[lbo-talk] Re: Posner, Schmitt, Strauss?

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Sun Oct 16 16:40:23 PDT 2005


Johst was the inspiration for the main character in Klaus Mann's novel Mephisto, also a movie from about 25 years ago. I liked the movie, but it's been decades since I saw it. I tried the novel in German, it was too hard for me. I don't know if it has been translated... jks

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(BTW, thanks for answering the Posner, Schmitt, Strauss thread. I'll keep Posner on a list of things to read---although I have to admit, a bit cynically, looking for insight into what's wrong with America)

According to various web sources the inspiration was Erika Mann's first husband, Gustaf Grundgnes...

The movie is worth seeing again. It's on DVD and I rented it last year during the election campaigns. The director is Istavan Szabo (1981), stars Klaus Brandauer. Look for Colonel Redl also. (Redl follows the career of an Austrian military academy boy from the Franz Joseph era into WWI. The young man who swooned at a view of the wonderful Emperor in a park...later rats out the A-H empire to the Russians.)

Both movies develop related themes of what happens to the opportunistic man without qualities who merely adopts the reining ideology proforma. In Mephisto, first Communist and then Nazis---following the political sweep of Weimar. Ultimately, Brandauer has to face the devil he has bedded. Both of these movies have a very middle Euro feel to them: dark and strange, mixed with depressing and sickening cynicism, followed by a grim and decayed life. I am almost certain Wotjek would love them.

These make great thematic background (far more aesthetically generous than deserved) to the US conservatives who follow related trajectories. Media figures like David Brooks should watch these flicks. It would be interesting to know if Posner understood the parallels. I am sure he would deny them tout court.

Looking through alibris, they list Mephisto, Klaus Mann, R. Smyth, published by Penguin, so I would assume Smyth is the English language translator. I never read it. I intended to after reading his father's Dr Faustus, but...

In any event, there are deep dramatic problems with the whole conceptual sweep of Faust. The dramatic action takes place in the cerebral realm of the imagination, as a philosophical problem. But philosophy just doesn't move the heart as dramatic action. Nobody feels the fall, nobody screams silently to themselves with the knock on the door.

I want to believe that such an emotion is real, but alas... the real falls in life, with all their silent and not so silent screams, are in the horror of betrayal by love, friendship, and honor---all of which have more dramatic bite than any fancy German philosophy.

This presents an interesting aesthetic problem which is how to dramatize what is so horrible about the US rightwing farce. They betray every measure of the public good, by claiming precisely to embody it. Meanwhile the public celebrates their deceit by deceiving themselves as if they were embracing all American truths in a bloodless pretense that mocks political commitment of any kind. My reactions never seem to reach beyond a visceral disgust with this.

And yet, in the end, it is not a farce. These despicable frauds have completely (or moved to complete the) corrupted government, murdered thousand of people for no reason, and turned over ever more public wealth and power to the already gorged capital pig elite. And, all under the banner of populism---yes we are the soul of Amerika!

Here is the opening to Heinrich Mann's Man of Straw:

``Diederich Hessling was dreamy, delicate child, frightened of everything, and troubled frequently by earache. In winter he hated to leave the warm room, and in summer the narrow garden, which smelt of rags from the paper factory, and where laburnum and elder-tree were overshadowed by the wooden roofs of the old houses. Diederich was often terribly frightened when he raised his eyes from his story book, his beloved fairy tales. A toad half as big as himself had been plainly sitting on the seat beside him! Or over there against the wall a gnome, sunk to his waist in the ground, was staring at him! His father was even more terrible than the gnome and the toad, and moreover he was compelled to love him. Diederich did love him. Whenever he had pilfered, or told a lie, he would come cringing shyly like a dog to his father's desk, until Herr Hessling noticed that something was wrong and took his stick from the wall. Diederich's submissiveness and confidence were shaken by doubts when his misdeeds remained undiscovered. Once when his father, who had a stiff leg, fell downstairs, the boy clapped his hands madly---and then ran away.''

(I think this is the novel that Thomas Mann hated his brother for writing and didn't speak to him for several years over it---until Thomas finally came to some of the same conclusions---which he wouldn't admit. They were eventually reconciled but I am not sure all the bitterness was ever entirely gone. After all his older brother had seen it coming and ratted out the grand Old Germany long before him...)

I imagine the great American imperial war hawks of US foreign policy and their high moral purpose mouth pieces in the Congress to be uniformly stamped from the same mold as little Diederich.

C



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