Jonas David's Blog, page 11

The Third Reich of Dreams, by Charlotte Beradt

I discovered this book via an article in the New Yorker, and knew I had to read it. I quickly discovered it was out of print (1000$ for a tattered paperback on Amazon) but I was luckily able to find a PDF online. That was Wednesday night (today is Friday). Needless to say, I couldn’t put it down.

Between 1933 and 1939 Beradt gathered hundreds of dreams from the German people, and found obvious influences from the totalitarian government. About 75 dreams are described in the book.

This book is not a scientific study or analysis, and though it does go into some psychological terms, this reads more like a dream journal than anything else. And the collective effect of these dreams (which are told in a provocative order) is unnerving to say the least.

What is most striking is that the author purposefully left out any dreams about violence, torture, being chased, etc. These kinds of dreams I’m sure were had by the millions, but their meaning is so surface level that it is pointless to examine them. Even after limiting herself in this way, the patterns that emerge from the dreams the author does describe- dreams experienced by people separated by time, class, race, and any other number of differences-have so many factors in common that the similarities hardly need to be pointed out at all.

The dream that stuck with me the most was one of the first described in the book. A factory owner tells of a recurring dream he has, where Goebbels comes to visit his factory. The factory owner is physically unable to give the Nazi salute, and struggles to raise his arm. He struggles ‘for half an hour’ to raise his arm, inch by inch, while his employees stand around him watching, and Goebbels watches with ‘neither approval nor disapproval, as if it were a play.’ When the factory owner finally gets his arm up, Goebbels only says ‘I don’t wan’t your salute’ and leaves. The factory owner is unable to lower his arm, and stands there frozen until he wakes. This dream recurs over and over, with more details added. In one version of the dream, his efforts to raise his arm cause sweat to pour down his face like tears. In one, he looks to his employees for support but their faces show only complete emptiness ‘not even contempt or scorn.’ In another version, he struggles so hard to raise his arm that his back breaks.

The Nazi’s managed to control people so well that they were, for the most part, not able to resist even in their dreams. The insidious power, this kind of mind control through fear so great that people control themselves in order to escape that fear, is important to understand and recognize, so we can prevent it happening in the future.

Frost, by Thomas Bernhard

The opening paragraph of this novel is one of the best I’ve read, and is so humorous and sets the tone so well that I had to read the book.

The narrator, a young medical intern, is given an unusual assignment to stay with, and observe his superior’s brother, a reclusive painter named Strauch, and try to determine his mental state and physical well being. Our narrator easily befriends the painter, and soon comes to realize that Strauch is seemingly afflicted by all kinds of things, most notably, madness?

The story is written as a sort of stream of consciousness of notes on and quotations of the painter, as well as some descriptions and actions of other characters in the small, snowy town and inn where the painter stays. The book is also written in the same extremely negative voice as The Loser, which is over the top enough to make you laugh and smile at how ridiculous it is.

This story is not as much a story as a series of meditations and observations by a disturbed mind, notated by a young, fresh mind that is slowly being dragged into the same insanity that he observes day after day in the painter.

This book was much more dense and difficult to follow than The Loser, and I enjoyed it less. But there were so many sharp and amazing bits scattered through out, that it’s hard not to recommend it, even though it did not seem very cohesive to me.

Many memorable sections, and I’m glad this author has a lot more books for me to read.

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, by Heinrich Böll

The opening page of this novella comes with a little hint as to what the contents will be like:

“The characters and action in this story are purely fictitious. Should the description of certain journalistic practices result in a resemblance to the practices of Bild-Zeitung, such resemblance is neither intentional, nor fortuitous, but unavoidable.”

Bild-Zeitung being a popular tabloid at the time.

In the first couple pages we also find out that a journalist for The News, the fictionalized version of the tabloid, has been murdered, and who murdered them. The rest of the novella goes on to show us exactly the kind of activity that lead to that murder.

The sub title to this novella is listed as: “How Violence Develops And Where It Can Lead”

The horrible twisting of the truth, and altering of statements in order to print a sensational story that will attract readers (who cares whose life it ruins) is very reflective of the kind of trash, click-bait writing we get today, from almost every major news source in America.

This story was infuriating to read because it is so entirely believable, and might as well be the telling of a true story. The way it was written, in a sort of documentary, pulled back and sterile way, somehow made the events even more horrible.

This was a very quick and effective read, and is one more drop of evidence in the bucket of Capitalism Ruins Everything. If reporters and magazines get more money when they print shocking stories, and have zero consequences for printing lies, you can guess where that will lead…

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, by Yukio Mishima

In this beautiful and dark novel, we read about a young man’s obsession with the famous Golden Temple in Kyoto, Japan.

Mizoguchi, who is unpopular and ostracized for his stuttering, is introduced to the temple by his father, and eventually becomes an acolyte there. After seeing the temple every day, he becomes more and more enamored by its structure and beauty. It becomes, to him, a symbol of beauty itself.

