Michael Butterworth's Book Publisher Exhibit: Savoy Press

Green Frog?

Highbrow

Michael Butterworth's exhibition of books from his publishing company, Savoy Press, has made its way to America, specifically, to Kent State University - as can be seen at Carter Kaplan's blog.

Butterworth - as many will recall - wrote the brilliant if melancholy story "Das Neue Leben" ("The New Life"), a dark tale of Hitler's survival and his obscure retreat somewhere in the nearly impenetrable Amazon jungle, accompanied by a 'manservant' and an enormous serpent.

Privately, Butterworth told me that he had initially intended to write a novel - but stopped at a short story! The result is so good, I assured him, that he should return to his original aim and write the novel.

Incidentally, despite the title, "Das Neue Leben," the story is told in English, not German . . .

True Translation: Translating Knausgaard's Struggle

Karl Ove Knausgaard
Photo by Chester Higgins Jr.
The New York Times

I've previously blogged on Knausgaard, but my reason for re-blogging is more limited this time. I've just read Liesl Schillinger's review -- "His Peers' Views Are in the Details: Karl Ove Knausgaard's 'My Struggle' Is a Movement" (NYT, May 21, 2014) -- and she observes in passing:

If you are an author, editor or critic, chances are you are lining up for [the book] . . . . If you are a lay reader, you may not have heard of Mr. Knausgaard; or if you have heard of him, you may have put off tackling the books, daunted by their Proustian bulk and uncertain of what that menacing title holds in store. ("My Struggle," or "Min Kamp" in Norwegian, is "Mein Kampf" in German -- the title of Hitler's notorious manifesto.)

Interesting that the translation of Min Kamp into English is the literal My Struggle rather than the far more resonant Mein Kampf. The question I have is this: Is My Struggle a true translation? Had there been no Hitler and thus no such book as Mein Kampf, then My Struggle would have been a perfectly true translation of the title.

But there was a Hitler and a Mein Kampf, a title that Knausgaard was obviously playing upon in choosing Min Kamp, so perhaps a better, truer translation would have been Mein Kampf. Native speakers of English would recognize the title and catch the allusion. Or maybe not. They might assume it were the work by Hitler. Nobody would buy it other than racist wingnuts! (It would be a bestseller.)

Maybe the best solution would be to title it Min Kamp, as a Norwegian would. That would cast a pall and light a fire, the truest translation thus being no translation at all! The allusion would have been preserved in the play on the title Mein Kampf, but the title would also be different enough for potential readers to distinguish the two.

Or one could title it My Jihad . . .

Martin Heidegger: Nazi Philosopher?

Martin Heidegger

(Image from New York Times)

In a recent article for The New York Times (April 29, 2010), "The Jewish Question: Martin Heidegger" (perhaps better titled "The Nazi Question"), senior editor for The New Republic, Adam Kirsch, reviews two recent books on this tarnished German philosopher, who joined the Nazi Party, served as rector of Freiburg University from 1933-34, and told the student body, in a November 1933 speech, that "the Führer and he alone is the present and future German reality and its law."

The more interesting of the two books would appear to be the one originally in French by Emmanuel Faye, The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 (translated by Michael B. Smith), for Kirsch writes that Faye argues not just that that Heidegger was a philosopher who happened to join the Nazi Party, nor that Heidegger was a Nazi who just happened to be a philosopher, but that Heidegger was, crucially, a "Nazi philosopher":

Faye, an authority on Descartes, is driven to this pitch of accusation by his study of the seminars, till now untranslated or unpublished, that Heidegger taught during 1933-35, in the first flush of his Nazi enthusiasm. In these classes, Faye proves beyond doubt, we do witness "the introduction of Nazism into philosophy," the outright transformation of Heidegger's thought into a tool of Nazi indoctrination. The more familiar a reader is with Heideg­ger's work, the more shocking it will be to see him employ his key terms -- being, existence, decision -- as euphemisms for nationalism and Führer-worship. Thus we find him, in the winter of 1933-34, declaring that "the question of the awareness of the will of the community is a problem that is posed in all democracies, but one that of course can become fruitful only when the will of the Führer and the will of the people are identified in their essence." At the same time, Heidegger tells his students -- "many of whom," Faye points out, "were to become combatants at the beginning of the following decade on the Eastern front" -- that "to a Semitic nomad," the "nature of our German space" is inherently foreign.

