We Must Revoke the Ninth Symphony

I have just finished reading a few new things on Germany's catastrophe in the twentieth century, especially “The Eichmann Trial,” by Deborah Lipstadt, and “The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust,” by Ernestine Schlant (Bill Bradley's ex-wife).

The subject currently gets many references by insecure rich people who are presenting themselves as unfortunate victims of poor peoples' envy of their wealth, superior diligence, discipline, intelligence, industriousness, and moral quality.

The absurdity of those references is evidence that maybe those people are right who believe that silence is the only appropriate comment on the horror itself. And yet, as Schlant says, it needs to be studied and discussed and described!

Both Lipstadt and Schlant are native German emigrants to the US. Both are academics and Lipstadt worked at the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C.

The are many thoughts in these two books that could be discussed forever, but the one that struck me most strongly was in Lipstadt's chapter on Hannah Arendt's “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” In particular, it was the idea that Eichmann was just a banal non-entity, a mindless cog in the system, as Arendt had it.

Lipstadt has this to say about the judges decision in the Eichmann case, p. 144:

“In the final paragraph of their decision, they addressed Eichmann's character rather than his deeds. He had not offered 'truthful evidence, in spite of his repeated declarations that...his only desire was to reveal the truth...his entire testimony was nothing but one consistent attempt to deny the truth and to conceal his real share of responsibility.' Even as they declared him a liar, they offered a back-handed compliment: 'His attempt was not unskillful, due to those qualities which he had shown at the time of his actions – an alert mind; the ability to adapt himself to any difficult situation, cunning and a glib tongue. But he did not have the courage to confess to the truth.'”

Clever, intelligent, alert, cunning, skillful people are a dime a dozen. In fact, I have never actually met Arendt's caricature in my seventy-three years. If you really get to know such people deeply, you find that they are very sharp indeed. Again, as I have mentioned before, I find arrogant clever, connected, learned people like Arendt to be far more harmful that the supposed stupids they think they see.

I once had the experience of attending a lecture in Los Angeles in 1965 by Herbert Marcuse entitled “We Must Revoke the Ninth Symphony.” That title comes from a line in Thomas Mann's book, “Dr. Faustus,” or “Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde.” Mann takes the crown jewels of German culture, its classical music, and shows how such a magnificent cultural accomplishment as German classical music can become catastrophic. Mann's masterpiece makes much more sense to me than Arendt.

I remember Marcuse saying that he of all people loves music, but that he looked around him during these concerts and felt that people “just oozed something I did not like.”