Denkwürdigkeiten eines Antisemiten

This novel's title was chosen, one may suppose, for its shock marketing value, a gimmick that has repeatedly forced reviewers to justify its inclusion to unknowing readers ("It's ironic"; "Of course, this is the opposite of the truth"; "This is not the memoir of an old Nazi," etcetera). Our climate of political correctness values non-offensiveness over precision – which is another way of saying if you don't really think we were all created equal you had better try and pretend – and we are now unable to criticize anyone with any regularity except white Christian men, that universally acknowledged most fortunate of demographic segments. The matter is ridiculous and exploitable, although quite natural in our development as we globalize, level out, and forget that inequalities can promote cooperation as much as envy. An admirable principle that flickers throughout the life of Arnulf, our narrator.

The novel itself is broken into five easy pieces, all of which can and should stand alone. Apart, they incorporate the changing perspective of one man; together they ache for company and commitment, both of which they do not deserve. Arnulf, who resembles our author in many ways, will begin and end his story with Russian words, perhaps because he secretly believes Russia and Marxism to be the downfall of his childhood home and memories (even the second chapter, Youth, echoes this Russian author's early work). While the final chapter, Pravda, needs little introduction or translation, the first word and chapter, Skuchno, can suggest both boredom and yearning – that is to say, a feeling of not being where one would like to be. From the very beginning, then, Arnulf, who does not give us his first name until the fourth chapter, Troth, feels horribly out of place:

We are all of mixed blood, we Austrians, especially we so-called German Austrians: children of an imperium of diverse peoples, races, religions. If, that legendary imperium having disappeared, we did not still, comically enough, feel Austrian, then we would have to own up to being American ... but we lack the political insight for that. Such is life, alas; thinking is often replaced by moods. They are more durable, they are livelier in withstanding time, and, in fact, the more irrational they are, the better.

Like von Rezzori, Arnulf is of Italian stock but born in Bukowina as the Great War destroys old Austria, an empire that claims to be an heir to Charlemagne. These fantastic circumstances not only make Arnulf a redoubtable polyglot, they also strip him to a certain extent of what all of us need at one point or another, a sense of home. Such moments are easier to abide when one has been raised in a multilingual and multicultural setting, and when travel and movement are as commonplace and tried as one's morning ablutions, the obvious parallel being those with no homeland in particular. Two such nations wandered about Europe in larger numbers up through the 1930s, the Roma people and, of course, the sons and daughters of Abraham. 

Sooner or later – be in a neighbor, a love interest, a rival, or an employer – Arnulf will discover the rich Jewish life that varnished Europe until the evil of the Second World War. He will belittle it, despise it, and enjoy it; but most of all he will quote his own relatives' hatred rather than come up with reasons of his own to feel animosity to these outsiders:

The specifically Jewish quality in Jews had never repelled me so much as the attempt – doomed from the start – to hush it up, cover it over, deny it. The yiddling of the Jews, their jittery gesticulation, their disharmony, the incessant alternation of obsequiousness and presumptuousness, were inescapable and inalienable attributes of their Jewishness. If they acted as one expected them to act, so that one could recognize them at first glance, one was rather pleasantly touched. They were true to themselves – that was estimable. One related to Jews in the same way as an Englishman to foreigners: one assumed they would not act like us. If they did so nevertheless, it made them look suspicious. 

A casual reader may protest the irony of the title, but those who actually finish the novel will be handed a plausible explanation for its use. As layer upon layer is peeled off Arnulf's fantastically rich life, we come to see the designation as that of an opponent in the literal sense of the word. Arnulf's clean-cut Anglo looks, mastery of several languages, sophistication, and inherent restraint allow him to pass for a citizen of any European country ("the biography of a model White European"), including a Jew. As it were, a shallow mind might think Arnulf's cosmopolitan meanderings mimic all too closely the stereotypical restlessness of the constantly displaced Hebrew, making the novel an exercise in self-loathing, but again this approach should be discouraged. We never get anything about his survival of the war because his life was in no danger, nor did he take an active role in combating the forces that wasted a generation. He existed as he always had – for himself and his artistic whims.   

