“… The album comprises 32 photographs taken in 1905 of graduates of Menomonie High School in Dunn County. It doesn’t describe the students’ extracurricular activities nor does it reveal their hopes, dreams and aspirations upon leaving high school. Instead, photographer Albert Hansen and "prophet" Sarah Ana Heller, both 1905 class members themselves, portrayed imaginary futures for their classmates in words and pictures.”
Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone crashed into my reading life like a bolt from the blue. I came across the book while randomly browsing through the thin selection of “literature” at our only locally owned bookstore (specified not to praise my local shopping emphasis, which is nearly non-existent, but to explain the odds of coming across the book in the first place). The title tinkled faint bells in my memory, confirmed by an entry in my wishlist. I don’t remember how Fallada’s final novel made its way onto my long list of books to read in the first place.
What a revelation! At the heart of Fallada’s novel are Otto and Anna Quangel, an older couple who have lost their only child on the German front lines, fighting what increasingly feels like a hopeless, useless war. Disillusioned but introverted– neither are the sort to join an active underground– the Quangels mount a quiet resistance to the irrational Nazi regime in one of the simplest ways possible: by anonymously dropping postcards with anti-Nazi and anti-Hitler messages all over Berlin. They drop hundreds of cards over a three year period from 1941-1943. The Quangels’ story is based on the story of Otto and Elise Hampel… reproductions of some of the cards they left– and the Gestapo files on them– are included in the book.
Intertwined within and around the story of the Quangels are stories of many other characters. There’s Inspector Escherich, assigned the task of tracking down the anonymous postcard author, who he’s nicknamed “the hobgoblin” and, through him, the entire, twisted mechanism of the Gestapo. In the Quangels’ own apartment building there’s another quiet resister, Judge Fromm, and the Persickes, a brutal family of Nazis, and Frau Rosenthal, one of the few remaining Jews, essentially trapped in her apartment with the remains of her former life. And there’s an assortment of petty thugs, postal workers, shop keepers, and factory workers, some good, some not. All of these together are the real main character in Fallada’s book– the character of a people in the midst of a brutal and increasingly irrational war, living together in a society of fear where anyone could be, and probably is, an informant, and where every bit of the baser nature of people who would in other circumstances be unremarkable have been drawn from them by the pressure of the totalitarian regime and the paranoia it instills in everyone.
Part of what’s fascinating about Every Man Dies Alone is what it is not. It’s not a story of Jews and Nazis, but of “normal” German citizens. Setting aside the philosophical import (or not) of Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase “the banality of evil,” Fallada’s novel inevitably brings it to mind. But the actions of Otto and Anna Quangel– particularly as they are implicitly contrasted with the limited view of an ineffectual and confused active resistance– equally inspire thoughts of a “banality of good.” Much has been written about the question of ordinary German people being warped by the war, and they are amply represented here, but in Fallada’s novel we see ordinary people who are elevated in small ways by their circumstance without becoming heroes in any ordinary sense.
Every Man Dies Alone, reportedly written in a “white heat” and completed in just 24 days, isn’t flawless. In attempting to distill a byzantine and bewildering structure of events and array of people into a single novel (dozens of novels could be written based on just the significant characters and events brought into play), Fallada chooses to intertwine and connect them in ways that defy belief. There are times when the story is dulled a bit by Fallada’s brief philosophical interjections. There were times Fallada’s serial changes in tense and point-of-view confused me. A few scenes are melodramatic in the manner of bestselling thrillers or soap operas. But taken together these are inconsequential flaws in a terribly important novel.
Recommended to me by Bruce Bentzman, A Man Called Intrepid is a historical account that reads like great spy fiction. The book documents how William Stephenson (code name: Intrepid) and Wild Bill Donovan created and ran a spy network well before and all through World War II, working with Roosevelt and Churchill and for the most part without any real governmental approval. Yet it seems clear that if this spy network didn’t actually change the final outcome of the war, it certainly changed the way it unfolded (and the duration).
