Time Bites: Views and Reviews

How many of such people were there? How many now in various parts of the world? In Zimbabwe the police may sit in on writers’ meetings, nothing secret about it; or they harass writers, or influence reviewers and editors against them. They drop in to say to a writer they hear such and such a book is being planned, but it would be better to think again. At this very moment, everywhere from China to Indonesia to South America to parts of Africa, a woman or man is thinking, But I daren’t write it. Talent is not necessarily allied to a readiness for martyrdom, or even courage. Why should it be? Such is our time’s history that our paradigm has to be an Ernst Toller, Solzhenitsyn, the killed or persecuted writers of some Muslim countries. A good thing for writers to be talented, but to be noticed it is even better if they are in prison or fighting cancer or, like Rushdie, sentenced to death. Writers as victims, that’s our mental set, but we scarcely notice the wasted or disappointed ones.

There are times and places when we collude with tyranny, in ways more direct than simply not noticing what goes on. In the old Soviet Union writers might claim proudly that they were developing censors that stopped them writing anything critical about communism. A shocking thing: but we all have inner censors, and often don’t suspect it. It is hard to step outside a prevailing way of thinking, particularly when you are convinced you are living in a free society. If you travel outside your culture, let’s say to the Fat East, or to a Muslim country or even somewhere in the United States, you may catch a glimpse of how we seem to others – or are not seen at all. In Iowa or Dakota for many people a state boundary can be their horizon. Britain – what’s that? In China Europe seems simply to drop over the edge of the world. If Europe ceased to exist tomorrow millions of people would not even notice.

An interesting indication of how we think is books that do not get published, or, if they do, are scarcely noticed. One example, among many: Arthur Deikman’s book The Wrong Way Home, about cults and their characteristics. By now we are pretty well informed about cults, but Deikman went on to point out that many of our institutions, from big businesses to gentlemen’s clubs, share the characteristics of cults. Surely there could not be a more useful tool for examining our culture – but no. It was ignored. Perhaps it was too close to the bone.

The most powerful mental tyranny in what we call the free world is Political Correctness, which is both immediately evident, and to be seen everywhere, and as invisible as a kind of poison gas, for its influences are often far from the source, manifesting as a general intolerance. The history books will say something like this: ‘When the certitudes of communism began to dissolve then collapsed with them – but slowly in some countries – the dogmas of Socialist Realism; but at once stepped into the vacuum Political Correctness. This began as a sensitive, honest and laudable attempt to remove the racial and sexual biases encoded in language, but it was at once taken over by the political hysterics, who made of it another dogma. In no time, from one end of the world to the other, everyone was saying, “It is Politically Correct”, “I am afraid it isn’t Politically Correct”, as if ordered to do so. There could hardly be a conversation without it, and PC was used often as the Victorians used “It isn’t done”, meaning socially improper, or to bolster the orthodoxies of “received opinion”, or even to criticise the eccentric. The new tyranny soon took over whole universities, particularly in the United States, departments of universities, colleges, schools, dictating habits of criticism, suffocating thought in some areas of scientific research, dimming the natural ferments of intellectual life. The submission to the new creed could not have happened so fast and so thoroughly if communist rigidities had not permeated the educated classes everywhere, for it was not necessary to have been a communist to absorb an imperative to control and limit: minds had already been thoroughly subdued to the idea that free enquiry and the creative arts must be subject to the higher authority of politics.’

Truly, we cannot stand being free. Mankind – humankind – loves its chains, and hastens to forge new ones if the old ones fall away.

The trouble is that people who need the rigidities, dogmas, ideologies, are always the most stupid, so Political Correctness is a self-perpetuating machine for driving out the intelligent and the creative. It is forming a class of people – researchers, journalists, particularly educators – who are exiles in their own culture, sometimes kept in inferior work, or even unemployed, and yet they are often the best, the most innovative, the most flexible.

In a certain prestigious university in the United States two male faculty members told me they hated PC but did not dare say so, if they wanted to keep their jobs. They took me into the park to say it, where we could not be overheard, as used to happen in the communist countries. Militant feminists were in charge.

