-owned.”23 A dense network of railroads in the Baltics and busy ports contributed to an explosive growth in Baltic German-owned industries in all sectors.24 While the once-positive stereotype of the industrious German in Russia might then be spun into one of the Baltic German-dominated industry, Baltic Germans held their economic dominance even as political and cultural privileges faded. Even the old political privileges of the Baltic Germans, once under heavy attack, saw a brief respite after the turmoil of 1905. During the revolution, nationalist sentiment among the Estonians and Latvians often directed violent action more at the Baltic German lords than the Russians. Throughout the Baltic region, “72 manor houses went up in flames during the summer and autumn and another 111 estates were ravaged, while in Courland 42 manors were torched and 187 estates ruined. Some 70 manors are estimated to have burnt to the ground in Estonia.”25 Excessive denigration of Germans and stoking of native Baltic nationalism caused significant Ibid., 169. Ibid., 176. 22 Alan Palmer, Northern Shores: A History of the Baltic Sea and its Peoples (London: John Murray, 2006), 233235. 23 Kirby, The Baltic World, 179. 24 Anders Henriksson, “Minorities and the Industrialization of Imperial Russia: The Case of the Baltic German Urban Elite,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 24, no. 2 (June 1982): 122-124. 25 Palmer, Northern Shores, 233-235. 20 21
32 Spring 2013
strife in the 1905 revolutions, leading to some reevaluation of anti-German policies. Even after the Russification policies, the Baltic Germans had proved themselves to the Tsar, and “in the aftermath of revolution in 1905-1906, their value as stout defenders of the conservative order was again recognized by Tsarism.”26 Germans such as Paul Benckendorff and Woldemar Friedrichs remained close to Nicholas II, and other Baltic nobles staffed high positions in the empire.27 Until 1914, the Baltic Germans could maintain a position of power by exploiting the divide between nationalist fervor and stability in the empire. Even during World War I, Baltic Germans remained in some positions of power: Paul von Rennenkampf commanded Russian forces on the Prussian front28, and Pyotr Wrangel, a scion of Wrangel servitors to the Tsar, represented Baltic loyalty to the end by fighting the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War.29 The Great War ultimately represented for the Baltic Germans the most unfavorable confluence of Russian nationalism and state interest, and here the Russian nationalists finally got their wish of a total stripping of power from the Germans whom they saw as collaborators. The story of the Baltic Germans in Russia representes the broader issues within the Russian Empire in balancing the new nationalist and ideological forces of the 19th century with the desire to stabilize a multi-ethnic empire. When the Baltic Germans first entered Russia, the former ideological forces barely existed, and the Baltic Germans thrived as the Tsar’s loyal segment of nobles, officers, and administrators of the empire. Once the forces of Slavophiles and Russian nationalists arose in the 19th century, Baltic Germans certainly suffered, but their position endured because the forces that seemingly appealed to conservative Russian Orthodoxy cut against a different sort of conservatism in maintaining imperial order. Only a cataclysmic war with the German Empire would align imperial interests with nationalism in a way to finally end the Baltic Germans as a force in Russian society. L This essay was written in November, 2012 for Professor Kelly O’Neill and her course History 1290: History of the Russian Empire.
Samuel L. Coffin is a junior in Mather House studying history. Samuel wrote this essay as part of a broader interest in the minority groups within the Russian Empire. Kirby, The Baltic World, 179. Giesinger, From Catherine to Khrushchev, 152. 28 Ibid. 29 “Who is Wrangel?” Independent 103 (Sept. 11, 1920), 311. 26 27
Simplicissimus 33
The Multi-faceted Legacy of Leni Riefenstahl Andrew Mooney
Of the characters to emerge from Nazi Germany, it is hard to believe that among the most controversial still to this day is a tall, athletic-looking woman with a penchant for film: Leni Riefenstahl. The historical narrative surrounding Riefenstahl, Nazi Germany’s most wellknown filmmaker, is not straightforward – which is, in part, what makes her controversial. Was she a Nazi activist, producing propaganda films at the behest of party leadership, or was she an artist who simply dealt in controversial subject matter? As is usually the case, it is difficult to put the reality into such stark terms; there are elements of truth in both lines of argument. In my analysis, I will delve into Riefenstahl’s films and the contexts in which they arose to attempt to parse out some sound ideological history for her, independent of the hysteria that so often accompanies discussion of Nazi Germany and its cultural significance. When taken together, I believe Riefenstahl’s two most famous films, Triumph of the Will and Olympia, reflect her divided legacy by offering not a coherent career as a propagandist, but rather a two-sided picture of her work and ideology. Perhaps the most infamous artistic work to come out of the Third Reich, Triumph of the Will – a purported documentary of the 1934 Nuremberg Nazi Party Congress – presents a fairly clear-cut argument for Riefenstahl as propagandist. Susan Sontag, a critic who vehemently denounces Riefenstahl and her claims of objectivity, notes that the film begins with written titles “heralding the [Nuremberg] rally as the redemptive culmination of German history.”1 The remaining 120 minutes serve primarily to reinforce that impression. The film is composed entirely of Nazi Party demonstrations, with marches, speeches, and mass assemblies piled into an intense outpouring of Nazi sentiment. The only individuals identified in the film are high-ranking officials in the Nazi administration. Hitler, foremost amongst them, is the undeniable star of the show, from his flight in an airplane down to a multitude of adoring Germans to his ability to captivate and arouse great crowds with his powerful words. The crowds are more than willing to be moved by Hitler; at times, the film can seem little more than a sequence of “clean-cut people in uniforms group[ing] and regroup[ing],” portraying the communal, disciplined image that Hitler sought for a rising Germany.2 Outside of party leadership, Riefenstahl dispels individualism entirely; the masses of German people need only respond as one unit to the urgings of the Führer. The arguments that brand Olympia, a chronicle of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, as propaganda are not nearly so straightforward and, frankly, unconvincing. The case against the authenticity of Olympia as a documentary film centers on its portrayal of the human form, interpreted as a glorification of a fascist or Aryan ideology of beauty and an implicit rejection of weak or deformed bodies. Indeed, there can be no doubt that Riefenstahl is fixated on the idea of physical beauty; from the opening sequence featuring mostly nude athletes exercising and dancing in what appear to be the ruins of Ancient Greece to the lithe, gleaming, twisting 1 2
Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, 1980), 83. Ibid., 87.
34 Spring 2013
bodies in the diving montage near the end of the film, she focuses the camera’s lens on the straining muscles and grace of world-class athletes in competition. Another critic, Michael Mackenzie, also contends that the presentation of the event itself in some ways gives undue glory to Germany; he interprets the opening ceremonies, with their “columns of marching athletes…and theatrical festivals” as an elaborate play that Hitler and the Nazis orchestrated in the mode of the disciplined demonstrations in Triumph of the Will.3 Further, we may argue that German athletes, struggles, and victories receive a disproportionate amount of attention from Riefenstahl’s camera, promoting Hitler’s belief in the necessity of great effort and overcoming adversity to achieve one’s goals. First, we must remember that the Olympics, like a World’s Fair or other international gathering, will almost necessarily take on an ethnocentric bias toward the host country. In his article “From Athens to Berlin,” scholar Michael Mackenzie notes that Riefenstahl’s presentation of the Games is essentially what we expect to see from “contemporary televised Olympics coverage,” highlighting the culture and achievements of the host nation and its athletes.4 Granted, the Nazis certainly had an interest in projecting a specific image of their country to the rest of the world, but it is unfair to read that intention in Riefenstahl’s final product, as Nazi illusion-making would have been aimed just as much at the live spectators as her cameras. She simply recorded what was in front of her, thereby maintaining the objective quality of the film. Neither were the many depictions of German victory a consequence of Riefenstahl’s supposed bias. In fact, they were largely the story of the 1936 Olympics; Germany won the most gold, silver, and bronze medals, and no country came within ten medals of matching them in any of the three categories. It tells a more faithful story about the event to dole out attention proportional to the share of victory each country earned. Finally, most sports narratives follow the effort-struggle-victory structure, and we should construe any overlap here with Hitler’s ideology as coincidence, convenient though it may be, with regard to the intention of the filmmaker. Riefenstahl’s assertion that her “attract[ion to] everything that is beautiful” is what explains her cameras’ intense interest on bodies and strength also seems plausible because of the diversity of bodies she presents.5 Admittedly, she portrays German bodies as athletic models of the human form, particularly in the Greek opening sequence, but one could say the same for any number of international athletes who appear in the film. Japanese Olympians receive prominent billing throughout, as are American athletes, and even Finnish athletes enjoy extended attention in the sauna scene that opens the film’s second part. We should also note that the film refers to almost every athlete in the competition by name, such that the film becomes a collection of individual achievements, rather than communal triumphs. The most notable non-German individual in the film, and perhaps the leading piece of evidence those who argue for Riefenstahl’s objectivity cite, is undoubtedly Jesse Owens, the African American track star. Riefenstahl’s lens does not flinch from Owens’ decidedly non-Aryan lineage, instead carefully documenting each of his four gold medals and the grace and power with which he won them. However, a more revealing indication of Riefenstahl’s veneration of physical strength comes in her presentation of the equestrian events in the Olympics. Her camera lingers on the horses’ Michael Mackenzie, “From Athens to Berlin: The 1936 Olympics and Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 2 (2003): 309. 4 Ibid. 5 Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn, 85. 3
Simplicissimus 35
rippling muscles as they run and jump through a series of obstacles, giving as much attention to their physical forms as she did to the human competitors in their respective events. This supports the notion that Riefenstahl cared about beauty and strength foremost, indiscriminate of where or in whom it was in nature. Even animals, should they display these qualities, deserve their due praise.
