Treptow Park

 We went to the Soviet war memorial at Treptow Park expecting Soviet kitsch. It turned out to be a curiously moving site. The memorial is most noted for a giant statue depicting a soldier with a sword, holding a baby, or being held by a baby, which surmounts a smaller stone space, a sort of hypertrophied hut.  The soldier faces (at a field’s distance) two pinkish red marble walls, which are separated by a space. There is a series of steles depicting various scenes of war and peace that make their way on the edge of the field between the wall and the giant statue.

None of this seemed in bad taste, or in some non-synchronicity with the event commemorated – the massive war between the Soviets and Nazi Germany that ended in the ruins of Berlin in 1945, when the German army finally surrendered.

In the 90s, it was considered in bad taste to prefer the Soviets to the Nazis. The moral equivalency argument, which had started on the far right in Germany, triumphed after the wall fell.

Of course, that is utter bullshit.

I’ve been reading Anthony Beevor’s account of the final push and the “battle of Berlin” since I’ve been here. Beevor’s account is famous for finally putting into the scales the massive number of rapes committed by the Soviet troops. This was a moral advance in historiography: military history has almost completely avoided the subject of rape, even though rape has been weaponized in all wars.

However, along with the moral enlightenment comes a certain puzzling moral blindness. While fully willing to lay the blame for the rapes on the Soviets, Beevor doesn’t spend much time pondering the terror bombing of the German cities, and in particular, Berlin. In the moral calculus, the Nazis and the Soviets get very bad marks, while the allies fall back into that comfortable category of military history, the advance of a number of divisions. In fact, though, those Allies were advancing through civilian casualties of at least 600,000; they were advancing through the deliberate destruction of cities, and their residences, which were all openly part of the Allied war plan, much more so than the Soviet quasi-approval of rape.

I myself have no doubt that the right side won in WWII. Whether it should have been fought at all is a question that goes back to WWI – the truly unnecessary war. If Vladimir Lenin had been the head of Russia in 1914 rather than Czar Nicholas, or if the governments had listened to the socialists, led by Jaures, and its radical wing, led by Trotsky and Lenin, WWI would never have happened – which would have meant that WWII never would have happened. Instead, the momentum of the 1900s and 1910s, which was with the Left, was broken, never to be fully recovered again.

Beevor, I should make clear, feels that the campaign of rape is morally important without feeling, therefore, that the Soviets and the Nazis were morally equivalent – which I take to be, logically, the idea that it would not have made a moral difference if the Nazis had won. 

Of course, the argument that the radical right made in the 70s in Germany, which you can now see casually sprayed across the New York Review of Books, as if it were obvious, was the argument of America First in 1939/1940. A group with which, I believe, Trump’s father was involved. But the same bien-pensant liberals who find Trump shameful have gone along with finding Trump historically justified. Such is the price of keeping in place a neo-liberal order that has to justify itself with larger and larger historical revisions. Otherwise, one has to question how we came to a place where the top ten percent own more than the bottom seventy percent, and how the top 1 percent own more than the next nine percent, and so on. Put it on a graph and label it: world-historical fuckup.

But I digress. The Soviet memorial is a quiet place, much quieter than the argument I am making above. There is something to be said for the aesthetic continuity of muscularity between the fascists and the communists. In the U.S., we confine the bulging muscles to the comic book and to action movies. But the monumentality, the bowed heads, the sense of human waste and exhaustion – this is what the memorial, in its entirety, conveys well. I expected something triumphal. What I found was something elegiac.

One of the more memorable spots in Berlin.