What came to my mind immediately is how, in today’s environment, it would be nearly impossible for a covert spy network like this to operate for 10+ years without being exposed to the general public… and if one were exposed, could you imagine the outrage that would ensue? But it’s hard not to agree that the outcome here justified the means, despite being not just a secret government operation of immense influence, but often operating in direct contravention of various laws and public opinion.
One really interesting story revealed here is that the “failed” DIeppe Raid wasn’t a failure at all, but was a planned sacrifice—an engagement that couldn’t be won undertaken to cover the real operation, which successfully infiltrated a scientist in to the country to examine an important nuclear development facility and back out again.
While browsing Brian’s trove of links, a pointer to an Esquire article caught my eye. It tells the story of the discovery, attempt at authentication, and subsequent wrangling over the ownership and authenticity of what might be a new photo of Robert Johnson. It’s a fascinating article that not only prompted me to listen to Johnson’s Complete Recordingsfor the millionth time, but reminded me of a couple of good books I’ve read about (or that involved) Johnson.
The best book I’ve come across so far is Peter Guralnick’s Searching for Robert Johnson. It’s short, readable, and covers pretty much all the facts available at that point about Johnson with very little mythologizing. Not coincidentally, I greatly enjoyed two of Guralnick’s other books on music and musicians: Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock ‘n Roll (includes pieces on Skip James, Muddy Waters and Johny Shines, the latter of whom figures into the Esquire article as well) and Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians, which focuses on roots music including pieces about Bobby Bland, Big Joe Turner, Hank Williams and Storey Edwards. Guralnick’s work is personal rather than academic, so no footnotes and he’s unafraid of conjecturing beyond the known facts… which is why his writing is interesting even when it involves musicians I’m not otherwise dedicated to.
Gayle Wardlow’s Chasin’ That Devil Music has some interesting bits, including Wardlow’s search for Robert Johnson’s birth certificate, and many interesting short essays/articles on Delta Blues– and only Delta Blues– history.
Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture is a drier, more academic book that attempts to sort the myth from the “objective” facts in service of examining the cultural symbol that Johnson has, in many ways, become. I enjoyed it, but I’ve been soundly indoctrinated into the academic tradition.
If you read any of the above, you can stay away from the very recent Robert Johnson: Lost and Found, which adds nothing new, though it is readable enough. It’s clear that many discoveries have been made in the last few years… unfortunately this book doesn’t include them.
This brief documentary on the rise of Neo-Nazis and other hate groups in Russia is powerful and disturbing… and perfect for the web where it isn’t censored as it would undoubtedly be on television.
The Secret Museum of Mankind is online, scanned in its entirety, with links to large versions of all the photos. Astounding.
Here’s the site’s description of the strange set:
Published in 1935, the Secret Museum is a mystery book. It has no author or credits, no copyright, no date, no page numbers, no index. Published by “Manhattan House” and sold by “Metro Publications”, both of New York, its “Five Volumes in One” was pure hype: it had never been released in any other form.
Advertised as “World’s Greatest Collection of Strange & Secret Photographs” and marketed mainly to overheated adolescents (see the 1942 Keen ad, left), it consists of nothing but photos and captions with no further exposition. This was not a book published to educate (despite appearing on some public library’s shelves), but to titillate (literally)– it’s emphasis was on the female form (“Female Beauty Round the World”) and fashion, and it featured as many National-Geographic-style native breasts as possible. But anything lurid, weird, or just plain unusual is fair game. This was a book to gawk at by flashlight under the bedcovers.
Another amazing find via BoingBoing, made better by the fact that I owned a single volume of this book many years ago, found in the abandoned remains of an old hunting lodge.
Shorpy constantly has interesting photos, but the recentpictures of a rural Depression era family are quite moving. The one linked from the thumbnail below really caught my attention, not least due to the strange trick of light and wood that made me think the young boy on the right was wearing glasses. It was so incongruous and yet at the same time made me realize that these people from a different time were no different from us. I am constantly guilty of seeing pictures from even 50 years ago and subconsciously imagining the people pictured as being as different from me and my children as aliens from some indescribable planet…
The proceedings of the Old Bailey, described as “A fully searchable online edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing accounts of over 100,000 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court,” are a rather addictive read.