The first two shots of the equestrian sequence, showing the frothing horse pounding across the earth. From Leni Riefenstahl, Olympia (1938; Leipzig: Kinowelt, 2004). Finally, the very existence of this debate provides evidence that we should not see the two films “as of a piece.” If any political agenda exists within Olympia, it is not overt and the casual viewer would not necessarily apprehend it. Triumph of the Will, on the other hand, is the antithesis of subtlety; for two hours, the film blasts its audience with shouts, cheers, and proclamations of the Nazi party platform. Even if Riefenstahl intended the film as an unbiased documentary of the Nuremberg rally (as Riefenstahl maintained), we might just as easily construe an objective depiction of the event, presented without comment or embellishment, as propaganda due to the nature of the scenes. Combine that with the cinematographic license taken by Riefenstahl – the descent from the clouds, the part-sympathetic, part-ecstatic score, the slow pans, the lofty camera angles – and the result is a film that elicits the same responses from its audience as propaganda, regardless of the filmmaker’s avowed intention. Olympia produces no such consensus of emotion; some viewers are inflamed by what they see as outright campaigning for Nazi ideology, but many others see merely an aheadof-its-time sports documentary. Sontag herself admits that Riefenstahl’s work in Olympia is more sophisticated than most Nazi art; far from portraying the body in a totally “witless” or “pornographic” manner, she doesn’t shy away from “effort and strain, with its attendant imperfections.”6 And while she praises the technical innovations of Triumph of the Will as superior to that of most other Nazi art, she finds nothing complex about the message the film proclaims. This, however, does not mean that the interest the Nazi elite gave to Olympia is void of any political intention. It is likely that they recognized the many parallels that existed between the discipline and pure bodies of Olympians and the ideal German state they intended to create. Hitler certainly thought it was valuable – the film premiered at his 49th birthday party. My contention is rather that Riefenstahl herself did not make the film with the intent that it would serve as propaganda, but as a record of intense, beautiful athletic competition. Sontag’s final, somewhat manipulative argument for highlighting the bias present in 6
Ibid., 92-93.
36 Spring 2013
Olympia is that the very thought of Riefenstahl’s ideological innocence as a filmmaker is dangerous and might even dull our ability “to detect the fascist longings in our midst.”7 To believe in Riefenstahl’s objectivity, she says, is to be duped by a conspiratorial government and to implicitly accept its insidious assertions. I respond to Sontag by referencing the principle of Occam’s Razor: the theory that makes the fewest assumptions – the simplest one – is often the most accurate. I take the films to be what they are at face value: one a glorification of the rise of the Nazi Party and the other a tribute to human athletic achievement. Riefenstahl is a filmmaker above such labels as propagandist or artist, and her place in history should reflect that fact. While certainly not removed from the ecstasy of the rise of Nazi Germany, Riefenstahl also possessed her own ideals, and she expressed both of these in different films and in different ways. V This essay was written in October 2012 for Professor Eric Rentschler and his course Culture and Belief 54: Nazi Cinema: The Art and Politics of Illusion.
Andrew is a junior social studies concentrator living in Mather House. He is also an Associate Sports Editor at The Harvard Crimson. Ibid., 97.
7
Simplicissimus 37
The Identity of Zarathustra in Ecce Homo Alex Trevino
The arrival of Thus Spoke Zarathustra marks a departure in Nietzsche’s corpus – a moment of height and certainty in the midst of a shifting, frequently groundless philosophy. Zarathustra is a creation who, like his author, affirms unconditionally, says Yes to life, and rejects “old tablets.” Yet he also prophesizes in a doctrinal manner seemingly unfit for a thinker such as Nietzsche. In reading Nietzsche before, during, and after Zarathustra, we are obliged to examine the relationship between author and character: to what degree does Nietzsche identify as Zarathustra, or anticipate him, or use him as a device or mouthpiece? What is the significance of their similarities and differences? Importantly, why does Nietzsche reframe his entire written life around Zarathustra in Ecce Homo? This essay will undertake to answer these questions and attempt to argue that, though Zarathustra is at first a separate entity, a literary device, and a poetic experiment, Nietzsche later equates himself with his creation in order to subvert and fix its posthumous identity. Using examples primarily from Nietzsche’s later works, I will posit Ecce Homo as a closure of identity – the ultimate performance of the philosopher, a textual suicide enacted precisely to ensure the mortality of an anti-metaphysical philosophy. Before the arrival of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche raises a profound question about the nature of truth and knowledge, asking, “To what extent can the truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment.”1 The question, posited as “the ultimate question about the conditions of life,” is in other words: can truth be reconciled with life? The stakes are high. Nietzsche associates truth with profundity and profundity with an abyss, danger, and suffering; conversely, appearances, which cover up the profound - are associated with safety and preservation. In Aphorism 59 of Beyond Good and Evil, he writes that “anyone who has looked deeply into the world may guess how much wisdom lies in the superficiality of men,” and later, “It is the profound, suspicious fear of an incurable pessimism that forces whole millennia to bury their teeth in and cling to a religious interpretation of existence: the fear of that instinct which senses that one might get a hold of the truth too soon, before man has become strong enough, hard enough, artist enough.”2 Here, appearances, whether in the form of religion or the progressive, creative “artist,” work to shield us from “incurable” fears, covering them with a “surface” – in other words, deceptions protect life from an abyss. Nietzsche’s question, then, is unavoidable for all seekers of knowledge, and nihilism is the risk of experimenting towards its answer. He posits a stronger, harder, more creative man to face that risk – can such a man exist? Nietzsche contrives one early experiment in the form of a famous parable. “Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?” cries the madman, speaking of the death of God. The madman wonders what “sacred games” will be invented next; he looks forward, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Gay Science; with a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs, trans. and ed. Walter Arnold Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 171. 2 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil - What is Religious,” in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Arnold Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 261. 1
38 Spring 2013
towards a new affirmation of life after God. But the townspeople, though they do not believe in God, also fail to understand the crucial implications of their atheism. Despite their alleged unbelief, they still subscribe to Christian morality, omitting only the name. The madman knows they will find it fruitless to “invent” anything until every vestige of God is wiped away too. Essentially, the townspeople are unable to reconcile the truth, which necessitates a turn away from morality followed by a risky and difficult invention of new principles, with their existence. “There has never been a greater deed,” claims the madman; he has “come too early.”3 Fictionally speaking, Nietzsche’s experiment fails, but it helps to prefigure a future experiment, similarly eager to create, similarly without illusions, and similarly untimely: Zarathustra. Zarathustra arises as a re-formulation of the madman. He exists to interrogate the same ultimate question, namely – is it possible to affirm life in a universe to which “none of our aesthetic and moral principles apply...?”4 He is nothing if not an untimely figure, at least in his creator’s view. In Zarathustra, the protagonist flies, “quivering, an arrow, through sun-drunken delight, away into distant futures which no dream had yet seen, into hotter souths than artists ever dreamed of, where gods in their dances are ashamed of all clothes – to speak in parables and to limp and stammer like poets…” However, the next line reveals Zarathustra’s ambiguity regarding the nature of his untimeliness and of prophecy (one that the author might share). He continues, “…and verily, I am ashamed that I must still be a poet.”5 Here, a previously unacknowledged, specific insecurity worms into the psychology of the fictional character, which in turn reveals the author’s uncertainty about his textual approach (Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a work of fiction, poetry, or parody). Does a force of progressive, terrible untimeliness necessitate a layer of artistry in order to conceal itself? One of the inherent beauties of poetry is that it multiplies interpretation; its difficulty, from a scientist’s perspective, is that it conceals and muddies what might otherwise have been clear. “To what extent can truth endure incorporation?” – But Zarathustra embodies the tension between truth and appearance that animates that question. In response to it, he can only deflect poetically and admit, “How lovely it is that there are words and sounds! Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart?”6 We are left with a Zarathustra that doubts his existential principle – the fundamental, contradictory question that produced him – and wonders whether he can teach or explain truth without illusive poetry. Beneath this doubt, being untimely is cast into deep shadow. Zarathustra’s fate is a paradox – he will not be heard because he speaks in verse, and he cannot speak in plain truths, otherwise others will refuse to hear him. His redemption, then, the salvation of the untimely “redeemer” himself, is represented as a finality: I taught them all my creating and striving, to create and carry together into One what in man is fragment and riddle and dreadful accident; as creator, guesser of riddles, and redeemer of accidents, I taught them to work on the future and to redeem with their creation all that has been. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 181-182. Ibid., 168. 5 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, “On Old and New Tablets,” in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Arnold Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1972), 309. 6 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, “The Convalescent,” in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Arnold Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1972), 329. 3 4
Simplicissimus 39
To redeem what is past in man and to re-create all “it was” until the will says, “Thus I willed it! Thus I shall will it” – this I called redemption and this alone I taught them to call redemption. Now I wait for my own redemption – that I may go to them for the last time. For I want to go to men once more; under their eyes I want to go under; dying, I want to give them my richest gift… Like the sun, Zarathustra too wants to go under; now he sits here and waits, surrounded by broken old tablets and new tablets half covered with writing.7