Walter B. and me

Me on Walter Benjamin's lost Berlin here: http://bookandfilmglobe.com/creators/dreaming-of-walter-benjamin-on-walter-benjamin-platz/

on titles

Adam has made up a game. He comes up to me and in a confiding whisper he says, Dad, do you know what the title of my next book is going to be? So I guess, sometimes. I say: the toothpaste vampire. Or I say, The monster that ate the donuts. Then Adam will tell me. The books Adam is going to write are all scary stories. Horror stories. He is in the throes of a love affair with being scared; and especially, being scared by R.L. Stine. The goosebumps series, the innumerable spin-offs – Adam just loves them. J’adore R.L. Stine, he’ll say. The titles he comes up with are Stine-esque, if not stolen outright from the master. Like: The Werewolf of the Swamp. Sometimes I’ll remind him that the title is already taken.

Yet Adam isn’t totally wrong. Titles exist in a strange no-man’s land in IP law. Although trademark claims are made for businesses (some Chicago restaurant was in the news recently for, absurdly, sending threatening letters to all organizations using the word “Aloha”, which the restaurant claims as trademarked), there seems to be a lot of elbow room in the title field. You can look up a popular title-ish word – say, Possession – and you will find half a dozen novels with that title. On the other hand, you will only probably find one Mansfield Park, or Mrs. Dalloway. It is hard to tell, in this labyrinth of the claimed and the unclaimed, what the rules are.

Even  though I do not remember talking about titles with Adam, his fascination with titles mirrors my own. I am a title dreamer. I love to jot down potential titles for books or articles, and I can almost see the future spirits of those books or articles flock around (spirit, is this a book that may be, or that must be?). There is a poetry of the title – and, of course, where there is poetry, there is mostly bad poetry. Many, many bestselling books bear embarrassing title names, adducing blue, infinitely, passion, love like a barker with Tourette’s syndrome (hey, is that the title of a future detective novel?).  These title suffer from Hallmarkitis, and even when they get good reviews, it takes a certain pause before one can pick them up.

But whose titles are these? We think of the title and the book as signed by the same maker. In fact, titles are where agents and publishers like to play. They are always suggesting that titles be changed, because they have a belief in what is marketable that is quite odd when you think that they are always calling for something totally original – as long as it is like everything else. The vulgar version of the death of the author has some strong evidence when it comes to titles.

Certain titles, though, seemed signed by the author. Mrs. Dalloway. Sense and Sensibility. The Great Gatsby – okay, I included the last one as a ringer, because this was not Fitzgerald’s first pick for the title. But he was persuaded away from Trimalchio in West Egg, thank God. Some titles give off an odd and enigmatic light – they are the answer to a riddle that is posed by the book. Supremely, this is the case with Ulysses. Joyce doesn’t tell you, hey, this book translates the Odyssey in some ways to a June day in Dublin. But the title tells you something is up. I remember the Modern Library classic, with that huge U – that stately, plump U – which I loved, and which might have kicked off my love of titles.

The medievals derived title from Titan, according to Thomas C. Stillinger: “According to Servius the term tutulus (title) comes from Titan, that is, the sun, either by a process of diminishing or by comparison. It is said to come through diminution because the lifht of that work is small in relation to the whole sun; by comparison [because] just as the rising sun gives light to the whole world, so the title illuminates the work that follows.” Thus, Nietzsche’s Morgenrote is a sort of entitled title, and the rays illuminate the whole disparate system of the numbered. But does every book deserve to be a planet upon which a sun, or title, rises? Are titles necessary? Should this little scrawl have one?

on

Elizabeth Nietzsche: the original Trumpite!

Weirdly enough, amidst all the reporting about the conspiracy theories of Trumpites and their ferocity against the “fake news”, nobody is making the obvious connection with Nietzsche’s sister.

So I guess it falls to yours truly – again! – to take up the task.

