1st June 2009
In my last post, I wrote about Stephen Spender’s book 'European Witness', and his reactions to the destruction he found in the cities of Germany after the war; of how this made him all too aware of the fragility of European civilisation, and his fear that the ruins of Cologne and Berlin could all too easily be followed by the ruins of London, Paris or Brussels.
The conclusion he drew from this was, that if things were to get better instead of worse, a conscious effort was required:
“… today we are confronted with the choice between making a heaven or a hell of the world in which we live, and the whole of civilization will be bound by whichever fate we choose.”
The Nazis had shown, in his view, that it was possible for individuals to have a dramatic effect on the future of the world, for the worse. Previous outlooks on life, prevalent before the war, were no longer sustainable. Both Marxist historical determinism and liberal laissez-faire attitudes had assumed that the actions of individuals were insignificant compared to the greater impersonal forces of history. But if the end result of trusting to a benign and inevitable social progress was the rise of fascism and the destruction of civilisation, as he knew it, what was the alternative?
“We realize today that what goes on in men’s minds may have a terrifying effect on their environment. The nihilistic nightmares of Fascism have proved that, and the weapons which destroyed fascism have proved it to a degree which makes even Fascism seem a childish dream.”
“One might compare the countries of the world to-day to clocks. Each country registers a different time, but outside their time there is one time for the whole world, registered to one clock, with a time-bomb attached to it.”
“The countries of the world are isolated in their separate experience. Yet the pressure of awareness is so great that the world to-day has a kind of transparency. We look through our own experiences to those of other countries. They might be us and we might be them. What has happened to us might happen to them. Through the streets of London and Paris we see the streets of Hamburg and Warsaw. Yet, it is easier in Paris to imagine the whole city being destroyed, than in Berlin to imagine Berlin being rebuilt.”
Liberal ideas of individual freedom, of each individual striving for his own personal self-interest, resulting in social progress and greater happiness for all, were no longer acceptable as a guide to personal conduct. The only answer to the nightmare of present destruction and the threat of worse to come was a conscious and deliberate effort, by all those who recognised the danger, to do whatever they could to avoid it.
“If we are truthful with ourselves, we have to admit, surely, that political freedom has been tolerable and welcome to us, because we did not think that it confronted us with the direct responsibility of a choice between good and evil. We were free because we believed in ‘laissez-faire’, in the old-fashioned conception of evolution, in the sense of having confidence that an interplay of free forces and conflicting interests would inevitably product the best results. And no one was responsible for these results, no one was responsible for progress. If one was a reformer or even a radical revolutionary, one was still only a force within a total of conflicting forces which were producing the general movement of social advancement, so that in a sense it was true that the people who were opposed to reform, the conservatives, were contributing as much to the general progress (in that they themselves represented one of the forces of society) as the progressives.”
The Nazi and fascist leaders showed that individuals could make a difference, even if it was for evil, rather than for good:
“They made social and political activity significant moral, or rather immoral, activity, and they renounced the irresponsible amoral automatism of the progressive industrial era. As human beings, they were at the centre of their own social actions and in a universe which, if it does not include the idea of heaven, at least includes the idea of hell, they damned and destroyed themselves and a great part of the world with them.”
I’ve written before on this blog (in my post on Amy Buller’s book ‘Darkness over Germany’) about how some British commentators described the war and its aftermath in religious and spiritual terms. Perhaps surprisingly, even an enlightened, liberal and rational commentator such as Stephen Spender ended his book by writing in religious and spiritual terms about the importance of morality, and of the “realization that society has got to choose not just to be free but to be good.”
“Thus can I explain to myself why it is that these terrible men preoccupied (I can witness only for myself) not only my waking thoughts but also my dreams, during many years. And in my dreams, I did not simply hate them and put them from me. I argued with them, I wrestled with their spirits, and the scene in which I knew them was one in which my own blood and tears flowed. The cities and soil of Germany where they were sacrificed were not just places of material destruction. They were alters on which a solemn sacrifice had been performed according to a ritual in which inevitably all the nations took part. The whole world had seemed to be darkened with their darkness, and when they left the world, the threat of a still greater darkness, a total and everlasting one, rose up from their ashes. And at the same time, there could not be the least doubt that the only answer to this past and this present is a conscious, deliberate and wholly responsible determination to make our society walk in the paths of light.”
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