booksmusic

Trapped in an Anonymous Judicial Machine

Franz Kafka: Der Proceß (English title: The Trial) ISBN 978-3-596-90356-6 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Imagine being arrested without being given a reason. Imagine being arrested and being free to go to work, to the movies or to stay at home. Imagine being judged without being informed whether you have been charged or why. The judges remain invisible, lawyers are merely tolerated, and the more you try to defend your obvious innocence, the worse your case gets. Arbitrariness seeps into your normality and usurps the place of the rule of law and logic in a form of bureaucratic brain-washing.

This is the frightening world Franz Kafka describes in his inimitable, dry, matter-of-fact language. “The Trial” is Kafka’s best known novel and without any doubt a masterpiece. He wrote it in 1914/15, but it was published only posthumously in 1925 by Kafka’s friend Max Brod. It is an unfinished work, with several fragments written but not inserted into the actual draft of the novel. Kafka’s inspiration driven story reflects the author’s complex personality, his relations to his family, his fiancée and his fiancée’s family. It takes up his experience as an office clerk as well as characteristic elements of the society in Prague, e.g. a voluntary deference to authority, and the Jewish community Kafka was part of.

Kafka’s narration of the fate of Josef K., arrested and judged for reasons unknown, is an allegory of his own psychic turmoil, and at the same time a description of man’s growing isolation in modern society. It also shows how men, by tolerating an initial restriction of his individual freedom, get trapped in a vicious cycle where the surrender of parts of his rights leads to the abolition of all of its rights. But while every man has to fight for himself, the ruling authority, that is the top-tiers judges, has to uphold at least the fiction of legitimacy. One of the surprising vulnerabilities of the anonymous tribunal is the concern it has for human relationships, necessary to maintain what Kafka calls “the cohesion of society”.

The risk of open revolt against the judges can be banned by creating the illusion that the final judgment can be influenced. Herein lies the only weapon an accused has: open and immediate revolt against a limitation of his basic rights, civil disobedience, the refusal to play by the (illegal or amoral) rules set by the judges. Josef K. fails in the novel where Kafka failed in his own life. It is remarkable that Kafka recognizes this lesson and still fails to live up to it. It is very well summed up in the scene in the dome. After a debate with a preacher about the nature of the law and the role of the gatekeeper, confering knowledge of the law to some but not all. At some point, Josef K. says with utter resignation: “The lie becomes the principle of the world order.” The law can and must be challenged, for laws are not immutable, they have been created by men for men.

During most of his life, Kafka felt he had to justify himself: for the job he chose, for the fiancée he picked, for his writing, for his inability to write, for his cold attitude towards his family, his lack of interest in the family business, in short, Franz Kafka felt he had to justify being Franz Kafka. Social exclusion, real or imagined, voluntary or imposed, was a constant issue, resulting in periods of depression, in self-depreciation as a human and as a writer and in self-inflicted psychic wounds. And fear of exclusion corrupted his mind. It seems that he never considered stepping outside the sphere governed by rules alien to him. He accepted the rules, suffered and succumbed. By doing so, he gave us some of the greatest pieces of prose ever.

Kafka was aware that writing was the reason for his existence, the essence of being Franz Kafka, and the search for his “inner truth” – looking into an psychologic abyss – produced novels like “The Trial”. A cruel creative process. The brutality of an anonymous, judicial machine that Josef K. does not understand, the inevitability of his tragic fate, his gradual transformation from a combative innocent to a cooperating witness against himself, expressed in Kafka’s detached style, inspired me horror and fascination at the same time. And a deep respect for the author. Writing such a novel was a superhuman act, and only Kafka could have conceived and produced such a book, coherent in its laconic style and grotesque logic from the first to the last line. He paid a high price: constant misery, a poor health and occasionally the fear to become insane.

