Arthur Strum 3600 words

Assistant Professor of German Studies 2002 Arthur Strum

Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2030
(650) 723-0397
strum@stanford.edu
AMERICAN IDYLL
By Arthur Strum
I.
We aspire, for the most part, to live our lives as private persons. We orient
ourselves around the refuge of the family, or the circle of friends, or the solitary
self. Public obligations yield to private ones. We have work, rather than a calling
-- or to the extent that our work becomes a calling, it is to satisfy essentially
private ends. Very few of us -- whether as musician or artist, athlete or scientist,
entrepeneur or writer -- reject the comforts, burdens, and consolations of
quotidian existence in order to subordinate our lives to the principle of
perfectability. Even fewer -- whether the courageous Medgar Evers, the NAACP
field secretary in Mississippi, shot and killed outside his house in Jackson in
1963, or the great Rosa Luxemburg, murdered and dumped into the Landwehr
canal in Berlin in January of 1919, or, indeed, Mohammed Atta, the quiet urban
planner who helped plan the murder of more than 5000 people in September
2001 -- even fewer of us stake not just private life, but all life, on an obligation or
principle which we perceive to be greater or higher. In their sublimity, in their
ability to defy our usual concern with mere life, such figures are either awe-
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inspiring, or in the case of Atta -- terrifying. Once figures like these have
embraced the role seemingly given to them by fate -- as Martin Luther King did,
when, a pastor, in his first months in Montgomery, he found himself President of
the Montgomery Improvement Association, or as Mirabeau did, in Paris in 1789,
when he refused Louis XVIs order that the Estates General meet separately --
their greatest hope is to be embraced by history, to be caught up in its force and
to try to shape it. Sometimes, these roles simply present themselves to us. At
these moments, even those who understand themselves primarily as private
persons may join together to make history -- in Tiananmen square in 1989, or in
the Kronstadt Fortress above Petrograd in 1921, or in Paris in 1789. For the rest of
us, most of the time, history is only experienced as an ominous shadow -- as war,
or violence, or as the capriciousness of impersonal economic forces. History is
not a force we aspire to shape, but a threat we hope to avoid.
The perhaps 50,000 people who found themselves in the World Trade
Center when the buildings were attacked, and the firemen, police and others
who entered these buildings to try to help save them, found themselves, against
their own wishes, swept into the vortex of historical existence. It is not surprising
that the great majority of obituaries have focused on the victims private
characteristics, rather than public deeds: these were private persons, who only
happened to be present where history intruded. We call these people innocent
because they had neither chosen the new roles which were thrust upon them, as
political or religious heroes do, nor even been able to prepare for them, as
soldiers, or even fireman and policemen, do. They were faced, suddenly, with a
situation in which common virtues, the virtues of a private person, were no
longer adequate. In a matter of minutes or seconds, some of them seem to have
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embraced the new role dictated by circumstance. But, as in the case of the
political or religious hero, doing so involved a moral risk. In their abrupt
decisions to endanger or sacrifice themselves in order to help others, these
people did not simply exhibit courage, but were also forced to choose between
their private lives -- their duties to the children, partners, and friends they shared
these lives with -- and a public one. In a few seconds, they left the realm of mere
life and entered the more uncertain one of history -- uncertain, because it is
likely that (like other historical actors before them) some or even many of the
people who made this choice may have failed in their efforts to save others. In
the harsh terms of history, they sacrificed their private existences for nothing. It
is impossible, for those of us who have never been faced with such a choice, to
comprehend it properly -- as little as we can comprehend the sustained, and
therefore even more sublime courage of a Medgar Evers or Rosa Luxemburg or
Nelson Mandela. Instead, we simply hope that we never have the misfortune of
having to exhibit it.
II.
Even a single human being gives, and has received, an immense amount
of human loving labor -- the labor which makes, and develops, and preserves us
as human beings. Each of these formed beings builds the world as an artifact.
When a person dies, we can try to remember this labor, and consider what has
been lost with that persons death. But when thousands die, this exercise of
memory is impossible. Since September 11, a river of obituaries, testimonials,
memorials have tried to build our sense of who has been lost, and of what has
been lost to the victims different worlds as a result of their passing. But since the
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first days after the disaster, there has been persistent discussion of another loss,
which affects all of us: that of the world before September 11th. The loss of this
world, it is said, has left a wound. Before September 11th, private activities still
seemed to have their own, intrinsic justifications. After September 11th, these
implicit justifications seem to have suddenly, if temporarily, become inadequate.
