Crossing the Zbruch by Isaac Babel – Translation and Commentary

This is my translation of “Crossing the Zbruch” by Isaac Babel. It is the first story in Konarmiia, or Red Army Cavalry, a collection of his stories on the Polish-Soviet war in the early 1920s. In other translations it has been rendered as “Crossing the River Zbrucz”. Following the text there are a few comments on the meaning of the piece.

Crossing the Zbruch

The leader of the sixth division had announced that Novograd-Volynsk was taken this morning at dawn. The headquarters moved out of Krapivo and our convoy, a noisy rear-guard, spread itself out along the highway that runs from Brest to Warsaw and was built on the bones of countless peasants by Nicholas I.

Fields of purple poppies flower around us, the midday wind plays in the yellowy rye, and on the horizon the virgin buckwheat rises like the wall of a distant monastery. The quiet Volyn river bends, she flows away from us into the pearly fog of birch groves, she creeps among the flowery little hills, and with weakening strength she gets lost in the thickets of hops. The orange sun rolls across the sky like a head after a beheading, and a tender light illuminates the canyons in the clouds, as above our heads our unit’s standards blow in the sunset. The smells of yesterday’s bloodletting and dead horses drip into the evening coolness.

The Zbruch, now grown black, sloshes and twists the foamy loops of her rapids. The bridges have been destroyed so we have to fjord the river. A majestic moon lies on the waves. The horses, end to end, enter the water, its noisy currents trickling between a hundred horses’ legs. Someone goes under and loudly curses the Virgin Mary. The river is strewn with the black squares of carts; she is filled with murmurs, whistles and songs, rumbling above the lunar shapes and shining depths.

Late at night we arrive in Novograd. I find a pregnant woman in the flat that I’ve been allocated, and two ginger Jews with thin necks; a third is asleep, hiding his head and lying close to the wall. I find a looted cupboard in the flat I’ve been allocated, and on the floor scraps of women’s coats, human shit, and shards of pottery from the special crockery used by Jews once a year – at Passover.

“Clean it up.” I say to the woman. “How can you live in such filth, and when it’s your own home too…”

The two male Jews get up from their spot. They jump onto their felt soles and clean up the pottery from the floor; they jump around in silence, like apes, like Japs in the circus, their necks swelling and twisting as they go. They place a scruffy feather bed on the floor, and I lie towards the wall, right by the third, still sleeping, Jew. A timid poverty closes in around my pillow.

Everything is dead with silence, and only the moon, with the blue arms of night wrapped around its shining, carefree head, wanders above the window.

I loosen up my numb legs; I lie on the scruffy bed and fall asleep. The leader of the sixth division comes to me in a dream. He is on a heavy stallion and chasing after the leader of the brigade, and then he places two bullets into the other’s eyes. The bullets make holes in the brigade leader’s head, and both his eyes fall to the ground. “Why have you turned the brigade around?” Savitsky, leader of the sixth division, shouts at the wounded man… And there I awake, because the pregnant woman is groping at my face with her fingers.

“Sir,” She says to me. “You’re shouting in your sleep and throwing yourself around. I’ll make your bed up in the other corner, because here you are kicking my dear father…”

She picks up her thin legs and round belly from the floor and takes the blanket off the sleeping man. It is a dead old man that lies there, thrown onto his back. His throat has been torn out, his face is chopped in half, and dark blue blood lies in his beard, like a piece of lead.

“Sir,” the Jew says as she shakes out the feather bed. “The Poles cut him down, and he begged them: kill me in the yard outside in the dark, so that my daughter doesn’t have to see me die. But they did what they thought was necessary – he died in this room, thinking of me… and now I want to know,” said the woman suddenly, and with a terrible strength, “I want to know where else on the whole earth you might find another such father as my own…”

Commentary

The River: Border and Baptism

“Crossing the Zbruch” has also been translated as “Crossing the River Zbrucz”, and this is a good place to start when considering what exactly we can get out of the text. The river Zbruch is a river running in Western Ukraine, which at the time of Red Army Cavalry was part of Poland. For that reason, the title can use either the Polish name of the river, or the Russian/Ukrainian one. I chose the second primarily because that’s what is the case in the original, but in using the former option the sense of strangeness, of non-Russianness is heightened. Either way, we are moving, just as the Russians of the story do, from a familiar world into an alien one, both ideologically and culturally. Poland was a democratic country in the 1920s, and Western Ukraine contains a large number of Jews and Catholics compared to the East.

A Picture of the River Zbruch
The River Zbruch looking particularly mysterious and misty. Crossing this river brings the Soviets and their worldviews into a challenging conflict with the outside world.

The image of the river as a border has a long history. The Styx comes to mind, and the images of death as the army crosses, such as the dead horses, give this suggestion a particular resonance here. A river marks a division, and divisions are central to Red Army Cavalry as a whole. Partially they are cultural divides – between the old world and its culture as seen predominantly in the Jewish characters, and the new world of the Cossacks – but there are also divides between night and day, fathers and mothers, and plenty more besides. Entering the water also denotes baptism, made more obvious by the full immersion of one of the soldiers (who then curses the Virgin Mary in a reversal of the sacredness of the baptismal act).

