Arthur Strum 3600 wordsAssistant Professor of German Studies © 2002 Arthur StrumStanford UniversityStanford, CA 94305-2030(650) 723-0397strum@stanford.edu

AMERICAN IDYLL

By Arthur Strum

I.

We aspire, for the most part, to live our lives as private persons. We orient

ourselves around the refuge of the family, or the circle of friends, or the solitary

self. Public obligations yield to private ones. We have work, rather than a calling

-- or to the extent that our work becomes a calling, it is to satisfy essentially

private ends. Very few of us -- whether as musician or artist, athlete or scientist,

entrepeneur or writer -- reject the comforts, burdens, and consolations of

quotidian existence in order to subordinate our lives to the principle of

perfectability. Even fewer -- whether the courageous Medgar Evers, the NAACP

field secretary in Mississippi, shot and killed outside his house in Jackson in

1963, or the great Rosa Luxemburg, murdered and dumped into the Landwehr

canal in Berlin in January of 1919, or, indeed, Mohammed Atta, the quiet urban

planner who helped plan the murder of more than 5000 people in September

2001 -- even fewer of us stake not just private life, but all life, on an obligation or

principle which we perceive to be ‘greater’ or ‘higher.’ In their sublimity, in their

ability to defy our usual concern with ‘mere’ life, such figures are either awe-

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inspiring, or – in the case of Atta -- terrifying. Once figures like these have

embraced the role seemingly ‘given’ to them by fate -- as Martin Luther King did,

when, a pastor, in his first months in Montgomery, he found himself President of

the Montgomery Improvement Association, or as Mirabeau did, in Paris in 1789,

when he refused Louis XVI’s order that the Estates General meet separately --

their greatest hope is to be embraced by history, to be caught up in its force and

to try to shape it. Sometimes, these roles simply present themselves to us. At

these moments, even those who understand themselves primarily as private

persons may join together to make history -- in Tiananmen square in 1989, or in

the Kronstadt Fortress above Petrograd in 1921, or in Paris in 1789. For the rest of

us, most of the time, history is only experienced as an ominous shadow -- as war,

or violence, or as the capriciousness of impersonal economic forces. History is

not a force we aspire to shape, but a threat we hope to avoid.

The perhaps 50,000 people who found themselves in the World Trade

Center when the buildings were attacked, and the firemen, police and others

who entered these buildings to try to help save them, found themselves, against

their own wishes, swept into the vortex of historical existence. It is not surprising

that the great majority of obituaries have focused on the victims’ private

characteristics, rather than public deeds: these were private persons, who only

happened to be present where history intruded. We call these people ‘innocent’

because they had neither chosen the new roles which were thrust upon them, as

political or religious heroes do, nor even been able to prepare for them, as

soldiers, or even fireman and policemen, do. They were faced, suddenly, with a

situation in which common virtues, the virtues of a private person, were no

longer adequate. In a matter of minutes or seconds, some of them seem to have

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embraced the new role dictated by circumstance. But, as in the case of the

political or religious hero, doing so involved a moral risk. In their abrupt

decisions to endanger or sacrifice themselves in order to help others, these

people did not simply exhibit courage, but were also forced to choose between

their private lives -- their duties to the children, partners, and friends they shared

these lives with -- and a public one. In a few seconds, they left the realm of mere

‘life’ and entered the more uncertain one of history -- uncertain, because it is

likely that (like other historical actors before them) some or even many of the

people who made this choice may have failed in their efforts to save others. In

the harsh terms of history, they sacrificed their private existences for nothing. It

is impossible, for those of us who have never been faced with such a choice, to

comprehend it properly -- as little as we can comprehend the sustained, and

therefore even more sublime courage of a Medgar Evers or Rosa Luxemburg or

Nelson Mandela. Instead, we simply hope that we never have the misfortune of

having to exhibit it.

II.

Even a single human being gives, and has received, an immense amount

of human loving labor -- the labor which makes, and develops, and preserves us

as human beings. Each of these formed beings builds the world as an artifact.

When a person dies, we can try to remember this labor, and consider what has

been lost with that person’s death. But when thousands die, this exercise of

memory is impossible. Since September 11, a river of obituaries, testimonials,

memorials have tried to build our sense of who has been lost, and of what has

been lost to the victims’ different worlds as a result of their passing. But since the

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first days after the disaster, there has been persistent discussion of another loss,

which affects all of us: that of the world before September 11th. The loss of this

world, it is said, has left a wound. Before September 11th, private activities still

seemed to have their own, intrinsic justifications. After September 11th, these

implicit justifications seem to have suddenly, if temporarily, become inadequate.