Fishing, museum-going, football, shopping, radio and television, pleasure in
nature even to enumerate them explicitly seemed to expose their
weightlessness. In the days after the attacks, every musical review began with
the writers effort to consider the larger significance of musical performance;
every description of a trip, or a meal, began with an apologia. Every activity or
diversion, that is, was measured against an impossible standard of significance:
the sudden and violent deaths of so many innocent people. One could, it is true,
work -- but here one had no choice. One could also -- even should -- retreat to the
intimate sphere, care for friends and family -- but this activity was considered to
be serious, to acknowledge what had occurred. But every potential pleasure,
every diversion or indulgence was smothered by ones awareness of its
comparative insignificance, by ones guilt at being among the healthy survivors.
This sharp awareness faded rapidly. But the world in which these pleasures and
diversions were still unproblematic, in which we were not constantly haunted by
our consciences this world has not quite returned. Its loss, seemingly, is the
wound which most of us have suffered.
It should surely have been possible to share wholeheartedly in the public
displays of earnest shock and dismay after September 11. It should have been
possible to speak of a collective wound, to call for healing -- even to mourn the
loss of a world in which our lives were secure from the arbitrariness of
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historicality, in which innocent pleasures were still possible. What is it, then,
which seems to block ones complete identification with these public expressions
of outrage and surprise? What is it which seems discordant, still, about many
public allusions to the event? In the first days after September 11, before the
boundaries of the acceptable had been established, one heard, even from public
figures or institutions not known for their particularly critical sensibilities,
public expressions of what sounded curiously like moral unease:: the major news
anchors casual, curious comment on Sept. 11 that we were making Whoopee,
and that is coming to an end; the newspaper headline asking plaintively, Why
do they hate us?; the sudden decline in consumer spending for vacations and
restaurants in the weeks after the disaster prompted, certainly, by new
economic fears, but also, clearly, by an indefinable sense of shame. Even Jerry
Falwells and Pat Robertsons suggestion, in itself absurd, that Americas moral
behavior had eroded its favored theological status suggested a curiously
chastened, rather than solely outraged, consciousness. For how could the murder
of many thousands of innocent people in the heart of New York City have in any
sense chastened us?
III.
All is in motion as though the already-shaped world into chaos/
Meant to resolve itself backward into night, and to shape itself over. Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe writes the poem Hermann and Dorothea in 1797, amidst
the upheavals of the French Revolutionary wars. The poem is an idyll: an effort
to represent a Golden Age, a peoples rustic simplicity, a peaceful, harmonious
existence. But rather than Arcadia, Goethe depicts a late eighteenth-century
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German village, whose inhabitants are both earnest and narrow, generous and
self-interested. Their idyll, furthermore, is threatened by the shockwaves of the
revolution: the French occupation of the left bank of the Rhine. Hermann and
Dorothea, in other words, is both an idyll and an historical poem. At its
beginning, the villages good citizens make a short journey to a crossroads where
the refugees stream by, to gawk at them, but also to offer them food, drink and
their old clothing: a modest relief effort. Hermann, sent by his parents with
worn-out linen, comes upon Dorothea, who is tending to a young mother who
has just given birth. Hermann falls in love. Private life and history: a love-story
set against the background of historical upheaval, and the despair and suffering
which results from it. In the nineteenth century, this book becomes Goethes
most popular work. It seems to have been understood as a defense of German
order and stability as opposed to French chaos and discontinuity. In this reading
of the poem, Hermanns inwardness and conservatism are exemplary: his
unwillingness, as a teenager, to shape himself to the times, to impress the
neighbors girls with fashionable dress and manners; his deeply private nature;
his lack of ambition (he only desires to carry on and tend to his fathers inn and
grounds); above all, his desire to preserve and endure. The book is taken as a
primer for the developing self-consciousness of the middle-class German, who
turns his back on the wider world and leaves politics to the leaders.
As Americans, we are, most of us, Hermanns. It is not that we are
awkward or shy, or that we lack ambition. But like Hermann, we imagine that
our various fidelities -- to our friends, or our families, or our jobs, or our teams --
are the proper measure of our virtue. Like Hermann and his father, we imagine
that we have a solid right to whatever our hard work has brought us: a big
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television, a car, a second house, an expensive vacation. We who are privileged
live with certain confidence that our lives, as private lives, will describe
continuous arcs -- trajectories only temporarily interrupted by the obstacles of
divorce, a lost promotion, sudden illness. The report from Beirut, or from the
refugee camp at Shatila; death squads in Haiti or Guatemala; starvation and
suffering in Iraq; even the tragedies of the Middle East -- all are neatly contained
within the columns of the folded newspaper.