I have said little of the plot because the plot, like the dull and darned topicality it wends itself around, is a flimsy clothesline for Arnulf's artistic observations. His peripatetic antics will not strike anyone as particular original or even wise, but their context, and the cultures negotiated for them to take place as they did, are quite remarkable and, with the possible exception of this writer's work, unparalleled in German letters. We can appreciate the novel for exactly these details. A Romantic encounter unfolds as, "behind us the city pinned lights all over itself," while another tryst is stymied as "all the myths of vigorous malehood surrounded me like totem poles." Arnulf has many things on his mind as a young man, and they usually devolve into some need for female attention. As such, the Jews we encounter are purposive in their roles: a prodigy pianist; a lonely thirty-something shop owner; a family of innkeepers and a curious Ladino-speaking guest (another tip of the hat to Canetti); a drunkard with a lame hip resulting from unhappy love and her aforementioned addiction; and then Arnulf's second wife, who hates him for one thing above all:

Already the previous, East Prussian wife had soon discerned his habit of incorporating other people's memories into his own when they were suitable and colorful enough; but she had held her tongue, just as she had held her tongue about everything, especially about her contempt for him; for she had loved him and been disappointed; and to avoid sharing the guilt of this disappointment, she had to keep his defects in mind. But the second, Jewish wife .... his Jewish wife attacked him from the very start for his heedless outlook on biographical property, and she was so rabid about it that he was offended ... He could not understand the vehemence with which she championed authenticity, documentary truth for every autobiographical detail ("Even at the expense of vividness?" he had once asked her ironically, and she had answered like a fanatic, "Yes!  Yes!  Yes!").

Then again, maybe the best method to breathe eternal life into old stories is to make them your own. Even if many of the stories belonged to members of a decimated people who have since forsaken Europe and its hidden hates? Yes, yes, yes, indeed.  

Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht

Unexpectedly perhaps, we begin this film in a crypt of mummies. These are not the stoic regents of Ancient Egypt who know they will rule in the afterlife as they have on earth. No, these relics seem to have suffered horrible and painful deaths before their unwilled preservation. They are filmed in ascending age to show that death does not distinguish between old and young. Indeed, apart from their physical size the only differences among these cadavers is the unique agony shrieking across each face. Even the most ignorant moviegoer knows what type of beast has borne the moniker of nosferatu for more than a century, but we are not dealing with vampires. That is to say, we do not believe our mummies the victims of those bloodsucking fiends whose sleekness, pallor, and hunger have catapulted to new heights within the last ten years of young adult fiction (vampirism being an apt cautionary allegory for sexual desire). We will learn, however, that they are and they aren't Dracula's victims. The ageless Romanian Count has become synonymous with a far greater scourge: that of the Black Plague itself.

One amendment: we do not know whether this Dracula (an iconic Klaus Kinski) is actually Romanian or even a proper nobleman. True, he resides in a gloom-laden Transylvanian castle, surrounded and perhaps somewhat abetted by another set of outcasts, the Roma. Yet he is more the shiftless ghost than the dashing Byronic predator who has dominated the innumerable variations since Stoker's novel, imbuing them with sex appeal and courtliness untenable in Herzog's version. As with all first-rate works, Nosferatu's aim becomes clearer in retrospect. Multiple viewings enrich the film because there is so much to notice apart from what actually propels the thin dinghy of a plot forward (a first viewing will also inevitably distract those who have seen the original). So is it with the struggle between Dracula and our ostensible hero, Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz). Harker may have an English name, but he is German in speech, manner, and residence, his home Wismar closely akin to the Wisborg of Murnau's production, complete with canals and Hanseatic primness. Dreams of a giant bat plague his wife Lucy (Isabelle Adjani), who is visibly upset when her spouse announces a business trip to Transylvania that, he snickers, will be teeming with "wolves, bandits, and ghosts." Right before he leaves, they go to the beach where they first met and Lucy confesses that she is overcome by "a nameless, deadly fear." This would all be perfectly acceptable dialogue in any lesser film about impending atrocities, and Ganz and Adjani are, as always, excellent and subtle actors – but this is quite beside the point. What awaits the Harkers is evil, fathomable but unstoppable evil, although not tinged with glamour or seductiveness like so many modern-day children of the night. Herzog has no abiding interest in Gothic romance. His monster simply possesses irresistible power, most evident when Dracula approaches his victims, who can only stare back in horror like snake-bait rodents. There will be no enticement to collaborate with these dark forces, nor will anyone wonder long about the residue of humanity in the Count's soul. That he still assumes the general contours of a human will be understood as more of a convenience than a true reflection of his essence.