In a good school in California I was taken to task by pupils for Political Incorrectness, in The Good Terrorist, which they were being ‘taught’ in class. Being ‘taught’ meant going through it to find incorrect thinking. Again, a young teacher took me aside to say she hated what was going on, and she was leaving teaching altogether, because this was what teaching had become.

In Wales I heard of a teacher, much loved by the pupils, who taught literature as it should be, out of her own love and enthusiasm, but she had been eased out of the department. Her ideas were considered old-fashioned. She was the kind of teacher of whom you hear people say: I was so lucky, I had this teacher who taught me to love books.

The sad question has to be, with this pattern so firmly established in our minds, when we do succeed in driving out the nasty new tyranny – if we do – what will replace it? The intolerances of religion were succeeded by communism, their mirror image, which set the stage for Political Correctness. What next? What should we be looking out for, what should we be guarding against?

The Forgotten Soldier, Guy Sajer (#u49eb7384-7820-5f54-a6e4-9a2ba17836bc)

This book was put into my hands by a veteran of the campaign in Burma, a particularly nasty theatre of the Second World War. ‘You’ll never read a better book about being an ordinary soldier. Pity they were Nazis.’ I read it with awe at what human beings can stand, and rereadings have not dulled my reactions. Many books are written about war, few by the men who do the bloody work. We are far here from the balanced reports of war correspondents, from the plans of generals, let alone the demented schemes for world conquest of Stalin and Hitler.

Guy Sajer, not yet seventeen, with a French father and a German mother – a First World War alliance – fell in love with military excellence, as he puts it, and joined Hitler’s armies. He then had to become all German, and fought with the German armies into and across Russia, retreated, pursued by the Russians and, starving, the only one left alive of his comrades, was advised by a kindly French officer that since his mother was German, not his father – which would have meant him becoming a prisoner – he could join the French administration supervising the collapse of Germany. The German boy, twenty years old, had to reverse his efforts to suppress his French self, was fed and clothed and rehabilitated – his body, not his mind – but not surprisingly became very ill. Which reminds me of a friend who, having survived four years of horror in a Japanese prison camp, people dying all around him of starvation and disease, arrived skeletal but healthy in England, but nearly died of a mild flu.

Could there be an apter symbol of Europe, of Europe’s mingled and mangled fates, than this young man? Or a more painfully racked person than Guy Sajer at the Victory Celebrations in Paris, which celebrated the defeat of his Germany, reciting under his breath the names of his dead comrades whose heroism was certainly not being applauded that day, and who were soon to be deliberately forgotten by the new Germany who had to find them an embarrassment?

Years ago I was told that this Guy Saje. r was living in Paris, solitary, and bitter that the men, or rather, boys – we have to remind ourselves that we are reading about 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds – had never been credited for their bravery. He has consecrated his life to bearing witness, says that as far as any personal life is concerned, he was burned out. This book could have been called ‘A Dead Man Bears Witness’. I think he would have approved. A person may flare like a match and be left a blackened twisted wraith of himself.

They started off, as young men do, high on adventure and patriotism. Sieg Heils and Heil Hitlers are recorded but not made much of. The cloudy patriotic idealism of Nazism does emerge in the speeches of officers trying to justify the war, and Sajer records that he rebuked comrades for lapses in patriotism. What immediately emerges as a major theme is that soldier’s preoccupation, food. These youths, at an age when no amount of food can ever be enough, were on rations, and it all gets worse as the war goes on and Germany frays apart: ersatz food, ersatz clothes, and the supply convoys uncertain, or not coming at all. These always hungry young men were fighting like wolves, on air, sometimes for days, then weeks at a time.

The author says that we, sitting comfortably and reading his words in safety, can never understand what he is describing. That is true. ‘I cannot find words to describe what I saw. Words and syllables were perfected to describe unimportant things.’ This plea to our imaginations repeats throughout his pages.