Kafka’s novel about an arbitrary judicial system reminded me of the trials organized by the Stalin regime in the 1930s and the feeling of insecurity it created in the Soviet Union. A composer with first-hand experience of Stalin’s arbitrariness was Dmitry Shostakovich. Here is his Sonata for Cello and Piano in D minor (Op. 40):

Whistling in the dark to keep monsters away

Hate Without Border. Antisemitism Here and Now.

juna grossmann

Juna Grossmann: Schonzeit vorbei. Über das Leben mit dem alltäglichen Antisemitismus. ISBN 978-3-426-27775-1 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ My fellow blogger Juna Grossmann is a German Jew. A Jewish German. A German citizen, born in Germany, of German parents and with German grand-parents. And she happens to be of Jewish faith. She has written a book, a good book. A frightening book. An important book. She has compiled stories of Antisemitism in Germany as they happen today. Daily verbal assaults, stemming from prejudice, ignorance and the wilful violation of basic human rights.

Antisemitism in Germany is everywhere, and it comes in different forms and shapes. It does not remain restricted to people with limited exposure to education, far from it. It is not limited to anonymous letter writers or social media trolls. More than ten years ago already, it was articulated by German politicians in the disguise of criticism targeting Israel’s domestic and foreign policy. Prominent Jews in Germany received and still receive letters with threats, less prominent Jews are being discriminated when they look for flats or jobs. Or sell vegetables. Many are asked to “go home”, as Grossmann ironically points out, herself included. Home? Germany is her home. People signal her to go to Israel – a country many antisemitists deny the right to exist. And more than just a few come up with an obvious, logic conclusion: Auschwitz.

It’s frightening and revolting. Would I like to live door-to-door with such people? The fact is, I do live door-to-door with such people. Antisemitism doesn’t stop at the border. Luxembourg has it’s own sad history of segregating and discriminating Jews. Luxembourg officials did nothing to keep Germans from rounding up Jews in 1940. People disappeared, no questions asked. Luxembourg was a victim of Germany’s expansionism, few cared about the Jews’ fate. Without being a Jew, I have witnessed Antisemitism in Luxembourg. I remember certain “jokes” told at school. That was in the 1980s. I noticed prejudices held by people I respected. And of course, being a blogger, I am well aware of social networks being an excellent environment for the propagation of hate-speech of all kinds, including Antisemitism. Hate without borders.

Grossmann’s chronicle is a gruesome, highly recommended reading. It shows to what extend open and hidden Antisemitism has become the norm in Germany once more, paralleled only by hate against Arab refugees. The book is important since it documents the plurality of the sources of Antisemitism: educated, respected people as well as people knowing next to nothing about Judaism or European history. Anonymous trolls on Twitter and people sending letters on official stationery with their name and signature. Antisemitism here and now and everywhere.

“Wehret den Anfängen” is a German slogan meant to remind Germans to fight early indicators of antisemitism. It was already wrong at the moment it was coined. Antisemitism had never left Germany, it had merely gone into hiding after 1945. The “re-education” efforts by the Allied powers in the aftermath of the German defeat were a failure, an excellent example of a completely misguided policy. After the Nuremberg trials, West German courts were slow to prosecute former Nazis for the complicity in the extermination of Jews. Right-extremist groups were courted by law enforcement and intelligence agencies during the Cold War. Grossmann was born in the GDR, where antisemitism officially did not exist. But the GDR’s ambiguous attitude towards Israel and the impossibility to discuss the Holocaust and Germany’s responsibility in a closed society nurtured Antisemitic prejudices that have become visible in the past two decades.

The time of hiding is over. Antisemitism is out in the open, unfiltered, unbound, viral. Read this book! Open your eyes and ears and stand up against any form of racial or religious discrimination! Democracy is not for free. Today it may be the Jews, the Arabs, the LGBT community, tomorrow it may be you or me. And here is a Jewish voice that was not silenced by the Nazis. In 1946, the composer Erich Korngold wrote his violin concerto in D major, Op. 35. He had left Austria before Antisemitism led to mass murder on an industrial scale:

A witty violin concerto written in Hollywood

Vienna, the Post-War Abyss

Ernst Lothar: Die Rückkehr (English title: The Return to Vienna) ISBN 978-3-552-05887-3 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Felix von Geldern returns to Vienna after the war. He is the envoy of a Jewish family that emigrated to the United States to escape the Nazis, and now he is supposed to look after those of the family who stayed in Vienna – his mother – and after the family’s business in Vienna. He doesn’t travel alone, he is accompanied by his grand-mother, and his time in Vienna becomes a series of brutal reality checks, experienced by Felix on different levels.