Does that mean that Harker is our knight, brazenly determined to thwart a thousand-year-old dragon (Dracul's meaning in his alleged native tongue)? Not quite, or, I should say, not at all. As opposed to other portrayals of Harker, Ganz's law clerk has nothing in the way of charm or elegance in his manners; in fact, all of him screams petit bourgeois (he longs "to buy Lucy a bigger house" even though they have no children and plenty of space). Like his adversary, Harker has only traces of humankind: his role is plain, simple, and terrifyingly banal. He will represent 'life' as understood by a mindless Philistine who has never really lived; Dracula will represent death as someone not allowed to die. He observes that Renfield (Roland Topor), the solicitor who dispatches him to Transylvania and the one person who appears to have been in contact with the Count, is at best mischievous and scheming, and at worst homicidally deranged, but accepts the task anyway for the money involved. Critics have commonly emphasized the loneliness – not so much the humanity as the pathos – of Kinski's vampire, a marvelous deception of directorial genius amplified by Harker's development. This contrast, coupled with the shift from vampiric infection as a means of enlisting an army of monsters to its allegorizing the Black Death, has fooled reviewer after reviewer into believing Herzog wished to portray a more human Dracula "who could not die." It gives nothing away to reveal that, towards the end of the film, Wisborg has been ravaged by the plague, and many of those afflicted decide to banquet publicly with friends and family, living out their last few days in full as an accelerated version of life itself. It also gives nothing away to mention that what Harker experiences in Castle Dracula has nothing of the Gothic nightmare and far more greatly resembles modern horror. Harker's steps become bold because the castle's inside is awake, white, and fully lit, like a gleaming skeleton. Vast cobwebs strangle chairs, recalling the Count's dagger-like fingers clutching at a hapless victim. As it becomes more obvious that he will never escape unharmed, Harker begins a journal to Lucy, whom he cannot reach by normal post. His confessions are tempered by a thick tome he receives in the inn at the foot of the castle's mountains that will also be passed down to her, a text about the whole legend that has become reality. And what is his reality? One identical to what screaming young victims encounter in contemporary slasher films: being trapped in a hideous maze with a madman whose only wish is to make you suffer for as long as your soul and body can endure.

In a very artistic way, Herzog ranks among the most political of directors (witness his turn in the last twenty-five years towards 'real life' documentaries) but his politics do not adhere to any ballot or banner. His champions are neither underdogs nor the gods of genius. What he enjoys is oddity, difference, and originality, even if, as in many of his duller non-fictional pieces, the fine line between originality and triviality is blurred. No one had ever bothered to make the Dracula legend into a severe indictment of life's randomness and meaninglessness, because that is not how the figure lives on in the popular imagination, a realm that Herzog openly despises. Herzog's accomplishment is to take the material completely seriously, without the slightest indication of kitsch (apart from the goofy silence of the gypsies in the inn, although that may be imputed to his fondness for non-professional actors). The fundamental problem of the Dracula legend, however, remains unsolved. No one, as it were, not even Stoker, has ever satisfactorily clarified why Dracula wishes to leave his ghastly ancestral home in the first place. Coppola's gorgeous version suggests the move is Dracula's destiny so as to reunite him with the love he lost hundreds of years before, the love that led him to forsake his faith. But all we find in Nosferatu is death. From the magnificent coffin gathering in the town square, to Dracula's appearance in Lucy's bathroom, to the oddest of scenes, that of a ghost ship sloshing into the canals of Wismar, we have no hope for redemption. Is that why, at one crucial point, we cannot but notice a stone high-relief frieze (a Romanesque carving of what appears to be a Barbary ape) by the fireplace precisely between man from vampire? A very odd form of evolution indeed.

The Piano Teacher

Bark on, bark on, my most vigilant hounds!
Let me not rest when dark slumber abounds!
With my dreams I have reached an end,
No more time have I with sleepers to spend

                                                                    Franz Schubert, Die Winterreise

This composer, whom the titular character in this film describes in absolute terms as “ugly,” was uncompromisingly devoted to his art, perhaps in no small part because he saw little value in a material life of hedonism and wealth. Schubert's perception of an artist working night and day to achieve minor personalized goals in his lifetime that will only become global imprints well after death suggests not only a blind faith in the redemption of the soul, but also a disheartening contempt for this one life he has been given. 

This quandary – art versus life, sacrifice versus immediate gratification, profundity versus superficial banality – is as old as life and art themselves, and one that plagues Erika (the sensational Isabelle Huppert), a teacher and lover of music. Erika is extremely gifted in her field and, like so many artists, as demanding of others as she is of herself.  She is a recluse, living with her mother (Annie Girardot) and socializing with no one else, suppressing the quiet pain of having a father rotting away in an asylum (“the twilight of the mind,” she calls it), unpleasant with her students, of whom she can realistically expect little, and evasively bellicose towards her colleagues. So far, Erika fits an artistic stereotype all too well: the insufferable genius who demands perfection in everyone and everything and is left bitter by the gross negligence of a world sworn to mediocrity and passableness. There is, of course, a little more to her than that – and what exactly that little more entails has stirred up a great deal of controversy. Erika has a curiously unhinged side to her that manifests itself in pornographic and sadomasochistic whims, the likes of which have no real place in an artistic work and the reason why this film has been considered a bit of a hybrid.  No need to go into details, but suffice it to say that Erika cannot really relate to anything except her music (even her mother is just another obstacle to her routine). And her music is about endless practice, endless striving towards perfection, and the vast majority of life is spent chasing that perfection, with the possibility of attaining it seemingly just around the corner. If this description sounds like a metaphor for something else, then the second half of the film will make perfect sense.

