Barbaric Document

Saturday, May 10, 2008

March and Rally for Palestine 10 May 2008

Photos from today's London March and Rally for Palestine. The march assembled on the Embankment between Waterloo Bridge and Temple tube station and set off at 2 p.m. By 3 p.m. it was half way down Whitehall. It ended in Trafalgar Square. Weather-wise it was VERY HOT.


















































































































































































































































































































































Sunday, August 06, 2006

The Blindness of Aharon Appelfeld

Aharon Appelfeld (Translated from the Hebrew by Aloma Halter), The Story of a Life. Hamish Hamilton, 2005.

The Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld is a writer who journalists approach with deference and admiration. “He is someone you immediately want to tell things to; beneath the jaunty peak of his sailor's cap, his sea-blue eyes gleam with inquiry,” gushed Hephzibah Anderson, writing about The Story of a Life and her meeting with its author (Observer, 21 August 2005), adding breathlessly: “When he speaks of writing, he gestures like a magician pulling a rope of silk scarves from deep within himself.”

Reviewing the book in the Guardian (Saturday September 24, 2005), Lisa Appignanesi was similarly paralysed by admiration for the man and his memoir:

Like a series of luminous paintings discovered in the darkness of a vaulted church after the bombs have fallen, this memoir evokes a wonder which is on the other side of language. Its scenes need to be contemplated, tasted, savoured.

In the Independent (23 September 2005), Carole Angier concurred, asserting: “Primo Levi read him ‘with awe and admiration’. So will you.”

Well, speak for yourself Carole. I think myself that Appelfeld is at best an interesting minor novelist. When I read Badenheim 1939 I found it a crushing disappointment – thin, one dimensional and heavy handed in its use of irony and metaphor. Designating it a ‘Modern Classic’ as Penguin Books do strikes me as more a marketing ploy than an informed literary judgement. I don’t think Appelfeld has ever truly freed himself from two of his dominant literary influences (Kafka and Camus) and the range of his interests and sympathies strikes me as being far too narrow to make him a great writer. However, evaluating a living writer is always a subjective exercise. For more enthusiastic responses than my own see Spurious and Waggish. Waggish supplies links to some very interesting interviews, which I shall cite in the course of this essay. My purpose here is not to rate Appelfeld’s fiction but to focus on his memoir. The deference accorded to Appelfeld seems to me quite illuminating when contrasted with, say, attitudes to Peter Handke and his politics.

The critical reception of The Story of a Life is itself very revealing of the Orientalist impulse in Western intellectual life. In Britain, the only remotely critical note sounded anywhere came at the end of Theo Richmond’s review in the Sunday Times (11 September 2005):

Is this slim book of 198 pages the story of a life? In essence, yes, but there are some curious gaps. The boy escaped from “an accursed camp”. Which camp? How did he escape? Appelfeld’s mother was murdered, but what became of his father, last seen on a forced march? On one page, he refers to himself as an orphan, so it was baffling to read in a Jewish paper that his father survived the Holocaust and was reunited with his son in Israel. Of the writer’s marriage, wife and family, not a word. This is a humane and moving memoir, but has the author taken reticence too far?

But if Appelfeld is indeed reticent about large areas of his life, so, too, are those who write about him. The first thing that struck me, even before I’d started reading the book, is the lie in the first sentence of the author blurb: “Aharon Appelfeld has lived in Israel since 1946”.

No he hasn’t.

Israel didn’t exist in 1946.

Aharon Appelfeld arrived in Palestine in 1946. Apart from a perfunctory reference to Palestine (p. vii), it’s a fiction reiterated by Appelfeld himself (“1946, the year I came to Israel”, p. 107, repeated p. 109 and p. 127, together with “the moment I arrived in Israel”, p. 111).

Palestine was, of course, wiped off the map in 1948 by armed Jews. The difference between 1946 and the violent annihilation of Palestine and its majority Arab society by Jews in 1948 is a crucial one, but is not registered by two of the reviewers I’ve quoted. Theo Richmond carelessly loses three years when he says of Appelfeld that “In 1949, the mentally scarred loner sailed for Haifa to start a new life”. For Carole Angier, Appelfeld’s postwar existence is telescoped into “A brief rebirth in Italy; then new life in Israel”.

What is written out of history in Carole Angier’s lazy formulation is, of course, the 1948 Naqba – the catastrophe – the erasure of Palestine and the forcible eviction of its population. It’s a very common erasure by those who are either ignorant of the twentieth century history of the Middle East or who have a vested interest in promoting the Jewish supremacist state. Thus the website of The Holocaust Teacher Resource Center states that “[Aharon Appelfeld] immigrated to pre-state Israel in 1946.”

Any formulation will do to avoid the word “Palestine” – a rhetorical strategy designed to muffle the historical reality of Jews as ethnic cleansers and bellicose aggressors. And of course it is almost never remembered that one-third of the Zionist army in 1948 comprised Holocaust survivors. The Holocaust survivor as a racist thug, a murderer or a rapist, is not a figure you will ever encounter in Western constructions of the Jewish identity or historical experience.

In Chapter 16 of The Story of A Life, Appelfeld dramatises a scene on the ship in which he sailed to Haifa in 1946. It’s a poignant account of a five year old Jewish girl, an orphan. One leg has been amputated. The child smiles. Asked about her past she says all she remembers is the rain. Repeatedly she mentions the rain – nothing else. It’s a short, poetically charged chapter which eloquently adumbrates many of Appelfeld’s central themes, both as a novelist and autobiographer - the suffering of a child, the way in which the human mind negotiates the residue of unspeakable horror, the struggle to articulate such horrors in words, and the friction existing between Jews who are survivors and all, literally, in the same boat. And little Helga is also clearly a kind of surrogate of Appelfeld himself, then fourteen years old, his mother murdered, his father lost. But it’s an artful, polished chapter. It may be based on a real incident but it’s surely a novelisation of it rather than a literal rendering. It’s improbable Appelfeld could exactly remember dialogue overheard in 1946. The girl’s eloquently dramatised refusal or inability to tell a larger story is clearly a kind of metaphor for Appelfeld’s own memoir.
If it wasn’t for the large woman who pesters the child, demanding to know her story, the chapter would risk the charge of sentimentality in its portrayal of a brave, angelic child amputee. It ends:

Helga sat on the lap of the man who had adopted her. The light returned to her face. She moved her lips, muttering softly. The man took her small hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed it. “Soon we’ll reach Palestine,” he said. “There we’ll have a house and garden.” (p. 97)

It’s a perfect emblem of Appelfeld’s profound moral complacency that he clearly neither intends nor is capable of perceiving even the smallest possibility of irony in those last two sentences. When the ship docked, he arrived at the Arab port of Haifa in 1946 – or as he blandly puts it, “Israel” (p. 109). And then?

Between the years 1946 and 1948, I was in the Aliyat Hano’ar Youth Movement, and between 1948 and 1950, I was an apprentice at the agricultural school founded by Rachel Yana’it at Ein Kerem (sic), on the outskirts of Jerusalem. (p. 118)

The name Ein Karem probably means nothing at all to European and American readers of Appelfeld’s acclaimed memoir. Palestinians have a different perspective. “Before 1948, Ein Karem was known as the most beautiful of all the Jerusalem villages.” That year, during the Naqba, its 3,000 Arab inhabitants were forcibly evicted by Jewish thugs. The village was then repopulated “in its entirety” by Jews, none of Middle Eastern origin. The Church of John the Baptist was closed down. The two mosques were closed down. None of the Arab inhabitants of Ein Karem was ever permitted to return. Today Ein Karem is a home for “wealthy Israeli professionals seeking a relaxing life in a beautiful village.” (Mariam Shain, Palestine: A Guide [2005], p. 342)

If we want to learn what happened in the Arab city of Haifa – Appelfeld’s “Israel” – we need only turn to Ghassan Kanafani’s long story “Returning to Haifa”, with its account of how its Arab population was driven out in 1948 by Jewish terrorists. It is a reasonable speculation that Appelfeld has never read it. He has never shown the slightest interest in any other perspective about his homeland other than that of Judaism. And where exactly was Appelfeld during the height of the Naqba? He doesn’t say. Palestinian suffering has no existence for Appelfeld: his gaze is inward. “The years 1946 to 1950 were years of verbiage; when life is full of ideology, words and clichés abound. Everyone talked.” (p. 123)

But those were years of something more than just talk:

In early 1947, Jews owned 7 per cent of the land in Palestine; three years later, they had seized 92 per cent of land within the new state, including Arab homes and buildings of every kind. …this constituted a colonial occupation on a scale, and with a speed, without precedence in colonial history.