It all goes back to a visit paid by Harry Graf Kessler to Nietzsche’s sister in 1921. Cut. Here we need to paste in a description of Harry Graf Kessler. This guy was the Zelig of his time. He knew everyone, from Hindenberg to Georg Grosz, and he was everywhere. He was rich. He financed avant garde art, hobnobbed with communists, and got himself the fuck away from Germany once Hitler took over. He put it all down in his diaries, which are fascinating even if you don’t know all the characters. If you want to know what the Cabaret era was like – the giant Kit Kat club of European artists, scroungers, heirs and heiresses, communist journalists, pacifists, sex reformists, nudists, psychoanalysts, surrealists, etc. – read In the Twenties, the translation of his diaries. End of paste, back to:

Nietzsche’s sister! As every fan of Nietzsche knows, his sister, Elizabeth, was despicable on every level. A Wagner groupy – wife of an anti-semitic conman – object of Nietzsche’s own contempt – and keeper of the poor goof once he went supposedly crazy just because he mistook a beaten cab driver’s horse for Richard Wagner – and I’m with him on this one. His last decade was spent in a gloomy catatonia, while his sister enjoyed, unexpectedly, the celebrity that came with his books. Nietzsche caught on, but he never got to enjoy being the fin de siècle’s favorite kind of dynamite.

End of story, horrible woman, who like many horrible people, lived forever. She even lived up to the 1930s and got to welcome Hitler to her Nietzsche museum.

Now, back to the early twenties. At this time, radical right soldiers and cops roamed the streets, attacking leftwingers, and killing quite a few. The courts, which the Weimar government did not reform, were filled with sympathetic judges, who let them off. As so often, look to the judicial system for nourishing reaction.

But the rightwingers didn’t like being identified as murderers. One of the rightwingers killed Germany’s minister, Walter Rathenau, because he was a social democrat and a Jews. Hence this vignette:

Afternoon with Frau Förster-Nietzsche. A very unrefreshing political conversation, that she introduced when she told me she feared for my life from the side of the Bolsheviks “who also let Rathenau be murdered”. This absurd nonsense, which Ludendorff in an interview with the ›Daily Express‹ loosed upon the world a few days ago, is, for her, an undoubted fact, because “assassination is not a German kind of thing”.

Thus tasteless lies are now disseminated by old German nationalist ladies, in order to shield themselves from the taint of murder! I told her my opinion, which led to a rather excited argument, without diminishing in the least her belief on the purity of the German nationalist soul or shaking the idea of the communist masterminding of Rathenau’s murder.

I introduced into the conversation the fact, among others, that firstly, the righ radicals have up to now murdered around five hundred Leftist activists since the Revolution [which kicked out the Imperial government] came to a close. Were all these inspired by the communists or the Bolsheviks? Secondly, that we have never seen a Bolshevik provocateur tried for the murder of a rightwinger, or even be named in any case. Thirdly,  that even the countless weapon reserves of the “German Security and Resistance Union”, the “E Organization”, etc. must then be derived from Bolshevik plotting, since they were also involved in the intention to attack and murder.  

One is ashamed to have to contradict such absurdities. The good old woman spoke about the rightwing radicals only as “we”! “

I imagine similar conversations have been held in many a household, as sane family members confront the good old fox watchin’ parents.

I think Trump needs to shout out Elizabeth Forster Nietzsche. She was his kind of woman.

Rico capitalism- flashback to the Bush-Obama era

The recent death, or euthanasia, of the New York Daily News, with the attendant plutocratic criminal behind it, reminds me of this piece I wrote back in 2009. Enjoy!

RICO CAPITALISM IN THE AGE OF BUSH-OBAMA

December 22, 2009 at 6:30 PM

“Now he's got Paulie as a partner. Any problems, he goes to Paulie. Trouble with a bill, to Paulie. Trouble with cops, deliveries, Tommy... ...he calls Paulie. But now he has to pay Paulie... ...every week no matter what. "Business bad? Fuck you, pay me. Had a fire? Fuck you, pay me." "The place got hit by lightning? Fuck you, pay me." Also, Paulie could do anything. Like run up bills on the joint's credit. And why not? Nobody will pay for it anyway. Take deliveries at the front door and
sell it out the back at a discount. Take a 200 dollar case of booze and sell it for one hundred dollars.
It doesn't matter. It's all profit.”

