4 Sunday, August 9, 1970 1954-55 They had made no arrangements for that Sunday, under the expectation that Brigitte would be in the throes of her period. In the last five years, since that mysterious condition that struck her when he turned thirty and lasted for eight months, her bleeding had become more copious than before, and while Dr. Severs had told her that there was no longer anything to worry about, and had only prescribed iron supplements to help stave off anemia, she did tend to become quite tired at that time of her month, especially during the first two or three days. But her cycle had also become somewhat irregular, and on that morning there was no sign of blood yet. They took advantage of the delay by lingering in bed. Frau Schmidt, as usual, had the day off. In the midst of their activities in bed they could hear her movements downstairs, preparing a breakfast buffet for them before leaving the house for the day, to visit either Ingrid or Klaus. Miki was not reminded of Ora until he began sipping his juice, freshly made by Frau Schmidt from Israeli oranges, at the breakfast table. He was pleasantly surprised by the fact that thoughts about his daughter, or her mother, had not intruded during his morning time with Brigitte. It had been quite different the night before, when Ora and Nili were on his mind even as he was kissing his wife with all the passion he could summon. And during the night, the old dreams about Nili made a return visit after a long absence. As he was facing Brigitte across the table, he wondered again if the decision to postpone telling her about Ora was the correct one, but he quickly convinced himself once more that it was. The weather outside was sultry. The aroma of roses from their garden entered through the open windows of the kitchen. “We haven’t made any plans for today,” he remarked as he ran the wires of the egg slicer through a hard-boiled egg. “It’s just as well,” she answered with a happy smile. “We had a nice unplanned morning. And I would like to do some more reading.” “The mystery script?” he asked. She answered with another smile, this time a mysterious one. Then she added, “You’re looking rather mysterious yourself. I’m thinking that there’s something you’re not telling me.” It was uncanny how she could read him. “But don’t tell me about it till you’re ready,” she went on. “That way we’ll be even.” *      *     * For Miki Wilner, the summer of 1954 brought him his first experience of world travel. It included the classic inconclusive shipboard romance: aboard the Gripsholm, one of his tablemates was a French Canadian student named Louise, a few years older than he, who took a liking to him at first because he spoke French, and soon began to flirt with him overtly. Almost out of politeness, he flirted back, but his flirtation was held in check by the constant presence of Brigitte on his mind. That he allowed himself to do it at all was because there was no opportunity to go beyond flirting, since they were both in tourist class and shared cabins with others. But when they got to Halifax they spent the night there, in the same hotel, before taking the same train the next day, he to Montreal and she to Quebec. The opportunity was there, but he chose, consciously or not, to take no advantage of it. In New York, where he spent three days, he did the obligatory sightseeing: the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Museum. The talk that he heard, when it was not about the amazing exploits of a baseball player named Willie Mays, was about the recently concluded Army-McCarthy hearings. The people who talked to Miki about it, except one, all agreed that Senator McCarthy had been exposed as an opportunist, a bully and a liar, and were happy with his fall from grace. The exception was an elderly Ukrainian waitress in a restaurant on the Lower Eastside, who still saw him as a crusading anti-Communist hero. “Makarti, he great man, he fight Communist,” she said to Miki as she served him his borscht, which was cabbage-green, not beet-red as he had expected. While he was on the Eastside he visited the area around Delancey Street, where the shopkeepers spoke hardly anything but Yiddish. From one such store he bought three pairs of jeans for ten dollars, each of a different make: Levi’s, Lee and Wrangler. They were to become his everyday wear for many years to come. But by the time he was on the Liberté, surrounded by French chatter, his mind was focused completely on the upcoming reunion with Brigitte in Paris. And that, indeed, was the climax of the journey. Her hair was still in the Minna von Barnhelm style when she stepped off the train at the Gare du Nord. He had been imagining her the whole time that he was away, even while keeping company with Louise, but he was still not prepared for the beauty that faced him, or the overwhelming feeling of love that invaded him. It filled him with wonder that he, an orphan of the Second World War, could be so happy. His first question after breaking from the long embrace was, “Did you get my postcards?” “Yes,” she said, “all three. From Halifax, Quebec and Montreal.” But he had sent four. “And New York?” he asked. “No, we haven’t received that one yet, at least as of yesterday.” “It must have gotten on a slow airplane,” he said with a laugh. “How are Leon and Fela doing?” she asked, after he took her suitcase from her and they began to walk out of the station. “Fabulously,” he said. “They live in a beautiful villa – at least we would call it a villa, they just call it a house – with other rich Jews. You know, my uncle Leon, the old socialist, who just barely survived the war, with his health broken and nothing but scraps of clothing on his back – I had no idea how rich he became. It turns out that just after the war, when there was no coffee to be had in Germany, and the people were willing to trade anything for