Zarathustra finds redemption in death: “dying, I want to give them my richest gift…” He goes on to define the moment of death quite precisely and deliberately as a finality of proclamation – “I spoke of my word, I break of my word: thus my eternal lot wants it; as a proclaimer I perish.”8 Indeed, Zarathustra’s resigned “I break” and “I perish” seem to refer to Zarathustra’s work above all, rather than his living self, but his own death is still illuminated as redemption, as opposed to the “guessing of riddles” that suffices as redemption for man. Until this moment, redemption does not feature prominently in Zarathustra’s type; it correlates with the manifestation of his existential tension, his dependence on the question, as doubt. These idiosyncrasies of death, doubt, and redemption fit into an understanding of him as the perfect experimental praxis – he exists only as long as the “ultimate question” goes unresolved. The redemption of the untimely in particular was foreshadowed in a dialogue from The Gay Science, Aphorism 262: “Sub specie aeterni. –A: ‘You are moving away faster and faster from the living; soon they will strike your name from their rolls.’ –B: ‘That is the only way to participate in the privilege of the dead.’ –A: ‘What privilege?’ –B: ‘To die no more.’” In 1882, the meaning of this aphorism for Nietzsche might well have agreed with Kaufmann’s critical footnote – that “what is timely will pass away with time, and untimeliness is the price of immortality,” a view that associates to “die no more” with a kind of world-historical immortality.9 Probably, this kind of immortality was Zarathustra’s original intention as well – he ascribes creativity (“my creating”), “hardness,” and nobility to an ability “to impress your hand on millennia as on wax, blessedness to write on the will of millennia as on bronze.”10 This proclamation leads to a useful analogy whose two components inherently oppose in the character of Zarathustra: greatness is to immortality as personal redemption is to death. Then, in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche radically re-inscribes his corpus, lining up his works as along a comet’s trajectory, all works and words pointing to Zarathustra – and he certainly has the right to do so. In the preface, he writes, “On this perfect day, when everything is ripening and not only the grape turns brown, the eye of the sun just fell upon my life: I looked back, I looked forward, and never saw so many and such good things at once. It was not for nothing that I buried my forty-fourth year today; I had the right to bury it; whatever was life in it has been saved, is immortal… and so I tell my life to myself.”11 Although the direct reference to immortality in his autobiography’s preface implies accordance with everything untimely, great, and immortal, the nature of the text as a whole undermines this simple conclusion, complicating the identities of relation, so-to-speak, of the author Nietzsche and his fictions. Nietzsche, “On New and Old Tablets,” 310. Nietzsche, “The Convalescent,” 333. 9 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 218. 10 Nietzsche, “On Old and New Tablets,” 326. 11 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, “Ecce Homo - Preface,” in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Arnold Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1972), 677. 7
8
40 Spring 2013
To be misunderstood: One of Nietzsche’s most explicit anxieties is also ubiquitously and practically coded into the prose of Ecce Homo as irony, dissimulation, and deception. A multiplicity of identities combined with an unprecedented style and ambiguous textual performance all complicate the book’s meanings. One of its most frustrating – though perhaps also instructive – aspects is the confusion of the author’s identity with that of his Zarathustra. Ecce Homo ties itself repeatedly back to Zarathustra, which Nietzsche unhesitatingly elevates to literary mountaintops: “Among my writings my Zarathustra stands to my mind by itself. With that I have given mankind the greatest present that has ever been made to it so far.”12 He repeatedly conflates himself with his character – in the preface, he signs a quotation from Zarathustra as “Friedrich Nietzsche;” in “Why I Am So Wise,” he fails to surround Zarathustra’s voice with quotation marks, then leaves the quotation open with an ellipsis leading into the next section; and in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” he again alternates his use of quotation marks.13 Subsequently, beginning in the same section, Ecce points more consistently and directly to the equivalence of author and character. Nietzsche writes of Zarathustra’s conception that it “was on these two walks that the whole of Zarathustra I occurred to me, and especially Zarathustra himself as a type: rather, he overtook me.”14 Then, Nietzsche perfectly echoes a previous description of Zarathustra – “in every word he contradicts, this most Yes-saying of all spirits; in him all opposites are blended into a new unity” – in a self-descriptive passage, claiming, “I contradict as has never been contradicted before and am nevertheless the opposite of a No-saying spirit. I am a bringer of glad tidings like no one before me.”15 And finally (though numerous other examples could be made), he confides that “the self-overcoming of morality, out of truthfulness; the self-overcoming of the moralist, into his opposite – into me – that is what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth.”15 Did the prophet not speak his own truth satisfactorily for himself? Nietzsche’s contradictory textual performances incorporate the aforementioned opposition between greatness and redemption: For Nietzsche to speak for Zarathustra, and speak extensively, violates the character’s solitude and pins him irrevocably to the author, a man; for Nietzsche to elevate Zarathustra to the rank of “destiny” speaks plainly to a desire for immortality. Yet Nietzsche goes out of his way to clarify, supplement, and identify himself with the words of Zarathustra. For Zarathustra, who originates from and inhabits the fundamental tension between truth and deception, it seems that to clarify him would be a killing stroke – would pin down the multiplicity of his potential, and strip him of his vital paradox and purpose. Is it possible that Nietzsche is attempting to ground his “sun arrow” deliberately and make him timely on purpose? In any case, how are we to understand Nietzsche’s reappropriation of Zarathustra? One clue might be found in the final formulation of Nietzsche’s plea: “Have I been understood? – Dionysus versus the Crucified.” Nietzsche makes another equivalence between Zarathustra and Dionysus by circumscribing Zarathustra’s voice with another presence: “But Ibid., 675. Ibid., 676, 690-691, 764. 14 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Arnold Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1972), 754. 15 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, “Why I am a Destiny,” in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Arnold Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1972), 784. 12 13
Simplicissimus 41
that is the concept of Dionysus himself,” followed by Zarathustra’s affirmation of the eternal recurrence as “one reason more for being himself the eternal Yes to all things… But this is the concept of Dionysus once again” [emphasis added].16 Once again Nietzsche flirts with the idea of immortality. This time, he justifies Zarathustra’s “being himself eternal” by placing him in proximity to a god. This transformation might leave us unsatisfied as little more than an interchange of symbols – are not both Nietzsche’s progeny? And, to reiterate, did the prophet not speak his truth satisfactorily for himself in the first place? Nonetheless, the introduction of the deity here marks off a crucial opposition regarding the Zarathustra’s confused identity: His type is now torn between Nietzsche and Dionysus, man and god. Now we are perhaps closer to understanding the title of the book. Ecce Homo, Behold the man: a mockery, to be sure, but what precisely does the name of Jesus the evangel mean in Nietzsche’s mouth? The answer, if anywhere, is surely to be found in the first part of Nietzsche’s uncompleted Revaluation of All Values: The Antichrist. In it, Nietzsche thoroughly deconstructs the literal interpretations of Christian concepts – which he always places in scare quotes – leaving in place their original, symbolic intent. He intends to leave us with the inward creations of a surprisingly free spirit, variously characterized as the “evangel” and the “Redeemer” – not always in quotes. Nietzsche writes that “the history of Christianity, beginning with the death on the cross, is the history of the misunderstanding, growing cruder with every step, of an original symbolism,” in which the evangel used father, son, kingdom of god, and other terms as symbols for psychological principles.17 He laments the appropriation of these terms into literal space and historical time, ennobling the inner states of heart and mind that they represented for Jesus as original metaphors. “In truth,” he argues, “there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. The ‘evangel’ died on the cross… only Christian practice, a life such as he lived who died on the cross, is Christian.”18 Then Nietzsche’s analysis of Jesus becomes decisive and intense: What was and is Christianity’s greatest “obscenity?” That “the whole and only actuality of the evangel, is conjured away – in favor of a state after death… All at once the evangel became the most contemptible of all unfulfillable promises, the impertinent19 doctrine of personal immortality.”20 In other words, Christianity is a world-historical tragedy from the moment the type ‘Jesus’ is elevated above and beyond his human existence. The truth of Christianity – and it is there – lies in the fact of living, in action, and in psychological states. In other words, the truth of Christianity was the evangel’s body, God as man. This piercing analysis of the evangel, firmly rooted in the bodily fact of the man, does not belong only to Jesus. There is another persona in Nietzsche’s corpus who deserves to be protected from the tragedy of reappropriation suffered by the “great symbolist” Jesus. His language betrays him. “Redeemer,” “glad tidings,” “parables,” “symbolism” – they refer also Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” 762. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, “The Antichrist,” in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Arnold Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1972), 610. 18 Ibid., 615. 19 Here Kaufmann’s translation of unverschämte, which can mean unashamedly, brazenly, or impudently, brings out the key distinction between Christianity and Jesus perfectly: “the doctrine of personal immortality” is impertinent – in OED 2nd, not pertaining, unconnected, unrelated – not relevant to the evangel. 20 Ibid., 616. 16
17
42 Spring 2013
to Zarathustra, and in Ecce Homo, to Nietzsche – “I am a bringer of glad tidings like no one before me” – as well. “Dionysus versus the Crucified” – what would follow if that final, concluding signature were applied, not only to the revaluation of values, but also to the psychology of Zarathustra? Would Nietzsche’s Zarathustra be made great, immortal, timeless, and god-like; or would he be pinned to a man, die with a body, perish as a proclaimer, and finally find personal redemption in death? Ecce Homo, behold the man. The book is less Nietzsche’s autobiography than it is Nietzsche’s biography of Zarathustra, in which he equates himself with his character, speaks through him, and makes him clear – that is to say, he ends the experiment. In this sense, Ecce Homo is the application of The Antichrist’s critique of Gospel to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche must defend Zarathustra against the world-historical desecration of symbolism that became Christ’s fate, and Ecce Homo is his hastily erected fortification. It pins the prophet to the man and ensures that prophet and prophecy die properly – with the man. Ecce Homo answers the ultimate question, of which Zarathustra is the ultimate experiment so far, in every literal, bodily, and corporeal sense: Truth is only incorporation. Truth is from the perspective of the body. Nietzsche accomplishes much by this answer. First, he grounds his philosophy firmly in his body, a longstanding theme in his writings. Second, he renders Zarathustra inaccessible to perspectives that are not prepared to recreate him. Because Nietzsche clarifies Zarathustra, the book, to such an extent, individuals who lack the strength, hardness, or creativity to re-imagine the symbols within must rely on Nietzsche’s account – literally, a dead interpretation. Those who understand Zarathustra – literally and etymologically21 those who stand their own ground underneath him – are obliged to reanimate him, to breathe new perspectives and new life into him, and essentially to design their own experiment with respect to their own truths. This opens a door to a treasury of multiplicity, of interpretation and reinterpretation and re-inscription, and of digging down repeatedly and coming back up with a unique precious metal each time. P This essay was written in May 2012 for Professor Peter J. Burgard and his course German 147: Nietzsche.