– Goodfellas

The merger of good business practice and racketeering in the 00s was embodied by the private equity firm, which made the Mafia look like punks. Two hundred dollar cases of booze were nothing when you buy a company with money you borrowed with your potential purchase as capital, thus adding the company’s cost to you to the company’s total debt load, from which – because you have been so successful! – you paid yourself a management fee, and then appointed undertakers to break the balls of any of the employees who’d been there long enough to, say, get a pension, or to have an emotional stake in the company’s success – deadwood, in other words; then you sell off the parts of the company that are working, which earns the management company, those private equity sweethearts, another management fee; and finally lead the company into bankruptcy, thus screwing the banks and the investors, the latter of which had been sitting on the sidelines swallowing pap about the efficiencies brought to the company by the private equity junta. Having followed the fuck you – pay me! Business plan, the private equity partners have long moved on, although not before putting a proper legal distance between the business they picked apart and the consequences.

Mattress companies, shoe companies, if it lives and breaths, if it produced value, if it employed people and was the result of honesty, toil, and the identification of the employees – well then, it deserved, from the racketeering rational choice point of view, to be fucked.

That was the trade – the bright side was that it got the thumbs up from economists, politicians, everybody in the know, all the bright ones in our Bush-Obama culture. You know, the ones who have shoved so much shit down our throats that we have gotten to like it, that it just seems normal to wake up with that taste of plutocratic turds in our mouths, it is just who we are, it is just what living in the Do Tread on Me Nation we call home is all about.

That this was done to Readers Digest sorta figures. Symbols are attractors, and what better symbol for a brisk deathmarch through the valley of the shadow of fuck you than the magazine that, in its humble way, embodied conservative middle brow Cold War culture? The army jokes, the first person accounts of American heroism, the vocabulary builder, the Cold War rants about all the usual topics: drugs, Communism, delinquency. Plus the condensed books, Ultra-Moderne – much like Campbell’s Condensed soups, showing that the process of assembly line production could be applied to the novel. It was a sign of middle class tastelessness – of working for the Middle Brow man - to have bookshelves full of Readers Digest books – in my family, we certainly did. I eagerly went through those books when they came, laughed at the humor in uniform, built my vocabulary with the vocabulary builder, and learned the anti-Communist facts of life. Ronald Reagan’s biographers say that he was an earnest reader of the Digest, and he often quoted from it – which makes sense. In a sense, Reagan embodied the whole RD ethos.

Including the reversal of what you would expect a conservative company to do. Just as Reagan’s experience of the only business he ever knew – the movies – gave him a, to say the least, skewed notion of the relation between labor and business, Reader’s Digest evidently treated their employees, in the HQ in Chattaqua, NY, with the kind of princely beneficence that would have softened Karl Marx’s heart. The Sunday NYT story about the decline and fall of the magazine includes this anecdote about the owners, DeWitt and Lila Wallace: 

Al Perruzza, now a senior vice president, recalls a dinner in the early ’70s at which Mr. Wallace rose, clanked a glass and announced that, effective Monday, everyone at Reader’s Digest would get a 10 percent raise. He sat for a moment, conferred with Mrs. Wallace and then stood up again.
“My lovely wife doesn’t think that’s enough,” he said. “So effective Monday, it’s 15 percent.”
He rose a third time and announced a cost-of-living increase.
“We had spent literally weeks preparing a budget,” Mr. Perruzza says with a grin. “I was sitting with the president of my division. The guy went ashen.”

As the NYT tells the story, Readers Digest, back then, was an incredible cash cow – much to the Wallace’s amazement. Having figured, when he began the business, that he could make as much as 5,000 dollars per year, DeWitt and his wife were rather stunned by how much they really did make:

“By 1929, circulation stood at 290,000 subscribers and brought in $900,000 a year — more than $11 million in inflation-adjusted dollars — according to “American Dreamers,” a book about the Wallaces. By the 40th anniversary of Reader’s Digest, Time tallied up the magazine’s achievements: 40 editions, in 13 languages and Braille, and the best-selling publication in Canada, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, Peru — and on and on. Total worldwide circulation was 23 million.”