This is complex material, for a proper critique demands that one deal not merely with nationalist ideas, ideologies of blood, and the concept of the leader, but that one engage in philosophical thinking and its distortion, not an easy labor. At the conclusion of his article, Kirsch suggests a similar task:

[W]hat makes Heidegger's Nazism a challenge -- as opposed to merely a scandal -- is the fact that he did not drift into evil, but thought his way into it. And once we acknowledge the powerful attraction of his work, we are morally and intellectually bound to explore what part of that attraction is owed to ideas with a potential for evil . . . . [T]hat more difficult questioning . . . asks us to confront not just Heideg­ger but ourselves.

I'd be interested to know what my philosopher friend Bill Vallicella thinks about this matter, for I can mostly just direct attention to a matter outside my expertise. Heidegger's personal culpability is beyond question, but the question concerning the culpability of his philosophy remains, and I think it an important one, intellectually, for Heidegger the philosopher is considered a major thinker of the 20th century, and his ideas have influenced the intellectual left, continental philosophy, literary criticism, theology, and many other fields.

As noted, I can mostly just call attention to this matter of culpability, but I'm still willing to hazard a guess. In a statement quoted above, Kirsch observes:

The more familiar a reader is with Heideg­ger's work, the more shocking it will be to see him employ his key terms -- being, existence, decision -- as euphemisms for nationalism and Führer-worship.

Kirsch isn't being very precise here in reporting on Faye's evidence, for he offers three different Heideggerian terms used for two different fascist characteristics, but none of the former seems to correspond with either of the latter. Perhaps Kirsch means "euphemisms associated with nationalism and Führer-worship"? But even if "being, existence, decision" are used by Heidegger in his seminars from 1933 to 1935 as euphemisms for Nazi concepts, Kirsch's term "euphemism" suggests that Heidegger is employing some intellectual sleight of hand, using more innocuous terms to hide something less reputable, a form of equivocation. If Heidegger is equivocating in his use of key terms from his philosophy, then his core concepts might not be essentially evil but merely corruptible.

But I haven't read Faye's book, and I would be in deep waters even if I had, so I leave this intellectual sea for better, more experienced sailors to navigate and chart . . .

UPDATE: My friend Bill Vallicella has offered his view of the matter.

The Density of History

Cyprian Koscielniak

The Armageddon Waltz?

(Image from New York Times)

A few weeks ago, Frederic Morton -- author of Thunder of Twilight: Vienna 1913-1914 -- wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times that somewhat interested me. Titled "The Armageddon Waltz," it took a slice of time from Vienna in 1913, glorious capital of a ramshackle Austro-Hungarian Empire beset with economic problems, troubled from political ideologies, threatened through religious dissonance, wracked by ethnic discord, and headed for Europe's Great War:

"Austria," said Karl Kraus, who was Habsburg Austria's H. L. Mencken, "is the laboratory for the apocalypse." What would he say about America today?

Morton, apparently, sees a parallel. I'm not one to prophesy about the future -- not seriously, anyway -- but the parallel to America seems forced. After all, Vienna only celebrated with a Bankruptcy Ball, whereas America has an actual bankruptcy. No, what intrigued me instead was this paragraph:

Vienna was incubating in its own streets some of the century's prime virtuosos of violence. One of them was active close to the imperial palace, Schloss Schönbrunn, where the emperor had received his heir. An elegant building on Schönbrunner Schlossstrasse housed young Josef Stalin, dispatched by Lenin to explore the empire's explosive nationalities situation. It was during Stalin's weeks in Vienna that he initiated his lethal feud with young Leon Trotsky, who, a few streetcar stops away, was publishing the original Pravda. All this while on the other side of town young Adolf Hitler was seething obscurely, painting postcards for a living. What those three did the day after the Bankruptcy Ball history does not record. We do know that the Austrian Parliament voted against appropriating money for the housing bill. We also know that the emperor turned down the archduke's plea for negotiation rather than confrontation with Serbia. Franz Ferdinand walked out of the palace defeated -- to die 16 months later of a Serb nationalist's bullet, igniting World War I.

Except for the archduke, these men -- Stalin, Trotsky, Hitler, and Gavrilo Princip -- were then but nobodies, yet went on to make history in the way that it is too often made. Our world is thick with such discontented individuals, and we live in this thicket that becomes history.