Alex, a recent graduate, is currently researching bioengineering and neuroscience at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. 21 The literal and etymological connotations of understand in English – from O.E.D. 2nd, to step under; to take upon oneself; and in the 16th century, to support – combined with Nietzsche’s pleas to be “understood” formed the basis of an amateur etymological analysis of the original German verstehen, which derives from the same root as the Old English forstandan, or “to stand for.” From Wollscheid: “[Verstehen] was, so Grimm says, coined to denote the brave behavior of the defendant in a medieval trial where he had to face accusations…To understand, in this sense, means to keep a difference (or a different opinion) alive along with the body hosting it.” “Have I been understood?” – asks Nietzsche; or, in the sense above: Have you accepted that my truths died with my body and cannot be yours? Do you differ from me; do you have a different opinion? Will you stand for it?
Simplicissimus 43
Licking the Pot Clean Basil Williams
Food and Identity in “Tevye the Dairyman” “Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.” — Mark Twain
While Mark Twain’s words provide food for thought, they are but a nosh in comparison to the wisdom of the Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem in his most famous work, “Tevye the Dairyman.” In “Tevye,” Sholem Aleichem, known to some as the “Jewish Mark Twain,” portrays a complicated and dynamic character who struggles with weighing the importance of the perpetuation of his own familial and religious tradition and the importance of becoming wealthy. While Sholem Aleichem often presents Tevye’s inner struggles in more blatant ways, such as his propensity to quote the Bible, he also does so more subtly: through food. In fact, in “Tevye the Dairyman,” food acts as a major reflection of his struggle. On one hand, Aleichem presents the cuisine of the wealthy Boiberik and Yehupetz crowds throughout the novel in an extravagant and garish manner that Tevye truly envies and resents. This kind of fare, when juxtaposed with Tevye’s economic situation, represents Tevye’s wishes for his family’s wealth, his hopes for his daughters’ futures, and his striving for his own exodus from social injustice and economic plight. The food and drink Aleichem presents in a traditionally Jewish way throughout the novel, however, represents Tevye’s everlasting cultural stability when his own daughters, his economic situation, or even God upset it. This dichotomy of foods mirrors Tevye’s inner struggle of weighing the significance of climbing Russia’s social ladder and the significance of maintaining his own values. The two foods in the novel define Tevye’s struggle and eventual transformation as an evolution of a mindset of destitution to a mindset of acceptance and realization of non-monetary riches, such as tradition and family. At the beginning of the story, Tevye meets two wealthy women on the street, who ask him to return them home to Yehupetz, a town where affluent summer visitors reside. Tevye despises and envies the rich Yehupetz lifestyle, and, in the first chapter of the story, he channels his frustration mainly through his discussion of their food. While saying a prayer, the Shmoneh Esrai, that morning before meeting the strangers, he says, “Boreych oleynu” – then interrupts – “Bless the fruits of this year, kindly arrange a good harvest of corn, wheat, and barley, although what good it will do me is more than I can say: does it make any difference to my horse, I ask you, if the oats I can’t afford to buy him are expensive or cheap?”1 This challenge to God represents his frustration with economic inequity – with the “eating and drinking” that the Yehupetz elite enjoy “in luxury.”2 He provides his most caustic qualm, however, after the two women complain that “except for a cup of coffee with a butter roll for breakfast, [they] haven’t had a bite of food all day.”3 Tevye thinks, “And you don’t have to tell me what hunger tastes like; that’s something I happen to know.” He continues, “I could smell the coffee, I could taste Sholem Aleichem and Hillel Hankin, Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories (New York: Shocken, 1987), 6. Ibid. 3 Ibid., 8. 1 2
44 Spring 2013
the roll on my tongue – my God, how fresh, how delicious it was,” signifying that to Tevye, Yehupetz food is a symbol of the riches that allow him to bemoan the economic disparity between himself and the rest of Yehupetz.4 After Tevye arrives at the strangers’ dacha, he witnesses an impressive spread of “soup brimming with fat, roast meats, a whole goose, [and] the best wines and salad greens” (13). At the meal, Aleichem reveals Tevye’s economic meagerness: he asks for three rubles for his chauffeuring services – a petty amount of money. Yet from the father’s embarrassment, Tevye earns a small fortune of rubles from the others in the house. The family also offers him dinner, but he does not eat, instead opting to bring food home for his family. His wagon is consequently filled with “rolls…fish…a pot roast, a quarter of chicken, tea, sugar, a cup of chicken fat, [and] a jar of jam.”5 The way Aleichem presents food in this scene evinces Tevye’s economic misfortune; indeed, as he states, “crumbs that fell from the table alone would have been enough to feed [his] kids for a week.”6 However, food in this particular scene also represents his loyalty to his family: by choosing to fill his wagon before his mouth, Tevye shows that, although he is starving for wealth, he will not compromise other aspects of his life and his tradition, such as his family. Unfortunately, Tevye must confront his dire economic status again when Menachem Mendl, Tevye’s scheming relative, convinces Tevye that he should invest his money to become richer. When Tevye first hears Menachem’s plan, Tevye invites him in for food. He warmly suggests, “We’ll start right in on the knishes, or the kreplach, or the knaidlach, or the varnishkes, or the pirogen, or the blintzes.”7 Tevye’s use of parallelism when describing the available food to Menachem emphasizes his newly found economic riches; the food however is also prototypically Jewish food. It is not the food itself that represents his tradition, but the way in which the author juxtaposes the food with a scene in which the characters discuss a desire for riches. While Tevye’s riches and Jewish values do not necessarily conflict – indeed, the rich butcher and his daughter Tsaytl’s ideal match, Layzer Wolf, are also traditionally Jewish – Tevye must constantly weigh the importance of both. As Menachem Mendl tricks him, Tevye seems to downplay the role of money in his life, as he quips, “It’s a false and foolish world, and if you want to be healthy and enjoy it…as my Grandma Nechomeh used to say…then you must never forget to lick the pot clean.”8 Tevye’s food is representative of his non-monetary values of life, including the tradition of his Grandma Nechomeh who, although not wealthy, found personal wealth in her tradition. But after Menachem tricks him, he quotes about food for just the opposite reason, to represent the wealth that he will never possess, stating, “Im eyn kemach eyn Toyroh – it’s all very well to know the Bible by heart, but you still can’t serve it for dinner.”9 In this scene, and throughout the entire story, Tevye struggles with weighing the importance of wealth and his own religious and cultural tradition in his life, a dichotomy that Aleichem’s presentation of food makes clear in these two different ways. Toward the conclusion of “Tevye the Dairyman,” however, after Tevye seems to lose Ibid., 9. Ibid., 15. 6 Ibid., 13. 7 Ibid., 24. 8 Ibid., 24-25. 9 Ibid., 39. 4
5
Simplicissimus 45
all of his daughters – to marriages, to suicide, and to another religion – his mindset seems to resemble his Grandma Nechomeh’s more closely. These changes are especially apparent in the penultimate chapter of the novel, the story about his youngest daughter, Beilke. The reader may see this particular chapter in many ways as a reversal of Tsaytl’s story. In the chapter about Tsaytl, Tevye wants his daughter to marry Layzer Wolf, a rich Jew, in order to transform her into “a grand lady with everything a person could ask for, closets full of fine linen, cupboards full of jam and schmaltz, cages full of chickens, ducks, and geese.”10 In Beilke’s story, however, Tevye is distraught to find that marrying into money has changed her. When he visits Beilke and her affluent husband, Podhotzer, in Yehupetz for dinner, he notices the ornate dining room: The oak table was set for a king, with tea, and coffee, and chocolates, and pastries, and the best French cognac, and the most expensive pickled herring, and all kinds of fruits that I’m ashamed to admit my Beilke never saw in her father’s home in her life.” (106)
The food that Tevye sees in this scene upsets him, though this table arrangement does not upset Tevye for the same reasons that elegant foods have upset him in the past. He is ashamed to admit that he was never wealthy enough to feed Beilke fancy food, but the reader may also interpret this differently. Why is Tevye unhappy? Is this not what he always wanted – for his daughter to marry a rich Jewish man? Is he ashamed that he was too poor and could thus never feed young Beilke food on an oak table? Or is he ashamed now that Beilke has diverged from his way of life and sacrificed her other values by marrying a man who has “never studied a page of Talmud in his life?”11 He wants to ask her, “[Do you remember] rolling up your sleeves and cooking me a good, down-to-earth borscht, or a dish of bean fritters, or a platter of cheese blintzes, and calling, ‘Papa, wash up and come eat’?”12 The food on the oak table may represent what Tevye does not have, but at this point in the story, the food at Beilke’s dinner represents nothing monetary to Tevye; rather, the food represents Tevye’s disappointment regarding the inevitable fate of his tradition, in addition to his realization that he values other things, such as family, more than he does money. In the end of the novel, Tevye’s daughter Chava returns home, even after marrying a non-Jew, to Tevye’s unshaken tradition. In this way, cultural stability is somewhat restored. And as Sholem Aleichem has done throughout the novel, he presents the themes of money and tradition with references to food and drink. As Tevye and his daughters prepare to leave after they learn of a pogrom; Tevye tells Tsaytl to “get busy packing the linens, the samovar, and everything else.”13 A samovar, a classic Russian tea-maker, was both an “everyday household item and a potent symbol of Russian identity.”14 The first thing that Tevye brings out of the house is a samovar because it represents his identity as a Russian Jew. He decides, at the end of the novel, that materialism does not make him happy. All he needs are the things that make him Tevye the Dairyman – his daughters, his identity, his Bible, his Yiddish, and the love of his family. Food represents both the economic and traditional facets of his inner struggle in this Ibid., 44. Ibid., 108. 12 Ibid., 107. 13 Ibid., 125. 14 Audra Jo Yoder, Making Tea Russian: The Samovar and Russian National Identity (Oxford, Ohio: Miami UP, 2009), 1. 10
11
46 Spring 2013
story, and in the end, it is the warmth of Tevye’s samovar and the richness of Tevye’s tea that gives him the comfort that money could never provide. W This essay was written in February 2012 for Professor Ruth Wisse and her course Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 29: Modern Jewish Literature.