Here’s a random example:
The next was a little confident ungrateful Slut, taken up in the streets by an honest laborious Market-woman, who first employed her, and afterwards admitted her to lie with her: she took an advantage one morning when her kinde Dame was gone out early, leaving her in bed, to rob the poor woman of almost all the clothes she had, sending them away by some Confederates, and devoutly forswearing her own knowing any thing of the matter; but finding a Warrant like to come, fled, and was found with an Ends of Gold and Silver woman, to whom she had pawn’d part of the things: she was Convicted only to the value of ten Pence; and consequently instead of riding in a Cart, shall only have the honour to follow it, under the correction of a gentle Lash.
There are some powerful images in this Slate exhibit about how to approach the disappeared artistically, but none more so than this video of an artist painting– with water on stone– the likenesses of disappeared individuals, a race against time before the images inevitably fade away…
As Sartre constantly reminds us, we are what we do.
In short, existentialism is not a philosophy that allows us to feel sorry for ourselves in the midst of our malaise. It is a philosophy with which we can come to grips with these terrible times and actually change them. The recent midterm election was encouraging. What it suggests is that America is collectively recouping its existentialist roots, not because of national pessimism but because of what I hope is the beginning of a cooperative optimism and the sense that things as they are cannot stand.
Scott Rosenberg draws a connection between a Breughel and a photo taken on 9/11. He also points to one of my favorite Auden poems about the painting: Musee des Beaux Arts. The parallel between my feelings about 9/11 and the poem/painting are clear and raw. 9/11 was a horrific, tragic event. But it, like any event, is subject to perspective. As far away as I was (and am), with no one I am directly connected to lost, the event remains remote.
And I can’t help but think of how many tragedies of this magnitude and even greater befall other countries all the time. Rwanda: 800,000 killed by machete. The India earthquake earlier in 2001: 20,000 lives. The Indian Ocean tsunami: 230,000 lost. Americans dead since Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” is almost as many as we lost in the Twin Towers. The Iraqi body count… no one’s sure, but likely 100,000 or more. What makes 9/11 special other than the happenstance of proximity and the puncturing of our smug “that only happens in other places” superiority?
And the spectacle that 9/11 has become– the television specials and the trotting out of the survivors like prized show horses, the speeches (from both sides) full of empty promises and the once-a-year interest that flashes across most peoples’ minds and is quickly forgotten– that sickens me and I want no part of it.
9/11 was America passing from overarching world power to participatory world citizen. It should have been a wake-up call to many things: an awareness of the immense diversity in our shrinking world, an interest in the truth of other cultures and religions, a commitment to making the world better rather than worse. Unfortunately, the most prominent legacy is needless violence and death. Most of us are disconnected and disaffected while the main event is prosecuted by neocon ringleaders to fulfill wholly external, personal, and profitable agendas.
It’s not Icarus who is scissoring into the water unseen behind us, but our future.
Hence it becomes more and more difficult to estimate the morality of an act leading to war because it is more and more difficult to know precisely what is going on. Not only is war increasingly a matter for pure specialists operating with fantastically complex machinery, but above all there is the question of absolute secrecy regarding everything that seriously affects defense policy. We may amuse ourselves by reading the reports in mass media and imagine that these “facts” provide sufficient basis for moral judgments for and against war. But in reality, we are simply elaborating moral fantasies in a vacuum. Whatever we may decide, we remain completely at the mercy of the governmental power, or rather the anonymous power of managers and generals who stand behind the facade of government. We have no way of directly influencing the decisions and policies taken by these people. In practice, we must fall back on a blinder and blinder faith which more and more resigns itself to trusting the “legitimately constituted authority” without having the vaguest notion what that authority is liable to do next. This condition of irresponsibility and passivity is extremely dangerous. It is hardly conducive to genuine morality.
February 14, 2010
Posted in: Art & Life & Politics 
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