It is precisely at the midway point of the film that she gives in to her desires for Walter (Benoît Magimel), a handsome young prodigy who also has feelings for her of a much more conventional sort. When she first plays before him, the long waits for Walter’s face to react tell you he will be a factor in the film. It is when he first plays, however, that we understand the twisted underside to Erika’s psyche: she cannot bear to look at him, not out of disgust but out of boredom. Erika, you see, has another aspect common to many artists: she is interminably bored when not engaged in her own artistic pursuits. It’s not even that nothing else matters, but that nothing else could possibly matter. But she has urges and physical lacunae that have never really been addressed, and her haplessness in that sliver of life called sexual interaction is as glaring as her art is elevated. When she hurts herself, it’s not for the trite excuse, “I hurt myself because I forgot what it was like to feel something,” but rather the “I don’t remember ever touching anything except piano keys.” At no point does Erika, who is a truly cultured and intelligent person, seem fake or conjured up from the back of some deranged and lonely mind. Yet at the same time she is also an abstraction, a piece of music that someone wrote and commanded to live, a Frankenstein sonata.  And when the film, based on a novel by this equally controversial Austrian Nobel Prize winner, asks her to live, it spirals swiftly down into a painful exchange of bruised egos and, well, bruises. 

Much has been made of the sex and violence in The Piano Teacher, directed by one of Jelinek’s most famous fellow countrymen, although it’s considerably less than the orgy of sexploitations and sexplosions scripted into your average action film. I have not read Jelinek’s novel and cannot say I am maneuvering my shelf components in anticipation of such a purchase, but the character names reveal a novelist’s touch. Walter’s last name is Klemmer, or, in German, “the one who clamps or traps,” and his first name, when pronounced in French (apart from some songs by Schubert, the film is exclusively in French but filmed in Austria with Germanic names, German street signs, and so forth) does not sound very different from “Voltaire.” Klemmer is also the surname of a famous jazz musician, whom Jelinek may have had in mind when she wrote her novel in the early 1980s, although this is debatable. More important is that another of Erika’s students is called Nápravník, who was a Czech conductor and was mentioned in this famous novel. In Czech (Jelinek is of Czech descent), nápravník is related to the words “correctional” and “corrector,” suggesting both a prison and a teacher, as Erika is certainly both. Yet Erika is not some sort of aspiring dominatrix, nor does she reflect Austrian society's alleged emphasis on discipline and excellence (you can foresee down what darksome path that leads), but a woman terrifyingly alone and closing the gap on middle age. Somehow her soul’s torment is supposed to be mitigated by a set of rather banal urges, when that is precisely her only quality that has nothing to do with art. But Huppert's performance is so outstanding that we try to battle through the film despite our repulsion. Maybe the last twenty minutes or so are best watched on fast forward; then again, perhaps there is no better way to experience Erika's slow burn than to endure what she endures down to the final frame. As one of her students sings (from Schubert's Der Wegweiser) in perfect summation:

But I have done nothing so wrong
That I should avoid the human throng.
What kind of foolish desire
Drives me tow'rd the wastelands' mire?

Heine, "Ich hab im Traum geweinet"

A work ("I had a dream in which I cried") by this German poet.  You can read the original here.

I had a dream in which I cried:             
You lay unmoving in a tomb;                
I woke to find my pain subside,             
My cheeks still wet in tearful flume.   

I had a dream in which I cried: 
You left me in cold solitude;             
I woke to drown in my woe's tide,             
My hours lost to bitter brood.

I had a dream in which I cried: 
You were still true and good and mine;
I woke to find no truth denied,
And tears aflow for all of time. 

Rilke, "Weißt du, ich will mich schleichen"

A work ("Know that I softly shall escape") by this Austrian poet.  You can read the original here.

Know that I softly shall escape    
Far from this loud, encircling gloom,   
Once I espy the wan stars' shape  
So high above the oaks' broad cape, 
And know their bloom.

Shall I choose paths of rarest weaves,   
By poet nor by mortal view’d, 
Among the palest evening leas?   
No dream but this within me heaves:  
That you’ll come, too.