a cup of real coffee…” “I remember very well,” she said. “Leon, with a few partners, found a way of smuggling coffee in from Holland, and they all got rich very quickly. He wasn’t sure what he would do in Montreal, but he found that there was demand for high-quality coffee, so he got into coffee importing, and now he has his own brand, Café Lion, with a picture of a lion on the package. The result is that he told me that I never need to worry about money, that if I need anything expensive I should just call him collect and he would pay for it. So we will start out by staying at the Ritz…” “You’re joking,” she said. “You’re right,” he said. “I wouldn’t know how to behave at the Ritz. But I found us a very nice, cozy little three-star hotel near the Louvre, and the Palais-Royal, and the Comédie-Française…” “The Comédie-Française? Can we go?” “I already have tickets for tomorrow night, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme with Louis Seigner. Tonight we will see a film called Le Carrosse d’or with Anna Magnani. She plays the star of a touring theater company…” She laughed and kissed him again just as they reached the taxi stand. The driver took Brigitte’s bag from Miki and placed it in the trunk while Miki told him where to take them. “So,” he asked as they sat in the backseat, holding hands, “how did this touring-company star do?” “Fabulously,” she echoed him. “I will show you the reviews.” His concern, then, had been unwarranted. Things must have improved since the rehearsal that he attended. They spent more time in Paris than he had originally planned, taking in the sights and gorging on French food. September was coming to an end, and, since they were both due shortly at their respective places of study, on the return trip they barely had enough time, in Brussels, to see the Grand-Place and the Manneken Pis – who turned out to be much smaller than they had believed – between trains, and in Cologne the cathedral. They lingered at the Hanover station, where Miki let two Göttingen-bound trains go by before he finally boarded one, after a farewell kiss. They would see each other again in a few days, in Bad Harzburg, but as Miki’s fifth train of the day – there had been a change at Dortmund – neared Göttingen, he knew that he was coming to the place that would now be his home. *      *     * He was back at his desk. He quickly looked over the four pages that he had completed and thought about some changes he might eventually make, but continued on page 5. Nevertheless, the contradiction between the mass-man and the mass-movement fanatic is more apparent than real. In any society, after all, the fanatics are the exception. Even when Hitler was elected Chancellor by a majority of Germans, the true Nazis were a minority. And when the whole population of a village, for example, is somehow stirred to fanatical action, it is normally only for a short time, before – as we usually read – “cooler heads prevail.” But it is precisely in a modern mass society that the mass-man, when he becomes dissatisfied with the “asphyxiating monotony” of his life, is likely to join a modern mass movement as molded by modern mass media, and thus become a fanatic or “true believer” à la Hoffer. Such fanaticism can rightly be called modern fanaticism. It therefore behooves us to consider present-day fanatical movements that differ from this mold and that in some ways are more reminiscent of the older forms of fanaticism as practiced by minority sects (such as the Zealots in Judaism, the Assassins in Islam, and any number of them in Christianity). We may call such a form of fanaticism postmodern. He now had a title. He would call the essay Postmodern Fanatics. He wrote the words in ink in the space that he had left on the first page. What is most characteristic of such movements is that the fanaticism with which the belief is held is typically of greater importance that its precise content, illustrating McLuhan’s now-famous dictum that “the medium is the message.” The credo itself may not be much more than a slogan: “Death to [...]!”; “Freedom for [...]!”; “[...] is great!” What matters is the intensity with which the slogan is internalized, an intensity that is sufficient to engender action. Indeed, it can be said that the vagueness of the beliefs is compensated by the zeal with which they are held. Page 5 was done. But this was no time to stop. As an example, let us consider the “anti-nuclear” movement. Let me state at the outset that I am as opposed as anyone else to nuclear weapons. Nothing about my alma mater has made me prouder than the Göttingen declaration that was issued when I was a student there. But lately voices have been raised under the same “anti-nuclear” banner in opposition to nuclear power plants, with threats – not yet carried out, but imminent nonetheless – to attack such plants physically. Now, one may oppose nuclear power on technical or environmental grounds, but it cannot be denied that its use will lessen the world’s dependence on petroleum and thus help avert petroleum-inspired conflicts such as the Suez Crisis. Equating nuclear power with nuclear weapons is, from a logical point of view, not very different from the Nazis’ equation of Jewry with Bolshevism, or the Stalinist equation of Jewry with capitalism. We thus see that even a fringe movement with no aspiration of becoming a mass movement – or at least not, since it has limited itself to a single issue, a totalitarian mass movement – can resort to propaganda techniques not unlike those of the latter. If we consider an anti-nuclear activist as an example of the postmodern fanatic, then he is a curious blend of Ortega’s mass-man and Hoffer’s true believer. Like the former, he has only a vague set of ideas that he wishes to impose. Like the latter, he holds these ideas very deeply. He thus combines two contradictory features of “modern” man, and it is just such combinations that contemporary cultural critics (Leslie Fiedler in literature, Robert Venturi in architecture) have characterized as postmodern. This is going well, he thought. Let me think of another example, and then try to generalize. The distant barking of a dog got him typing again. Another possibility of postmodern fanaticism in a seemingly noble cause is brewing in the area of animal rights. Some scholars at Oxford have been laying a new theoretical groundwork for such a movement. One of them has coined the term speciesism (I will refrain from commenting on the linguistically shoddy construction of the term), analogous to racism, as something that such a movement might be against. Under a banner of “rights for animals” I can foresee the possibility of referring to, for example, a cattle-raising farmer as a “speciesist swine,” thereby dehumanizing him and making him a potential target of guerrilla action. Six pages done. He was averaging, thus far, two pages, sixty-odd lines, a day, the equivalent of a regular newspaper article. *      *     * At German universities, the semester adheres literally to its original Latin meaning of ‘six-monthly,’ and so in an academic year, the first or winter semester runs from the beginning of October to the end of March, and the second or summer semester from the beginning of April to the end of September. In practice, the winter semester’s classes typically go from mid-October to some time in February, with a midwinter break around the New Year, and the summer semester’s go from some time in April (always after Easter) to some time in July. Miki Wilner’s first semester at Göttingen, consequently, spanned Brigitte’s and his twentieth birthdays, hers at the beginning and his at the end. Helga gave a birthday party for Brigitte, and a few of their high-school classmates who were still in the area attended. Renate came too, though without Jürgen, and the strained relationship between the sisters dampened the festivities. Afterwards Brigitte declared to her mother and to her boyfriend that she did not want any more birthday celebrations. Soon the semester got underway. All of the subjects that Miki was interested in pursuing were given in the philosophy faculty: history, German literature and philosophy itself. In order to study all three he would have to choose one of them as his major subject and the other two as minor subjects. But German literature was only a part of German studies, and to have this as a major subject would require studying another part – linguistics or medieval studies – as well, something that did not interest him. It was similar with history: he was interested in modern history, not ancient or medieval. With philosophy, on the other hand, he felt no such limitations. Indeed, he could not imagine how one could understand Spinoza, Kant or Hegel, let alone Russell or Wittgenstein, without studying Plato and Aristotle. And he could study logic and metaphysics, ethics and epistemology, aesthetics and political philosophy. The choice of his program of studies thus made itself, and the fact that all three subjects were given in the same faculty would make its administration easier. At some point, he was told, he would have to decide which of the two minor subjects would be the first and which would be the second; the main difference was that, in the second minor subject, no written intermediate examination would be required. *      *     * In the afternoon Brigitte, in a sleeveless polka-dot dress and sandals, was back in the garden with her script. Miki wondered if there were any garden scenes in the plot, since Brigitte liked to learn her parts in surroundings that resembled those of the action. He walked out to the garden with her, and it did not escape his notice that she held the script’s binder in a tight grip. He kissed her just before she sat on the bench and he walked back to the house, but when he looked back at her before opening the back door he saw that she still had not opened the binder. She flashed him a knowing smile. Ah yes, secrets must be kept. The words that he was going to type were forming in his mind even before he sat down at his desk once more. Let us generalize a little bit. What do the anti-nuclear and animal-rights movements have in common? A fanatical belief in a noble cause, of course, and the fact that the cause is one of opposition to some practice of society at large that the movement regards as evil. But, just as importantly, that the evil must be seen as vague and ominous. If it is precisely defined, then opposition to it is usually held rationally. For example, the aforementioned movement of abolitionism, which led the opposition to Negro slavery in the United States, was a highly rational one, led by moderate religious and literary leaders; the extremist group led by John Brown was very much an exception to the rule. Conversely, an opposition to some generally perceived immorality of the society is likely to generate a fanatical movement. If the immorality is seen as the flouting of a divinely inspired code, then the movement becomes one of religious zealotry, such as the one led by Savonarola, or, in recent years, the Muslim Brotherhood, especially the radical faction led by Sayyid Qutb. While the Islamic concept of “jihad” is represented by some Muslims as a struggle that is an inward, spiritual one, or, if outward, a peaceful one, according to Qutb such struggles are only preliminary phases to a holy war on behalf of Islam. And if, as is currently rumored in the Arab world, the mainstream leadership of Muslim Brotherhood decides to renounce violence, radical jihadist movements will undoubtedly be formed. There goes Wilner with his predictions, he said to himself. But they had been successful for him. Don't mess with success, he had heard Americans say. He now had a little over six