When Felix and his mother go ashore in France, no warm welcome is waiting. The port lies in ruins, food is scarce and thieves try to steal the travelers’ luggage. Once they arrive in Vienna, they see a city partly destroyed, hungry citizen, refugees, beggars and thieves, a flourishing black market and US soldiers fraternizing with former Nazis. People live as if the Holocaust never happened, the hate against Austrian Jews is alive and kicking. And emigrated Austrians, displaying their moral superiority, quickly trigger death threats and physical violence.

Felix’ mother and his grand-mother pick one fight after the other, their rivalry exemplifying the divide between those who chose to flee and assimilate to Americans and those who stayed and found a modus vivendi with the Nazis. Felix, who got engaged to an American girl, falls for his former love, an artist with a distinguished career made possible by the Nazi propaganda master Joseph Goebbels.

The plot narrated by Ernst Lothar is fascinating, the moral abysses he explores are frightening. The novel is partly autobiographic. Lothar fled from Austria in 1938 after Germany had annexed it and made it a part of the Reich. When he returned, he found a country he would not recognize. It is no surprise that the novel, published in 1949, did not exactly trigger a wave of enthusiasm in Austria. Vienna is being confronted not only with its past under the Nazis, but also with the fact that it seemed to be slow to draw any lesson from that past.

The book is first of all an excellent read. Readers familiar with Vienna and the “Wiener Schmäh” will instantly feel at home, fascinated and horrified. Furthermore the current political developments – the gains of the right-leaning coalition party FPÖ in term of votes – can be partly explained by the fact that Austria, unlike Germany, never critically debated the Nazi period and its co-responsibility for the Holocaust. These phantoms have been haunting the country since 1945, showing their ugly face every now and then and each time with less inhibition.

Obviously, any novel linked to Vienna should be matched with music from a Viennese composer, and to compensate for the bleak picture painted by Lothar, here is Franz Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A major, D.664:

Seeking freedom, independence, identity

Exposing the Pitfalls of Capitalism

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Das Kommunistische Manifest (English title: The Communist Manifesto) ISBN 978-3-88619-322-6 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Why should one read a Communist manifesto, written more than 150 years ago and decades after the obvious failure of Communism throughout the world? Today Marx would call his book “Capitalism for dummies”. He anticipated the human drama on the stage of a globalized economy, and, as he intended to speak to workers with limited education, he explained in simple yet powerful words the pitfalls of the capitalist economy. Although his systems analysis was based on a limited and not necessarily representative volume of information available in 1847, Marx isolated certain distinctive features of capitalism that have not changed over time.

It is those distinctive features that movements like “Occupy Wall Street” in New York or the “Gilets Jaunes” recently in France pointed their fingers at: the widening income gap between a handful of really, really rich people and a growing number of lower middle class people, the neglected infrastructure in rural areas, the increasing number of low paid jobs, the lack of access to education for certain parts of the population, the systematic discrimination of migrants in terms of employment.

None of these phenomena is new, they existed already in the 19th century and encouraged Marx to explore how these came about. He developed the theory of class conflicts: master against slave, feudal landowner against peasant, worker against company owner. In “Das Kommunistische Manifest” Marx and his associate Friedrich Engels postulate for the first time that this conflict is a necessary element of the human condition and thus unavoidable. Capitalism – and with it the class conflict – has to reach a climax and will break down right after that. That moment would be the beginning of the proletarian dictatorship. Classes would disappear and all means of productions (workforce, tools, factories, transport…) would come under collective ownership. It would be the birth of a new, more equal society.

