Waste Land

Waste Land

I.

Weimar Goes Global

Premonitions can be precious. They offer an uncanny, decipherable warning about something or other, especially if the person having them is at the right place at the right time. Consider the Anglo-American Christopher Isherwood and the German Alfred Döblin, novelists who each wrote about Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s. In the guise of fiction, a writer can more easily tell the truth, hiding behind his characters and other forms of make-believe. Their Berlin is a fantastic, neurotic nightmare.

Isherwood, in Goodbye to Berlin, describes an edgy, decadent demimonde; marked by wholesale perversion and end-of-the-world partying; flaky characters on unending sprees of drinking and carousing all set against the backdrop of a “bankrupt middle class” living amid secondhand furniture in shabby, leaking buildings plastered with hammers-and-sickles and swastikas. He zooms in on a down-at-heel innkeeper, cleaning chamber pots, battered by the Great War and inflation. There are bank closures, sullen crowds, and the eerie pageant of burying social democracy amid black banners of one extremist group or the other. “Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold,” Isherwood writes. “This town is sick with Jews. Turn over any stone, and a couple of them will crawl out. They’re poisoning the very water we drink!” exclaims one of his characters.

Isherwood lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, so Goodbye to Berlin, as prescient as the author’s initial experiences were, was helped a bit by hindsight. Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz was published in the fall of 1929, when people had still not given up on the Weimar constitutional experiment and the future did not seem hopeless. But only a few weeks after the book’s publication, the stock market crashed on Wall Street, sending tremors all over Europe and especially Germany.

Berlin Alexanderplatz contains a stunning premonition not just of chaos but of something far worse and murderous that succeeds it, and also of the general instability of cities in the 20th and 21st centuries, including those in the developing world. Berlin, in Döblin’s rendering, is “Sodom on the eve of its destruction.” Döblin’s book is hard to read, almost plotless. It is filled with cluttered rhythms and long asides, and its low-down, scummy characters go from one petty disaster to another. But the book is also full of sound and streetwise wisdom. Listen:

“On Alexanderplatz they’re tearing up the road for the underground railway. People are made to walk on duckboards. The trams cross the square and head up Alexander and Munzstrasse to get to Rosenthaler Tor. . . . In the streets, there’s one house after another. They are full of people, from cellar to attic. . . . The tenancy protection law isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Rents are going up all the time. The middle class are finding themselves out on the street, bailiffs and debt collectors are making hay.” The protagonist, Franz Biberkopf, an ex-con, sells far-right-wing newspapers on the street. “Not that he’s got anything against the Jews, but he is a supporter of order,” says the narrator. The book concludes with a vision of people, arms linked, “marching into war,” now that “the old world is doomed.”

Doom is the word that immediately comes to mind when thinking about the Weimar Republic. Weimar is a candy-coated horror tale: a cradle of modernity that gave birth to fascism and totalitarianism. Weimar signifies an artistically and intellectually vibrant period—defined by the novels of Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse, the expressionist poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, the atonal music of Arnold Schönberg, the design and architectural experimentation of the Bauhaus—a period replete with so much social and cultural experimentation, yet packed with nasty racial and religious tensions, to say nothing of inflation and depression, all leading, without skipping a beat, to . . . Hitler. Yes, we all know how it ends. But its participants, caught in freeze-frame in the act of everything that they were doing, could have no idea what was in store for them.

Will we be any the wiser?

I ask because Weimar now beckons us.

But not at all in the way we think.

We think about Weimar only in terms of the weakening of American democracy. While we should really think about it in terms of the world.

At the moment, we rush headlong into a soulless and gleaming future, our lives grimly routinized and yet full of overwhelming possibilities, determined by gadgetry that we cannot do without. Technology has made us both masters and victims to a previously unimaginable degree. We believe we can defy gravity, yet we are weighed down by a mountain of worries that arrive instantly in our devices. This is a very claustrophobic and intimate world, yet also limitless: we may be connected with friends and relations around the globe, but just as often the people in the house or apartment next to ours might as well be in another universe. This alienation carries over from our neighborhoods to our politics. Politics has rarely before been played out on such an intense, globe-spanning, and consequential level, even as electronic communications have made it abstract and therefore more extreme—creating vast political distances between even our closest neighbors.

Yet, technology has also contracted our world, erasing the distance across oceans and between continents. We directly experience the burgeoning of new cities defined by technology and glittering financial centers, which vaguely look the same no matter the hemisphere or latitude where they are located. The future is here, and wherever we are, we are stuck in traffic.

We are building a truly global civilization that connects us all, and that is the challenge. Precisely because this global civilization is still in the act of becoming, and has not yet arrived, and will not arrive for some time, there is this phenomenon of both intimacy and distance between the various parts of the globe. True globalization is still an illusion until technology and world governance advance a few more orders of magnitude. Yet we dramatically affect each other and depend upon each other, so that we all inhabit the same, highly unstable global system. It is like in Sartre’s play No Exit, in which the three characters are locked in a small room and torment each other. With no mirrors on the walls, they only know themselves by the gaze of the others upon them. Indeed, we are liberated and oppressed by connectedness, with the media increasingly directing governments rather than the other way around. Russia and America, China and America, Russia and China, to say nothing of the mid-level and smaller powers, are all, because of their tense standoffs and the way that technology continues to contract the earth, running a strange simulation of the Weimar Republic: that weak and wobbly political organism that governed Germany for fifteen years from the ashes of World War I to the ascension of Adolf Hitler. The entire world is one big Weimar now, connected enough for one part to mortally influence the other parts, yet not connected enough to be politically coherent. Like the various parts of the Weimar Republic, we find ourselves in an exceedingly fragile phase of technological and political transition.

I see no Hitler in our midst, or even a totalitarian world state. But don’t assume that the next phase of history will provide any relief to the present one. It is in the spirit of caution that I raise the subject of Weimar.

Analogies can be futile, I know, since no thing is exactly like another. Analogies can lead us down a perilous path. Yet they are often the only way to communicate and explain. While on the one hand an analogy is an imperfect distortion, on the other hand it can create a new awareness, another way to see the world. It is only through an analogy that I can begin to describe the depth of our global crisis. We have to be able to consider that literally anything can happen to us. This is the usefulness of Weimar.