and a half pages done, and the rest of the essay seemed clear. He had touched on fanatical Islam. He would go on to discussing the various radical leftist splinter groups, and then fanatical nationalism. He would lastly show how these elements tie together in the fanaticism that is fueling the conflict in Palestine. For the most part, however, society’s evils are nowadays more likely to be described in Marxist rather than religious terms: they may be ascribed to bourgeois morality, or the contradictions of capitalism, or rapacious imperialism. Consequently the movements that rise up to oppose them tend to see themselves as Marxist. A Marxist perspective allows one to subject any social evil, however vaguely perceived, to a detailed theoretical analysis that helps mask the vagueness of the perception. The analysis also enables the movement to tack on an additional label such as Leninist, Trotskyist or Maoist. Page 7 was done. He was getting close to the probable halfway mark. Not bad. He felt the need to stretch his limbs. He stood up and walked over the window that looked into the garden. Brigitte was absorbed in reading her script. In her usual way, she would glance at a page and then lift her head without actually looking at anything, not mouthing her lines but acting out her part in a way that showed on her face. They had been living in this house with its cozy garden for only two years, so that he had had only a few opportunities to observe her in this way, and he cherished this one. Eventually she would notice him spying on her and flash him a mock-angry expression, but that, too, was worth the wait. At one point she put the binder on the bench beside her, stood up and walked around in a small circle before she sat again. Before picking up the script again she made some subtle gestures, whose significance he did not capture, with her hands. She still had not looked at the window where he was standing. Perhaps she knows that I’m here and doesn’t want to acknowledge me, he thought. And the more he thought about it, the surer he became of it: hardly anything ever escaped Brigitte’s notice. Finally she seemed to have finished her reading session. She closed the binder at looked at him directly, her smile telling him that of course she had known all along that he was there. Of course. He returned to his desk, turned the typewriter off and walked out to meet her. Her shoulders, only minimally covered by the straps of her dress, were calling him to kiss them. *      *     * Because he managed to see Brigitte about two out of three weekends, either in Bad Harzburg or in Hanover, Miki found himself, during the week, free of the distractions that affected most of his fellow students (for the males, mostly drinking and chasing girls) and able to concentrate on his studies, which, in the first semester, consisted mainly of introductory lecture courses; there were only two proseminars, one on Socrates in his major subject and one on the French Revolution in modern history. He always had been somewhat of a grind, and there was not much in Göttingen to change his nature. Occasionally he would go to a concert or a film with a group of students, typically ones with whom he met in the mensa and not necessarily classmates, and have a beer with them afterwards in one of the old city’s many taverns. By the end of the semester he realized that he was learning his subject matter with the greatest of ease, earning grades between 1 and 2 on his written work, and that he had made a few friends that he could have fun with. When Helga proposed to give a twentieth-birthday party for him as well, he invited them to Bad Harzburg. At the party, however, Brigitte’s glowing beauty and the overabundance of schnapps that Bruno had provided got to be too much for two of the friends, who got rather rowdy – including lewd remarks to Brigitte – and had to be driven by Bruno to the railway station. Rather than renouncing birthday parties altogether, however, Miki proposed to Brigitte that they wait till they were twenty-five for the next such occasions. And so was born their pact of celebrating only those birthdays whose numbers were multiples of five. *      *     * After dinner Brigitte took time to make some telephone calls, including the usual Sunday evening call to her mother. Occasionally, depending on what Helga had told her about Renate’s life, she would call her sister. Miki could always tell when such sisterly calls had taken place, because Brigitte’s mood suffered visibly in consequence of them. She would tell him a little of what they had talked about, but in a neutral way, with no indication of what, specifically, might have irritated her. Invariably there was something about Renate’s daughters, and Miki speculated that Renate talked about them too much, flaunting her motherhood in the face of Brigitte’s barrenness. Whenever she spoke about the matter directly, Brigitte never expressed any regret over not having children. On the contrary, she professed to see only the positive side of her childlessness: that having children would disrupt her work, to which she was passionately devoted; that her body would lose its shape, especially her breasts (which, as she well knew, Miki found magically perfect); that her life with her husband would lose its spontaneity. Miki saw no reason to doubt her sincerity in these pronouncements, and came to believe that her irritation with Renate was due to her sister’s self-righteous style, not the substance of their conversation. On this occasion no such irritation could be discerned. Evidently Brigitte had called only her mother and, probably, some friends in her profession. After some more reading by both of them they played a leisurely game of chess, which ended in a stalemate (as it most often did). They went to bed with Brigitte giving every indication that she was still ready for action.