Look around you. Perhaps a Mohamed Atta seethes obscurely in the next cubicle, intent on crashing the gates of history.

In Search of Lost Time Lost...

À la recherche du temps perdu

Marcel Proust

(Image from Wikipedia)

I've occasionally posted entries on martial arts expert and memoirist Jacques Sandulescu, a Romanian who at 16 years old was abducted by Soviet troops and sent to a work camp in the coal fields of the Ukraine's Donbas region.

Eventually, after tremendous suffering but also encounters with kindhearted Russians and Ukrainians, he escaped despite horrific injuries from a mine collapse and made his way to the States where he ultimately met the writer Annie Gottlieb and lived happily ever after. Annie relates a recent anecdote. The two of them were watching a History Channel program about Hitler, which set Annie to thinking about the life that Jacques might have led if the politics of fascism and then communism had not erupted in all their enormity. Looking at the image of Hitler onscreen performing a "spittle-spewing oratory," Annie got angry:

I said, "See that sonofabitch? He's the one who destroyed your world. If he hadn't started the war, Stalin might have stayed put. You would have been the mayor of [your town], you would have owned [a large tract of land] . . ."

J said, "But I never would've met you!"

At that Romanian's romantic words, Annie melted: "Awwww. An armful of WWII. Beats roses."

But Jacques is getting on in years, his hardscrabble life has taken its toll, and he gets confused sometimes . . . yet remains alert even in his confusion, as Annie shows:

A: Where are you going?

J: (trying to get up from his wheelchair) To the phone.

A: Who do you want to call?

J: (looking at me like I'm supposed to know) My mother!

A: I'm sorry, baby, your mother died a long time ago.

J: (not missing a beat) Then the phone call won't cost anything.

I hope that I'm that alert when I grow great in years and dimmed in memory.

At the moment, however, I have a lot of grading to do, so I'm breaking off for now. Meanwhile, here's a touching video that also concerns memory, My Name is Lisa, a short story of about six and a half minutes that won third place in some video competition and that both saddens and uplifts.

"Lying for the truth..."

Willi Münzenberg

(Image from Wikipedia)

My friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, posted a link to a long but fascinating article that very nearly convinces me that there was indeed not only a Communist 'conspiracy' but even a rather effective one at work in the middle years of the twentieth century.

I say "very nearly" because I'm not sure that the 'conspiracy' was quite so effective, but that's a point for debate.

Anyway, if you have an hour, go and read Stephen Koch's long essay, "Lying for the truth: Münzenberg & the Comintern" (The New Criterion, Volume 12, Number 3, November 1993). One hour is about how much time that I spent yesterday reading this fascinating report on one of yesterday's threats to world order. That hour was time that I didn't actually have available for leisurely reading, but I could justify the luxury of enjoying a well-written essay by telling myself that we can possibly learn something about the current methods of Islamists by studying the past methods of Communists. This rationale might even be true, but whether it is or isn't, the article itself made for compelling reading, as you can see from its opening lines:

On October 22, 1940, not far from a tiny French hamlet near Grenoble called Montagne, two hunters out with their dogs stumbled across something gruesome hidden in a small stand of woods. At the foot of a fine old oak sat, upright, the decomposing body of a man. The man had been dead for a long time, and he appeared to have been hanged.

What the hunters found that day would become more than a legend of their town; it would take its place among the enduring mysteries of modern politics. For this was the body of a man named Willi Münzenberg, and Willi Münzenberg had lived and died as one of the unseen powers of twentieth-century Europe. When the hunters found it, his corpse was almost entirely covered with fallen leaves. Only the vile face and the popped stare of strangulation were visible -- that and the noose. The reek was awful; the body had plainly been there for months. The knotted cord around its neck seemed to have snapped, probably quite soon after he had been hanged, and when it broke, the body had apparently dropped to the base of the tree. There it had stayed, knees up, all through that summer of the French defeat, sitting oddly undetected until October began to cover it with the drift of autumn and the hunters' dogs, yelping and whining, discovered the thing.