(John Rose, The Myths of Zionism [2004], p. 149)

When the first great phase of ethnic cleansing ended in January 1949, 90% of the Palestinian population of what became Israel was living in refugee camps in the Jordanian occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Gaza.

Joel Gordon, reviewing Lawrence Davidson’s America’s Palestine, comments that Davidson… writes of the disregard for the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine as “a form of ethnic cleansing on the conceptual level”.

Gordon thinks this idea is “provocative” but it seems to me that Appelfeld’s memoir is a perfect example of that proposition. Appelfeld says, “We had come to Israel, as the saying went, ‘to build and to be rebuilt.’ (p. 116) That the building of the Jewish state was done on stolen property is a matter of complete indifference to Appelfeld: he completely erases Palestine and its indigenous population from his self-serving memoir. He continues with a reference to “the ideological complacency that sought to make me into a man of narrow horizons, which I refused to be.” (ibid) In the context of his Orientalism the smug tone of self-congratulation is remarkable.

No one in the West would use the word “holocaust” without an awareness that that word now carries a specific historical resonance. But Appelfeld uses the word “catastrophe” (e.g. pp. 185, 187, 189) as if it had no resonance at all in the land in which he has spent most of his life. The Story of a Life is, at a foundational level, a work of Naqba denial.

The parallels between the lives and writing of Aharon Appelfeld (born in 1932) and Ghassan Kanafani (born in 1936) are loose but striking. When they were children, their societies were shattered by brutal, racist occupying forces; forced into exile they had to reconstruct their lives and became novelists and intellectuals. Their creative impulses are drawn from a lost childhood world and societies on the brink of being extinguished forever. But Kanafani was exiled and then murdered by the Jewish state with which Appelfeld unequivocally identifies.

Heidegger has commonly and quite reasonably been charged with being blind to his own blindness, but it’s a charge which should also be levelled against Appelfeld. Indeed, Aharon Appelfeld supplies a perfect example of the moral corruption of modern Judaism in its Zionist incarnation and of the reluctance in Western intellectual life to confront that corruption. The (un)critical reception of The Story of a Life testifies to an enduring Orientalism which is blind to Appelfeld’s own pernicious and extreme brand of Orientalism.

Appelfeld is completely silent about the Naqba. It seems unlikely he played any active role in it but it seems equally unlikely he can have been aware that his new existence in Israel was predicated on the expulsion of the majority Arab population. With a characteristic lack of irony (shared by his admiring reviewers) Appelfeld describes how in the 1950s he was a member of the New Life Club, which among other things “arranged memorial services for small towns and remote villages that had been wiped out during the war”. (p. 184) But the society which piously remembered the lost villages of Europe was itself responsible for destroying 531 Arab villages and 11 urban neighbourhoods, as well as seizing entire cities like Haifa.

Bypassing this crucial period, which saw half of Palestine’s population turned into refugees, Appelfeld writes only of himself. He describes how little formal education engaged him during his years at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1952-1956:

I wanted to return to the orchard. The quiet orchard that changed with each season now seemed to me like a spring of blessing. I loved the hours I spent there alone, plowing and harrowing the soil, spraying the insects, watching for the fruit to ripen in the spring and for the leaves to fall in the autumn, and then pruning the trees in winter. (pp. 146-7)

This is the lyrical expression of a memory; it is at the same time classic Zionist propaganda. It erases from history the question: whose land, whose orchard? Such questions do not trouble Appelfeld.

In setting out the Zionist blueprint in The Jewish State, the slippery Theodor Herzl never once mentions Arabs, in John Roses’s words “as though they did not exist” (op. cit., p. 95) But Herzl was well aware of their existence, and was also well aware that their deportation was an essential requirement of the establishment of a Jewish supremacist state.

Like Herzl, Aharon Appelfeld self-servingly blanks out the existence of Palestine and its Arab population. He mentions a friend, a fellow Holocaust survivor, who now owns a factory and “has a house in Herzliyya and an apartment in Jerusalem” (p. 178); what’s more there is “a large library in his home. He is interested in philosophy, literature, the arts, and medicine” (p. 179). Like Amos Oz, Appelfeld gives us an image of cultured and sensitive Israelis; all that is missing is the material conditions of that culture – property and land theft, institutionalised sectarianism, state violence, massive injustice. Appelfeld is completely blind to his own position as the privileged beneficiary of sectarianism and discrimination; his conscience is unstirred by pitiless repression taking place just a short distance from his agreeable existence.

When Appelfeld does mention Palestinians at all, it is from the viewpoint of Zionism. Interviewed by the Boston Review (December 1982), Appelfeld asserted that “The Zionist movement began around a hundred years ago. Then Palestine was a waste – rocks and hills and sand. Very under-populated by Arabs.”

Those last two sentences are just as much odious self-serving rubbish as the notion that the world is run behind the scenes by a secret conspiracy of Jews or that the number of Jews who died in the Shoah has been exaggerated, or that they weren’t gassed but died of illness. But such is the power of Orientalism within Western culture that, while Peter Handke is demonised for his pro-Serbian sympathies, Appelfeld’s extremist views attract no attention, let alone even the faintest whisper of criticism.

Appelfeld’s suggestion that late nineteenth century Palestine was a “waste” containing a handful of Arabs scratching a living in the dirt is ludicrous. By 1880, for example, more than 30 million oranges were being exported to Europe from Palestine every year. John Rose cites the case of the Jewish writer, Ahad Ha-Am, who visited Palestine in 1891 and who wrote that it was “difficult to find fields that were not sown” by Arab peasants. The racist fiction that Palestine was ‘a waste’ is comprehensively debunked in Chapter Five of Rose’s book.

Appelfeld’s assertion, prompted by the sympathies of his interviewer, that Zionism’s involvement in land struggles and territorial rights “was not and… is not” part of the original plan is chutzpah on a truly gargantuan scale. It is as indifferent to historical truth as it is to the central role played by sectarian land law in establishing and sustaining a Jewish state. In Israel 94.5 per cent of all land is now administered either directly by the state or by Zionist institutions, on behalf of Jewish citizens only. Appelfeld’s hardline Zionist beliefs register the moral blankness at the heart of his concept of Jewish identity, or what he has blandly called ‘the complex of Jewish existence’.

Appelfeld transmits the aura of the Holocaust survivor, so he is always treated very deferentially by European and American journalists. And of course in a central way his story is a remarkable one: a child surviving off his own wits after the murder of his mother and separation from his father. His reinvention of himself as an intellectual and a leading Israeli novelist who spurned the German language and learned Hebrew is a striking achievement. But it is an achievement with a dark side, which is that of his complicity in the sectarian project known as the Jewish state. Appelfeld’s complicity is present in his role as a soldier involved in its wars, as an academic and intellectual, and as a prominent novelist happy to promote his views on the politics of the Middle East through the medium of newspaper and magazine interviews. He is also, in a very small way, a state asset.

Appelfeld’s opinions play less well to a Palestinian intelligentsia. He once remarked, ‘What is happening here in Israel has to wait fifty years before becoming literature.’ This drew a retort from Mourid Barghouti, the Palestinian poet excluded by the Israeli state from his homeland because of his race and his religion:

The Holocaust has been written as a novel, as poetry, as music, as theatre – as everything – in the Fifties and Sixties. It didn’t have to wait fifty years to be written. Israel has been established for fifty-six years and the West Bank has been occupied for thirty-seven years. They have been occupiers for thirty-seven years and that’s not long enough to look at themselves and see what they have become? Where exactly is their human gaze directed?

(Both quotations from Ahdaf Soueif, Mezzaterra [Bloomsbury, London, 2004], p. 332.)

In the case of Aharon Appelfeld the only reply to Barghouti’s question is surely: inwards and backwards. Appelfeld has no interest in or sympathy for Palestinians. He is pitilessly ignorant of the Other and pitilessly indifferent to their experience or their writing. Palestinians have no existence for him, other than as a threat to his beloved version of Judaism. Appelfeld, like Zionists generally, is incapable of constructing Israel as anything other than a victim, or criticism of Israel as stemming from anything other than the same kind of virulent anti-Semitism which he witnessed as a child. Everything, for Appelfeld, is simplistically framed by the Holocaust.