Ambiguous Descriptions

What we have is a profane crossing and an entry into the unknown. The suggestion that the Soviets were in some way fulfilling a divine (or at the very least a fated – think Marx’s conception of historical development) role would have been welcomed in Soviet literature in the 1920s, but Babel undermines the purity of the idea by corrupting the Christian image. This is one of the ways he works in Red Army Cavalry – no image or idea is permitted without being questioned simultaneously. Indeed, one of the main metaphors employed by Babel in the collection is the idea of “rot” or “mould” – at the centre of what we take to be perfect there is a hostile element. Another example of this in “Crossing the Zbruch” is the standards. Though they suggest military glory, they are tainted by their association with the horrific decapitated head of the sunset.

A Divided Narrator: Misanthropy and Poetry

The narrator, who we learn later on in Red Army Cavalry is called Liutov, also seems uncertain in his role. We go from the formal language of the first paragraph into the lyrical second paragraph, and then back round again. The poetic beauty of the landscape is stressed, but then suddenly its horrors come to the fore. I take the image of the decapitated head to mean that it is impossible, even as you try to focus on the splendour of the natural world, to escape the violence and destruction that penetrates it throughout – even the sky is not safe from blood.

Liutov arrives at the flat he has been allocated, and here the main action of the story takes place. After the dream-time earlier on, where each paragraph seems to move at breakneck speed, here everything slows down. The formal tone returns as Liutov repeats the phrase “I’ve been allocated”, as if he is trying to take responsibility away from himself for what he sees and place it onto his superiors. The initial scene is dreadful, with only the image of the moon providing a sense that there is a better world out there. A sense of misanthropy permeates Liutov’s interactions with the Jewish inhabitants of the flat. He calls them “apes”, and when he describes the pregnant woman she seems to be a body before she is a human being – the image of her picking up her own body from the floor is particularly repellent.

Heroisms

But even here there is a tension. Liutov’s hostility towards the Jews is countered by his own Jewish nature, which is at this point only hinted at through his recognition of the Passover crockery. And even as he tries to order the other inhabitants of the flat around, his own nightmare makes his apparent confidence and leadership seem very much feigned, or at least unnatural. This is then contrasted with the pregnant woman. Her very nature as someone pregnant in a warzone suggests great suffering and asks questions about how she became so.

But instead of cowering away, she alone of the other characters is given a voice to express herself, and she does so at length and with self-assurance. This is in sharp contrast to Liutov’s speech, which is marked by the uncertainty of its closing ellipsis. She has experienced death – just as we, seeing her father’s body described in grim and unusual detail, have too – and for that she has come out stronger. Her own speech ends the story, and the message of her words is ultimately a positive one, stressing love for her father and also praise for his heroism. Her language, memorialising her father’s memory within the story, defends heroic death over cowardice, even as his body repels us. In Red Army Cavalry we see time and again that language’s power is transformative, giving us protection against the hostile world around us. It makes the woman herself a hero.

Conclusion

“Crossing the Zbruch” is the first story in Red Army Cavalry and it sets out immediately the main thematic currents of the collection. The nature of suffering and heroism in the form of the woman and her father, the dehumanising effects of war through the other Jews, and also the counterpoint to all this, the glorious loud and boisterous army – all are given attention. Key to the representation of all of these themes is Babel’s lack of judgement about them – the story, after all, ends with the woman’s words, not the narrator’s. As a result, the reader is forced to consider for themselves what they think the woman’s speech means – should we find it uplifting, or is horror a more sensible reaction? It is also important that images are always undermined, such as the connection between beauty and blood, and water and a distorted baptism.

Picture of Babel after being arrested.
Ultimately Babel was murdered by the Soviet secret police for his writing. But Red Army Cavalry comes from an earlier time, and portrays an uncertain if cautiously hopeful attitude towards the Revolution.

Nothing is ever clear in Babel’s world. The challenge of finding one’s way in the new and tragically flawed ideology of the Soviet Union makes itself manifest in the competing impulses of the narrator of Red Army Cavalry and the collection’s world. But these confusions were present in Babel’s own life too, and his death in 1940 at the hands of the secret police. We have to make up our own minds here instead of going in with our opinions already iron-cast, and repeated readings of Red Army Cavalry only give more food for thought. The intelligence of Babel’s stories, and their ambiguity, is something that I hope is captured here in my translation of this one.

For my essay on Red Army Cavalry as a whole, look here. Another Soviet writer whose attitude towards the new state was dangerously ambiguous is Andrei Platonov – see my review of his Soul and Other Stories here. For more Russian translations, check out my work on a Tolstoy short story here, or some Leskov here.

Picture of the Zbruch by Arts at pl.wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)]; Picture of Babel after being arrested is in the public domain.

