Theater of Cruelty (14 page)

This time, however, she couldn’t get away with it. She was not a young girl but a middle-aged writer, blessed with many privileges. This time, she wasn’t able to duck responsibility for a state she had supported. Analyzing her private fears, in that solipsistic way that has become her inimitable style, as though those fears were more important than their actual cause, was too much like discussing the meaning of fire while the forest burned. And so the book was violently attacked as soon as it appeared last spring.

For one thing, as many critics pointed out, the book simply came too late. If she had published it ten, or five, or even two years earlier, it would have caused a sensation. She would have been acknowledging the reality of a system whose terrors and failures were still being
glossed over by many in the West. But to have done so now that the Stasi, the Wall, and all the other tawdry tools of oppression had been broken made her look opportunistic, self-pitying, and ridiculous. It was, as Ulrich Greiner wrote in
Die Zeit
, “as embarrassing as her resignation from the Party at a time when there was no more risk in doing so.” To bring out the book now, he went on, “didn’t betray a lack of courage, since there were no more dangers, but of sincerity toward herself, and her own history, a lack of sensitivity toward those whose lives have been destroyed by the Communist state.”

Embarrassing and insensitive, certainly; dishonest, perhaps. But can Wolf be accused of being a “collaborator,” a
Mitläufer
, as they say in German? Was she simply a vulgar careerist, after all? Should she have spoken out more forcefully against the GDR regime? Does the fact that she did not discredit her as a writer? Does it detract from her work? These questions are being asked, sometimes by people who didn’t have to face the dilemmas of a Communist state. To demand courage in another person is always a tricky business when one is not exposed to the same dangers oneself. There is an element of hypocrisy involved here too, since many Western intellectuals applauded writers like Wolf, as well as the leftist, anti-American causes she stood for. If she is to be crucified for her opinions, so should many much more comfortably placed people in the West. And if it’s a matter of feeling betrayed by a writer who was thought to have been a dissident, she certainly never pretended to be one.

And yet, the positions of writers in quasi-totalitarian states must be taken into account in an assessment of their work. Hermann Broch once remarked that “truthfulness is the only criterion for autonomous art.” But could art produced in a state like the GDR ever be called autonomous? The officially sanctioned writers were, in the words of Günter Kunert, a novelist who went west, supposed to be ideological mediators between the powers that be and the people.
Some conformed more to this model, others less. At what point is the work of an artist fatally compromised by the political pressures he or she cannot or will not resist? Kunert was privileged, like Wolf. But “he couldn’t stand it anymore to walk around happy and free in the midst of prisoners. The privilege to be able to travel became an oppressive burden. And one was always aware that this privilege depended to a great extent on one’s good behavior.”
¹⁵
Good behavior, naturally, extended to what appeared in print.

Since much of the present debate in Germany about writing in the former GDR is between those who stayed and those who left, there are echoes of the late 1940s. A similar battle took place then between the exiles, many of whom returned to the socialist half of Germany, and the writers who had made their pact with Hitler. The most famous exile was Thomas Mann. This was his assessment of the years of his absence:

The GDR was not the Third Reich, nor was everything published there until 1990 worthless. But
Kultur
, including the German spirit
alluded to by Mann, was pressed into service by the state to further its political ends. And just as the writers who stayed in Nazi Germany sneered at the “unpatriotic” exiles, those who stuck with the Communist state, such as Stefan Heym, still express contempt for those who left. The point of finding out why writers like Heym and Wolf allowed themselves to be compromised by a corrupt and oppressive regime, all in the name of a distant ideal, is not to morally condemn them, or to suggest that their work can be reduced to a mere exercise in propaganda. Wolf’s books are certainly better than that. But without questioning their politics, it is impossible to understand the nature of their art. For in the melancholy context of modern history, especially in Germany, art and politics cannot be cleanly separated without doing damage to the very thing Wolf considers the central theme of her work: our memory.

It is interesting that both Syberberg and Wolf share a fascination for Kleist and the German Romantics. Could it be that in their respective quests for utopia—in Syberberg’s case a kind of kitsch, de-Nazified vision of Blood and Soil, in Wolf’s an ideal socialist state without Stalin—that they have something deeper in common than a loathing for America and messy liberal democracy? Do they miss, perhaps, the heady sense of idealism of their youth, which they have tried to recreate, in their different ways, ever since? This makes them rather anomalous in a nation that is distinctly lacking in idealistic fervor these days, but it is precisely why Wolf still admonished the masses to “dream” and why Syberberg uses every opportunity to vent his misanthropic disgust with the modern world and the people who live in it. They are intellectuals forever in search of the ideal community.