Mizoguchi’s internal thoughts are so different to his exterior, and so dark and unsettling, but in a very believable way, that it made me wonder about what other such thoughts might be occurring in anyone around me. The actions he takes, while completely rational in his own mind, often seem cruel or insane from an outside perspective.

I enjoy stories of obsession, but they tend to always be about the same, tired things. I liked very much that the object of obsession in this book was not an attractive neighbor or student. Instead, our character is obsessed with a building. The temple inserts itself into his mind whenever he sees beauty in the world. Even his sexual attractions somehow become related to this temple.

This is a very strange novel, and intensely beautifully written. The beauty has floating beneath it, though, a kind of sickening undercurrent of darkness.

Highly recommended for it’s beauty and originality.

The Train Was On Time, by Heinrich Böll

In another war novel by Böll that does not feature battle or action, a young soldier, Private Andreas, boards a train and is immediately overcome with the certainty that he will soon die.

As the train rolls on, Andreas’ certainty grows, and he even begins to narrow down exactly the time and place that he will die. This unavoidable surety that his own demise is coming very soon is the entirety of the novel. Andreas notes each place that he will no longer visit, and how every line he crosses is final and irreversible. He sees the world around him shrinking as he perceives himself being carried toward his end.

“Every border has a terrible finality. There’s a line, and that’s it. And the train goes across it just as it would go across a dead body, or a live body. “

While the opening pages struck me as somewhat melodramatic, the writing in this novel is terribly subtle, and builds on itself to create an overwhelming sense of impending and dread. And as with the other Böll novel I’ve read, there are many layers beneath the surface that probably will require a reread to appreciate (easy, as it’s only a little over 100 pages.)

What really struck me, aside from the powerful tone of the novel, were the little personal memories and details that made Andreas so identifiable. He treasures, for example, a secret memory of a woman’s eyes, an unknown woman who he made eye-contact with for only a second as he marched through France. He thinks of her and prays for her every day, and imagines he can someday go back to that village and try to find her. The fantasy and desperation of this idea makes the surrounding tone of impending death even more powerful.

Give it a read, unless thinking too much about death gives you anxiety…

Vanishing

I’ve been writing (very slowly) about birds.

As I read about various birds, I’m finding that they are strange, intelligent, alien creatures living their own full, social, and interesting existence, right next to us.

The more I think about birds and other animals, the more I see our overwhelming waste of the beauty right in front of us. We treat the world and the beings in it as objects to be consumed, rather than things that exist in their own right. A bird is a moving piece of meat. A tree is uncut floorboards. An ocean is a bottomless pit for trash that also contains moving pieces of meat for us to scoop out.

And despite how much that might sound like a parody of a certain kind of thoughtless, in-the-moment greed, there are plenty of people who would agree emphatically with those statements, just as I’ve said them.

The powerful are eating the world around us.

It will be ground up, plowed over, flattened, drained, dried to dust and every bit of life swallowed. Species are vanishing by the millions, gobbled up, chewed up, bones crushed between the teeth of the rich. Forests are mowed down, burned, chipped into toothpicks and used to remove the scales of now extinct snakes like popcorn kernels from Bolsonaro and Bezos’ mouths.

Will we just watch as everything around us is systematically processed into dollar bills and human flesh?

The Silent Angel, by Heinrich Böll

I bought this based on W.G. Sebald’s recommendation, and it did not disappoint.

Set in Germany, in the weeks after the war has ended, the story follows one soldier as he wanders the wreckage, looking for food, shelter and love.

The writing is continuously subtle and deft, and the imagery almost always seems to be double sided or metaphorical.

Right from the opening scene, the soldier encounters what he perceives to be a stone angel and he notes how strong and solid it looks, like a beacon of hope among the other wreckage, but as he draws closer he finds that it is not stone at all, but cheap, tawdry plastic covered in ash. This hints (to me anyway) that the strength of the fascist army was only empty posturing hiding behind the destruction it caused.

The writing is great, and the story is sad and bittersweet. The small scraps of hope seem so far between each other, but that makes them all the more powerful.

Sebald said that this book was the best one to describe the post WW2 destruction, however it was not published until ’92, 50 years after it was written. Perhaps this is because it described things too well…

Looking forward to further books by this author!

The Loser, by Thomas Bernhard

The rambling, obsessive, internal thoughts of a bitter loser… who’d have thought they’d make such good reading?

The Loser is about three piano virtuosos who meet in their early 20s at a music school. All three have great talent, but one of them is Glenn Gould (a real piano virtuoso–this story mixes some fact in with fiction) and the other two (one of which is the narrator) quickly realize that Glenn is far far above them. There is no way they could ever be as good as Glenn.

So, they quit. They simply give up piano because they can’t be the best.

The story is not told in the way I just told it, however. The entire novel is a single paragraph. One long bitter rant about life, and about the other student who quit, Wertheimer. Wertheimer is “the loser” according to our narrator. But it is plain to see the narrator is quite a loser himself, too, no matter how arduously he justifies his actions, or tries to differentiate them from what Wertheimer did.

Both of these characters chose to do nothing instead of doing something, simply because they couldn’t be the best.