Red Army Cavalry by Isaac Babel – The Birth of a Revolutionary Culture

Introduction: Isaac Babel and his World

War is a time and space of rapid change, of unrivalled destruction but also of the creation and recreation that comes in its aftermath. In 1920 a young Russian Jew of Odessa accompanied the newly formed armies of the Soviet Union in their war against Poland. Isaac Babel, friend of Maxim Gorky, had been given the role of war correspondent through his connections to the other writer. Gorky saw Babel as needing first-hand experience to improve the quality of his writing. What came out of this time was a cycle of short stories, Red Army Cavalry (Konarmiia), a work of both beauty and brutality. Babel’s stories, published separately in the 1920s before being collected together, showed a new revolutionary world being born, and all the ambiguity it brought.

Picture of Isaac Babel
Isaac Babel (1894-1940) was one of the greatest writers of the early Soviet period. But like so many, he fell foul of the state and was murdered by the secret police.

Babel’s work in these stories is of vital importance to understanding Soviet culture because it contains within itself the two trends that were later to become dominant in it. The first, in works lying outside of state approval and published only clandestinely if at all, criticised the state for claiming to have made a utopia reality when in practice they had made a lie leading only to suffering; the second view, however, which developed into Socialist Realism, was one that promoted the Russian Revolution as creating a new and better world, which saw bright hopes and the chances to put them into action, and a new type of heroism, accessible to all.

Babel expressed both views with equal care, and for this his collection is important in a world where views of the Soviet Union tend to be particularly black-or-white. But these stories are also intellectually challenging, extremely well-written, and even at times entertaining. And that doesn’t hurt them either.

War and its Representation: The Structure of Red Army Cavalry

The great Russian war novel is the aptly titled War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. At well over a thousand pages it conveys the totality of war by describing everything Tolstoy can think of that is connected with it. Red Army Cavalry is, by contrast, tiny. The stories themselves are only ever a few pages long, and the whole book in my edition is just over 150 pages. But Babel was a huge admirer of Tolstoy’s, and his influence is felt here, albeit in a sublimated form. Whereas Tolstoy aimed to write about everything, Babel felt that such an option was no longer open to him.

Faced with the horrors of war, and aware of his own limits as a witness, he wrote what comes together to be a fragmented novel rather than a short story collection. Characters recur, and each story chronologically follows on from the previous one, as the cheerful optimism of the Soviets is replaced by concern as they begin to suffer losses, and then fear as they are routed. The narrator is a man called Liutov, which was Babel’s own name while he was working as the war correspondent, and the two men share other similarities that blur together fact and fiction. Babel made liberal use of his diary for creating these stories, so that it is hard to tell where Babel ends and Liutov begins.

Picture of Red Army soldiers during the Polish War
Kalinin and Trotsky survey Red Army troops. The Polish War was an early failure of the new state, but at least it led to Red Army Cavalry.

By showing an individual’s challenges during war, Babel can focus on the reality of suffering rather than the abstractions that are inevitable when trying to paint a bigger picture. Liutov encounters many of those affected by the warring armies, from Catholic priests in Poland to smaller Jewish communities in modern-day Belarus, to simple peasant men and women. Even as an individual there is enough material to bear witness to. And whenever Babel wants to expand beyond this, he uses the Russian technique known as skaz, similar to free indirect speech it is where characters speak in language and styles clearly distinct from those of the author. For example, in the story “The Letter”, a young boy, Kurdyukov, dictates a letter for his mother to Liutov. In this letter he reveals the extent of his own, personal suffering in the war in a way that Liutov himself cannot express on his own, except by recording it.

The Prose of Sympathy and Absent Judgements

What Babel takes from Tolstoy is not a grandiose scale so much as a sense of sympathy towards the world and its inhabitants, and a lack of direct judgement on them. He takes time to focus on the specific and concrete casualties of the fighting in ways that challenge the simplistic metanarratives of war being merely a tug-of-war between opponents.

The first story, “Crossing the River Zbruch”, is representative of this. It begins “The leader of the Sixth Division reported that Novograd-Volynsk was taken today at dawn” (translations mine unless otherwise noted) – the tone here is formal and military. But by the second paragraph there is a shift from the objective towards a more subjective and poetic appraisal of the landscape: “Fields of purple poppies are blossoming around us, the midday wind plays in the yellowy rye, and on the horizon the buckwheat rises like the wall of a far-off monastery”. Death, hidden in official reports under mere statistics, breaks through in images like that of the orange sun that “rides across the sky like a decapitated head”.

After these lyrical moments the bulk of the narrative takes place. Liutov enters Novograd and is billeted in a flat with a pregnant woman and three Jewish men, one of whom lies on the floor and sleeps. The descriptions of the poverty within the flat indicate more than the narrator’s frustration ever could what suffering the war has caused. The floors are covered with human faeces, while the pregnant woman’s very existence demands the question – by whom is she pregnant? The lack of judgement by Liutov encourages the reader to search the text carefully to determine for themselves what it might indicate.

Picture of Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) wrote stories which, like Babel’s in Red Army Cavalry, often end without conclusions. Through a lack of judgement both writers encourage their readers to come to their own conclusions about the meaning of a story.

