Had the line been that straight, however, the bunker could have been averted. The history of a nation, like the history of an individual, consists more of what's forgotten than of what's remembered. As a process, history is not so much an accretion as a loss: otherwise we wouldn't need historians in the first place. Not to mention that the ability to retain doesn't translate itself into the ability to predict. Whenever this is done—by a philosopher or a political thinker—the translation almost invariably turns into a blueprint for a new society. The rise, the crescendo, and the fall of the Third Reich, as much as those of the Communist system in Russia, was not averted precisely because it was not expected.
The question is, can the translation be blamed for the quality of the original? The answer, I am tempted to say, is yes; and let me succumb to this temptation. Both the German and the Russian versions of socialism sprang from the same late-nineteenth-century philosophical root, which used the shelves of the British Museum for fuel and Darwinian thought for a model. (Hence their subsequent confrontation, which wasn't a battle between good and evil but a clash of two demons—a family feud, if you will.)
An earlier fertilizer, ofcourse, was the splendid French showing in the eighteenth century, which kept the Germans flat on their back militarily and intellectually long enough to develop a national inferiority complex, which took the form of German nationalism and the idea of German Kultur. With its incoherence of elevation, German Romantic idealism, initially a cri de coeur, pretty soon turned into a cri de guerre, especially during the Industrial Revolution, since the British were better at it.
Consider, then, Russia, which had even less to show for itself than Germany, and not only in the eighteenth century. It was a case of an inferiority complex squared, since it proceeded to emulate Germany in every conceivable— no, available—manner, producing along the way its own Slavophiles and the notion of a specifically Russian soul, as though the Almighty distributed souls geographically. To put it cutely, the cri de coeur and the cri de guerre merged in the Russian ear into le dernier cri; and it was out of an inferiority complex, out of provincialism—always keen on the latest—that Lenin set out to read Marx, not out of a perceived necessity. Capitalism in Russia, after all, was just raising its first smokestacks; the country was predominantly agrarian.
But then you can hardly reproach either one of them for not reading other philosophers—say, Vico. The mental pattern of the epoch was linear, sequential, evolutionary. One falls into that pattern unwittingly, tracing a crime to its origins rather than to its purpose. Yeah, we are that kind of hound: we would rather sniff out ethics than demography. The real paradox ofhistory is that its linear pattern, a product of the self-preservation instinct, dulls this very instinct. Be that as it may, however, both the German and the Russian versions ofsocialism were informed by precisely this pattern, by the principle of historical determinism echoing, after a fashion, the quest for the Just City.
Literally so, one must add. For the chief trait of the historical determinist is his disdain for the peasantry, and the setting ofhis sights on the working class. (That is why in Russia they still refuse to decollectivize agriculture, putting—literally, again—the cart before the horse.) A by-product of the Industrial Revolution, the socialist idea was essentially an urban construct, generated by deracinated minds that identified society with the city. Small wonder, then, that this brainchild of mental lumpen, maturing with an enviable logic into the authoritarian state, amplified the basest properties of the urban lower middle class, anti-Semitism first of all.
This had little to do with the religious or cultural histories of Germany or Russia, which couldn't be more different. For all the vehemence ofLuther's rhetoric, I honestly doubt that his largely illiterate audience bothered much about the substance of his ecclesiastical distinctions; and as for Russia, Ivan the Terrible in his correspondence with the runaway Prince Kurbsky proudly and sincerely proclaimed himself a Jew and Russia, Israel. (On the whole, had religious matters really been the root of modern anti-Semitism, its ugliest head would have been not German but Italian, Spanish, or French.) And so for German revolutionary thought ofthe nineteenth century, no matter how wildly it oscillated on the subject of the Jewish expulsion or Jewish emancipation, the legal result, in 1871, was the latter.
Now, first and foremost, what happened to the Jews in the Third Reich had to do with the creation ofa brand-new state, a new social and existential order. The thousand-year-long Reich had a distinctly millenarian, fin-de-siecle ring to it— a bit premature, perhaps, since the siecle was only the nineteenth. But postwar Germany's political and economic rubble was a time as good as any for starting from scratch. (And history, as we remarked, doesn't set much store by human chronology.) Hence the emphasis on youth, the cult of the young body, the purity-of-the-race spiel. Social utopianism meets blond bestia.
The offspring ofsuch an encounter, naturally, was social bestiality. For nothing could be less utopian than an Orthodox—or even an emancipated and secularized—Jew; and nothing could be less blond. One way to build something new is to raze the old, and the New Germany was that sort of project. The atheistic, future-bound, thousand-year-long Reich couldn't regard three-thousand-year-old Judaism as anything but an obstacle and an enemy. Chronologically, ethically, and aesthetically, anti-Semitism just came in handy; the aim was larger than the means—larger, I am tempted to add, than the targets. The aim was nothing less than history, nothing less than remaking the world in Germany's image; and the means were political. Presumably their concreteness, as well as that of their targets, was what made the aim less abstract. For an idea, the attraction of its victim lies in the latter's helping it to acquire mortal features.
The question is, Why didn't they run? They didn't run because, first, the dilemma of exodus versus assimilation was not new, and fairly recently, only a few generations before, in 1871, it seemed to have been solved by the emancipation laws. Second, because the Weimar Republic's constitution was still binding and the air of its freedoms was still in their lungs, as well as in their pockets. Third, because the Nazis at the time could be regarded as an understandable discomfort, as a party of reconstruction, and their anti-Semitic outbursts as a by-product of that reconstruction's hardship, of its straining muscle. After all, they were the National Socialist Workers Party, and the swastika-clutching eagle could be seen as a provisional phoenix. Any one of these three reasons taken separately would be sufficient not to flee the premises; but the inertia of assimilation, of integration, lumped them all together. The general idea, I imagine, was to huddle together and wait until it all blew over.
But history is not a force of nature, if only because its toll is usually much higher. Correspondingly, one can take out no
134 I J О S E PH B R О D S K Y
insurance policy against history. Even the apprehensiveness of a people with a long record of persecution turned out to be a lousy premium: its funds were insufficient, at least for a Deutschebank. The claim submitted by both the doctrine of historical determinism and by the creed-sponsored mental climate ofProvidence's general benevolence could be settled only in human flesh. Historical determinism translated itself into a determination of extermination; and the notion ofProvidence's general benevolence, into a patient waiting for a Storm Trooper. Wouldn't it have been better to benefit less from civilization and become a nomad?