Now the terror of history, which had intruded into the American idyll
mostly in the form of news reports from Israel, or the Gaza Strip, or Baghdad, or
Panama, has been visited upon us-- not just upon the soldier, or the most
vulnerable among us, but on a cross-section of the inhabitants of two large office
buildings. After September 11, the world, certainly, is different. But if we say
this, then there is no way to avoid the conclusion that, to us, the laborers or
lawyers who happened to be in the way when the artillery shells began hitting
the apartment buildings in Beirut or who found themselves exposed to violence
in the refugee camp at Shatila, were -- somehow -- less innocent than the clerks
and secretaries and bonds traders in the two World Trade Center towers. It is
true that the former might have walked more lightly upon the ground than
Americans do: for no people seems to be so optimistic, so certain, so heedless in
its pleasures as Americans are. But included in this heedlessness was
forgetfulfulness, or even innocence, about the cares and sufferings of others
and our share in them. Included in this heedlessness seems to have been a very
limited ability to imagine what those others -- Lebanese, Bosnian Muslims,
Palestinians, Israelis -- must have felt when their own private idylls were
shattered by airplanes or tanks or bulldozers, when the loving, caring presence of
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their own families and friends suddenly and arbitrarily came to an end. In The
Fire Next Time, James Baldwin wrote that One can be, indeed, one must strive
to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is
what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man . . . But it is
not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the
innocence which constitutes the crime. There is no easy parallel between the
historical relations of white Americans to black Americans, and Americans
collective relations to the broader world. Yet many of us exhibit the very same
innocence in indulging our pleasures, the same innocence about histories of
which our government, or we ourselves, have sometimes been the authors. And
this innocence constitutes a kind of crime.
It is understandable that, like Hermann in Goethes poem, we want only
to Preserve and endure/Preserve ourselves, along with the fine things which
are our possessions -- understandable that, even now, we want to turn away
from the world and from history. Animated by the opposite desire, Dorotheas
former fiance (Hermanns predecessor) has gone to Paris to participate, and be
destroyed, in French Revolutions new dawn. Most of us have no desire to live
such a purely historical existence. Both to live and yet also maintain the strictest
vigilance against any slackening in ones consciousness of the worlds suffering
is, furthermore, impossible. To deny oneself any rest or pleasure is to deny life --
to invite madness. But the criminal innocence which we have permitted
ourselves has resulted in its own kind of madness.
Baldwin often repeated that emancipation -- of blacks from the machinery
of white supremacy, and of whites from the history they didnt understand --
was only a matter of time, because the people who could save white people from
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their false sense of history also lived among them. To live entirely in ones own
private world is to be mad. The authors of historical destruction would be saved
from their madness by those who actually understood this history, because they
had experienced it. We have yet to see, entirely, the realization of this prophecy.
But there is no doubt that our false sense of world history is partly due to the fact
that those who could save us from our illusions do not live among us or, at
least, do not seem to. Americans relative lack of outrage at our governments
increasing reluctance to participate in, and thereby be responsible to, any form of
international law -- from the Reagan administrations refusal in 1985 to recognize
the jurisdiction of the World Court with regard to its support of the Contras, to
President Bushs refusal to submit to the Kyoto accords -- suggests that many
Americans dont seem to consider that there is any considerable need for the rest
of the world -- that those of us in this country who enjoy the privilege of being
able to define our lives in exclusively private terms imagine that we can keep the
others, who may not enjoy this luxury, indefinitely at bay. However they might
be explained, the World Trade Center attacks are only a very late sign that this is
not the case.
It is understandable that we hope that the long cycles of our personal lives
proceed uninterrupted by economic upheaval, or war, or revolution: that history
in these forms never intrude upon our private idylls. That many of us can even
hope for such a private life is itself a great historical accomplishment of the
developed world. Freedom from want, and a measure of leisure to pursue
pleasures, interests, and perfections, are no longer the exclusive privilege of the
Few. But as we attain to the privilege of private existence, our relation to history
changes. For the excluded and downtrodden, history remains the medium of
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suffering, but also potentially -- of emancipation. For the private person, on the
other hand, history tends to represent chaos and uncertainty -- no longer
something to be made, but something to be feared. Desiring only to keep it at
bay, to keep ourselves safely beyond its currents, we experience its continued
existence only in the form of violent intrusions.