This lack of narratorial judgement, analogous to the conclusions of Chekhov’s stories, is made even more glaring by the often horrific contents of the stories. At the end of “Crossing the River Zbruch” Liutov discovers that the pregnant woman’s father, who he’d thought was sleeping, is actually dead. “His throat was torn, his face was chopped in half, and dark blue blood lay in his beard, like a piece of lead.” This description of death is so different to numb cliché that we are forced to pay attention to it, to face the terrifying reality of war. Its presence invites judgement but does not make it. The pregnant woman has the final words of the story, explaining how the Poles killed him because it was “necessary”. Through his sacrifice she finds “a terrible strength” and pride in spite of her surroundings. Only in “terrible” is there hinted Liutov’s own reaction.

Culture Wars: Introduction

The world after the Russian Revolution was changing culturally just as much as it was technologically and politically. In some sense the change was a positive one, bringing art and artistic production down to the masses from being almost exclusively the domain of Russian elites in the capitals. Religion was dismissed as mere delusion, “the opium of the people” in Marx’s eyes, and science and rational thought were promoted as the alternative. Social progress on a grand scale, by the most forward thinking (in its own eyes) states ever to have existed, was the order of the day. A new type of hope was born, one that saw agency transferred from a mysterious God above into the hands of individual men and women.

But with all that there comes a question – what have we lost? Red Army Cavalry presents the two sides of progress’s coin through the times of the day, contrasting in daytime stories those who represent the new world with the characters of stories set at night, who represent an old world that, however irrevocably tainted it is, still retains something intangible and important for human life.

Culture Wars: Night and the Old Culture

Who are the people who lose out in the face of the Revolution and its consequences? Primarily it is the Jewish characters and the Catholics. Liutov himself is like Babel, Jewish, and thus as vulnerable as these others to the cataclysmic changes taking place. Within the stories the great representative of the old culture is the Jew, Gedali, from the story of the same name. In his story Liutov, late on the evening of the Sabbath goes out among the Jews of his current village, looking at the little stalls where they sell items like chalk to survive. The destitution makes him think of Dickens, and it is such appeals to an established literary tradition that reveal how culturally bound up in it he is.

Eventually he comes across the bench of an old man, Gedali, and sits down for a chat. At Gedali’s bench there are dead butterflies and other objects of fragile beauty. Yet with these symbols of culture there is a sense of its own negation, when Liutov smells “decay” underneath it all. Gedali is an educated man, and the two discuss the Revolution together. Gedali says he loves music and the Sabbath, but the Revolution tells him he doesn’t know what he loves. He talks of the violence the Revolution has led to and comments “The Revolution is the good act of good people. But good people don’t kill. That means that the Revolution makes people bad”. For all the idealism motivating the Soviets in this period, Gedali is concerned with its failed reality of it. In pain he famously asks Liutov “Which is the revolution and which the counterrevolution?”

Liutov has no real answers. His responses are pithy, thoughtless, as though plucked from a handbook on propaganda. “The Revolution has to shoot, Gedali… for it is the Revolution”, he says, obviously playing a different role to the one he plays in other stories. Soon enough he gets tired of his self-deception and asks where he can get some Jewish food and tea. Then he sets off to take part in the culture he was born into and cannot, though he tries to pretend otherwise with Gedali, escape. Meanwhile, Gedali goes to pray.

Closed indoor spaces, filled with decay and dust – these are the domains of the old culture. It is dying, certainly. There is a distinct sense of infertility in them, an absence of women and children. But for Liutov, and for other intellectual characters, it is absolutely necessary. It is a part of themselves that they cannot afford to lose.

Culture Wars: Sunshine and Cossacks in Red Army Cavalry

Loud and proud and colourful, the Cossacks stand out among the characters encountered during the day. They do not think beyond the present – neither past regrets nor the future hopes hold sway with them. They embody upheaval and joyous chaos. One of them is Dyakov, who was formerly a circus manager, and now is a soldier. He is described as “red-faced, silver-whiskered, in a black cloak”, as though he had never abandoned his roots as a performer. Colour is one way that the day-people stand out compared to the dull souls of the night. In their huge, larger-than-life poses and actions they are more than a little reminiscent of epic heroes.

Picture of a Cossack
Cossacks like this one pictured here were traditionally free of some of the administrative burden of the Russian state in exchange for aiding it militarily. They played key roles in the subjugation of the Caucasus, for example.

They have no culture of the sort comprehensible to Liutov. Instead, they sing and one of them, Afonka Bida, at one point tries drunkenly playing a church organ in an act clearly symbolic of the usurpation of old culture’s place by the new. Their vitality is overpowering, and is usually marked by connecting them to their horses. They are often shown having sex or seducing women, demonstrating the sheer magnetic attractiveness of their love of life. They do not care whether they live or die, so long as in every moment they are living to the full. In this sense, it is hard not to wish to be like them and similarly free from restraint and concern.

But their freedom and joy is only one side of them. They come at a cost – their violence and unpredictability sets them outside of society and civilization, and for all their heroism, such as squadron commander Trunov valiantly facing down a biplane on his own like a modern day Don Quixote, under its surface Red Army Cavalry questions what good these people will be able to do once the war has ended and it is time to settle down. These are people who, thinking back to Gedali’s words, have made the Revolution and made it in their own image. The violence with which they carry out the Revolution also shapes it, and hardly in a good way.