In 2004, pressed by an interviewer from the Israeli paper Ha’aretz, Appelfeld complained:

there are not yet trains from Jenin to concentration camps in the Negev. There are no smokestacks. Yet, the Guardian and Le Monde feel the need to draw that comparison every day. To say of the Jews that they are a little like the Nazis. Not exactly Nazis, just a bit. When I see that, I say that there is something very deep in European civilization: the need to demonize us runs very deep.

But his claim that every day the Guardian compares Israel to Nazi Germany is preposterous. His ridiculous and paranoid notion that contemporary Europeans have an innate need to demonise Jews simply recycles the traditional Zionist line that all critics of Israeli sectarianism and human rights abuses are secret anti-Semites. Generalising about Europeans is as fatuous (and in its own way as Orientalising) as generalising about any other large, diverse body of people (Americans, say – or even Israelis). For Appelfeld, Israel is the only true representative of Judaism: in The Story of a Life he speaks of “a Jewish world that had renewed itself in the Land of Israel” (p. 155) (the upper case used in “Land” signifies, I think, Appelfeld’s sense of Israel as sacred Jewish territory – another device which extinguishes the vulgar reality of stolen property).

Chapter 27 of The Story of a Life describes Appelfeld’s IDF service in the Yom Kippur war, when, as he blandly puts it, “I found myself stationed alongside the Suez Canal”. The chapter describes the relationship between Holocaust survivors and the younger generation. It ends:

The three days that I spent with that unit not only brought me close to the young soldiers, but also gave me a deeper insight into my own life. As in every war, there hovered above us a sense of fate hanging in the balance. Who knew what awaited us?

The voices of the soldiers became more lighthearted and jovial toward the end of my stay. The cease-fire appeared to be holding. I found it hard to part from this unit of young people on whose shoulders rested the fate of a people welcome neither in Europe nor in this part of the world. As different as the struggle was here, it was, nevertheless, the same ancient curse pursuing us.

It’s amazing that Appelfeld gets away with this tosh. The origins of the Yom Kippur war lay in Israel’s refusal to withdraw from land it had occupied in 1967. On the Arab side it was a war of liberation against a bellicose Zionist state which, not for the first time, had invaded and occupied land outside its own borders. Egypt and Syria hoped to “force the superpowers to intervene and put pressure on Israel to withdraw” (Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World [Penguin Books, 2000], p. 319)

Appelfeld’s reduction of the war to the “ancient curse” of anti-Semitism is characteristic of his attitude to all modern Middle Eastern history. As far as he is concerned the clock stopped in the early 1940s. Europe is a hotbed of anti-Semitism. The Middle East is a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Israel represents world Jewry. Israel is hated because it is a Jewish state.

As an alibi for Zionism it’s so threadbare it’s barely worth engaging with.

Let’s also consider his cited example of Jenin. In mentioning this refugee camp of 15,000 residents, Appelfeld was clearly alluding to events there two years earlier. In the words of a fellow Israeli academic with a far more humane grasp of these events than Appelfeld:

What did clearly happen in Jenin [in 2002] was that the Israeli forces simply ignored the fact that there were an unknown number of civilians in the areas that they attacked day and night with missiles from Cobra helicopters and demolished with bulldozers, in order to clear the way for the invading tanks. No one came to execute these people individually; they were crushed and buried under their bombed or bulldozed homes. Others died of their wounds in alleys, or cried for days under the ruins, until their voices faded away.

(Tanya Reinhart, Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948, Seven Stories Press, New York, 2002)

Reinhart cites the case of the A Sha’abi family, crushed alive in their house by a giant Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer; their nine bodies were recovered six days later when the Israeli army withdrew.
Not as bad as the Holocaust? True, obviously. But as a response, surely a coarse and inhumane one.

The crimes of the Israeli state against Palestinians, though enormous, are self-evidently not on the same scale as those of the Third Reich’s crimes against European Jews. And it’s perfectly true, as Appelfeld suggests, that Zionism is not a genocidal project. Exterminating the world’s Arabs has never been its dream. In that the distinction with Nazi Germany is crystal clear.
It is however true that Zionism has always, from its origins, been quite consciously about seizing land and expelling an indigenous population to make way for a sectarian Jewish state. Its leading thinkers and activists have all been racists, with an ingrained loathing and contempt for Arabs. A genocidal impulse has always been inherent in Zionism and Israel may yet carry out an atrocity on a scale which dwarfs past massacres of Arabs by Zionist Jews. These are truths about which Appelfeld, as a man who all his adult life has benefited from his privileged existence as a member of the master religion in an ethnically-cleansed land, is completely in denial.
The entire history of Israel can only be understood in the context of the Zionist desire for land, the expulsion of non-Jews, and the creation of a sectarian state where citizenship would be defined not by birth but by religion. It is this last factor which makes Israel unique.

David Hirsh of the anti-boycott group Engage says: Zionism is not racism. Zionism is Jewish nationalism and it is not fundamentally different from other forms of nationalism. But this is quite untrue. Zionism is fundamentally different to nationalism. To be Jewish is to belong to a religious group, not a national group. All nations except Israel define citizenship by birth, not religious identity. Travellers who land at an Italian airport are not divided into two queues – Catholics and Other Religions. If you are born in Italy to a non-Catholic family, the state does not discriminate against you and make you a second-class citizen who is forbidden to buy land. Therein lies a central difference with the sectarian Jewish state. Zionism is a Jewish supremacist ideology and Israel, like its founding ideology, is inherently chauvinist. Israel is institutionally sectarian and substantially, though not exclusively, racist (it imports black Jews from Africa to maintain its demographic superiority over its Arab population). Israel defines citizenship by religion with the same rigour that the Third Reich defined citizenship by race. Israel is a corrupt and sectarian democracy, born out of sectarian violence and terror, democratic only by virtue of expelling the majority Arab population and then maintaining an artificial Jewish demographic superiority.

*

No one could possibly blame Appelfeld for the way in which he ended up in Palestine as a bewildered and damaged teenager. Appelfeld’s focus on the Holocaust is understandable but it completely disables his understanding of events in the land of his exile. He is a man who emigrated to the Middle East from Europe and, sixty years later, finds no discomfort at all in remarking, "I am not familiar with the Arabs. For me they are an abstraction.” The complacency in that remark is stupefying. Appelfeld cannot rely on the Holocaust to shield him forever from the implications of his subsequent role as a soldier in the IDF, as an academic, and as a novelist and intellectual.

But Appelfeld’s complacency is protected by other intellectuals of an Orientalist cast of mind. In his Introduction to the Penguin edition of Badenheim 1939, Gabriel Josipovici says, “Today [Appelfeld] lives in Israel, devoting his time to writing, after spending thirty years teaching at the University of the Negev.” Let’s give that educational institution its full name: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. David Ben-Gurion was a leading Zionist and Israel’s first prime minister. His history is well documented. Let’s leave aside Ben-Gurion’s complicity in attempting to cover up the Qibya massacre in 1953 (69 innocent Arabs, two thirds of them women and children, murdered by an Israeli army unit led by a young major called Ariel Sharon) or his central role in creating Israel’s nuclear arsenal or the fact that

Ben-Gurion had surprisingly little knowledge of Arab culture and Arab history and no empathy whatever for Arabs…Ben-Gurion could not conceive of a multi-ethnic society, embracing Jews and Arabs. (Avi Shlaim, op cit p. 96)

In a civilised society all of these factors might be thought something of an impediment when considering a suitable candidate after whom to name a university. Yet in one sense what could indeed be more apt than “Ben-Gurion University of the Negev” because, as Ben-Gurion wrote in 1937, “Negev land is reserved for Jewish citizens whenever and wherever they want. We must expel the Arabs and take their place.”

The Negev is a highland region which comprised slightly more than one third of historical Palestine. Ben-Gurion’s ethnic cleansing fantasy was a kneejerk response to the Peel Commission Partition Plan of 1937, which recommended that the Negev remain under Palestinian rule since it was an exclusively Arab region. Prior to 1948 the Negev was inhabited almost entirely by semi-Nomadic Palestinian Bedouin tribes; the major urban centre of population was the town of Birsheba.

In 1948 Ben-Gurion’s racist dream came true: the entire Arab population of Birsheba was driven out by the Zionist army (one-third Holocaust survivors, let’s again remember) and the Negev was almost completely emptied of its indigenous population, leaving behind just 11,000 Bedouin.