Basil studies environmental science and public policy but possesses a passion for literature and creative writing. He is a manager of the Harvard basketball team. Simplicissimus 47
Leiligheten
Michael Thorbjørn Feehly Etter Erlend Loes roman Naiv Super
Leiligheten er tom og man er alene, setter seg ved vinduet selv om bare mørket kommer inn etter å ha kastet alle stjernene inn i hvilken som helst stor busk, liksom de var kulene i et kosmisk crocketspill. Leiligheten er tom og man er alene, men har to venner —har alle minst to venner?— en god og en dårlig. Men da man satte seg på gresset og ristet på hodet, kom de ikke. Venner som fugler i luften, venner som papirer i faksmaskinen, venner som har gjort sine navn meningsløse. Leiligheten er tom og man er alene, men har en bror: en bror som satte seg ved ens side på gresset da alt forekom seg meningsløst, meningen av alle ting skjult fra øynene, dypere enn hvis den var kulen i busken, lenger bort enn hvis den bodde på en øy, nordpå. Leiligheten er tom fordi hjertet ens er tomt. Tomt er alt som man synes at er meningsløst. Tomt er livet etter bare tjuefem-års ensomhet, en kjærlighetløs ungdom, en formløs fremtid som ligner på ens lånte leilighet.
48 Spring 2013
The Apartment
Michael Thorbjørn Feehly After Erlend Loe’s novel Naïve, Super A translation of the original Norwegian The apartment’s empty and one’s alone, sitting by the window even though only the dark is coming in after having thrown all the stars into some large bush, like they were the balls in a cosmic game of Croquet. The apartment’s empty and one’s alone, but one has two friends —everyone’s got at least two friends?— a good friend and a bad one. But they didn’t appear when one sat in the grass, shaking one’s head. Friends like birds in the air, friends like paper in the fax machine, friends making their names meaningless. The apartment’s empty and one’s alone, but one has a brother: a brother who sat himself beside one in the grass when everything became meaningless, the meaning of all things hidden from one’s eyes, deeper than if it were a ball in a bush, further afield than if it lived on an island up north The apartment’s empty because one’s heart is empty. Empty is everything one thinks empty of meaning. Empty is one’s life after but twenty-five year’s loneliness, a loveless youth, a shapeless future resembling one’s borrowed apartment. F
Michael is a history concentrator studying Norwegian and poetry. Simplicissimus 49
Svengelska
Sarah Amanullah
Mitt bästa språk är Svengelska Då jag beskrev mina ögonbryn som “rufsiga” till mina Amerikanska kompisar Och de hade ingen aning vad jag tjafsade om Eller när jag önskade från mamma en “kostym” för Halloween som barn På tala om “barn,” jag älskar hästar men inte småttingar… så vill jag ha en eller inte när jag blir stor? Kommer du eventuellt, eller kommer du kanske till min fest? Mamma skrattar när jag annonserar att jag är jätte full efter jag åt för mycket (eller drack jag och min syster vårt hemliga vin innan vi kom till köket för middag?) Spring snabbare! Skriker din coach åt dig, eller längtar du till soligare dagar? Så många obesvarade frågor när ens bästa språk är Svengelska Å andra sidan vilket stort ordförråd jag helt plötsligt har Synd att bara mina syskon kan förstå mitt galna språk.
50 Spring 2013
Swenglish
Sarah Amanullah A translation of the original Swedish Swenglish is my best language When I described as “disheveled” my eyebrows to my American friends And they hadn’t a clue what I was fussing about Or when, as a child, I wanted a Halloween “suit” from my mom Speaking of “kids,” I love horses but not toddlers… so will I want to have one or not when I grow up? Are you coming eventually or coming maybe to my party? Mom laughs when I announce that I’m wicked drunk after eating too much (or did my sister and I drink our secret wine before we came in the kitchen for dinner?) Run faster, sprint! Does your coach yell at you, or do you long for sunnier days? So many unanswered questions when one’s best language is Swenglish On the other hand what a large vocabulary I have all of a sudden A shame that only my siblings can understand my mad tongue. J
Sarah is a junior in Dunster House. She plays on the Polo Team and works with the non-profit Circle of Women. Simplicissimus 51
Hitta Jultomten Nick Mimms
Snöstormen kom tidigare än vi hade väntat oss, och mina bröder och jag var oroliga att Santa Claus inte skulle hitta vårt hus den kvällen. Det var illa nog att vi var i ett främmande land för att fira jul med mammas familj. Santa Claus skulle få det mycket svårt att hitta oss! Vi frågade mamma om hon trodde att Santa fortfarande skulle komma. Vad hon sa härnäst förvånade oss: -Kanske inte. -Nej! ropade vi. Hon skrockade. -Ni vet ju att Sverige är jultomtens ansvar, inte Santa Clauss. Och han bor just på vägen till mormors hus. Mina bröder och jag trodde inte henne, så hon bjöd in oss att sitta runt eldstaden. -När jag var mycket yngre, berättade min pappa historien om jultomten för mig. Han berättade att jultomten bodde under den stora stenen nära vägkröken på vägen till mormors hus. -Varje år, på julafton tog pappa oss barn till stenen. Vi ställde alltid en tallrik med risgrynsgröt till tomten brevid stenen och vi tittade runt omkring i skogen om vi kunde se en skymt av honom men vi såg honom aldrig. -Sedan blev min pappa sjuk och hade svårt för att gå, så mina föräldrar bestämde sig för att ställa tallriken med risgrynsgröt just utanför vårt hus. “Han skulle komma hit hur som helst, och en stor snöstorm kommer snart,” sa min pappa. Men jag trodde att han hade fel, så jag planerade att ta risgrynsgröten till stenen den natten i alla fall. -Min bror Benny – er morbror Benny – och jag smög ut ur huset efter vi var säkra på att mamma och pappa hade somnat.
52 Spring 2013
Jag tog pappas stora ficklampa, och vi tog på våra snöskorna. Innan vi lämnade huset, tog vi den vackra gamla skålen vi alltid använde till tomtens gröt och fyllde den full med gråt som mamma hade kokat. Sedan gick vi på vägen. -Vandringen var hemskt. Snön yrde och låg i drivor på skogsvägen upp till Bennys knän, och vi kunde knappt ta oss fram. Vi var så oroliga att Jultomten inte skulle kunna komma till vårt hus. Vi kom slutligen fram till stenen, lämnade gröttallriken, och vände om för att gå tillbaka, men då halkade Benny på en isfläck och föll i en snödriva. -Jag hörde hans rop och försökte att gräva ut honom. Men han var fast! Jag trodde att det kanske var en troll som höll fast på Benny under snön. Men slutligen kunde jag dra ut honom. När han kom på fötter igen, var han blå av kylla, så vi sprang tillbaka till huset så fort som möjligt. -Pappa hade väntat på oss där. Han var så arg på oss, och vi började gråta. “Jultomten kan inte komma i denna snöstormen!”grät jag. Men pappa svarade vara: “Jag tycker inte att du ska oroa dig om det. Du ska se at han kmomer.” -Och så blev det, nästa dag hade vi presenter under julgranen, även om snöstormen fortfarande rasande utanför. Mamma avslutade sin berättelse för Kristoffer, Jakob, och mig och sa: Jultomten hittar alltid ett sätt. Vi låg redan i sängen när Kristoffer tänkte på nånting. -Vi hade ju glömt att lämna jultomten gröt som mamma brukade göra! viskade han till Jakob och mig. -Vad talar du om? frågade jag. Det
står en tallrik med gröt utanför köksdörren. -Nej! Nära hans sten! Som mamma brukade göra när hon var liten. -Men mamma sa att jultomten skulle hitta vägen! viskade Jakob. -Jo, det gjorde hon, men hon talade om vädret. Hon lämnade fortfarande gröt till honom. Jag satt upp i sängen. –Du har rätt! viskade jag. Vi hoppade ut ur våra sängar och såg att mamma och pappa redan hade somnat. I mörket hittade vi en ficklampa, tallriken med gröt, och Kristoffers fickkniv, för att skydda oss från vilda djur och troll. Vi tog på våra skor och smög ut genom dörren. Vinden blåste hårt, och snö fortsatte att falla. -Vilken väg? frågade Kris. -Du vet vägen till mormors hus. Längs denna väg. Men det är snabbare att gå genom skogen. -Nej! Skrek Jakob. Inte på natten! Vildadjur och troll bor därinne. -Okej, okej, sa Kris. Då följer vi vägen. Så vi började följa vägen till mormors hus. Vi gick förbi kyrkan där morfar är begravd. Han dog när jag var bara fem, men han var sjuk för en lång tid och var tvungen att använda en rullstol. Jag kom inte ihåg mycket om honom, förutom att vi brukade besöka honom i sin äldreboende. Han berättade historier för oss om troll och andra magiska varelser som levde i Småland, och han gav oss choklad. Vägen efter kyrkan blev mycket smalare, och det var mörka skog på båda sidorna. I skogen bodde troll, feer, vildadjur, och en jultomte förhoppningsvis. När vi gick längre och längre bort från ljuset från kyrkan, blev vi kallare och kallare. -Kan vi gå fortare? frågade Jakob.