So they did things like make their Chappaqua campus a nice place to work by hanging art on the wall: "Paintings by Picasso, Monet, Degas,Matisse, Renoir and van Gogh — museum-worthy décor was just another perk of working for a publishing phenomenon, one that sold millions of magazines and books a year, a readership rivaled only by the Bible. Although comparing sales of the scriptures to those ofReader’s Digest has always been unfair, because, as The New Yorker noted in 1945, “the Bible had a head start.””

That art, seen by the 3,000 employees and their family members, has now, of course, been stripped (“Take a 200 dollar case of booze and sell it for one hundred dollars. It doesn't matter. It's all profit.”). In the place of those paintings – o symbol calls to symbol, the worm that turned calls to the mindboggling serfs we are today! - we have this:

“…the walls are dominated by inexpensive prints and lots of corporate propaganda.
That’s right: corporate propaganda. Posters in the corridors of this mostly empty building trumpet something called the FACE plan, an acronym for fast, accountable, candid and engaged. One poster offers simplistic how-tos for running a meeting. (“Ensure that the right people are at the table.”) Another is headed with the words “Vision Statement” and uses lots of empty white space to underscore the point: “We will create the world’s largest multiplatform communities based on branded content.”
That mantra, and all the posters, are the brainchild of Mary Berner, the kinetic former president of Fairchild Publications who landed here with the backing of Ripplewood Holdings, the Manhattan private equity firm that orchestrated the debt-fueled takeover of Reader’s Digest.”

Our fast, accountable and engaged Mary, at a modest 125,000 a month, has surrounded herself with a coterie of “blondes” – as they are called by the stunned remnant of RD culture – to ‘reconfigur[e] the innards of the company’ – as NYT says, building up our biz vocabulary. Reconfigure – strip what isn’t nailed down, burn employees, create on-line presence.

It is a heartwarming story, this, the rescue of Readers Digest, with Ripplewood Partners throwing the company a big life preservers, made out of lead, after RD fell on hard times post-9/11. It wasn’t just that Readers Digest had been rendered rather useless by the internet. It was also that the Feds shut down RD’s sweepstakes. That killed the company with its base. It is one thing to have the condensed works of Taylor Caldwell on your shelves, but quite another not to have a shot at winning the sweepstakes. Underneath the idea of earning your money, we all long for the main chance. Ripplewood saw the bleeding, and stepped in to suck the creature dry.

“Ripplewood, led by Tim Collins, its chief executive, saw turnaround opportunities as well as a chance to roll up the fund’s own media properties, including Time Life Inc., the direct-marketing company that was formerly part of Time Warner. Ripplewood put in $275 million of its own money and had a bunch of partners, which included Rothschild Bank of Zurich and GoldenTree Asset Management of New York.
But the $2.4 billion deal piled so much debt onto Reader’s Digest’s balance sheet that it tripled the company’s interest payments, to $148 million a year. The Great Recession hurt ad sales, of course, and devastated sales of direct-marketed books. Instead of the single-digit percentage growth in revenue that Ripplewood was banking on, revenue declined.
In January, the company laid off 300 people, about 8 percent of its staff.
But even with those measures, the company did not, as Ms. Berner might put it, make its number. In August, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.”

HENRY (V.O.)
And, finally, when there's nothing
1 left, when you can't borrow
another buck from the bank or buy
another case of booze, you bust
the joint out.

CUT DIRECTLY TO:

LARGE CLOSE UP OF - HANDS

making rolls of toilet paper being kneaded into long rolls
with Sterno.

CUT TO:

HENRY AND TOMMY shoving wads of Sterno paper into the
ceiling rafters.