One sees this attitude towards history already in Goethes Hermann and
Dorothea. The threat of history is captured in the image of the refugees carts,
where objects once bound into carefully stewarded domestic orders now lie in
disordered anarchy. Dorothea, who has been engaged to a German Jacobin, and
for whom the difficulties and dangers of exile have also meant some measure of
public happiness as an independent woman, exchanges her historical existence in
the maelstrom of the times for the idyll with Hermann -- for the life of an
angel of the house. But even here, Goethe doesnt quite permit the characters
the history-denying idyll which the poem seems, on one level, to endorse. For in
accepting Hermanns ring, Dorothea declines to discard her old one, the gift of
her former fiance. Seemingly, she returns to domesticity only on the condition
that her connections to the larger world, her fidelity to larger purposes that is,
her historicality -- not be sacrificed or erased. It is her presence which stimulates
Hermann, passive at the beginning of the poem, to rise up against the patriarchal
authority of his father. Through Dorotheas inclusion, the idyll becomes a refuge
not just of order, but also, potentially, of freedom. Even more significant is the
bitter irony in Goethes representation of character of the idyll. In a letter, Goethe
wrote that Herrmann und Dorothea represented an attempt to distill what was
purely human in the existence of a small German town from its slag. Before
Dorotheas arrival, however, this humanity is nowhere in evidence. It is not just
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that the inhabitants of the idyll are heedless when the villagers stream out to
view the misery of the exiles, no one considers that he, by a similar destiny,
may, in the future, if not indeed next, likewise be oertaken.. More than that,
their idyllic autarchy has made them self-satisfied and cold: the same character
who criticizes other villagers for gawking at the exiles, the bachelor apothecary,
celebrates his good fortune in days like the present,/ of flight and confusion, to
live by himself in his dwelling,/ Having no wife nor child to be clinging about
him in terror! What Goethe seems to identify is a mechanism according to
which the most elementary features of human intimacy -- self-love, love and
compassion for ones intimates tend, inexorably, towards inhumanity towards
others. As Dorothea recognizes, an immense gap appears to separate her destiny,
as a penniless refugee, from that of these well-to-do Brger. Only in finally
welcoming Dorothea into their community are these figures challenged to cast
off the slag and exhibit their humanity; only in opening itself to that which,
and those whom, it otherwise tends to exclude, does it redeem its humanity.
IV.
Some conscientious people, in hastening to compare the Trade Center and
Pentagon attacks to U.S.-sponsored violence, or to link them to the rage and deep
hatred engendered by the latter, have seemed to rationalize the actions of the
kidnappers, to hold the country which was the victim of these attacks in some
sense responsible for them. There is, it is true, something unfeeling, almost
barbaric, in moving so quickly from acknowledging the horror of an event to
relativizing its status as a tragedy. Even the purest of voices grows hoarse from
shouting. Nevertheless, it is also impossible not to suspect that, in denying others
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the privilege of private life, or in making no effort to include them in our idyll,
we have not made them that much more willing to endure the rigors of purely
historical existence. Even simply to protect ourselves against terrorism requires
not only that we fight its present manifestations, but also speculate about its
deeper origins. Such speculation neither obviates the moral requirement that
those who assisted in the attacks be punished for their crimes, nor in any way
shifts responsibility for their crime to the United States, or its citizens. To attempt
to explain is not to justify. At the same time, even if the United States has caused,
and tolerated, great suffering, and this suffering is in some way linked to the
rage which led to these attacks, one should never say that one evil has
necessitated another. The conspirators, even in their powerlessness, could still
have chosen, instead, to speak. Nonetheless: something seems to prevent us from
responding to this tragedy as unambiguously as we should, or wish we could. If
we, as American citizens, could knowledgeably maintain that our government
had consistently defended the cause of justice on the world stage; if we could
truthfully say that we had valued our many privileges, but not to such an extent
that we would deny them to others, or commit wrongs in order to preserve or
extend them; if we could affirm that our desire to provide and care for our loved
ones had not hardened us to the plight of others, or -- worse helped us to
rationalize our injustices towards them: if we could say these things, then we
could feel comfortable in attributing these attacks against freedom and
democracy solely to an insane jealousy, and return to the world before
September 11. But we must know, even in our innocence, that this is not the case.