Fishing, museum-going, football, shopping, radio and television, pleasure in

nature – even to enumerate them explicitly seemed to expose their

weightlessness. In the days after the attacks, every musical review began with

the writer’s effort to consider the larger significance of musical performance;

every description of a trip, or a meal, began with an apologia. Every activity or

diversion, that is, was measured against an impossible standard of significance:

the sudden and violent deaths of so many innocent people. One could, it is true,

work -- but here one had no choice. One could also -- even should -- retreat to the

intimate sphere, care for friends and family -- but this activity was considered to

be serious, to acknowledge what had occurred. But every potential pleasure,

every diversion or indulgence was smothered by one’s awareness of its

comparative insignificance, by one’s guilt at being among the healthy survivors.

This sharp awareness faded rapidly. But the world in which these pleasures and

diversions were still unproblematic, in which we were not constantly haunted by

our consciences – this world has not quite returned. Its loss, seemingly, is the

wound which most of us have suffered.

It should surely have been possible to share wholeheartedly in the public

displays of earnest shock and dismay after September 11. It should have been

possible to speak of a collective wound, to call for healing -- even to mourn the

loss of a world in which our lives were secure from the arbitrariness of

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historicality, in which innocent pleasures were still possible. What is it, then,

which seems to block one’s complete identification with these public expressions

of outrage and surprise? What is it which seems discordant, still, about many

public allusions to the event? In the first days after September 11, before the

boundaries of the acceptable had been established, one heard, even from public

figures or institutions not known for their particularly critical sensibilities,

public expressions of what sounded curiously like moral unease:: the major news

anchor’s casual, curious comment on Sept. 11 that ‘we were making Whoopee,

and that is coming to an end’; the newspaper headline asking plaintively, ‘Why

do they hate us?’; the sudden decline in consumer spending for vacations and

restaurants in the weeks after the disaster – prompted, certainly, by new

economic fears, but also, clearly, by an indefinable sense of shame. Even Jerry

Falwell’s and Pat Robertson’s suggestion, in itself absurd, that America’s moral

behavior had eroded its favored theological status suggested a curiously

chastened, rather than solely outraged, consciousness. For how could the murder

of many thousands of innocent people in the heart of New York City have in any

sense chastened us?

III.

“All is in motion as though the already-shaped world into chaos/

Meant to resolve itself backward into night, and to shape itself over.” Johann

Wolfgang von Goethe writes the poem “Hermann and Dorothea” in 1797, amidst

the upheavals of the French Revolutionary wars. The poem is an idyll: an effort

to represent a Golden Age, a people’s rustic simplicity, a peaceful, harmonious

existence. But rather than Arcadia, Goethe depicts a late eighteenth-century

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German village, whose inhabitants are both earnest and narrow, generous and

self-interested. Their idyll, furthermore, is threatened by the shockwaves of the

revolution: the French occupation of the left bank of the Rhine. “Hermann and

Dorothea,” in other words, is both an idyll and an historical poem. At its

beginning, the village’s good citizens make a short journey to a crossroads where

the refugees stream by, to gawk at them, but also to offer them food, drink and

their old clothing: a modest relief effort. Hermann, sent by his parents with

worn-out linen, comes upon Dorothea, who is tending to a young mother who

has just given birth. Hermann falls in love. Private life and history: a love-story

set against the background of historical upheaval, and the despair and suffering

which results from it. In the nineteenth century, this book becomes Goethe’s

most popular work. It seems to have been understood as a defense of German

order and stability as opposed to French chaos and discontinuity. In this reading

of the poem, Hermann’s inwardness and conservatism are exemplary: his

unwillingness, as a teenager, to shape himself to the times, to impress the

neighbors’ girls with fashionable dress and manners; his deeply private nature;

his lack of ambition (he only desires to carry on and tend to his father’s inn and

grounds); above all, his desire to “preserve and endure.” The book is taken as a

primer for the developing self-consciousness of the middle-class German, who

turns his back on the wider world and leaves politics to the leaders.

As Americans, we are, most of us, Hermanns. It is not that we are

awkward or shy, or that we lack ambition. But like Hermann, we imagine that

our various fidelities -- to our friends, or our families, or our jobs, or our teams --

are the proper measure of our virtue. Like Hermann and his father, we imagine

that we have a solid right to whatever our hard work has brought us: a big

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television, a car, a second house, an expensive vacation. We who are privileged

live with certain confidence that our lives, as private lives, will describe

continuous arcs -- trajectories only temporarily interrupted by the obstacles of

divorce, a lost promotion, sudden illness. The report from Beirut, or from the

refugee camp at Shatila; death squads in Haiti or Guatemala; starvation and

suffering in Iraq; even the tragedies of the Middle East -- all are neatly contained

within the columns of the folded newspaper.

