The magicians of the apocalypse: Germany, 1925-1933

 

To read the signs and portents of carnival shows and curiosity cabinets is no mean feat.

There were many such shows, and many readers, in Weimar Germany. As the Nazi event horizon neared, the magicians became more intrusive, and the readers became more puzzled.

Hanussen was the most famous of the magicians, a fortuneteller who, though a Jew, somehow convinced himself that he was a member of the Nazi inner circle. He was disabused of this notion on March 25, 1933, when three S.A. agents dragged him out of his apartment to a Gestapo barrack, where he was beaten and stabbed to death.

Krakauer described Hanussen’s show in a report for the Frankfurter Zeitung: „Der Hellseher im Varieté“ (The cabaret clairvoyant) in June, 1932. Kracauer found his gifts of prophecy less impressive than his “profane talent for creating a mood in the audience.” Hanussen would sit enthroned at center stage with a black band around his eyes and, receiving a card with the name of one of the spectators, tell them of events that had happened in their past. Kracauer found this part of the act rather tedious, since the events were common, and the addition of context by Hanussen was such that the spectator would agree to it without exactly having any proof – the memory of the event would, rather, conform to the words of the magician. It wasn’t in the words, though, that Kracauer saw the eeriness of the act, but in the way the audience was entirely wrapt up in Hanussen’s presence, and would stare at the black band over his eyes as if it were a portal to the future. “A heavy sense of excitement that showed how, in this crisis, there was a mounting expectation of a miracle.”

Another spectator of the stage magician’s art was Joseph Roth. He, too, wrote a feuilleton for the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1925 – a less fevered year – about a magician named Rha-Min-Tho. Where Kracauer’s piece was all about the magician who enchanted an audience, Roth’s piece was about the comedy of the audience member who sought to demystify the magician’s tricks. The throne on which Hanussen was mounted was at the center of his act; for Roth, though, it was the spotlight that took … well, the spotlight.

An audience member – mostly male – would come to Rha-Min-Tho’s show and at a certain point, would be invited to come onto the stage to monitor, i.e. expose, the magician – or, as the magician would put it, to show that his tricks were not explicable by natural laws or devices.

I am not sure if Roth’s reportage has been translated. But it is a shrewd… parable of sorts. Here’s the two paragraphs I like:

In any case, the audience is with Rha-Min-Tho, even when he makes mistakes;  and even evening a man climbs out of the seats and onto the stage to persuade himself that it is impossible to explain the miraculous feats of the magician in a natural way. Most are intelligent gentlemen, well adjusted gentlemen, one can even say: MEN. Men who are confident that they can catch out the magician at his tricks, who are not afraid of the stagelights and the spotlight or of the expectant and slightly mocking glances of the magician. Often it is a man who has come with his wife, and leaves her sitting in the seats, without being afraid of embarrassing himself before her, certain of his effect on the stage as of his inextinguishable power over the heart of his companion.

Unfortunately, this is a mistake. In private life he is, perhaps, a powerful personality, a sergeant, a police officer, a court official – and he wears the clothes made by some reliable tailor, allowing him to sit without wrinkling it, hiding his bodily dieficiencies and emphasizing his good physical attributes. As long as he is sitting there in the seats, he is a respectable gentlemen with gravitas. However, in the moment he ascends the stage, the spotlight falls upon him like a pitiless robber and strips him of all his virtues. In the unflattering white light we see that the good humored man has a belly, a laughable double chin, red, protruding ears. His coat is wrinkled, his pants are too short, his laces in his boots are done up any which a way, his heals are worn and the soles have a light though distinct crumpled curve.”

Ah, these men! In Roth’s view, they come out of the seats of the audience thinking that they will be the audience’s favorite – don’t they represent the intelligent section of the audience, probably dragged there by their women? And yet they find out, on stage, that the audience is with the makeupped magician, the trickster, the effeminate showman! He does, our rational man, search the stage and watch the magician’s gestures closely, but it is all in vain and was from the very beginning.