It’s important to note that the ethnic cleansing continued long after the war of 1948. In the 1950s the Israeli army forcibly moved the remaining Bedouin into a restricted area outside Birsheba. This was done to steal the good agricultural land they owned and push them on to inferior land. The Bedouin were “Confined to a space less than 10 per cent of the area of the land they had formerly possessed” (Hussein Abu Hussein and Fiona McKay, Access Denied: Palestinian Land Rights in Israel [Zed Books, 2003], p. 114).

As a Professor of Hebrew Literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Appelfeld enjoyed an academic career spanning three decades amid the ruins of the comprehensively annihilated Palestinian society which once existed there.

When Appelfeld says there are no concentration camps in the Negev he is wrong. There are no death camps but there are
detention centres which are essentially no different to Dachau in its early years. These are political prisons where Arab prisoners are brutalised by racist Jewish guards and where children are forced to sign confessions written in Hebrew, a language they do not understand. Appelfeld’s blindness to their existence is reminiscent in its own modest way of Heidegger’s indifference to the death camps.

Historically, the blatant sectarian discrimination against the Bedouin in the Negev did not cease in the 1950s. The expropriation of Bedouin land in the Negev and the eviction of Bedouin homes as part of a forced relocation policy continued throughout the period of Appelfeld’s tenure as an academic at Ben-Gurion University and continues to this day. And while the Bedouin were forced bit by bit into as small an area of land as possible, the land they formerly owned was seized for more and more Jews-only agricultural villages, settlements and farms.

Palestinians who have resisted moving to “development towns” for Arabs are deemed to be living in “unrecognized” zones and their hamlets and villages are denied electricity, running water and municipal services by the Israeli state. The Negev is a place where ethnic cleansing has been continuing over half a century and where an indigenous Arab population has been subjected to forced relocation and the denial of basic services.

Appelfeld’s evident indifference to the sectarianism and
ethnic cleansing underpinning his agreeable existence as an academic is reciprocated by Gabriel Jospivici, who finds it appropriate in his Introduction to allude to TS Eliot’s anti-Semitism but whose bland reference to Appelfeld’s long tenure at the University of the Negev omits to note either its history or the telling reality that this institution, with hundreds of academics, has just three Arabs on the faculty. (“Israeli universities are among the most open and anti-racist spaces in Israel. They have large numbers of Arab students and teachers,” asserted the Zionist apologists over at Engage in a recent letter in the Guardian opposing the Natfe academic boycott. They were lying.)

‘The World of Aharon Appelfeld’ was the title of the University of Cambridge’s 2003 conference, attended by Josipovici and speakers from Ben-Gurion University, Bar-Ilan University (targeted by pro-Palestinian AUT activists because it has expanded on to Palestinian land) and The College of Jude and Samaria in Ariel, a college built unlawfully on Palestinian land. Quite appropriately, among the subjects up for discussion were those of detachment and silence.

Aharon Appelfeld is also, famously, a citizen of Jerusalem:

I’m writing mainly about Jewish fate. Jerusalem, I would say, is the heart of Jewish history. So I cannot imagine myself being a Jewish writer and not being in Jerusalem. It is not a question of it’s noisy, it’s not noisy. It is not a question of politics even. I’m a Jewish writer, I’m living amongst my people, and I’m trying to understand the complex of Jewish existence. So where can a Jewish writer live?

"It's worth remembering that Zionist founder Theodore Herzl wasn't interested in Jerusalem," says Waggish, in the course of his account of Appelfeld’s novels. Well, yes, it’s true that Herzl didn’t have the fixation on the Middle East that other Zionists did, and the Jewish state might conceivably have ended up devouring Argentina or Uganda instead of Palestine. But Herzl knew full well that the Jewish state involved taking over land currently occupied by non-Jews and then expelling them, a task which he advised should be carried out ‘discreetly and circumspectly’ (Greg Philo and Mike Berry, Bad News from Israel (2004), p. 3)

Theodor Herzl visited Jerusalem in 1898 and dreamed of turning the city over to Jews. His dream was expressed in the characteristically racist language of Zionism:

The musty deposits of two thousand years of inhumanity, intolerance, and uncleanliness lie in the foul-smelling alleys… If we ever get Jerusalem and if I am still able to do anything actively at that time, I would begin by cleaning it up. I would clear out everything that is not something sacred, set up workers’ homes outside the city, empty the nests of filth and tear them down, burn the secular ruins and transfer the bazaars elsewhere.

In other words, get rid of the dirty Arabs. Herzl’s racist vision was duly implemented and Arabs now form only a minority of the city’s population. Arab citizens, currently about one-third of the city's residents, get only 12 per cent of its welfare budget, even though their poverty rate is more than double that of Jewish residents. They get 15 per cent of the education budget. A stunning 98.8 per cent of the city’s budget for culture and art goes to Jews. Overall, the Arab share of the services' budget is under 12%, meaning a four-to-one difference in spending per person between Jews and Palestinians.

When Appelfeld says, “I’m a Jewish writer, I’m living amongst my people, and I’m trying to understand the complex of Jewish existence” what he is blind to is his own privileged status in a sectarian society. Jerusalem's Jewish population, who make up about 70% of the city's 700,000 residents, are served by 1,000 public parks, 36 public swimming pools and 26 libraries. The estimated 260,000 Arabs living in the east of the city have 45 parks, no public swimming pools and two libraries. "Since the annexation of Jerusalem, the municipality has built almost no new school, public building or medical clinic for Palestinians," says a B'Tselem report. "The lion's share of investment has been dedicated to the city's Jewish areas."

Palestinians in East Jerusalem, often the city of their birth, are not considered citizens but immigrants with "permanent resident" status, which, some have found, is anything but permanent. In the old South Africa, a large part of the black population was treated not as citizens of the cities and townships they were born into but of a distant homeland many had never visited. "Israel treats Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem as immigrants, who live in their homes at the beneficence of the authorities and not by right," says B'Tselem. "The authorities maintain this policy although these Palestinians were born in Jerusalem, lived in the city and have no other home. Treating these Palestinians as foreigners who entered Israel is astonishing, since it was Israel that entered East Jerusalem in 1967."

Fleeing from Europe, Appelfeld regarded German as “a language drenched in the blood of the Jews.” He blocked out the possibility of writing in German and reinvented himself as a Hebrew writer: “You see, it would be not only a paradox, it would be tragic, to write in the language of the murderers. Just to think about it is enough to stop it.”

It’s a dubious concept, I think, blaming a language for the crimes committed by those who speak it. Shakespearean English was also the language of those who committed atrocities against the Irish. American English is the language of torturers and war criminals but also the language of poets and novelists. Paul Celan’s response to the Shoah seems to me far more effective than Appelfeld’s: he chose to confront the culture which destroyed his family in its own language. He became the leading post-war poet who wrote in German. He made Germans aware of his suffering through their own language and culture.

Appelfeld’s differentiation between guilty German and innocent Hebrew is a deeply ironic one, in the light of the history of Israel. Who nowadays could deny that Hebrew is now also the language of racism, mass killing, atrocity and a sectarian state? Hebrew is a language drenched in the blood of Arabs.

Uniquely, Jean Genet witnessed occupying troops who were Nazis and occupying troops who were Zionist Jews, and what he saw was not the guilt of German and the innocence of Hebrew but identity. Jean Genet was in Paris in 1939-45; he was also in the Lebanon during the 1982 Israeli invasion. There is a telling moment in his book Prisoner of Love (1986) in which he describes his shock at seeing that “The road signs between Beirut and Baabda were in Hebrew”. It reminded Genet of that earlier occupation:

Arriving in Beirut from Damascus and seeing those signposts at the crossroads was as painful as seeing Gothic lettering in Paris during the German occupation.

The Hebrew language “induced a sense of unease”:

Not only did this writing belong to the enemy – it was also an armed sentry standing over the people of Lebanon.

Worse than unease, Hebrew produced “nausea”. Hebrew seemed to express the very essence of the bellicose Jewish state and the misery it had inflicted on the Palestinians:

the letters were separated by immeasurable spaces filled with several layers of time – a time as dead and incalculable as the space between a corpse and a living eye looking at it. In the space between each Hebrew letter, generations have been born and spread abroad, and its silence shattered us worse than bullets and bombs.

(Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, Trans. from the French by Barbara Bray [New York Review Books, 2003], pp. 310-311)

Ironically, the sectarian discrimination which defines the Jewish state in which Appelfeld so fervently believes is also evident at the most basic level of language. To Edward Said, Hebrew supplied a tangible expression of the Jewish supremacism that underpinned the condition of Israel:

It seems to me therefore absolutely crucial to achieve some kind of real normalization, where Israelis can become part of the Middle East and not an isolated sanctuary connected to the West and denying and contemptuous and ignorant of the Palestinians. One sign is that wherever you go in Israel, the road signs are written in English and Hebrew, There’s no Arabic. So if you’re an Arab and you can’t read Hebrew or English, you’re lost. That’s design. That’s a way to shut out 20 per cent of the population. So it’s very important for Israelis to be forced intellectually and morally to confront the realities of their own history.

(David Barsamian and Edward W. Said, Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said [Pluto Press, 2003], p. 21)

Aharon Appelfeld’s The Story of a Life, and the interviews he gives to journalists, show all too clearly that even some of Israel’s finest writers and intellectuals refuse absolutely to confront their own history. Appelfeld, like the majority of Israelis, perceives Israel as a victim. He is a Naqba-denier, narrow in his sympathies, oblivious and indifferent to the Other, using phrases like “to erect walls” (p. viii) and “working the land” (p. ix) without a trace of understanding of what such terms mean to dispossessed Palestinians brutalized by sectarian Jews. He describes The Story of a Life as “a description of a struggle” (p. viii) but he is oblivious to the material conditions which allowed his reinvention, blind to the struggle of those who have an equal right to justice.

Appelfeld is clearly as incapable of understanding his own blindness as Heidegger was, which raises the question: what is to be done? Well, it would be nice for once if journalists challenged this old man’s complacencies, but somehow it’s hard to see that happening.

At the level of culture the challenge is to those who have directly suffered at the hands of the barbaric, sectarian state which Appelfeld has foolishly aligned himself with. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Palestinian intellectuals are now fluent in Hebrew, as result of being incarcerated as political prisoners in the Israeli Gulags. What one of them needs to do is write a masterpiece in Hebrew which forces Zionist culture to acknowledge the Other in the way that Celan forced German culture to face up to the truth of his experience. To write in Hebrew and to write better than Appelfeld; that, at the level of culture and humanity, is one challenge for the victims of Zionism.




Sunday, March 12, 2006

The Complicity of Paul Celan

Two pieces of writing define the poet Paul Celan’s relationship with the philosopher Martin Heidegger. One is his inscription in Heidegger’s guest book, which translates as: “Into the Hütte-book, while gazing on the well-star, with a hope for a word to come in the heart / July 25 1967”. The other is his famous poem ‘Todtnauberg’. Both pieces are reasonably interpreted as obliquely alluding to Heidegger’s relationship with the Nazis. Celan evidently hoped for some kind of acknowledgement of error on Heidegger’s part – an acknowledgement which Celan, as a Holocaust victim, was surely entitled to expect.

Notoriously, Heidegger kept his silence. Heidegger, delighted by ‘Todtnauberg’, seems to have been oblivious to the poem’s inner meaning and its verbal and historical resonance. At the end, Celan wrote of ‘die halb- / beschrittenen Knüppel- / pfade im Hochmoor,’ [‘the half-trodden log-paths through the high moors’]. But as John Felstiner notes in his fine critical biography Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (1995), “in an explosive wordplay, Celan’s term for ‘log’ (Knüppel) also means ‘bludgeon.’ Translating Night and Fog he had used that word for death camp prisoners “ ‘bludgeoned awake’ at 5 a.m.”

The meeting between Heidegger and Celan is both legendary and enigmatic; it is invariably defined from Celan’s perspective. How could it not be? Celan (1920-1970), an East European Jew whose first language was German, is generally regarded as the the major European poet of the period after 1945. His best known poem is “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”), which is probably the finest poem to emerge from the Holocaust. It originated in Celan’s personal experience. During the Nazi occupation of Romania, Celan came home one morning to find that his parents had been taken away. His father died of typhus in a concentration camp; his mother was shot. Celan himself was made to do forced labour in the Romanian camps, but survived. In 1948 he settled in Paris, where he remained until his death, apparently by suicide.

And yet to my mind there is a curious absence in a book such as Felstiner’s, which is Paul Celan’s own complicity in oppression and injustice. It is even more curious bearing in mind that the year in which Heidegger and Celan had their famous encounter is also the year which brings out in Celan’s writing an obtuseness which surely, at some level, parallels that of Heidegger.

Felstiner notes that in 1967 Celan had started to insert Hebrew words into some of his poems. He concludes that “Celan’s poems with Hebrew in them, especially with Hebrew ending them, trace a meridian of Diaspora yearning.” (p. 240) He relates the enigmatic poem “Ziw, jenes Licht”” (“Ziv, that light”) to the deteriorating situation in the Middle East: “By the date of this poem, 10 May 1967, Syrian raids and shelling had been met by Israeli air attacks, terrorists had struck the Galilee, and Nasser’s Egypt was threatening in the south.” (p. 241) Celan then wrote a poem ‘Denk dir’ (translated by Hamburger as ‘Think of It’ and by Felstiner as ‘Just think’) which appears to be a direct response to the Six Day War.

THINK OF IT

Think of it:
the bog soldier of Massada
teaches himself home, most
inextinguishably,
against
every barb in the wire.

Think of it:
the eyeless with no shape
lead you free through the tumult, you
grow stronger and
stronger.

Think of it: your
own hand
has held
this bit of
habitable
earth, suffered up
again
into life.

Think of it:
this came towards me
name-awake, hand-awake
for ever,
from the unburiable.


This is Paul Celan’s poem ‘Denk dir’, taken from the dual language edition published by Penguin Books in 1990, translated by Michael Hamburger. In his critical biography, John Felstiner translates the title as ‘Just think’.

It’s a cryptic, elusive poem, like most of Celan’s verse. Felstiner carefully unpicks the historical and literary threads of the poem, interpreting it as a response to the Six-Day War and to Israel’s victory. The “you” of the poem is the Jewish people. The poem is being about the Jewish “homeland” and the Jewish people. “Now free, they go from strength to strength”, as Felstiner puts it (p. 242). Felstiner notes that an early draft of the poem carried an echo of the words “yad vashem”, which is Hebrew for “hand and name” and the name given to Israel’s Holocaust memorial. Felstiner glosses the last word of the poem as follows: “Finally, Celan’s word ‘unburiable’ fuses the two halves of one idea: Jewish victims who could not be buried and their spirit that will not.” (ibid)

Felstiner supplies the background to the poem. He describes how the Six-Day War broke out, “stirring him to an unambiguous poem. Starting on 7 June, when Jerusalem’s Old City was regained, Celan worked closely on it for two days at the clinic. His title ‘Denk dir’ registered the jolt that Jews everywhere felt”. (ibid) Celan felt an urgency about this poem: it was published straightaway in Zurich and twice in Israel’s German-Jewish press. Celan sent it to the German-born Israeli poet Natan Zach, who published a translation in Israel’s main daily paper. Later in the year it appeared in Germany, and it was the final poem in his next collection Fadensonnen (“Threadsuns”, 1968).

If Felstiner is right, in this poem Celan conflated Jewish identity with the Jewish state. It seems a plausible interpretation. The Jewish “home” is Israel; it is a refuge which has now been “inextinguishably” achieved against “every barb in the wire” – not just Nazi genocide but also, perhaps, Arab aggression. The Jewish people have come “through the tumult” – again, both Nazi genocide and wars with Arabs – and “grow stronger and / stronger”, in the shape of the victorious Jewish state, “this bit of / habitable /earth”.

If Felstiner’s interpretation of the poem is correct – and I see no reason to quarrel with it– it seems to me it indicates an imaginative failure on Celan’s part. Paul Celan was not a Zionist, and preferred to live in Paris rather than anywhere else, but in conflating Jewish identity with Israel and telescoping the Holocaust and the Six-Day War he produced what is surely in essence a Zionist poem. Like most of Celan’s output, ‘Denk dir’ is an oblique, elusive work. But John Felstiner’s plausible reading both of the poem and its context makes it clear that ‘Denk dir’ is, implicitly, under its abstractions and ambiguities, on the side of Israel, and hence of imperialism and sectarian persecution – though Felstiner is incapable of perceiving it in those terms. That the author of “Todesfuge” should be capable of such a poem is, I think, interesting, and worthy of discussion.