Liutov’s Among his Comrades

Liutov, of course, fits in uneasily among his comrades. Two stories illustrate this. “My First Goose” is one of Babel’s most famous ones. In it Liutov is first mocked by the Cossacks for his appearance – like Babel he wears glasses – and for his education. Savitskii, one of them, suggests he defile a woman in order to be respected by the rest of them. Instead, he goes and kills a chicken with a sword in a mockery of his own hopes of being heroic before giving it to its owner, an old woman, to cook. The woman repeatedly says that she wants to kill herself, but Liutov ignores her, returning to his comrades. Now that he has killed he is accepted by them and addressed as “mate”. But the act leaves him feeling guilty, and during the night he dreams of the blood he has spilled.

The second story, “The Death of Dolgushov”, further demonstrates his failure to fit in. Dolgushov, a Cossack, is injured and dying from his wounds, which are described just as horribly as they are in “Crossing the River Zburch”. He asks Liutov to kill him, so that the Poles don’t find him alive to torture him further. But Liutov, filled with compassion and the humanist values common among the night characters, is unable to do it – his care paralyses him. Instead Afonka Bida has to finish the other Cossack’s life. As he does so, he says to Liutov: “Get away or I’ll kill you! You, four eyes, pity our brother like a cat does a mouse”. Values that seem so effective in books fail Liutov the moment he has to put them into practice. By the end of the story he has lost the little all the respect he had gained.

Pan Apolek and the New Culture

Pan Apolek is not a Cossack, but rather a Polish Catholic. Yet where the Cossacks fail to create a new culture out of the ruins of the old, Pan Apolek in his own story shows one way in which a potential synthesis of the old culture and the new is possible. Liutov first meets him at night, while he is having tea with his hostess, and then learns about his work. Apolek is a church painter, but with a difference. Traditionally such a person would go around trying to paint according to the strict rules of icon paintings, deviating as little as possible from an original image. Yet though Apolek paints Mary Magdalene, Jesus, and other Biblical figures, they are not modelled on originals but rather on local people. In this way he mixes high, religious culture with the low culture of normal people.

Picture of an icon
Icons like the one pictured here generally were painted according to strict rules. Pan Apolek instead democratises the whole concept of an icon, bringing poor peasants into a religious culture that otherwise would seem distant and cold to them.

Though he is branded a heretic, he continues painting. His subjects include such blasphemous pairings as having Mary Magdalene be Yelka, a local woman who has given birth to many illegitimate children. What Apolek does is bring the high culture of religion down into the world, and in doing so make it more accessible. More than the revolutionaries themselves, he brings their ideals into practice.

Conclusion: Writing and Synthesis

Liutov is not the only writer here. In the story “Evening” several other war correspondents are depicted, each of them marked by illnesses, with Liutov’s being his poor sight. In vain one of them tries to convince a girl in the camp to sleep with him, but she instead joins one of the Cossack soldiers, unattracted by statistics and historical figures. But the very existence of Red Army Cavalry is itself an argument about writing and its use. As much as the Cossacks see little need for fancy metaphors and complex structures, Babel still gives them to us. He gives us stories of night and day, evening and the dawn. By writing about so many people, those who suffer from the Revolution and those who are made great by it, he encourages us to consider it not as good or evil, but as a mixture of the two.

A great deal of culture was lost, a strain of humanism of value seemingly disappeared, but in its place was a new world, filled with hopes and vitality. Liutov may be scrawny and bespectacled, but in writing this book Babel has made him, too, a kind of hero, because through these stories their emerges an attempt to shape the direction of cultural production within the Soviet Union, and with it an entire society, for the better. Like Pan Apolek, in the stories of Red Army Cavalry Babel syntheses two worlds, instead of letting one or the other get the better of him. If only his work had found more success instead of repression, perhaps the Soviet Union could have been a different place.

For more early Soviet literature filled with ambiguity, have a look at my piece on Andrei Platonov’s Soul and Other Stories. Alternatively, if you’d rather look at the dark side of the Soviet system directly, Varlam Shalamov writes wonderfully and grimly about the Gulag here.

picture of Babel, picture of Kalinin and Trotsky surveying the Red Army, picture of Chekhov, picture of a Cossack, and picture of an icon are all in the public domain

The Meaning of Working Through the Past by Theodor Adorno – Summary

Introduction: Adorno and his Aims

Theodor Adorno, a real curmudgeon of thought if ever there was one, is well-known for his sceptical attitude towards such modern inventions as “jazz” and mass culture. But then again, the professor had plenty of reasons to be. Reaching academic maturity in the years after the end of the Second World War Adorno, as a German and Jew, was determined in his critical writings to outline the ways in which the society and culture of postwar West Germany left open the door to a potential resurgence of fascism, so that such problems could be dealt with before it was too late. As he wrote in “Education after Auschwitz”: “The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again”, and he does everything he can in his own work, including “The Meaning of Working Through the Past”, to body forth that very idea.