What use is this all to him? He never had the sympathy of the public, whose ambassador and delegate he actually is. On the contrary: the public is much more sympathetic to the magician. Perhaps the audiences’ pants are also too short, but at least they aren’t being displayed on the stage – and even when they are of the buckled type.“

Cagliostro and the dupes – a motif that keeps turning up, mysteriously, in times of crisis. And especially when the dupes have lost our sympathy.

On not seeing the wood for the trees

 

John Heywood, like many a gentleman in Henry VIII’s England, was not pleased by the Henry’s conversion to the weird Protestantism that has stuck around in the United Kingdom ever since. He was a Catholic, and he wrote as a Catholic, and he was imprisoned as a Catholic in 1544. But being burnt as a Catholic was a big ask: so he was granted a pardon and repented before “the citizens of London at Paul’s Cross.” A good thing too, as he delivered, after that date, his chief claim to fame: A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the englishe tongue …

In Anthony a Woods microbiography of Heywood, he is described as a wit, but not a logician. He was a great favorite with Henry, who found his witty sayings funny; and with Thomas More, who sympathized with his faith.

Here is a passage from Heywood’s dialogue that still lives on the English speaking tongue:

An olde saied sawe, itche and ease, can no man please.
Plentie is no deyntie. ye see not your owne ease.
I see, ye can not see the wood for trees.
Your lyps hang in your light. but this poore mā sees
Bothe howe blyndly ye stande in your owne lyght,
And that you rose on your right syde here ryght.
And might haue gon further, and haue faren wurs.

The variation that I have heard all my life is: not seeing the forest for the trees.

Which is a phrase that contains a deep psychological insight, as the Gestalt school in the twentieth century would show.

In the metro Atlanta countryside, one is astonished by the arboreal mass. Fly into L..A. and you see buildings and lights; fly into Atlanta and you see arboreal cover. I was sitting on my brother’s porch the other day, staring out at the pine tree/deciduous mix that came up to the lawn line like nomads come to decline civilization and all its attributes, and I was thinking about politics. Sadly. America is in the grip of Mr. T mania. I’m among the strong antis. But the question on all of our minds is, are we not seeing the forest for the big fuckin’ orange tree?

I imagine John Heywood, in his house in North Mims, Hertfordshire (near More’s dwelling), might have looked out at woods. According to Anne Rowe’s environmental history of Hertfordshire, it was the site of a familiar double whammy: the common land was being privatized, and the woods were being chopped down in the 16^th century: “Divers parcels of wood’ – said to be at least 80 years old – were felled and sold for 160 pounds from the 200 acre common “woodgrounde’ called Mayne Wood in the parishes of Tring and Wigginton in 1584. The aunathorised felling of substantial amounts of timber and underwood from the 300 acre “great wood”, another common wood, was recorded in the court rolls of the manor of Caddington in the 1680s and 1590s…”

Heywood may well have profited from wood sales, but he was a poet who saw the trees in the forest, and his heart went out to them.

In the Low Countries, the great theorist, so to speak, of collecting proverbs was Erasmus, who wrote: “If Hesiod is right a popular saying is never meaningless.”

Recent historians have put their boot into the idea that Heywood or Erasmus were really listening to the milkmaid and the tavern keeper – the proverbs they collected came from text. Perhaps. Or perhaps text confirmed what they heard, gave them the courage to put it down. At the same time Heywood was presenting us with his Western Zen saying, Brueghel was painting his proverb paintings, which were not given any ancient context. As for Heywood, in his preface he understands the great thing about proverbs: that they are found and heard. Perhaps in Hesiod, a text; and perhaps in the converse of ax men and carters and wetnurses and court hangers-on, where what an ancient Sage said three thousand years ago is all unconsciously echoed.

“That almost in all thinges good lessons they teache.
This write I not to teache, but to touche. for why,
Men knowe this as well or better than I.
But this and this rest, I write for this.
Remembryng and consyderyng what the pith is
That by remembrance of these prouerbes may grow
In this tale, erst talked with a frende, I showe
As many of theim as we coulde fytly fynde,
Fallyng to purpose, that might fall in mynde.
To thentent [intent] the reader redyly may
Fynde theim and mynde theim, when he will alway.”