Utan att svara gick vi snabbare. Vi gick och gick och gick, ledd av ljuset av Kristoffers ficklampa. Vägen framför oss var raka, och vi följde den i vad vi trodde var många kilometer. Slutligen kom vi till en kurva i vägen. Vinden tjöt mer och mer, och jag trodde jag hörde något som tjöt under vinden. -Hör ni det? frågade jag mina bröder. -Det var bara vinden. Jag hörde bara vinden, sa Kristoffer. Nu hjälper du mig att hitta stenen. Vi gick av vägen in i skogen och sökte efter den största stenen. -Tror ni att detta är den stenen mamma pratade om? frågade Jakob. Han pekade på en liten sten -Naturligtvis inte! svarade Kris. Jultomten skulle inte få rum under den stenen. Och om en jultomte inte kan få rum under den, då kan inte en jultomte och alla hans julklappar få rum under den. Jag kunde inte ens få rum med en tågbana under den stenen! Plötsligt blev det lugnare och vinden tjöt Kristoffers namn. -Hörde du det? frågade jag. -Jag, vi måste gå nu! Jag är rädd! skrek Jakob. -Men tänk om det är jultomten? sa Kristoffer. Han vet att vi har med gröt för honom. Han vill att vi ska hitta honom. Tänk, om ni hade levte många år utan mat, då skulle ni vilja ha mat. -Men hur vet han ditt namn? frågade jag. -Du har nämnt det när du pratade innan han ropade mitt namn. Jag trodde han hade fel, att jag hade aldrig nämnt hans namn, men vi beslutade att gå mot ljudet, mot skogen. Vi har bara gått några steg när vi såg en brun huvad figur i skogen, bland den vita granarna. -Troll! skrek Kristoffer och Jakob och jag. Simplicissimus 53
Vi alla tre vände oss snabbt för att springa iväg, men jag föll av en sten, i en snödriva. CRACK! Kristoffer och Jakob vände sig om och glömde trollet. -Är du okej? frågade de. De trodde at jag hade bruttit ett ben. -Vad var det för ljud? frågade Kris. Jag försökte, men kunde inte stiga upp. -Jag tror att jag skadat något, svarade jag. Plötsligt skrek en röst bakom oss: Mina älsklingar! Vi vände för att titta på varelsen, som snart tog av sin huva. -Är du okej? frågade mamma när hon rusade till min sida. Jag har inte varit tillbaka hit på många år, men jag visste att jag skulle hitta er här. -Jag vet inte, svarade jag. Vi hörde ett ljud... Mamma frågade mig. –Gör det ont?
-Nej, sa jag. Och sen: Jag vill gå hem. Jag började gråta. -Sh sh sh. Glömmer ni något? Ni måste har kommit hit för att göra något. -Naturligtvis, sa Kristoffer. Men vi vet inte vilken sten jultomten bor under. -Niklas hittade den. Han föll av den. Jackob sprang till stenen och lämnade gröttallriken på marken. -Men titta vad jag har hittat! ropade Kristoffer. Han höll upp en vackra gammal skål, delad perfekt i två. –Du måste har fallit på den. -Jag har helt glömt bort den, viskade mamma. Jag gick aldrig tillbaka för att hämta den efter den natten. -Och titta! ropade Jakob. Skålen är ren. Gröten är borta! Jultomten har ätit upp den! -Då antar jag att vi bara måste byta ut tallrikarna. Här, ta de och vi lämnar den nya gröttallriken för Jultomte.X
Denna berättelse var semi-självbiografiskt. Jultomten bor faktiskt under en sten på vägen till min mormors hus. Vi har fortfarande inte sett honom, men julen alltid kommer fram i tid.
Nick is a chemistry concentrator and has taken two Swedish courses thus far. He also plays trumpet in various groups on campus. 54 Spring 2013
Accepting Fools as Heroes Teresa Gaille Puguon Teo
What sociocultural attitudes towards the intellectually disabled – commonly referred to as fools – were prevalent during the Viking Age? 1 Within the first decade when disability studies emerged,2 scholars quickly noticed that “Norse society did not recognize disabilities as medical conditions or personal tragedies,” with “no hint of marginalizing pity or consequent charity.”3 The oldest Norse literature is therefore likely to treat disabilities in a fashion quite unlike that to which we are accustomed to find in modern literature; modern societies marginalize the disabled while archaic oral societies seem to have treated disabled people more positively, allowing them to fill more important social positions such as priests or shamans.4 This paper examines two psycho-social techniques – cognitive dissonance and character likability – that the storytellers of the old Icelandic tradition used to sustain audience interest in “Hreidar’s Tale,” a tale from 13th century Iceland commonly referred to as “The Tale of Hreidar the Fool,” before exploring the effect of those techniques on sociocultural attitudes toward fools like Hreidar. Academics and literary critics have used interdisciplinary theories to engage critically with “Hreidar’s Tale.” Maria Eliferova, for instance, argues that Hreidar the fool surprises the king by having him stand up and publicly take off his cloak, an episode which ends in mutual fondness.5 Taking Eliferova’s point further, Jesse Byock points out that “modern friendship” is an inadequate translation for the relationship between King Magnus and Hreidar because the original Norse word for friendship, vinfengi, also includes the notion of a political union between equals.6 Both scholars assume that Hreidar is intellectually disabled beyond doubt before asserting that political authorities like kings and social contemporaries still treat him as an equal in society. In contrast, Ana Stefanova takes the opposite position by arguing that Hreidar feigns foolishness, yet she comes to the same conclusion that Hreidar enjoys admiration and respect as Disabled people have existed in all periods of history, but until very recently the discipline of Medieval Studies had not concerned itself with historical questions as to who, for instance, were the physically, sensory or mentally disabled in the Middle Ages, how did medieval society interact with its impaired members, or what socio-economic consequences being disabled might have implied for a medieval person. From Irina Metzler, “Disability in the Middle Ages: Impairment at the Intersection of Historical Inquiry and Disability Studies,” History Compass 9, no. 1 (2011): 1. 2 It was not until the 1990s that disability studies began to emerge with an academic identity of its own. From the perspective of the relatively young field of disability studies, cultural representations of the intellectually disabled allow us to interrogate charged ethical and political dynamics of social inclusion and exclusion. From Mike Oliver and Len Barton, “The Emerging Field of Disability Studies: A View From Britain” (paper presented at Disability Studies: A Global Conference, Washington, D.C., October, 2000). 1. 3 Edwin G. Boring, “Cognitive Dissonance: Its Use in Science,” American Association for the Advancement of Science 145, no. 3633 (1964): 1, accessed July 21, 2012, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1713761. 4 Lois Bragg, Oedipus Borealis: The Aberrant Body in Old Icelandic Myth and Saga (Cranbury: Associated, 2004), 2. 5 Maria Eliferova, “Body and Society in Pre-Norman England,” in A Full-Bodied Society, ed. Logie Barrow and François Poirier (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 24. 6 Jesse Byock, Viking-Age Iceland (London: Penguin, 2001), 192. 1
Simplicissimus 55
a “trickster.”7 Similarly to the three critics, I find positive sociocultural attitudes towards fools in “Hreidar’s Tale.” I argue that storytellers played on the lack of conclusive judgment on the nature of Hreidar’s foolishness to incite cognitive dissonance to maintain interest in the story as they told it. They then combined cognitive dissonance with another storytelling device – character likability. The combined effect is to encourage positive sociocultural attitudes toward the intellectually disabled. Although it is impossible to comprehend the psychology of heroes/ fools like Hreidar fully, humanity’s inability to delve into the inner recesses of an individual’s mind should not lead to the exclusion of mentally ill individuals as deserving of the audience’s respect. When evaluating the social attitudes towards Hreidar the Fool, one must ask if Hreidar is genuinely a fool, or if he is merely playing a fool. Because “Hreidar’s Tale” was deliberately constructed to encourage ambivalence towards Hreidar’s foolishness, there is no easy answer. On one hand, there are several hints that Hreidar is genuinely foolish. First, storytellers introduced Hreidar to audiences simply as “ugly8 and barely intelligent enough to care for himself,” words that were common for individuals who were intellectually disabled – not physically disabled people.9 A reading of the five volumes of Icelandic sagas and tales reveals that individuals who were intellectually disabled often received the same descriptive treatment: for example, in The Saga of the Sworn Brothers, the foolish farmhand named Egil “was a large, strong man with an ugly face, and he was clumsy and stupid. He was nicknamed Egil the Fool.”10 The Icelandic sagas and tales mark out intellectual capabilities and societal value based on one’s physical attributes. The opening paragraph of “Hreidar’s Tale” therefore points to the hero then as indeed intellectually disabled. Second, Hreidar is juxtaposed with his brother, Thord, who is clearly defined from the outset as an intelligent and socially respected man: “Thord was a short, good-looking man… [and was] highly regarded.”11 Third, the narrative structure of “Hreidar’s Tale” encourages the audience to believe that Hreidar is categorically intellectually disabled – Hreidar is not described in heroic terms before an explanation is given for his taking on of a foolish guise, suggesting that he was in fact born foolish. By contrast, most protagonists who pretend to be fools, such as Thorleif in “Thorleif, the Earl’s Poet,” are introduced as heroes, not fools: Thorleif is described as a “handsome” and “promising” young man who disguises himself as a foolish beggar to take revenge against Earl Hakon.12 Unlike Thorleif, Hreidar is crucially marked as a fool within the first minute of storytelling. We can see yet another hint that Hreidar is genuinely foolish in his actions as he grows up and transitions into adolescence: Hreidar “always stayed at home,” while “Thord travelled Ana Stefanova, “Humour Theories and the Archetype of the Trickster in Folklore: An Analytical Psychology Point of View,” Electronic Journal of Folklore 50 (2012): 82, accessed July 21, 2012, http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=1005727. 8 Ugliness often meant, simply, unpleasant to look at. Ugliness seems to signify intellectual disability instead of physical disability. Medieval Nordic people were quite capable of noting and describing physical disfigurements and disabilities without confusing such exceptionalities with ugliness, as so often happens in modern Western societies.” From Lois Bragg, “Disfigurement, Disability, and Dis-integration in Sturlunga Saga,” Alvíssmál 4 (1994): 16. 9 Vidar Hreinsson, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, Including 49 Tales (Reykjavik: Leifur Eiriksson, 1997), 375. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 368. 7
56 Spring 2013