HENRY (V.O.)
You light a match.

on jokes

When I was in my twenties, I often found myself in the midst of a joketelling orgy – that is, I found myself among joke tellers. I’d tell some jokes myself, but I did not have the rhythm of the great joke teller. I was equipped with one advantage, however: I was a great laugher. I could laugh until, literally, I ran out of breath. Not only that, but I laughed not only at the punch line – for the punch line, for the great joke teller, is only the final touch on the whole artistic edifice, the last gargoyle, so to speak, on the cathedral of shit – but I would laugh even more at the absurdities that the joke piled up, especially if it was an obscene joke.

Obscenity requires a concatenation of circumstances that remove us more and more from social reality, and each step is funnier. In a sense, I was a strange audience for a joker, who is used to the laugh coming last. But the talented joker would realize that this was a set with a heavy infusion of improv and would get into using the rhythm my laughter threatened to interrupt.

I was also among a literary set, and some of them – notably my friend Stefan – were very aware of the joke as an artform. Stefan was a very good joke teller, but he was not a great joke teller because he was too aware of the art. Sometimes, though, when he just let his natural flow take him there, he was a great one. Joke telling, back then, had a setting: it was in a bar, or a coffee shop. It was close to a college or university. At least, for the joketellers I knew. And this closeness made jokes something like an anti-classroom. In a classroom, you read, or you talked about texts - and were talked to about texts, and were generally educated in the complexities of reflection, the necessity of critique, and the never-ending task of imagining the good life arising out of the crimes of history. The joke climbed joyously back into the crimes of history and wallowed. In the great jokes – which were almost always dirty, misogynist, homophobic, racist, etc. – liberal society, indeed any social ideal, was turned upside down, its pockets were picked, and its underwear observed – and its underwear was always dirty.

I’ve been freelance now for almost twenty years, and I never find myself in joke telling orgies anymore. Is it that the age for them – my twenties and thirties – has passed? Or is the joke itself falling prey to its internet counterparts – the tweet, the Instagram caricature, etc.?

There’s an essay by Andrei Sinyavsky, the Soviet dissident, entitled The Joke in the Joke. It is a very good essay, one of the best on jokes. Written in the early eighties, it is also rather sexist. Conservatives often complain that the use of sexism and racism as interpretive categories distorts the past. This isn’t true - they help one see more of the past. Benjamin’s dictum that every monument of civilization is also a monument of barbarism finds its practical application here.

The core of the essay – which contains some silly and some truly disgusting jokes, and ends with a misogynistic rape joke – is that jokes are philologically important, and are the popular art form, just as folktales were in the past.

“In a closed society of the Soviet type, where the parameters of self-interested and complete existence are marked by all sorts of prohibitions (especially verbal ones), the joke is the only emotional outlet. More than that, it has actually developed into a model for living and serves the function of macrocosm inside the microcosm. As such, it becomes a kind of monad of the world order. The joke is in the air, but not in the form of dust. Like a spore, which contains everything that the soul needs in embryonic form, it is capable of reproducing the organism whole at the first opportune moment. Hence its readiness to provide universal formulas, explicating the epoch, history or the nation.”

Much emphasis is put, here, on the closed society of the Soviet type. But as all wee peas in the cogs of American capitalism can testify, the prohibitions here are cruelly marked out in dollars and sense, in time devoured, in exhaustions never to be redeemed; in cross-purposes between races, classes, and “discourses” that seem to have become zones of lies entirely. Here, the joke’s redemptive purpose, its “monad-hood”, seems lost to the onrush of ever more comic catastrophes. Of that which take your breath away, you physically cannot speak. And as I am removed, now, from the culture of oral jokes, I can’t really testify as to its health. But thrust into the pseudo-society of social networks, I can testify that everything begins to look, in a ghastly but undeniable way, like a joke. So much so that it has become a joke that one can’t joke, that irony needs an emoticon to explain itself.

There’s another wonderful bit in the Sinyavsky essay that is worth digging out. Here it is:

“If it weren’t for one more characteristic feature of the joke, perhaps the most important one, we could end our story here. I am referring to the joke’s philosophical relation to the world, to things, to the old and the new, when the new is a variation on the old but is nevertheless a new variant. We can imagine the joke in the form of an endless chain which connects just about all possible human situations. It can be likened to Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements, which has empty spaces for new valences as if for new jokes. The heading for this chart consisting of humorous parables would read something like “Human Existence” or “Human Reality”.