The book is written in such a bitter, hostile voice that you can’t help but laugh. It’s very humorous in a dark way. Most of Bernhard’s books are written in this voice, it seems. But despite all his books being seen as negative and death obsessed, Bernhard thinks of himself as a positive person. He says: “An idealistic literary work can produce disgust in the reader. Whoever sees through the author’s intention and recognizes that in reality things are completely different will fall back into negativity.” Bernhard feels that his ‘negative’ books should produce the opposite reaction, a sort of cathartic or ‘tragic’ laughter. I found that to be true, in this case. The negativity was so much that you had to laugh at it.

This book really struck me, along with other things going on in my life it made me realize that time is short. We really don’t have the luxury to be obsessing over perfection.

Bernhard wrote a lot of books, and I’ve already bought a second one, ‘Frost’–it’s really good in just the first few pages. Looking forward to a possible new favorite author!

On the Natural History of Destruction, by W.G. Sebald

In World War Two, 131 German cities and towns were bombed by the Allies, and many were entirely destroyed, leaving over seven million homeless, and 600,000 dead–twice the number of all American casualties in the war. The subject of this book is to ask, given the sheer scope of this destruction, why did rarely any German writers describe it in fiction? Why does this destruction seem to have been erased from Germany’s ‘cultural memory’?

The first half of this book is composed of lectures Sebald gave in 1997 in Zurich, and as everything Sebald writes, they are stunning, upsetting, moving, and memorable.

While I had learned of the horrors of the Holocaust in school, I never learned much about the retaliation against Germany. The firebombing of all these German cities, while not a nuclear wiping out like Hiroshima, was just as horrifying in a different way.

Sebald describes the burning of these cities, and the aftermath–the thousands of rotting bodies under the rubble, the maggots and flies, the charred corpses littering the streets in the hundreds–in such an unflinching and straightforward way, that it is not hard to believe that the surviving populace chose to block these memories completely from their minds and to only look forward toward rebuilding.

Only three novels, so Sebald says, even try to accurately describe the experiences of surviving these bombings. And the one that does it best was not able to be published until 50 years later (The Silent Angel, by Heinrich Boll, which I’ve now purchased)

Like all of Sebalds books, he focuses on the properties of memory. In this case, how does the mind deal with traumatic events? It seems, he says, that an entire culture chose to excise this memory. Not only because of the horror and humiliation of it, but because thinking about it or examining it would also require thinking about the events that led up to it. And that, as anyone can imagine, is also hard to do.

The second half of the book is made up of three essays on three writers. By the end, you’ll see why Sebald chose those three, and the progression from the first to the third. There is always a subtext in Sebald’s writing that is just as enjoyable as the words themselves.

I highly recommend this to anyone interested in WW2, or history in general. But be warned, some parts are very difficult to read.

The influence of Dostoevsky

I’ve been reading The Idiot, and the same as with Crime and Punishment, I am now seeing its influences on everything.

I will share just one example, early in the novel. Prince Myshkin, the protagonist and titular ‘idiot,’ is a very open and guileless person, which leads many people who encounter him to doubt his mental health. While waiting to be admitted to a house see someone, he begins chatting in a very open and personal way with the doorman–someone of much lower social standing than himself.

Myshkin talks of an execution he witnessed, and the effects it had on him. He goes into great detail about how he feels the death penalty is torture–more so than any physical torture because while someone is in agony they have no ability to think or worry of anything but that instant in time. On the other hand, a person sentenced to death must spend every moment knowing that the inevitable end is approaching. Every day one thinks ‘in one week I will be dead’ then ‘in one day’ then ‘in one hour’ then ‘in three more streets I’ll be arriving at the guillotine’ then ‘in three more steps i’ll have to lay down’ and on and on, until the final instant when you hear the sound of the blade being released, all of this without any hope, all of it completely inescapable and final.

Myshkin thinks that this is a kind of psychological torture, far worse than any physical torture, and I identify heavily with that sentiment.

This sort of description of an impending execution is very familiar to me in two other books I’ve read.

In one, The Stranger by Albert Camus (Camus, coincidentally, has a quote on the back of my copy of The Idiot) the character Meursault is sentenced to death, and has similar thoughts about the inevitability of his execution, the hopelessness of it, being worse than the actual idea of dying itself. He fantasizes about his executioners using instead a combination of chemicals that would kill a man only nine times out of ten, or even ninety nine out of one hundred times–because then at least there would be hope.

The second book, Invitation to a Beheading, by Nabokov, is entirely about a man waiting his own execution. Contrary to The Stranger, this man has no idea when his execution will be, and spends a large portion of the book trying to find out. Without knowing, he feels, he can think of nothing else, plan nothing else, take no action. However once he learns the date he realizes that not knowing was a luxury. In the final pages of the book his trip to the guillotine echo how Myshkin imagined such a trip would be, and I can not help but believe this was, if not a direct homage, then heavily influenced by Dostoevsky.

I’m sure other such influences abound, and I’m sure I will continue to have fun spotting them!