What particularly intrigues me are the lines

this bit of
habitable
earth

If I have understood the poem correctly Celan means, in one sense at least, Israel. If he does mean this, then I think the reader is entitled to feel disgust. Firstly, because this land was land stolen by brute force. In 1948, the year Israel was artificially created, no more than 7 per cent of Palestine was owned by Jews. The remaining 93 per cent was held by indigenous Palestinians. Secondly, having stolen more than half of that land the Jewish state then set about seizing the rest, using a pitiless violence steeped in racism and sectarianism – a process which has continued up to the present day. Today only 3 per cent of land in Israel is owned by Palestinians, a land theft of quite staggering proportions. That theft was not simply accomplished by force, however. An essential component was the sectarianism built into the Jewish state. By definition, it exists to promote and prioritize its Jewish citizens.

This is the corrosive legacy of Zionism and the Jewish state to the history and culture of modern Judaism: that Jewish identity must be conflated with the bellicose, blood-drenched, pitilessly sectarian state of Israel. That coarse identification is taken for granted by Felstiner, whose own Zionist bias is revealed when he speaks of the origins of ‘Denk dir’: “Starting on 7 June, when Jerusalem’s Old City was regained, he worked closely on it for two days in the clinic.”

Jerusalem’s Old City “regained”?

*

In the Zionist version of history, Jews in the Middle East are always the victims, never the oppressors. It’s worth looking again at Felstiner’s version of the origins of the 1967 war: “By the date of this poem, 10 May 1967, Syrian raids and shelling had been met by Israeli air attacks, terrorists had struck the Galilee, and Nasser’s Egypt was threatening in the south.”

In reality, Felstiner’s account of what was happening in the Middle East at this time is a meretricious, self-serving one. Israel had signed up to a demilitarized zone (DMZ) between itself and Syria. In the words of Ahron Bregman in his book Israel’s Wars: A History Since 1947 (Routledge, 2003), “The Israelis – who had signed up to this arrangement voluntarily rather than under a Diktat – later regretted this, and attempted to regain control over these lands by provoking the Syrians and then taking advantage of military clashes to expand control over the DMZ.” (pp. 65-66) Israel was the bellicose aggressor, not Syria. What Felstiner is referring to by “terrorists had struck the Galilee” is puzzling. None of the standard histories mentions guerrilla activities in early 1967; perhaps he is alluding to attacks by Fatah on Israeli water pipes in 1965. If so, the word “terrorist” is fairly meaningless in this context, since Fatah guerrillas were legitimately resisting the colonisation of their land by an army of occupation, and their actions were no different to those of the French resistance in the Second World War. The theft of Palestinian water resources by Israel has always been a central aspect of the conflict, though rarely if ever mentioned by the media.

What caused the 1967 war? In his book The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (Penguin, 2001), Avi Shlaim concludes: “Israel’s strategy of escalation on the Syrian front was probably the single most important factor in dragging the Middle East to war in June 1967” (p. 235).

Finally, Felstiner says that “Nasser’s Egypt was threatening in the south.” But this again plays down the reality of Israeli aggression. In 1967 Egypt was in the sphere of Soviet influence. Nasser was firmly told by the Russian prime minister Alexei Kosygin not attack Israel: “Should you be the first to attack you will be the aggressor…we are against aggression…we cannot support you.” (Cited Bregman, p. 82) The USA was not so scrupulous. Israel was informed by the CIA that the Americans would welcome it if Egypt was attacked. When the Israeli delegate to Washington, Meir Amit, told the Secretary of Defense that he would recommend to the Israeli government that an attack be launched, Robert MacNamara replied: “I read you loud and clear.”

The surprise Israeli attack on Egypt, Jordan and Syria which occurred on 5 June 1967 happened with the advance knowledge and enthusiastic support of the USA and Britain. The extent of British complicity is revealed in Jeremy Bowen’s book Six Days (2003). Shiploads of armoured vehicles, munitions and other weaponry sailed from Felixstowe in Suffolk, where U.S. military police guarded an arms dump. Israeli transport planes ran a shuttle service out of RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire. The Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had agreed to help Israel, but insisted that “the utmost secrecy should be maintained.” Arms for Israel poured in from the USA. In the surprise attack that followed Israel duly wiped out the air forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. With complete air superiority, Israel had no difficulty in defeating the land armies of those states. 12,000 Egyptians died in the Israeli offensive. The result was the occupation of the entire Sinai peninsula, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

In short, Felstiner’s book is both classically orientalist and Zionist in its attitudes.

*

Felstiner’s complacency becomes particularly acute when he describes how in 1969 Paul Celan visited Israel for the first time. Celan made a speech to the Hebrew Writers Association in Tel Aviv on 14 October, in which he said:

I have come to you in Israel because I needed to.

As seldom with such a feeling, I have the strongest sense, after all I’ve seen and heard, of having done the right thing – not for me alone, I hope.

I think I have a notion of what Jewish loneliness can be, and I recognize as well, amongst so many things, a thankful pride in every green thing planted here that stands ready to refresh anyone who comes by; just as I take joy in every newly earned, self-discovered, fulfilled word that rushes up to strengthen those who turn toward it – I take that joy during this time of growing self-alienation and mass conformity everywhere. And I find here, in this outward and inward landscape, much of the force for truth, the self-evidentness, and the world-open uniqueness of great poetry. And I believe I’ve been conversing with those who are calmly, confidently determined to stand firm in what is human.

Celan enjoyed himself in Israel. He said he was “happy to have lived so intensively, more intensively than for a long time… I’m already thinking of coming back.”

Felstiner comments, “Celan was also struck by the memoir a veteran Israeli writer had given him and by how, during Arab attacks on Jews in pre-state Jerusalem, Christians put crosses on their doors for immunity.” (p. 268) Felstiner adds: “Celan wrote to this writer of his ‘anxiety for Israel’.”

And that’s the only way in which Arabs are, very briefly, registered in this book. Aggressive Arab nations make trouble for the Jewish state which is obliged to defend itself. Arabs attacked Jews in pre-state Jerusalem – for reasons not given. In the index of Felstiner’s book you will find 36 references listed under “ant-Semitism” (together with the recommendation to ‘See also Nazism; Neo-Nazism’). But “Palestinians” are not listed; nor is “Arab” or “Arabs”.

As far as I can tell (though there is a vast commentary on Celan in German which has not been translated into English) Paul Celan seems to have had no perception at all of Israel as a chauvinist sectarian state founded on the violent persecution of the indigenous population. The dogged anti-Zionist Mark Elfrecently defined the basic problem of the Jewish state:

Israel exists on the basis of three things: colonial settlement, ethnic cleansing and racist laws. As far as I know it is the only state that exists on that basis. Now recognising Israel's right to exist recognises its right to those three things.

As far as I can tell, Paul Celan lacked the insight of Marek Edelman, recently cited by Elf:

Why did Marek Edelman remain in Poland [after the Second World War) as a doctor when almost all his Jewish political colleagues and people close to him personally left? Edelman used to come, now and then, to Israel, to see old friends, but no one had ever publicly asked him this question, though he had a very good answer: he didn’t like the idea of the ‘new nation’. In fact, Edelman was always very critical not only of Israelis’ attitude to the Holocaust, but also of more sensitive issues – such as our racist laws of citizenship. In a late interview he told a Polish journalist: ‘Israel is a chauvinist, religious state, where a Christian is a second-class citizen and a Muslim is third-class. It is a disaster, after three million were murdered in Poland, they want to dominate everything and not to consider non-Jews!’

Celan is the great poet of the Holocaust and one of his central themes is that of loss – one of his greatest poems is ‘Aspen tree’, about his dead mother. But as far as I’m aware Celan seems to have had no perception that the invention of a Jewish state involved the ruthless sectarian persecution of a people, who also suffered and who also experienced loss. Paul Celan happily accepted the privilege of travelling to Israel, because of his identity as a privileged member of the master religion.

Celan’s complacency needs to be contrasted with what happened to to the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti. After Israel invaded and occupied that rump of Palestine known as the West Bank in 1967 it forbade native Palestinians abroad the right of return to their homeland. It did so for no other reason than racism and the basic ambition of the sectarian Jewish state of combating democracy by artificially maintaining a Jewish majority. The demographic problem was initially dealt with in 1948 by expelling the Arab majority; it was perpetuated in 1967 by the simple device of refusing to re-admit Arabs who lived in the newly occupied territories and who happened to be outside them when the Israeli army took control.