And so we talk the summer evening away, here in Georgia.

Corporate governance and the Paramount firing of Colbert

 Peeps be getting mad about the cancellation of Colbert, since the trigger seemed to be him mocking Paramount bribing Mr. T. And that is some justified anger!

But shuffle a little of that anger to the deeper cause, which is our old friend, regulations on corporate governance.

The problem is less Paramount (though definitely boo Paramount) than the erosion and annulation of old New Deal to Great Society regulations on corporations and large enterprises.. Shareholders now rule absolutely. Stakeholders - consumers, contractors, and the general public - should have representatives on all interstate businesses, or enterprises above a certain size, measured in employees.

Now am I some goddamn expert on corporate governance? Come on, look at me! I'm a sad and shabby outsider. But our good friends over at the Roosevelt Institute have been at this a long time. Go to this article by Lenore Palladino and Kristina Karlsso. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/.../towards-accountable.../

They make four comparatively modest suggestions to break the stranglehold of “shareholder primacy” , also, in technical legal jargon, known as "dickheads sitting on your face forever". Here they are:

"-Boards of directors should be accountable to all stakeholders, not just shareholders. Specifically, board “fiduciary duty” should run to all stakeholders;

-Corporate purpose statements should include a requirement that corporations positively benefit society;

-Multiple stakeholders should be represented on corporate boards; and

-Large corporations should be required to charter federally,"

Those with sharp eyes will notice that the last suggestion goes all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt. In fact, Roosevelt's Progressive party pushed for an even more radical suggestion, which would have outlawed P and E splits that we are used to in the stock market today.

To quote myself from something I wrote all by myself back in the day:

There was, back in those days, a burning issue that has flamed out so much since that the very word brings an eery blank to the mind: overcapitalization. The reason this figured so heavily as a scare word among the progressives is that the era from the turn of the century to the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission, in 1914 – which is generally taken to bookend the progressive moment – saw the instantiation of what Lawrence Mitchell, in The Speculation Economy, claims is the founding moment of modern American capitalism: the subjugation of industry to finance. This was a moment that expressed itself on several fronts – for instance, the Courts finally cleared up the confusion about how property law applied to corporations – creating a new form of property, defined by John Commons this way: [the old common law definition] … is Property, the other is Business. The one is property in the sense of Things owned, the other is property in the sense of exchange-value of things. One is physical objects, the other is marketable assets.” [quoted by Sklar, page 50]

One of the results of this legal change, or rather, one of the reasons it came about, was that the notion of a corporation as a body issuing stock was changing. And that change brought up the charge of overcapitalization – that a corporation, instead of finding its raison d’etre in using its assets to produce a good or service on which it made a profit, was now an entity wrapped up entirely in the market for its stocks.

In 1911, a bill was voted through the House of Representatives and narrowly turned down in the Senate that would have smashed this legal structure. S. 232 built on legislative ideas already crafted during Roosevelt’s term (remember, Roosevelt was in the wings in 1911, and would run in 1912, thus ruining Taft’s chance at a second term). S. 232 would not only have required federal incorporation of all interstate businesses. Here’s Mitchell’s description of it:

“It would have replaced traditional state corporate finance law by preventing companies from issuing “new stock” for more than the cash value of their assets, addressing both traditional antitrust concerns and newer worries about the stability of the stock market by preventing overcapitalization. But it would have done much more. S. 232 was designed to restore industry to its primary role in American business, subjugating finance to its service. It would have directed the proceeds of securities issues to industrial progress by preventing corporations from issuing stock except “for the purpose of enlarging or extending the business of such corporation or for improvements or betterments”, and only with the permission of the Secretary of Commerce and Labor. Corporations would only be permitted to issue stock to finance revenue-generating industrial activities rather than finance the ambitions of sellers and promoters. … S. 232 would have restored the industrial business model to American corporate capitalism and prevented the spread of the finance combination from continuing it dominance of American industry.”

Take that, Mr. Tariffs!

So the next time you are shocked by your fave media product being canceled and censored, give a thought to corporate governance. There are many avenues to the overthrow of the plutocracy - this is one of them.