The French villagers knew nothing about Willi Münzenberg. Münzenberg was and is not a famous name, though this man's power had given him a potent grip on the workings of fame. Since his radical youth in 1917, Willi Münzenberg had been a largely covert but major actor in the politics of the twentieth century. As a founding organizer of the Communist International and a leader in the structure of Marxist-Leninist power outside Russia, Münzenberg had played an especially influential part in the conspiracies, the maneuvers, the propaganda, the secret policies and actions that had led to this very spot: here to the fall of France; here to Hitler's war on the West; here to these woods, and this death.

Unlike those French villagers, I'd heard of Willi Münzenberg, though I didn't really know his story, but this opening had my curiosity whetted for more details, and I read the entire essay without being distracted despite the various people coming and going through the faculty lounge that doubles as 'my' office.

What did Münzenberg do? He worked, rather successfully, to organize a network of Communists, their witting sympathizers, and their unwitting-but-culturally-influential fellow-travelers into a conspiracy aimed at shaping cultural values in the West, especially in Europe. How did he do this? Through the Comintern:

The instrument through which Münzenberg organized this cultural power was the Communist International, or, as it was almost always known, the Comintern. The Comintern was in many ways the quintessential Leninist institution, shaped from its inception by the two leading passions of Lenin's political personality: his obsession with secrecy, and his preoccupation with absolute power. Its aims were never even remotely democratic, never even remotely meliorist, and never were intended to provide any real assistance, however minute, to any branch of the left not entirely under Soviet control.

It worked like this:

Münzenberg's information network controlled newspapers and radio stations, ran film companies, created book clubs, ran magazines, sponsored publicity tours, dispatched journalists, and commissioned books. It planted articles and created organizations to give direction to the "innocent." To use the jargon of a different age, it was a media combine. Yet it differed in a number of ways from the BBC, Time Inc., or even from an explicit instrument of political propaganda like Radio Liberty. For example, many people working for it did not publicly acknowledge the connection. Many operated under aliases. Many led classic double lives, sometimes totally changing their identities, concealing their true mission from their friends, even their spouses, and certainly from employers, who often included unsuspecting editors, publishers, and producers whose ideas were very remote from the real agenda. They were, in short, secret agents, people who lived and worked, however publicly, in a secret world: the realm of intelligence gathering, covert action, undercover penetration, clandestine influence, quiet sabotage, discreet blackmail -- what the American counter-spy James Jesus Angleton, quoting T. S. Eliot, called "a wilderness of mirrors." Nor did the work stop with the media. Münzenberg also courted business people who could be used in industrial espionage, both in Europe and the United States. Given Lenin's obsession with electrification, for example, an early target was General Electric. And back when the revolution was still young, it was Münzenberg's task to create for much of this vast unseen enterprise a persuasive public face.

Münzenberg's efforts ultimately failed. History ever slips through our mortal fingers. But in its day, Münzenberg's network shaped European and even American attitudes profoundly enough to persuade many that Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were innocent. Why? Münzenberg cared not whether the two were innocent or not. The point was a different one:

Münzenberg's ... idea was to create and sustain a worldwide anti-American campaign that would focus its appeal upon the mythology of the country's immigration. The purpose of such a campaign would be to instill a reflexive loathing of the United States and its people as a prime tropism of left-wing enlightenment. To undermine the myth of the Land of Opportunity, the United States would be shown as an almost insanely xenophobic place, murderously hostile to foreigners.

With such an aim (and possibly Communism's principal, lasting success), the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti was a thing that the Communists only pretended to oppose, as revealed in the following anecdote that Koch attributes to the writer Katherine Anne Porter:

The Communist goal was never to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti. Acquittal would have dissolved the whole political point. Katherine Anne Porter, like hundreds of writers and artists of the time, participated in the Boston deathwatch. She reports an exchange with the Comintern agent who was her group leader, Rosa Baron, "a dry, fanatical little woman who wore thick-lensed spectacles over her accusing eyes, a born whiphand, who talked an almost impenetrable jargon of party dogma. ... I remarked ... that even then, at that late time, I still hoped the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti could be saved. ... 'Saved' she said, ringing a change on her favorite answer to political illiteracy, 'who wants them saved? What earthly good would they do us alive?'"

Ms. Baron's remark is either the profound cynicism of the nihilist or the deep conviction of the true believer that every deception is permitted in pressing forward toward the utopian 'truth' ... and maybe both at once.

In this regard, the old Communists -- unwittingly of course -- prepared the way for today's Islamists ... but will history slip through their fingers?