As he describes in his memoir I Saw Ramallah (2004), Barghouti found himself stranded in Cairo. He was not alone. In his words, Israel forbade “hundreds of thousands of young people to return. And the world finds us a name for us. They called us zaiheen, the displaced ones. Displacement is like death. One thinks it happens only to other people. From the summer of ’67 I became that displaced stranger whom I had always thought was someone else.”

And Paul Celan? His personal knowledge of sectarian persecution and displacement was as bitter as anyone’s can be. But he could only perceive Jews as victims, not as racists and persecutors. There was, apparently, not a glimmer of knowledge or understanding of the plight of someone like Mourid Barghouti who, like Celan, became a poet out of his experience of persecution.

Visiting Israel, Celan enjoyed his sectarian privileges as a Jew. Though a total stranger to the Middle East, he was a welcome guest in Israel. While Celan read his poems to admiring audiences, Barghouti was exiled. Barghouti, a native, was banned from his homeland. Barghouti was prevented from going to the places where a foreign Jew like Paul Celan could travel freely. And Barghouti, after 29 years of being excluded, found himself, on his return visit, still persecuted: “The others are still masters of the place. They give you a permit. They check your papers. They start your files on you. They make you wait.”

Mourid Barghouti was born in 1944. In 1996, briefly, he was permitted to return to the land from which he had been excluded in 1967. He was able once again to view the room in which he was born, “four years before the birth of the State of Israel”. He revisited the sites of his younger days. The wood at al-Nabi Saleh, for example. But now everything was changed. “Israel seized the wood and large tracts of the lands surrounding it. It built houses and brought in settlers. The road leading to the wood – like all roads leading to the settlements – is closed to Palestinians and for the use of the Israelis alone.”

On his visit to Israel in 1969, Paul Celan gushed about his “thankful pride in every green thing planted here that stands ready to refresh anyone who comes by”. Anyone? No, not anyone. Celan’s complacency and ignorance is stupefying. Here, he reminds me of nothing so much as a gullible West European Communist in the 1930s, visiting Stalinist Russia and discovering there a workers’ paradise.

Mourid Barghouti’s experience was rather different. On his return to Ramallah he saw that “There is less green now since Israel has been stealing the water since 1967”. The pitiless theft of Arab land and Arab water has always been a central feature of Zionism and the sectarian state it gave birth to. So, too, has the denial of access to water to Israeli Arabas. Even today, 80,000 Israeli Arabs are deliberately denied access to clean drinking water and sanitation. They are forced to rely on contaminated water. Children contract hepatitis and die. And yet Paul Celan, blind to the chauvinism and racism of the Jewish state, could see only delightful and refreshing greenery.

The issues of land and water, touched on by Celan in his poem and in his speech, remain every bit as relevant to day as they did in the late 1960s. Referring to the withdrawal of Jewish colonialists from Gaza, Mustafa Barghouti (no relation to the poet) noted [‘The Truth You Don’ Hear’, 9 January 2006 AL-AHRAM Weekly Online]:

Israel had already exhausted the water resources in Gaza by tapping the flow of underground water east of Gaza resulting in the seepage of seawater into Gaza’s coastal aquifer and through the over-pumping of the existing aquifer by Israeli settlements. As such, Gazans have been left with brackish water resources that cause high rates of kidney failure. The maximum accepted level of chloride in drinking water, as set by World Health Organisation standards, is 250 mg per litre. In most areas of Gaza, the level stands between 1,200 and 2,500 mg per litre.

*

To Paul Celan, Israel’s victory in 1967 was a cause for celebration – a free people, the Jews, going “from strength to strength”. Mourid Barghouti saw it differently:

Our calendars are broken, overlaid with pain, with bitter jokes and the smell of extinction. There are numbers now that can never again be neutral: they will always mean one thing. Since the defeat of June 1967 it is not possible for me to see the number ‘67’ without it being tied to that defeat. I see it in part of a telephone number, on the door of a hotel room, on the license plate of a car, in any street in the world, on a cinema or theatre ticket, on a page in a book, in the address of an office or a house, at the front of a train, or a flight number on an electronic board in any airport in the world. A number frozen in its frame.

John Felstiner’s book on Celan no longer seems to me as admirable as it once did. And neither does Paul Celan. It is dispiriting to perceive how the great poet of loss and suffering was silent about Israel’s victims. And Celan’s silence about Jews as persecutors and their victims appears to be reciprocated by everyone who writes about him.

Saturday, March 26, 2005

What is 'Jane Eyre' About?

There’s a silly article by Tanya Gold in today’s ‘Guardian’ about ‘Jane Eyre'. The gist of her piece is deeply unoriginal. It is not exactly news that Mrs Gaskell’s biographical account of Charlotte Brontë is a travesty or that Haworth displays the cult of literary personality at its most fatuous. Nor is it a revelation that ‘Jane Eyre’ projects Charlotte Brontë’s fantasies about M. Heger, the headmaster of the school in Brussels where she worked. Just about everything that Tanya Gold says has already been said much more fluently and intelligently in this book.

Tanya Gold, writing in the over-heated style that masquerades as journalism in a newspaper with a circulation that continues to plummet, calls ‘Jane Eyre’ “the dirtiest, darkest, most depraved fantasy of all time”. Obviously Ms. Gold has never read the Marquis de Sade, let alone ‘Naked Lunch’. What bothers me is not her lack of originality or her attention-seeking slovenly style but her errors of fact and her failure to engage with the significance of ‘Jane Eyre’.

According to Gold: “Contemporary critics had been appalled by Jane Eyre's ‘coarseness’, but the public was thrilled and Charlotte was a celebrity.” This simply isn't true. Although there were one or two hostile reviews the overwhelming majority were very, very favourable.

At the end of the third edition of ‘Jane Eyre’ the ‘Opinions of the press’ were reprinted. They make interesting reading.

‘Fraser’s Magazine’ praised the novel for the plot and “the enchantment”. ‘Atlas’ gushed that it was “a book to make the pulses gallop and the heart beat, and to fill the eyes with tears”. ‘Critic’ adored the “riveting” plot. The ‘Economist’ praised the fresh style, characterisation, and gripping plot. The Catholic ‘Tablet’ liked its representation of the development of a mind, including “the restraint, direction, and subduing” and the “pearls of thought and sentiment” attached to the plot, concluding: “The reading of such a book as this is a healthful exercise, and we sincerely hope may prove as attractive as it must be profitable.” ‘Jerrold’s Newspaper’ concurred in finding the novel wholesome, remarking “it is edifying from its moral truth and beauty; and it is absorbingly interesting on account of the originality, vigour, and moral edification aforesaid.” ‘Jerrold’s Magazine’ liked the plot and characterisation. The ‘Morning Post’ liked the characterisation, plot and “thrilling interest…in each division or department of the story”. The ‘Observer’ thought that “The matter and the moral of the book are good” and that it was “truly of a most noble purpose”. The ‘Spectator’ applauded the “great power” of the writing and identified it as one of those novels “where minute anatomy of the mind predominates over incidents”. The ‘Sun’ thought that “the characteristic which is most deserving of commendation is the very admirable delineation and nice discrimination of power”. The ‘Morning Advertiser’ praised the intermingling of “fact and fiction, reality and romance” which maintained the novel’s “deep and unflagging interest”. ‘Era’ was thrilled to find “much of trial and temptation, of fortitude and resignation, of sound sense and Christianity – but no tameness.” The ‘Guardian’ liked the plot, the characterisation, the dialogue “and the mystery such as would baffle the keenest scented reader”. ‘Howitt’s Journal’ thought it “One of the freshest and most genuine books which we have read for a long time.” The ‘People’s Journal’ thought it an excellent read: “the moral sentiments are pure and healthy; and the whole work is calculated to rivet attention, to provoke sympathy, to make the heart bound and the brain pause.” The ‘Sheffield Iris’ applauded the novel’s style, dialogue and characterisation and its demonstration that “external beauty is inferior to loveliness of heart, and conventional accomplishments valueless contrasted with depth and originality of mind united to high moral purpose.” The ‘Nottingham Mercury’ thought that where the modern novel was concerned, “we have read few of a more thrilling, edifying, and purifying character than ‘Jane Eyre’. Without the slightest approach to cant it is eminently religious – without any strained attempts at sentimentality it is truly pathetic.” The ‘Church of England Journal’ called it “One of the best works of its class that has appeared for years”. The ‘Westminster Review’ hailed it as “decidedly the best novel of the season”.