Now the terror of history, which had intruded into the American idyll

mostly in the form of news reports from Israel, or the Gaza Strip, or Baghdad, or

Panama, has been visited upon us-- not just upon the soldier, or the most

vulnerable among us, but on a cross-section of the inhabitants of two large office

buildings. After September 11, the world, certainly, is different. But if we say

this, then there is no way to avoid the conclusion that, to us, the laborers or

lawyers who happened to be in the way when the artillery shells began hitting

the apartment buildings in Beirut or who found themselves exposed to violence

in the refugee camp at Shatila, were -- somehow -- less innocent than the clerks

and secretaries and bonds traders in the two World Trade Center towers. It is

true that the former might have “walked more lightly upon the ground” than

Americans do: for no people seems to be so optimistic, so certain, so heedless in

its pleasures as Americans are. But included in this heedlessness was

forgetfulfulness, or even innocence, about the cares and sufferings of others –

and our share in them. Included in this heedlessness seems to have been a very

limited ability to imagine what those others -- Lebanese, Bosnian Muslims,

Palestinians, Israelis -- must have felt when their own private idylls were

shattered by airplanes or tanks or bulldozers, when the loving, caring presence of

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their own families and friends suddenly and arbitrarily came to an end. In The

Fire Next Time, James Baldwin wrote that “One can be, indeed, one must strive

to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is

what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man . . . But it is

not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the

innocence which constitutes the crime.” There is no easy parallel between the

historical relations of white Americans to black Americans, and Americans’

collective relations to the broader world. Yet many of us exhibit the very same

innocence in indulging our pleasures, the same innocence about histories of

which our government, or we ourselves, have sometimes been the authors. And

this innocence constitutes a kind of crime.

It is understandable that, like Hermann in Goethe’s poem, we want only

to “Preserve and endure/Preserve ourselves, along with the fine things which

are our possessions” -- understandable that, even now, we want to turn away

from the world and from history. Animated by the opposite desire, Dorothea’s

former fiancée (Hermann’s predecessor) has gone to Paris to participate, and be

destroyed, in French Revolution’s new dawn. Most of us have no desire to live

such a purely historical existence. Both to live and yet also maintain the strictest

vigilance against any slackening in one’s consciousness of the world’s suffering

is, furthermore, impossible. To deny oneself any rest or pleasure is to deny life --

to invite madness. But the criminal innocence which we have permitted

ourselves has resulted in its own kind of madness.

Baldwin often repeated that emancipation -- of blacks from the machinery

of white supremacy, and of whites from the history they didn’t understand --

was only a matter of time, because the people who could save white people from

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their false sense of history also lived among them. To live entirely in one’s own

private world is to be mad. The authors of historical destruction would be saved

from their madness by those who actually understood this history, because they

had experienced it. We have yet to see, entirely, the realization of this prophecy.

But there is no doubt that our false sense of world history is partly due to the fact

that those who could save us from our illusions do not live among us – or, at

least, do not seem to. Americans’ relative lack of outrage at our government’s

increasing reluctance to participate in, and thereby be responsible to, any form of

international law -- from the Reagan administration’s refusal in 1985 to recognize

the jurisdiction of the World Court with regard to its support of the Contras, to

President Bush’s refusal to submit to the Kyoto accords -- suggests that many

Americans don’t seem to consider that there is any considerable need for the rest

of the world -- that those of us in this country who enjoy the privilege of being

able to define our lives in exclusively private terms imagine that we can keep the

others, who may not enjoy this luxury, indefinitely at bay. However they might

be explained, the World Trade Center attacks are only a very late sign that this is

not the case.

It is understandable that we hope that the long cycles of our personal lives

proceed uninterrupted by economic upheaval, or war, or revolution: that history

in these forms never intrude upon our private idylls. That many of us can even

hope for such a private life is itself a great historical accomplishment of the

developed world. Freedom from want, and a measure of leisure to pursue

pleasures, interests, and perfections, are no longer the exclusive privilege of the

Few. But as we attain to the privilege of private existence, our relation to history

changes. For the excluded and downtrodden, history remains the medium of

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suffering, but also – potentially -- of emancipation. For the private person, on the

other hand, history tends to represent chaos and uncertainty -- no longer

something to be made, but something to be feared. Desiring only to keep it at

bay, to keep ourselves safely beyond its currents, we experience its continued

existence only in the form of violent intrusions.