abroad as a merchant.”13 The contemporary audience would have immediately grasped the narrative implications storytellers made who juxtaposed Hreidar and Thord as character foils: Hreidar is a male both associated with the domestic realm and physically attached to his house while Thord is a man who bravely journeys to other lands to advance his own commercial interests. Further, in Gisli’s Saga, the cultural link between staying home and intellectually disabled people becomes explicit with the physical tying of the fool: “the fool lay eating in a small, grassy hollow, haltered by the neck to a stone.”14 Right away, Bork realizes that the real fool must be the man physically tethered to the farmhouse and not the man on the boat (who was, of course, Gisli mimicking the fool). Bork’s instant reaction involves the physical limitations expected of fools: “Not only is there a great deal of talk about this fool, but he seems to move around a lot more than I thought.”15 It is significant that Bork’s immediate reaction is not that of confusion about who the real fool is, but rather that fools should not be away from the domestic realm. Thus, the storyteller emphasizes the intellectual inadequacy of Hreidar at the beginning of the tale by making clear that Hreidar spends his entire life at home. There are, on the other hand, indications in Hreidar’s Tale that Hreidar feigns foolishness, the most obvious of which is that he is remarkably articulate for a fool. The very first time the audience hears Hreidar speak, he demonstrates consciousness of social norms and gumption to seek out actively what he desires as evidenced when he tells Thord: “I wouldn’t be here, except that I have some business to take care of.”16 However, Hreidar’s articulate nature is not indicative of a sane man pretending to be a fool. Other fools and madmen in the Icelandic sagas also feature surprising displays of articulate speech. In The Saga of the Sworn Brothers, audiences come to know Egil the Fool, who is intellectually disabled yet quite capable of commonsensical and assertive speech, as evidenced in his castigation of Thormod in chapter twenty-four: “Why are you acting so foolishly? Are you mad? Do you want to capsize the boat?”17 Therefore, it is not Hreidar’s eloquence and expressivity that mark him as playing a fool. There are more effective clues that Hreidar might be feigning foolishness. A closer examination of Hreidar’s speech reveals the manipulative content of his words. For instance, Hreidar is surprisingly shrewd when he rejects Thord’s unwillingness to “go where there are big crowds” with a canny assertion: “[We] both have to go. You would like it better than my going alone, and you can’t keep me from going.”18 Another example is when Hreidar is able to suggest to the king that both Thord and himself be welcome in the king’s household, sharing the logic of his thought processes: “So to me it seems wise to be around someone who keeps an eye on me, like my brother Thord, even if there are a lot of people, rather than to be somewhere less crowded where there is no one to smooth things over.”19 A third example reveals that Hreidar, manipulative and logical, is also capable of irony. When Hreidar says to Thord, “Then I would not be very smart if I accepted this unequal share but voluntarily gave up your supervision,” Ibid., 375. Ibid., 33. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 375. 17 Ibid., 386. 18 Ibid., 376. 19 Ibid., 379. 13 14
Simplicissimus 57
audiences would have had to puzzle through the layers of irony within his statement – Hreidar is the fool in his community, is conscious of it, then denies the application of the label on himself in a very roundabout manner.20 In declaring that he “would not be very smart,” the town’s fool reveals a great deal more agency than most fools and madmen are capable of. Very quickly the audience becomes aware that if Hreidar truly is a fool, he is a most shrewd and manipulative one. Old Norse audiences would likely have been able to see clues in Hreidar’s Tale that Hreidar feigns foolishness by comparing plot elements that are similar to the literary tradition of the “Hero-as-Fool.”21 The “Hero-as-Fool” can be found as far back as A.D. 1200 in Saxo Grammaticus’s Vita Amlethi and continued to the late seventeenth century as seen in the Ambales Saga, which is why audiences would likely have recognized similarities between Hreidar and the traditional Hero/Fool.22 In both the Ambales Saga and the Vita Amlethi, the hero prudently plays the fool in self-defense because his father has been murdered and he fears for his own life. There are two significant “Hero-as-Fool” characteristics that Hreidar fulfils: firstly, he reveals his true intentions in obscure language, “metaphoric or other riddling manner.”23 This is apparent in Hreidar’s conversations with King Magnus, during which he always says exactly what he means to say in a circuitous manner, utilizing ambiguous statements such as “It would be dangerous to others to have praised you, if you were not truly the way I think you are and have just said,” and “It will be easier dealing with you by as much as you are smarter than he.” 24 25 The second characteristic that Hreidar fulfills is that of camouflaged craftsmanship: both Amleth and Ambales “pass their time whittling crooks or stakes at the hearth.”26 They accumulate a store of them and guard them carefully, and no one knows their purpose.27 Similarly, Hreidar is “shut in a building where he went to work,” implying that no one else knows what he is making or for what purpose.28 For all three heroes/fools (Ambales, Amleth and Hreidar), those crafted objects (crooks, stakes, and young pig, respectively) turn out to be tools with which they trick the king who seeks their destruction. By the time King Harald realizes that the young sow has “been made in mockery,” Hreidar likely appears heroic and not at all foolish to audiences, a model “Hero-as-Fool.”29 However, the storyteller is ambiguous in declaring Hreidar as a part of the Hero-asFool tradition. Much the way scholars today still vigorously debate the question of Hamlet’s Ibid. Certain features of Hreidar’s Tale, such as the hero-as-fool and the skilled craftsmanship of the protagonist, reflect the Icelandic story tradition contemporary audiences would have easily recognized. The Hero-as-Fool story may have been told elsewhere, but of that we know nothing. What we can say with some certainty is only that the story was familiar in one place or another in the North for over six centuries, from around 1000. Hansen convincingly argues that the ‘Hero as Fool’ story is an Icelandic regional variant of a more widely known story whose history extends back in time over a thousand years before the first literary records of the Northern hero (Amleth or Ambales). From William F. Hansen, Saxo Grammaticus & the Life of Hamlet (Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1983), 14. 22 Ibid., 7. 23 Ibid., 11. 24 Hreinsson, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 378. 25 Ibid., 380. 26 Hansen, Saxo Grammaticus, 11. 27 Ibid. 28 Hreinsson, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 382. 29 Ibid., 383. 20
21
58 Spring 2013
madness, Hreidar’s Tale does not end with a satisfying answer because it deliberately fails to deliver a plausible motive behind Hreidar’s feigned foolishness. Audiences never learn why Hreidar acts a fool and chooses to stay at home for many years – they are only left to contemplate the fact that Hreidar outgrows “the foolishness which he had adopted in the first half of his life.”30 Unlike Amleth and Ambales, Hreidar’s father is not king of the land, nor is he slain by another man who assumes the throne and weds the widowed queen. While it makes sense for Amleth and Ambales to play the fool prudently in self-defense and bide their time to seek revenge, there is no equivalent motive that drives the hero to feign madness. If anything, the only possible source of familial tension and financial competition is Thord, Hreidar’s brother. But from beginning to end, Thord proves to be a reliable brother, as shown when he explains to the king his reason for bringing Hreidar the Fool abroad: “He asked only one thing for himself, to travel abroad with me, and it seemed unreasonable not to permit him this one thing, when he allows me to have my way in so many other ways.”31 There is a great deal of family loyalty infused in that line. In contrast, the very lack of the honorable concept of family loyalty is precisely what is missing in Ambales’ and Amleth’s families, for it is their uncles’ lust for power that results in the murder of the king, precipitating the heroes’ feigned madness. In this respect Hreidar’s Tale confuses audiences with its ambiguous take on Hreidar’s motives. By dropping clues that Hreidar is feigning foolishness after introducing him as an intellectually disabled protagonist, the storyteller causes audiences to feel cognitive dissonance – discomfiture – from the inability to reconcile their contrasting ideas of Hreidar’s character. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological concept that describes the state of discomfort that audiences find themselves in when they hold two conflicting opinions: on one hand, the storyteller introduces an intellectually disabled protagonist, yet, on the other hand, the storyteller chooses episodes of Hreidar’s life that show him to be logical and manipulative, as well as emotionally and intellectually curious. Yet another example is the nature of the oral tradition. Hreidar is understood as a layered character because the audience cannot take Hreidar’s words at facevalue if they want to pick up on his double meanings. However, audiences must distinguish between the different roles the storyteller plays: the act of storytelling, the literary function of the narrator, and the performance as protagonist and other characters. There is an inherent tension amongst the three roles; when the storyteller performs the line “It will be easier dealing with you by as much as you are smarter than he” as Hreidar, audiences must discern between the tone in which Hreidar talks to King Magnus, the narrator reporting what Hreidar says objectively, and the storyteller wanting audiences to remain emotionally invested in the story, perhaps in a guileful tone.32 The intellectual tension and emotional discomfort causes audiences to seek to reduce the cognitive dissonance they experience. Audiences can alleviate the discomfort of cognitive dissonance by seeing Hreidar’s foolishness as falling between natural and feigned; from this perspective, Hreidar’s foolishness is a result of his immaturity as a child, and, as he transitions from adolescence to adulthood, he grows out of his folly. This is, of course, what the narrator in “Hreidar’s Tale” abruptly asserts through the penultimate sentence: “For the most part he outgrew the foolishness which he had Ibid., 384. Ibid., 377. 32 Ibid., 380. 30 31
Simplicissimus 59