Adorno’s essay „Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?“, translated as “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” by Henry W. Pickford in the collection Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, has as its primary target is the ways, most of them unhealthy, that we try to deal with the past. In this it has relevance not just to German history, but also to America’s relationship to the destiny it once so gladly made manifest, and the United Kingdom’s often ambiguous attitude towards its colonial past, to give a few examples. Yet the focus remains on Germany in particular, and the way that Germans fell under Hitler’s spell, and could perhaps again. What follows is a summary of the piece, alongside the important contexts for it.

Picture of Adorno
Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) was one of the leading members of the Frankfurt School of German thinkers, alongside Herbert Marcuse and others.

Context

“This day” being 1959, when the lecture was given. It was a time of crisis in the newish country of West Germany. The grand coalition of the CDP and CSU led by Konrad Adenauer, which had run the Germany since 1949, was sustaining a great deal of negative public attention after it emerged that  Theodor Oberländer, one of the major ministers, had committed war crimes for the Nazis. It raised questions throughout the whole of West Germany about the way that the government, socially and economically conservative, had been dealing with the past. The problem was that it had not been dealing with the past at all – rather, it had done its best to treat the events of the Holocaust and the Third Reich almost as if they had not happened, in what Adorno called “collective amnesia”. And this, naturally, once it was revealed publicly, led to pressure for change.

The Social Democrats in Germany, long unpopular for stances such as being in favour of unconditional reunification with the Eastern part of the country, saw the failure of the grand coalition to answer for the past as a potential weapon to boost their own popularity. Adorno’s essay thus came at a time where it was particularly relevant to public discourse. Not only in this way did it seem timely though. Shortly after the essay was given for the first time, in December 1959 in Cologne a synagogue was daubed with a swastika and the words “Juden raus” (“out with the Jews”), proving Adorno’s fears of lingering fascist elements within German society to be completely justified.

The essay was given as a lecture, but it was also given over the radio too. Adorno’s saw his work, in spite of its academic style and nature, as important to the average German citizen because of its educational content. Through this essay and others given in the radio format he hoped to help Germans learn how they themselves can identify the signs of fascism, both within their own thoughts and actions and in those of other people. Though it is philosophy, it is manifestly practical too.

The Essay

Language as a Way of Hiding from the Past

One of the major arguments of “The Meaning of Working Through the Past”, and the one that begins it, is that language is very much a potential tool that can aid the survival of fascist tendencies, even as in other hands it can be used to stop them. One need only think of the great heights reached by Joseph Goebbels as Reich Minister for Propaganda under Hitler for an example of language’s recent abuse for evil. Adorno begins his piece with a much finer distinction however: the difference between “Aufarbeitung” and “Verarbeitung” in German. By the time of the essay, public debate was already primarily using the first term. In Adorno’s mind this is a mistake, because the former term suggests “the intention to close the books on the past” rather than the idea of carrying through a consciousness of the past into the present of the latter term.

As a result, the word “Aufarbeitung” is associated with “the unconscious and not so unconscious defensiveness against guilt”. Adorno’s point here is that by moving on too rapidly we run the risk of avoiding the very guilt we should be confronting. For, although moving on seems like the rational thing to do, “because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive” we cannot yet pretend that it is simply history and not still in some form present today (in 1959). This is especially important because the people who most loudly call for the country to move on often turn out to be those people who are most guilty and in need of working on their own past.

Adorno points out that even the term “guilt complex” is dangerous. The phrase undermines itself because “complex” suggests that there is no real guilt but rather just a psychological problem. Furthermore, it also suggests that healthy people do not look towards the past, but only towards the future and present moment. With the threat of fascism still present ignoring the past instead of trying to understand it is not a healthy attitude at all in Adorno’s view.

Changing the Subject

This is not the only way that language was used dangerously in the in the years after the War’s end. Adorno singles out various other ways that language helped Germans to avoid the past. First among them is the use of euphemisms like “Kristallnacht” to refer to the pogroms against Jews throughout Germany in early November, 1938. In English the phrase “The Night of Broken Glass” is sometimes used – like the German phrase it too distracts attention from the potentially 100+ Jewish deaths by focusing on abstract objects. A better name, in Adorno’s mind, would force its user to reflect upon the nature of the event with each utterance. Thus calling it a pogrom is much better than referring to it by means of a euphemism.

Another linguistic method often used by Neo-Nazis in our own time is creating an argument out of specifics. By forcing a discussion to focus on whether, for example, it was five or six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis, acknowledgement of the reality of the huge death toll – whatever its specifics – is sidelined, and sometimes even ignored together. In the same way, when people talk about “the balance sheet of guilt”, such as by claiming that the bombings of Dresden and other German cities may mitigate Auschwitz, what they actually do is avoid facing the reality of German guilt by changing the subject. No doubt the bombings were bad, but they are neither here nor there when it comes to the fact of the Holocaust.

People might also try to suggest that they had no idea that something was happening to the Jews, which Adorno finds to be a poor excuse given that Jews were literally disappearing in broad daylight. Sometimes “a lax consciousness consoles itself with the thought that such a thing surely could not have happened unless the victims had in some way or another furnished some kind of instigation”. This attitude is idiotic because even if a small number of the Holocaust’s victims were in some way guilty, that in no way justifies the mechanised slaughter that faced them. Moreover, focusing on potential guilt of the victims is once more a way of changing the subject from the certain guilt of the perpetrators.