We laugh, so we don't cry. And then we discover that we laugh cause we can't cry. And then we cry with laughter.

visit to the Museum of the Wall - Berlin

The communist world is fallin' apart
The capitalists are just breakin' hearts
Money is the reason to be
It makes me just want to sing Louie Louie

And the state 
Was on the other side

Our Rough Guide to Berlin says this about the Wall Museum: “Overall, though, the huge collection is
somewhat jumbled and rambling, and not quite the harrowing experience that some visitors expect.”

About which, more must be said – at least by this visitor, who landed in Berlin on Tuesday.

A little nostalgic hits of the 80s music please, Maestro. Let’s get into it.
When the Berlin Wall fell, I was living in Austin. My source of income was precarious. A little of this, a little of that. Mostly working as a carpenter’s helper. But also teaching one class at ACC: a class in philosophy, about ethics. For which I had a text book that I threw out, and just photocopied a buncha the great texts and handed them out – The Gorgias, Nicodemean Ethics, Prolegomena to a future metaphysics of morals, Geneology of Morals, bits bits bits. Good bits.

I’d spent 4 years in Austin by that time. I came there to study philosophy, to get a Ph.D., and gave up that idea after two years, because the emotional climate of the department and the emotional climate of Roger Gathmann just didn’t mix. So I was thinking about my next move: garbage man? Secretary? Also, I wanted to right high fiction following in the footsteps of the masters. In the meantime, I talked at various tables, in various coffee shops. A leftist, of course.

When the Wall fell, I didn’t experience it from TV. Surely I saw the images somewhere, but for me, it was all text – after all, I was following in the footsteps of the masters. It was the newspapers. It was in my head from newspapers and photos in news magazines.

I was excited. I’d lived under the threat of nuclear war my whole life, and that was bad, ridiculous, ignoble, etc. Also, it had long been obvious that the paradise of “really existing socialism” was run by a bunch of geriatric prison guards who tossed their critics into prisons, and were incapable of running the system with any efficiency. The industrial system was filthy, a black hole of social costs (what else was Chernobyl), negative externalities out the butthole. It was all very nice for the Soviets to align themselves with the anti-colonial struggle, but by 1968 at the latest it was obvious that the jig was up. Andrei Amalrik, now forgotten, got it right in his 1970 book, Will the Soviet Union survive until 1984? While the schtick of the Soviet establishment was to make its rule seem eternal – which is the schtick of the American establishment, circa 2018 – the energy spent on the image was weakening the thing itself.

In 1989, I considered myself a Marxist, but one of those critical kind. Of course, I was aware that there was some bad faith mixed in with that characterization, but we all gotta live. Anyway, point is that I was brimming with the historical moment, and even had a forum, my philosophy class, to brim away in. My poor kids, though, didn’t see it like this. In fact, every class I taught in philosophy in the eighties would make a mockery of the assumptions of 19th century philosophers, who would vaunt freedom as our greatest good. These kids didn’t think about freedom, or freedom of thought, at all. And though, in their very lifetimes, the U.S. had spent a good twelve trillion dollars on the military, ostensibly because Americans felt that the freeing up of the Russian and Eastern European masses was of a much higher priority than, say, national healthcare – the good news that our expenditures were bearing fruit did not seem to brighten the eye or your average 18 year old.

Looking back, over thirty years, it is obvious that they were right and I was wrong. The removal of the Soviet threat unleashed the kind of capitalist shit that so undid the world in the first half of the 20th century. I’ve become a convert to the Misfit version of history. The Misfit, in Flannery O’Connor’s story, A good man is hard to find. You’ll remember the end of the story, when the Misfit shoots the Grandmother dead. Then one of his boys says something about her, and the Misfit says, “She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” Which is rather how I now think of the U.S. and, in general, the West. Without the Soviet threat, I doubt that the Great Depression and the War would have been followed by the greatest rise in working class wealth in history. I doubt that the wealth inequality of the Western nations would have gone down. I doubt that health care would have become a human right in the civilized places. What we have seen in the thirty years is that pigs will be pigs.