In this respect Marx and Engels obviously where wrong. Capitalism proved to be adaptive and the fact that the two political thinkers published their ideas in the manifesto, and expanded it later in the monumental work “Das Kapital” may have contributed to it. The much despised capitalist bourgeoisie took Marx very seriously, they saw the signs on the wall. Anticipating revolutions in Europe, politicians and businessmen managed to forestall the proletarian dictatorship. Marx had deemed it impossible that the capitalist class would voluntarily raise workers pay, allow unions to negotiate salaries and contribute to a social security system. But that what capitalists all over Europe did, proving that there were alternatives to scenario Marx had sketched.

The only Marxist revolution that created a new type of society happened in Russia, an agricultural country with almost no proletariat. And the population had to be manipulated a coerced to participate in the creation of this new society – it had nothing at all of a historically unavoidable process as Marx had predicted it. The Communist manifesto is worth reading not only to see on a few pages where Marx was right, but also where he was wrong. Besides this, the German edition is wonderful to read, with almost every third sentence an aphorism.

The composer Dmitry Shostakovich initially believed in building a better world under the flag of Communism. While Nazis seemed to triumph over the liberal democracies in Europe, he like many other Soviet citizens were convinced that Communism was a bulwark against Germany’s expansionism. In 1929 he conceived his Symphony No. 3 “First of May”:

Thriving for a better, more human world

Overcoming Fear and Speaking Up

Fallada Jeder stirbt

Hans Fallada: Jeder stirbt für sich allein. (English title: Every Man Dies Alone) ISBN 978-3-7466-2811-0 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Fear corrupts the human being more than wealth or poverty. Fear dissolves the social fabric like acid, it makes the individual feel alone and powerless, it paralyses him and perpetuates the miserable condition it propels him into. Fear can have multiple facets: the fear to lose a job, a family member, the fear to fail other people’s expectations, the fear of physical violence, of permanent surveillance, the fear to stand out or to be held responsible. Fear is a terrible thing. And the longer I observe society, the more I have to realize that many people I know or deal with are victims of some kind of fear and see not way to get rid of it.

In 1947 the German writer Hans Fallada published a novel about a couple that decided to overcome their fear of the all-powerful Nazi state and engage in a small act of resistance in Berlin during World War II. The plot was inspired by a the case of Otto and Elise Hampel, who anonymously distributed between 1940 and 1942 post-cards with slogans calling into question the official propaganda and encouraging Germans to speak up against the war, the SS terror, the prosecution of the Jews, the lack of freedom of the press. A perilous act.

Fallada’s heroic couple are called Otto and Anna Quangel. The death of their son as a soldier during the campaign against France propels them into action. Fallada’s description of the two main characters, the evolution of their psychic condition and of the love that binds the two, is riveting. The many side-plots with very authentic secondary characters make for an entertaining read. The violent events – the arrest and death of the Quangels, the fate of some of the secondary characters – perfectly illustrate what fear can do to a society.

An extraordinary novel and an appropriate read at a time when tw types of fear seem to pervasive in Europe and the United States: the fear of uncontrolled immigration, the fear of right-extremist populists grabbing power. Fear leads to terror, terror generates new fear, and if fear isn’t countered it will destroy society. Courageous people are needed, people who dare to think and to speak their mind. Everybody’s voice counts. The Hampels didn’t wait for someone else to save Germany from the Nazis’ totalitarian state. They did what they had to do.

In Fallada’s novel, Otto Quangel is portrayed as a self-absorbed carpenter, interested only in his work. And at the beginning of the novel this is his true nature. It becomes a useful mask, once he has decided to resist. Who would suspect such an old, boring, reclusive fool? Once he has been imprisoned by the Gestapo, he meets another inmate, a conductor suspected of harbouring Communist ideas. He makes Quangel discover the music of Mozart and Beethoven. A defiant piece of music, written as an act of artistic resistance, is Beethoven’s incidental music “Egmont”, Op. 84:

Liberty, sacrifice and charming madness