Who is to Blame?

Well-intentioned people when talking about German postwar guilt tend to focus on those people who tolerated Hitler’s rise and later on claimed blamelessness because they were merely “following orders”. While it is undoubtedly true that these people must admit and bear their share of the guilt, Adorno is keen to point out that this approach nonetheless can sometimes lead us to forgetting about those who enthusiastically cheered the Nazis on. Even before Hitler became Chancellor, in the (free) Federal Election in November 1932 the Nazi Party was receiving 37.27% of the popular vote. With propaganda on his side the number of Germans who actively supporting the state would have grown even higher by the time of the war, and so it is foolish to pretend honest supporters of the Nazis did not exist in large numbers.

“But what about the Autobahns and the Soviets?!”

Another dangerous trend in thinking about the Nazi era is the tendency to think of the time after Hitler gained power as being one of mass oppression and suffering. Moving on is easier when we think that the past is no longer attractive, but trying to conceal the truth of the matter is even more foolish. The Nazi era was an awful time for minorities, especially Jews, within the German borders. It was a bad time for non-straight sexualities and for communists. But for the average man and woman, NSDAP member or not, it was not so bad. As Adorno writes, “terror’s sharp edge was aimed only at a few and relatively well-defined groups”. Hitler came to power at the tail end of a huge economic downturn, and thus much of his time was marked by a massive recovery, which brought huge benefits to the German people.

Picture of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a cruise ship that was used by the Nazi's for state-organised recreation
Germans under the Nazis used to be able to go on cruises on ships such as this one, the Wilhelm Gustloff. Adorno is keen to stress that though not everything about Nazi Germany was bad for everyone, that’s no excuse to want to return to fascism.

Large scale building projects like the Autobahn system suggested a new and modern Germany. After the social alienation and mass political disillusionment of the Weimar era Nazi Germany brought the “warmth of togetherness”. Public gatherings and group trips with the famed Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) state leisure organisation all meant that for most of the people left in Germany to discuss Nazism as it had appeared before the war began the period had not been in any way a bad one. More importantly still, the contemporary Cold War between the West and the East seemed to vindicate Hitler’s concerns about the Soviet threat.

To ignore both of these aspects is, to Adorno, fatal. If we pretend that the Nazi era was bad instead of acknowledging its ability to bring benefits to much of the German population, then it provides an easy opportunity for someone arguing against us to begin undermining the rest of our argument too. If we are wrong about one thing, then we may be wrong about other things. And if Hitler was right about the Soviets, our opponent might argue, perhaps he was right about other things too. Adorno thus wanted to focus on conveying as much of the reality of the past as possible, instead of concealing that which doesn’t fit into easy arguments. For it soon turns out that much of what was seen to be so good about Hitler and his time actually wasn’t. For instance, economic “recovery” was really down to rearmament and unsustainable without war.

What Remains of the Conditions that Caused Fascism in Germany?

The reason that Adorno is so concerned about fascism is “the objective conditions of society that engendered fascism continue to exist”, but what were these conditions? One of them is that both in the home environment and in school obedience was promoted and praised above and beyond autonomy. This produced good worker drones, but it also produced people who would easily be led astray by a charismatic leader like Hitler. Because it encouraged obedience, it was thus inherently conservative and supportive of the status-quo. This meant that once society was changed towards totalitarianism these people would see little reason to complain about the new status quo that would have emerged. Such a system fosters what Adorno terms “the authoritarian personality”, that is people who “identify themselves with real-existing power per se, prior to any particular contents”. It is these people who are vital in the running of a totalitarian system.

The causes were not merely educational – they were also economic and political. Here Adorno’s membership of the Frankfurt School of thinkers comes into play. Though he was no supporter of the USSR, he found a number of faults within laissez-faire and other forms of unbridled capitalism that meant they were vulnerable to fascism. Economically, Germans were still dependent on conditions beyond their control and thus they were politically immature, seeing democracy as “one system among others” rather than as the ultimate system of organisation. Adorno was thus not worried about neo-Nazi organisations so much as the trends within democracy that could lead to fascism becoming dominant again. He mentions as an example the way that many Germans hoped that Black Friday 1929 and its economic trauma would not happen again. Adorno notes that the hope contains within itself the belief that a strong state would protect Germans economically once more.

It is the individual’s impotence on the one side and the massed power of the state on the other, that leads towards totalitarian forms of domination in Adorno’s view of the matter.

Nationalism Nowadays

A key part of Nazism was the idea of returning to an ideal specifically German past. Though Hitler’s defeat ought to have broken Germany’s belief that it could conquer vast swathes of Europe, instead it had the opposite results. The “collective narcissism”, as Adorno calls it, that manifested itself as national vanity and exceptionalism, carries on in the form of “chimerical hopes.” German nationalists thus fall into “an illusory inner realm” where they can construct “reality itself as though the damage never occurred” to begin with. Instead of being focused on one idea, nationalists now seek anything that seems to conform to the idea of German greatness. Nazism’s hopes of creating a great German nation remain, even if their form has changed. Thus, with the right leader, these hopes could be focused again and millions mobilized to try to achieve “goals they cannot immediately identify as their own.”