But that’s another story, children. This is just to present the background for our visit to Checkpoint Charlie, the place where the American soldiers in Berlin kept watch on their Soviet counterparts. Next to which, on Friedrichstrasse 45, you find the Wall Museum.

Yes, I was expecting an anti-communist fiesta. But I was not expecting a museum with such a revisionist theory of history. In the Museum’s history, the Nazis came from, apparently, outer space. First we get World War II. What happened in World War II? Why, the brave Germans tried to resist terrible Hitler (whose picture is oddly muted among the pictures of all the world leaders on the walls) under Stauffenberg. After that, it is on to Soviet atrocities, like the German soldiers kept in Soviet concentration camps after the war. No mention, of course, is made here of Dachau, Matthausen, or the 3.5 million Russian soldiers who died in the p.o.w. camps. Once you wipe these things out, it is much easier to speak of the moral equivalence, the coin toss, between Hitler and Stalin.

That equivalence was the burden of the song of the rightwing German historians in the 1970s, who were fighting against Willy Brandt socialism and radicalized youth. And nobody spread this idea more than Axel Springer. So I suppose, in retrospect, that his portrait hanging in one of the Museum halls, combined with an elogious explanatory plaque, was not surprising, any more than the portrait of Reagan and the plaque explaining he was an American hero. American horror is more like it.

Springer doesn’t push many American tourist buttons. It is hard to explain his influence or his politics. He was Rupert Murdoch crossed with Berlusconi. He was a sign, a terrible sign, of the future. His publishing empire combined a staff in which a considerable number of ex-Nazi bigwigs held positions of power; but, in a twist, Springer media was always wholeheartedly for Israel. Long before American evangelicals traded in their old hatred of the Jews as Christ-killers for their new love of Israel as a great place for most of the Jews to be decimated and the rest converted (as per Revelations), Springer was there, making a strategic change to Israelophilia in a European rightwing tradition that was default anti-Semitic.

Thus, as we toured the hot, hot building – Berlin is hot, the world is hot, and the major polluters are doubling down on destroying the Holocene, I kept thinking in the dusty heat – I noticed, like the Rough Guide writer,  that the exhibits were oddly off-track. What was a whole room devoted to Guernica doing here? But looking at it as a whole, that makes sense. If you are not going to include Auschwitz on your itinerary, Guernica is a very nice, portable atrocity. It reduces the scale of atrocities to put the crescendo on a German bombing that took place in Spain, before the war. Everybody can be against Guernica, we can pull out the reproduction of Picasso’s painting, and we don’t have to ask any difficult questions. And it avoids making atrocity the core principle of the state.

Springer – for us literary types – is remembered, as well, through Heinrich Boll’s novel, The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum. Another prophetic work! Boll saw that rightwing media operated through systematically stripping people of their dignity – punching down hard. Katherina Blum has a one night stand with a man who joins a leftwing terrorist group, and her life is destroyed by the press, who depict her as a whore, a terrorist, scum, etc., etc. Finally she agrees to meet the journalist who is on the anti-Blum crusade for an interview, and shoots him dead. I believe, I haven’t read the book in years. It famously upset Springer, who threatened to sue. Boll included this disclaimer at the front of the novel.

„Persons and incidents of this story are invented. If the description of certain journalist practices bear a similarity with the practices of the Bild-Newspaper, these similarities are neither intended nor accidental – but unavoidable.”

Why is it that I suspect Murdoch has a picture of Axel Springer up in his office? He should if he doesn’t. He owes much to the man.

Mourn the victims of the Wall, but, for their sake: don’t go to the Wall Museum. Advice from a friend.