One sees this attitude towards history already in Goethe’s “Hermann and

Dorothea.” The threat of history is captured in the image of the refugees’ carts,

where objects once bound into carefully stewarded domestic orders now lie in

disordered anarchy. Dorothea, who has been engaged to a German Jacobin, and

for whom the difficulties and dangers of exile have also meant some measure of

public happiness as an independent woman, exchanges her historical existence in

the “maelstrom of the times” for the idyll with Hermann -- for the life of an

“angel of the house.” But even here, Goethe doesn’t quite permit the characters

the history-denying idyll which the poem seems, on one level, to endorse. For in

accepting Hermann’s ring, Dorothea declines to discard her old one, the gift of

her former fiancée. Seemingly, she returns to domesticity only on the condition

that her connections to the larger world, her fidelity to larger purposes – that is,

her historicality -- not be sacrificed or erased. It is her presence which stimulates

Hermann, passive at the beginning of the poem, to rise up against the patriarchal

authority of his father. Through Dorothea’s inclusion, the idyll becomes a refuge

not just of order, but also, potentially, of freedom. Even more significant is the

bitter irony in Goethe’s representation of character of the idyll. In a letter, Goethe

wrote that Herrmann und Dorothea represented an attempt to distill what was

“purely human” in the existence of a small German town from its slag. Before

Dorothea’s arrival, however, this humanity is nowhere in evidence. It is not just

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that the inhabitants of the idyll are heedless – when the villagers stream out to

view the misery of the exiles, “no one considers that he, by a similar destiny,

may, in the future, if not indeed next, likewise be o’ertaken..” More than that,

their idyllic autarchy has made them self-satisfied and cold: the same character

who criticizes other villagers for gawking at the exiles, the bachelor apothecary,

celebrates his good fortune “in days like the present,/ of flight and confusion,” to

live by himself “in his dwelling,/ Having no wife nor child to be clinging about

him in terror!” What Goethe seems to identify is a mechanism according to

which the most elementary features of human intimacy -- self-love, love and

compassion for one’s intimates – tend, inexorably, towards inhumanity towards

others. As Dorothea recognizes, an immense gap appears to separate her destiny,

as a penniless refugee, from that of these well-to-do Bürger. Only in finally

welcoming Dorothea into their community are these figures challenged to cast

off the “slag” and exhibit their humanity; only in opening itself to that which,

and those whom, it otherwise tends to exclude, does it redeem its humanity.

IV.

Some conscientious people, in hastening to compare the Trade Center and

Pentagon attacks to U.S.-sponsored violence, or to link them to the rage and deep

hatred engendered by the latter, have seemed to rationalize the actions of the

kidnappers, to hold the country which was the victim of these attacks in some

sense responsible for them. There is, it is true, something unfeeling, almost

barbaric, in moving so quickly from acknowledging the horror of an event to

relativizing its status as a tragedy. Even the purest of voices grows hoarse from

shouting. Nevertheless, it is also impossible not to suspect that, in denying others

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the privilege of private life, or in making no effort to include them in our idyll,

we have not made them that much more willing to endure the rigors of purely

historical existence. Even simply to protect ourselves against terrorism requires

not only that we fight its present manifestations, but also speculate about its

deeper origins. Such speculation neither obviates the moral requirement that

those who assisted in the attacks be punished for their crimes, nor in any way

shifts responsibility for their crime to the United States, or its citizens. To attempt

to explain is not to justify. At the same time, even if the United States has caused,

and tolerated, great suffering, and this suffering is in some way linked to the

rage which led to these attacks, one should never say that one evil has

necessitated another. The conspirators, even in their powerlessness, could still

have chosen, instead, to speak. Nonetheless: something seems to prevent us from

responding to this tragedy as unambiguously as we should, or wish we could. If

we, as American citizens, could knowledgeably maintain that our government

had consistently defended the cause of justice on the world stage; if we could

truthfully say that we had valued our many privileges, but not to such an extent

that we would deny them to others, or commit wrongs in order to preserve or

extend them; if we could affirm that our desire to provide and care for our loved

ones had not hardened us to the plight of others, or -- worse – helped us to

rationalize our injustices towards them: if we could say these things, then we

could feel comfortable in attributing these “attacks against freedom and

democracy” solely to an insane jealousy, and return to the world before

September 11. But we must know, even in our innocence, that this is not the case.