Nonetheless, nationalism has lost a lot of its power and charm. Though it “does not completely believe in itself anymore”, still it remains a political tool to make people insist on conditions that otherwise they would not tolerate. Thus it is “both obsolete and up-to-date”. It is obsolete because clearly, with NATO and the Warsaw Pact the truth was that countries were now organised into military blocks under the most powerful; yet it was and is up-to-date because it continues to have psychological power and the force of tradition behind it. Still, Adorno writes that the countries that now are most vulnerable to fascism are actually the less developed ones – those victims of Western imperialism who want some of the West’s previous power for themselves.

Solutions: Education for Self-Reflection

Still, the focus of the essay is on Germany its own dangers, and Adorno here proposes a few solutions. Chief among them is a change in education, of the sort he writes about in more detail in “Education after Auschwitz”. I mentioned the problems of education towards obedience above, so Adorno instead wants to educate people towards something different. In the same tradition as thinkers like Immanuel Kant, Adorno sees education’s goal as “Mündigkeit” – maturity. What this means is that students must be taught how to think for themselves instead of falling into whichever collective appeals to them the most. In the first appendix printed in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords there is a discussion of the lecture between Adorno and some of his students. It is here that he explains that people must “be led to self-reflection and thereby be prevented from becoming blind victims of… instinctual impulse”.

Part of this means an increased emphasis on psychoanalysis in schools. Children must be able to analyse themselves so that they can be aware of the cognitive biases that they are vulnerable to, and thus prevent themselves from acting from pure or manipulated emotion rather than reason and logic. This education would also include a focus on propaganda, and how to identify and avoid it so that Germans would be better able to come to their own conclusions regarding how to live. What this means ultimately is not a focus on facts, but rather on understanding oneself and one’s motivations. Adorno writes that “a working through of the past understood as enlightenment is essentially such a turn towards the subject, the reinforcement of a person’s self-consciousness and hence also of his self.”

Difficulties: Anti-Semitism the Appeal to Self-Interest

Perhaps all this is too optimistic, and indeed Adorno admits as much. The difficulty of dealing with anti-Semites and other people who reject rationality is precisely the way that they reject logic. For example, Adorno write that “panegyrics to the Jews that isolate them as a group already give anti-Semitism a running start”. By encouraging us to see the Jews as different, we allow anti-Semites to start thinking of them as different in a bad way. Another method that Adorno is sceptical of is using individual examples to educate anti-Semites. Anne Frank, probably the most famous of those murdered in the concentration camps, can thus be seen as a tragic exception, rather than one guiltless individual among many others, none of whom deserved to die. “I have a black friend” does automatically mean you are not a racist; it may just mean you have taken your friend as an exception.

Picture of Anne Frank, one of the many murdered in the Holocaust
Anne Frank, pictured here, may help us to understand the human face of the Holocaust’s victims. But at the same time, focusing on her can lead to us inadvertently singling out victims like her as exceptions, rather than the rule.

Indeed, even trying to introduce anti-Semites to Jews in the hopes of demonstrating to the first group that the latter are humans just like the rest of us is not necessarily the best argument against the fascism that can result from anti-Semitism. Anti-Semites, Adorno writes, have “an incapacity for any experience whatsoever”. Instead, ultimately what he suggests we ought to do when arguing with people who have rejected self-reflection and are acting against reason and logic is actually simple: “the most effective antidote is still a persuasive, because true, demonstration of their own interests and, moreover, their most immediate ones”. Appealing to eternal values like equality and freedom, or even to the huge suffering views like anti-Semitism can cause, is far less effective than simply explaining to the anti-Semite in question that fascism means war, it means you might lose your house or money or family. Everybody listens to that.

Conclusions

“The Meaning of Working Through the Past” is ultimately a demonstration of way we ourselves might do the same self-reflection that Adorno advocates. It shows the ways, linguistic and otherwise, that we might avoid facing the truth of the horrible consequences of Nazism. It also shows us how to argue with those who might be unwilling to admit or acknowledge that Nazism was an awful mistake. In this way, it does everything it can to educate its readers in how they might avoid fascism’s recurrence, just as Adorno wanted.

But it is not only relevant in the context of Germany in 1959. The piece is relevant to any country which has a past that it needs to come to terms with. The deliberate starvation of certain parts of Ukraine and Kazakhstan in the early years of the USSR; and European, American and Japanese colonialism, are all unpleasant pasts that countries deal with in different ways, some more healthily than others. And in a world where nationalism and the far-right are on the rise again, Adorno’s exhortation towards self-reflection and his warnings about propaganda have never seemed less timely.

For more German thought, check out my piece on Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller”. For a more practical look at the consequences of living under a totalitarian regime, my review of Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma stories, detailing his time in the Soviet Gulags, is here.

Picture of Adorno by Jeremy J. Shapiro used under [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)]; Picture of the Wilhelm Gustloff comes from the Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H27992 / Sönnke, Hans / CC-BY-SA 3.0 [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)]; and Picture of Anne Frank is in the public domain.