In an interview given in 1982, Wolf says something very self-revealing about the German Romantics of the nineteenth century: “They perceived with some sensitivity that they were outsiders, that they were not needed in a society which was in the process of becoming industrial society, of intensifying the division of labour, of turning people into appendages of machines.”

This is the common enemy of many intellectuals, in East and West, of left and right: the industrial society of machines, contracts, of contending political parties, where the imagination is not in power, where intellectuals and artists are outsiders, tolerated, often well paid, even lionized, but nonetheless on their own. Nazism and socialism promised solidarity, a family state, unity of the
Volk
. There was a role to play for idealists; they could be prophets of the new order. Wolf was a prophet in the GDR, the antifascist
Heimat
that was in so many ways the mirror image of her first, Nazified home: “We were living as socialists in the GDR because we wanted to be involved in that country, make our contribution there. When individuals are thrown back on literature alone, they are plunged into crisis, an existential crisis.”

It is this crisis that leads to the kind of fear displayed by Syberberg, and even Grass, the fear of being ignored, of preaching to deaf ears, of losing the prophet’s mantle. The
Heimat
is also a childish fantasy, a fantasy of order, security, and power, the ideal conditions of infancy. Syberberg lost his
Heimat
twice; he was expelled from Pomerania at the end of the war and left the GDR in 1953. And he has been pining for the
Volk
ever since, for the banners of solidarity, the smell of the native soil, the sacred poetry of the German bards, the ruined castles of the ancient kings, and so on. Because this ideal community is an imaginary one, he must invent it through the fairy tales of his childhood: Hitler’s speeches, Karl May’s adventure stories, and
echoes from Bayreuth. Which may be why his film sets look like gigantic toy stores, with Syberberg, as a monstrous child, rummaging through the props of his imagination.

Wolf, whose fantasy was never as baroque as Syberberg’s, invented her imaginary community in the Communist state. Her communism, as is so often true, was always reactionary, the road back to something that was lost, long ago. Something she would never forget, just as Cassandra couldn’t forget Troy:

ANNE FRANK WAS
an ambitious young woman, and most of her wishes came true. She wanted to be a famous writer and “to go on living even after my death!”
¹
Few writers are as famous as she.
The Diary of Anne Frank
continues to be read by millions of people in dozens of languages. The movie version was a global success. The “award-winning” play, based on the diary, was a smash hit on Broadway, as well as pretty much everywhere else, and its current revival is playing to full houses.
²
As is usually the case with fame of this scale, the quality of the original work does not fully explain the legendary status of its author.

Anne Frank has become more than a writer, and more than a victim of the Holocaust whose eloquent voice happens to have reached us across the stinking pits of Bergen-Belsen. She has become an almost sacred figure, a Jewish Saint Ursula, a Dutch Joan of Arc, a female Christ. I grope for Christian examples, since Jews don’t canonize their martyrs as saints. Nor do Jewish saints offer universal
redemption. Anne’s most famous words—“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart”—have been notoriously wrenched out of context to promise just that. And gratefully they were received, too, especially in Germany.

Anne’s death, premature and brutal, also lent itself easily to a common thirst, not just for absolution but for a kind of sentimental aestheticism. Her smile has become as famous as Mona Lisa’s. It pops up everywhere, from Santa Barbara, where it was recently on display to promote “tolerance,” to the English city of York, where the smile was projected onto a medieval tower where Jews were massacred during the twelfth century. Anne’s diary has been set to music. There are cartoon versions, one of them Japanese. Anne has been a character in at least one famous novel. About the only thing we haven’t seen so far is Anne Frank on Ice.

A beautiful and talented girl dying so young was always destined, in the minds of many, to live on forever. She had wished it, but I doubt that the result was quite what she had in mind. Many letters arrive every day at the Anne Frank Foundation, located a few steps away from the “secret annexe,” at Prinsengracht 263, in Amsterdam. They come from all over the world. Some are from people who think they have “seen” Anne somewhere, in Argentina, or Belgium, or Japan. Many more come from people who think they
are
Anne Frank.

The curse of fame is that it attracts cranks, mostly harmless, sometimes not. Cranks latch on to redeemers. And not just cranks. The actor who played Anne’s father in the original Broadway production said the play gave him a “sacred feeling.” He wasn’t the only one. But Anne’s diary, sold as a message of universal redemption, was actually something much better than that. For she was too intelligent to have written a simple message, redemptive or otherwise. What lifts the diary above the level of a mere witness account is the author’s capacity to grapple with problems to which there are no easy
answers. These include the problems of sexuality, growing up, and relations between parents and children, but also of being Jewish, of national belonging, religious faith, fate and personal freedom, the meaning of life, and of being denied the right to live.