adopted in the first half of his life.”33 This viewpoint seems to suggest that “Hreidar’s Tale” is an early version of the bildungsroman. Hreidar is born foolish, chooses to feign foolishness as a childish adolescent, then grows out of his foolish immaturity. Bildungsromans “all portray a young man of their time: how he enters life in a happy state of naïveté seeking kindred souls, finds friendship and love, how he comes into conflict with the hard realities of the world, how he grows to maturity through diverse life-experiences, finds himself, and attains certainty about his purpose in the world.”34 First, although Hreidar’s Tale is a relatively short story, Hreidar certainly undergoes substantial character development as an itinerant and courageous protagonist whose circumstances change from that of a homely and protected younger son to the king’s man. While Hreidar’s age is never mentioned, it is clear that he is a young man who longs for more emotional depth, as seen when he hopes to lose his temper (“How long until that happens?”) so that he may understand what anger feels like.35 Second, Hreidar longs for diverse life experiences – he asks King Magnus for permission to “go to the settlement meeting. I am not widely travelled, and I have a great curiosity to see two kings together in one place.”36 Third, the storytellers illustrate how “Hreidar’s Tale” is a bildungsroman through the vivid telling of the poem Hreidar composes for King Magnus: the poem “was most unusual, most peculiar at the beginning and better towards the end.”37 The fool who constantly stood “out from other men” for all the wrong reasons ends up becoming “a powerful figure” in Svarfadardal.38 39 It is significant that society eventually accepts and admires Hreidar the Fool. The learning experiences of youths who act a fool before gaining respect as an adult form the backbone of the bildungsroman. Seeing Hreidar’s Tale as a bildungsroman alleviates cognitive dissonance by allowing audiences to see Hreidar’s feigned foolishness as a part of a childish phase which he eventually grows out of. The idea that “Hreidar’s Tale” is a form of bildungsroman does not, however, alleviate the discomfort of cognitive dissonance even though it lends credence to the school of thought that Hreidar is pretending to be foolish. Although audiences may begin to believe that Hreidar’s intellectual disability is feigned, audiences know well that Hreidar is still intellectually disabled.40 One objection to the bildungsroman school-of-thought attacks the neat categorization of Hreidar’s foolishness: to be logically consistent, Hreidar’s behavior should be most foolish at the beginning of the tale before he gradually grows in maturity – but this is not what happens. Hreidar’s arguably foolish actions (including wearing strange attire to see King Magnus and acting a fool during their conversation, allowing king Harald’s men to physically hurt him before losing his temper) do not follow such a smooth, free-falling trajectory. Instead, the degree to which Hreidar acts a fool is erratic and unpredictable – a fact that supports the opposing school-of-thought that sees Hreidar’s foolishness as genuine. The question then is why the storyteller remains frustratingly ambivalent with regards Hreidar’s intellectual capacities? Ibid., 384. Anniken Telnes Iversen, “Change and Continuity: The Bildungsroman in English” (PhD diss., University of Tromso, 2009), 22. 35 Hreinsson, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 379. 36 Ibid., 380. 37 Ibid., 383. 38 Ibid., 376. 39 Ibid., 384. 40 Boring, “Cognitive Dissonance,” 2. 33
34
60 Spring 2013
The storyteller takes advantage of cognitive dissonance to keep the audience invested in the story. It is crucial that, in addition to being kept in a prolonged state of cognitive dissonance, the audience likes Hreidar. Character likability ensures that the audience does not get too frustrated and loses interest before the storytelling is over. Hreidar, described as an “ugly” and “good-tempered” fool who constantly gets the better of supposedly better looking people and political superiors (Thord and King Magnus, respectively), is more than likable – the audience wants him to succeed. The narrator’s portrayal of a likable protagonist who may or may not be feigning foolishness achieves an effect that all storytellers desire: the storyteller successfully inveigles the audience’s interest in Hreidar’s life experiences, which form the backbone of all activity in the tale. The combination of cognitive dissonance and character likability that the audience experiences generates an urge to settle the dissonance. In order to reduce the dissonance, audiences can only listen intently to storytellers to sieve out more facts about Hreidar. Indeed, even as audiences experience cognitive dissonance regarding Hreidar’s natural or feigned foolishness, audiences are in no way ambivalent when it comes to character likability: Eliferova, Byock and Stefanova all agree that Hreidar is a very winsome and successful protagonist despite his intellectual disability. When Eliferova describes “mutual liking” between king Magnus and Hreidar, she is not exaggerating.41 Indeed, Hreidar and King Magnus seem to operate on a very unusual level of equality and mutual respect. Even though it is Hreidar who is officially presented to King Magnus, as the episode plays out it seems as if, rather, King Magnus is presented to Hreidar. King Magnus is the first to ask: “Would you like me to stand up?”42 This suggests that Magnus and Hreidar engage in a strange shift of subordination, with Magnus asking Hreidar if he should remove his kingly cloak just so Hreidar could look at him. In what would have been a comic role reversal for Icelandic audiences, it is Hreidar who judges Magnus’s looks, saying: “Excellent, excellent.”43 Natural or feigned, Hreidar’s intellectual disability does not hinder his appeal. Byock and Stefanova bolster Eliferova’s argument, advocating that Hreidar is accepted as a heroic and well-received character despite his intellectual disability. Byock points to the very public display of warmth between Hreidar and King Magnus, positing that when King Magnus welcomes Hreidar “in my household,” audiences would accept the scene as a symbol of political friendship.44 It is obvious that King Magnus sees positive characteristics in Hreidar right away, a favorable attitude that would have been transmitted to Icelandic audiences. Likewise, Stefanova points to the “integrative” aspects of Hreidar’s Tale: “The story gives the feeling that all people, even the enemy, admire him.”45 When Stefanova argues that the “trickster-hero... may turn every situation to his own advantage and win even in the most severe circumstances,” one immediately calls to mind the highly memorable and entertaining images of Hreidar getting the king to take off his cloak in public and Hreidar fooling King Harald with his crafty creation of the young sow.46 Eliferova, “Body and Society in Pre-Norman England,” 24. Hreinsson, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 378. 43 Ibid. 44 Byock, Viking-Age Iceland, 193. 45 Stefanova, “Humour Theories and the Archetype of the Trickster in Folklore,” 82. 46 Ibid. 41
42
Simplicissimus 61
Not only did the combination of Hreidar’s extreme likability as a character and the ambivalence regarding his intellectual capacities keep audiences invested in the story, it led to another, probably unintended, effect: Hreidar the Fool is portrayed as courageous, likeable, and worthy of societal admiration in Icelandic culture. Feigned or not, Hreidar’s foolishness does not serve as an obstacle to gaining honor as a respectable Icelander. “Hreidar’s Tale” epitomizes the problem of mental disorders and intellectual disabilities: the human mind is so complex that no one – not even professional psychiatrists – can definitively state when an individual is faking his mental state and mental abilities. 47 This is because mental disorders are notoriously easy to malinger, a concept that Icelandic audiences would certainly understand. Hreidar however lacks any of the traditional malingerer’s motives.48 Further, it seems unlikely that Hreidar engaged in strategic planning to feign folly from a young age. Therefore it is difficult for the audience to escape the uncomfortable state of cognitive dissonance, leading them to better understand the convincing moral: the near-impossibility of concretely determining the psychological and intellectual abilities of others should not debar the societal acceptance of fools as likable men of distinguished courage and other noble abilities. “Hreidar’s Tale” deliberately engineers the state of cognitive dissonance in audiences while ensuring the chief protagonist is an extremely likable character, which successfully sustains audience interest in the tale from beginning to end. The two techniques the Icelandic storyteller would use also led to another effect: that of elevating the social receptivity of Viking Age peoples in favor of social inclusion of the intellectually disabled. L This essay was written in July 2012 for Professor Stephen Mitchell and the Harvard Summer School in Scandinavia.
Gaille is president of Harvard ‘Consent, Assault Awareness, Relationship Educators’ (CAARE). She serves on the Women’s Cabinet and the Special Events board at the Institute of Politics. 47 Victor Kuperman examined the representation of psychiatric malingering in post-1950s literary and cinematographic narratives. In his study, about 40% of all textual excerpts were characterized by feigned folly, which was defined as the fabricated deficit in intellectual and adaptive functioning. From Victor Kuperman, “Narratives of psychiatric malingering in works of fiction,” Medical Humanities 32, no. 2 (2005): 67-72, accessed July 21, 2012, http://mh.bmj.com/content/32/2/67.abstract. 48 Theodore Lidz, Hamlet’s enemy: Madness and myth in Hamlet (New York: Basic, 1975), 18.
62 Spring 2013
Simplicissimus 63
Acknowledgements Dear Reader, I dearly hope that you have enjoyed the first issue of Simplicissimus: The Harvard College Journal of Germanic Studies. In the beginning of 2013, eight students from various backgrounds, spanning six Germanic languages, came together to create a journal to support student work from Harvard College about Germanic topics or in Germanic languages, and in April we successfully published our spring issue both online and in print. Our endeavor would not have been possible without the undying support of the German, Dutch, and Scandinavian communities on campus. To this end, I thank especially Martin Reindl and Jelle Zijlstra for their invaluable assistance in proofreading submissions in German and Dutch. I would like to thank all those who submitted works for review – the number of submissions that Simplicissimus received was astounding, and we regret that we have been able to publish only a select few of the many excellent pieces submitted. I thank Professor Peter J. Burgard, Professor Ursula Lindqvist, Professor Stephen Mitchell, Professor Ruth Wisse, and Mr. Ofer Dynes for their support in recommending particular pieces for consideration, and I thank our advisor, the Director of Undergraduate Studies in German, Lisa Parkes. Our founding members have worked diligently to ready Simplicissimus for publication, and I thank everyone on our board again for this dedication and effort. In addition, I thank the Harvard Undergraduate Council for their financial support. Without their assistance, Simplicissimus would never have been printed. Further, I would like to acknowledge Canada Type – Simplicissimus is printed with licensed copies of their Dutch Mediaeval typeface. Finally, I thank you, the reader, for supporting Simplicissimus as we continue our work at Harvard with the amazing Germanic languages and literatures that we so love. Until the next issue, Cody Dales, Editor-in-Chief
64 Spring 2013