A comparison presents itself: Solzhenitsyn’s 1914, that account of the confusions of war, masses of men being moved about, chaos everywhere, no one knowing what is going on. These soldiers, making impossible sacrifices, urged on by officers to find in themselves yet another ounce of effort, thought they were supplying the soldiers fighting at Stalingrad, but that front had collapsed. They were being killed in their thousands to support men already dead or taken prisoner. And the tale is told again, again; when the German front was collapsing everywhere and the Russians advancing, Sajer and his mates were making efforts to retake a certain sector. Starving and in rags, they were met by starving men in rags. ‘Our shock at meeting our combat troops in such a state was equal to theirs finding us as we were.’ Two officers confer: ‘Where do you think you are going … what are you talking about … what sector, what hill? – are you dreaming? There is nothing left, do you hear me? Nothing but mass graves which are blowing apart in the wind.’ ‘You can’t be serious … you are a little light in the head and you are hungry. We, too, have been keeping ourselves alive by miracles.’ ‘Yes, I’m hungry, hungry in a way the saints could not have imagined. I’m hungry and I’m sick and I am afraid. I feel like devouring you. There were cases of cannibalism in Stalingrad and soon there will be here too.’

An account of the battle to take a position at Belgorod, ten days of fighting, which Sajer rightly says it is impossible to imagine, must surely be a classic of war. They took it and then the Russians retook it. A third of the German soldiers were killed. Futility, unless heroism is its own justification – and what else can soldiers believe, when there is nothing to show for such efforts? ‘There is no sepulchre for the Germans killed in Russia. One day some mujik will turn over their remains and plough them under as fertiliser and sow his furrow with sunflower seed.’

There are rewards of insight into the human condition which it seems the author only too painfully understands.

The famous regiment, Gross Deutschland, for which Sajer volunteered, was trained by a certain Herr Hauptman. We may have read, or seen, how raw youths in this army or that are bullied and bludgeoned into being good soldiers, but all these accounts are like the descriptions of first days in infant school compared with the regime of Herr Hauptman, which we read disbelieving. He killed four men and incapacitated others, and at the finish this sadist said he felt satisfied with his men and with himself. ‘It seems scarcely possible that by the time we left we all nourished a certain admiration for Herr Hauptman. Everyone in fact dreamed of someday becoming an officer of the same stripe.’

There is a key question that has to nag and intrude. Nowhere, not once, are Jews mentioned. Yet we know how Hitler’s armies were ordered to treat Jews. Is it likely that Gross Deutschland did not follow Hitler’s orders, or had not heard of them? There are accounts of cruelties by the German side and by the Russians. Both killed or abandoned prisoners and the wounded, sometimes their own. There are also incidents showing compassion. A starving soldier rescued a bottle of half-sour milk that was the only food of a baby, only to be killed by enraged comrades. But never a mention of Jews. What are we to believe? Yet there are surprises you would think were impossible. Throughout the Ukraine in the early days of the war the Germans were welcomed as deliverers, fed, given shelter, found girlfriends, among people who hated the communists. Captured partisans shouted that they were anti-communist and on the same side as the Germans. But here is another surprise. The Germans did not seem to hate the Popovs, the Ivans, the Russkies, as much as they did the partisans, who aroused in Sajer paroxysms of hate. They were unfair, played dirty, were treacherous and generally disgusting. No mercy for partisans, only loathing. There is no end to the sheer irrationality of – well, of us, of humans.

‘Russian excesses do not in any way excuse us for the excesses of our own side. War always reaches depths of horror because of idiots who perpetuate terror from generation to generation under the pretext of vengeance.’

The long finale of this account of every kind of excess is the retreat into Germany, before the Russian armies. No food. Uniforms in rags. One after another Sajer’s friends were killed. ‘To watch a friend die is like dying oneself.’

And in the middle of this long nightmare notes of pure farce. If Sajer and his comrades hated the partisans, they hated even more their own military police, who would appear fresh and fed to punish half-crazed men more dead than alive just emerged from days of battle – for having lost a bit of equipment.

Soldiers who had not eaten for days and could hardly stand, saw an abandoned supply vehicle and raided it. Two were hanged by the police with a label around their necks, ‘I am a thief and a traitor to my country.’

The battles to preserve bridgeheads along the Baltic and North Sea coasts so that refugees and surviving soldiers could be taken off in boats were as terrible as any that had gone before. At last Sajer was rescued and became French, repeating under his breath the names of dead comrades who by now would be old men honoured in anniversary Victory parades if the infamous history of Hitler’s Barbarossa permitted it.