‘Jane Eyre’ met with the approval of the bourgeoisie, across a wide spectrum of publications. It touched a chord. It was their idea of what a really good novel should be like. Tanya Gold tries, as she puts it, “to exhume the real Charlotte - filthy bitch, grandmother of chick-lit, and friend.” It’s not a new argument that ‘Jane Eyre’ is about sex, but it is NOT about sex as subversion. Notoriously, Mr Rochester has to be punished for flouting Victorian morality – symbolically castrated, in effect.

There is nothing subversive about Jane Eyre’s attitude to sex. In Vol. III, Chapter One, Mr Rochester urges Jane to be his mistress and to go off and live with him in the south of France. She rejects him. Sex outside marriage is utterly unacceptable to Jane. What Charlotte Brontë succeeded in doing was effectively and dramatically to express the values of the middle class. ‘Jane Eyre’ prizes chastity before marriage. The novel upholds religion, but it’s a middle of the road Christianity – nothing too extreme, like the type represented by the Calvinist, St John Rivers, or that of Mr Brocklehurst. Mr Rochester is punished - mutilated! - for his sexual waywardness and his first wife is killed off, clearing the way for his second marriage, to Jane.

‘Jane Eyre’ was a novel written and published at a moment of great crisis for the European bourgeoisie. The Chartist movement was its height, and soon revolutions broke out across Europe. ‘Jane Eyre’ dramatised a voice that spoke of the injustice and unfairness in society - but it was a voice that sought not the overthrow of that society but assimilation within it. ‘Jane Eyre’ is ultimately a novel about control and self-restraint. Jane seems to articulate the voice of rebellion: “it seemed as if my tongue pronounced words without my will consenting to their utterance: something spoke out of me over which I had no control.” But that absence of restraint only occurs at the start of the novel. Later, Victorian values become her weapon against those who breach them.

‘Jane Eyre’ is about starting out as an outsider and finding your place in bourgeois nineteenth century English society. In that sense the novel replicated the actual journey of Charlotte Brontë’s own father, Patrick. He was the eldest of ten children, born to a pair of Irish peasant farmers in County Down. The children were raised as Protestants and Patrick Brontë’s journey into bourgeois acceptability went from being appointed to the post of assistant school teacher at 16, then tutor to the sons of a local vicar and then acceptance into St John’s College, Cambridge. It was at St John’s that Patrick Prunty reinvented himself as Patrick Brontë – apparently after his hero Nelson, who was created Duke of Bronté by the King of Naples in 1799. He was, in short, seriously upwardly mobile and keen to absorb the values of the bourgeoisie. He seems to have cut himself off from all contact with his family back in Ireland. Patrick Brontë ended up as a parson – a paid servant of the ruling ideology, employed to transmit it. (Nowadays he’d be working for BBC news.)

Jane starts out as “an uncongenial alien” but by the end of the novel she becomes a respectable, affluent married woman, with servants. A central aspect of the narrative is that it’s about a plain, ordinary, poor girl who succeeds in marrying a rich property-owner – a popular fantasy template which is still around today, in modern form, in modern mass entertainments like ‘Notting Hill’or ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’.

Ideologically, it promotes the idea that to join the elite in capitalist society all you need is love – not inherited wealth, property, land or business interests. Romantic love is represented as a force that supercedes social status, education, accent, behaviour, experience, expertise, knowledge, social connections, or all the other various components of class privilege. In ‘Jane Eyre’ a plain Jane, without substance, an airy nothing (Jane Air, in fact), becomes a woman of substance with a social identity

The ‘Examiner’ praised the novel for showing “how intellect and unswerving integrity may win their way, although oppressed by that predominating influence in society which is a mere consequence of the accidents of birth or fortune…in the end, the honest, kindness of heart, and perseverance of the heroine, are seen triumphant over every obstacle.”

Capitalist ideology is triumphant – helped along the way by fairy tale interventions like the apparition of Jane’s dead mother (who drops by to promote the importance of chastity before marriage) and the moment when Jane magically hears Rochester’s voice calling out to her in the night from far, far away. There is also the matter of her magical inheritance from an uncle in Madeira, who leaves her the staggering sum of £20,000. That fortune clearly comes from the slave trade, though the novel never acknowledges this. As feminism, this is akin to The Color Purple, where the route out of oppression is taken via setting up a business and inheriting land and property.

‘Jane Eyre’ is an authoritarian text in the sense that there is only one point of view – Jane Eyre’s. That was what so enraged Jean Rhys, who devoted the second half of her life to deconstructing the novel and rewriting it from the viewpoint of the supposedly mad wife. ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ challenges the iron certainties of Mrs Jane Rochester.

The title of this novel is challenging. Something is missing: the definite article. Shouldn’t it be ‘The Wide Sargasso Sea’? And where precisely is the Sargasso Sea? It’s remote from Britain. It sounds exotic. And even when you’re told where it is – “The sea is a tract of the North Atlantic Ocean lying roughly between the West Indies and the Azores, in the Horse Latitudes” – it’s still hard to get a mental hold on.

Which was the writer’s point.

Jean Rhys wrote a poem which represented the Sargasso sea as a zone of destruction and entrapment: ‘They say it’s strewn with wrecks / And weed-infested / Few dare it, fewer still escape.’ But nowhere in the novel is there any reference to the Sargasso Sea. The title is an enigma which the reader has to work out for herself.

The Sargasso Sea can mean many things. “It is a relatively still sea but it is at the centre of a great swirl of ocean currents.” It’s a zone of stasis. Columbus was becalmed in it on his first voyage. It removes (you could say) masculine power and energy. It threatens to render action inactive and mobility immobile. “Its name derives from the tracts of floating weed on its surface”. The weed is yellow. Portuguese sailors named the sea after their native sargassum weed, found growing in wells. A popular myth held that a sailing ship which became entangled in this weed would be trapped there forever.

Jean Rhys drew attention to the Afro-Caribbean colonial sub-text of 'Jane Eyre'and dramatised the point of view of the first wife. This was just one aspect of ‘Jane Eyre’ which Charlotte Brontë excluded.

There is another, which is not one I’ve come across in books or articles about the novel. ‘Jane Eyre’ was written against the background of the the Irish Famine of 1846-50, which killed as many as one million from hunger and disease. Shortly after the novel appeared, Sir Charles Trevelyan, the British civil servant in charge of Irish relief policy, published his book 'The Irish Crisis', which described the famine as “a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence”. (In fact the famine was entirely bogus in so far as there was plenty of food available to feed the starving Irish; notoriously, ships were exporting food to England from a land where the poor were literally dropping dead from hunger.) To Trevelyan, God was punishing the Irish for their inefficient ways. It was a view which slotted in neatly with the view of the English bourgeoisie that the Irish national character was defective and lacking in self-reliance. It seems to me there are strong parallels between the ideology of individualism in ‘Jane Eyre’ and the ideology that sustained the English bourgeoisie in their ruthless indifference to mass (and preventable) death in Ireland. In Vol. III, Chapter Two, Jane Eyre flees from Mr Rochester and wanders the countryside, hungry, outcast and desperate. Exhausted, she collapses, crying out: ‘I can but die…and I believe in God. Let me try to wait His will in silence.’ Providentially, her words are overheard by a man of God, she is given food and shelter, and finds Christian charity, friendship and employment. It’s a sentimental fantasy, and it’s surely no coincidence that the class which swooned with admiration over ‘Jane Eyre’ was the same one which regarded with equanimity the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Irish peasants.

Sunday, February 06, 2005

A Few Words About Slaughterhouse-Five

By common consent the two great English language anti-war novels of the past 50 years are Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). A third war novel, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), seems to have lost it former appeal as a big, important book about war and morality, and it’s not a title you are likely to come across in British bookshops, unlike the other two. Strange (but comforting) to find that realism has a shorter shelf life than exuberant non-conformist fiction.

Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five were both written by men who were young servicemen in the Second World War. Heller, born in 1923, enlisted in the Army Air Corps and was trained as a bombardier (i.e. the man who aims and drops bombs from a bomber). In 1944 he was sent in combat, flying out of Corsica with B-25 crews of 488 squadron. He flew 60 missions. His nerve cracked after what one obituary writer called “an awful experience on a bombing raid near Avignon” and for his last 25 missions he was “terrified”. In later years, as a successful writer, Heller played down the darker side of those missions, saying that for the most part he had “a very good time in the war”. But his sister Sylvia claimed he had a wartime diary which contained details of appalling events. (Heller died in 1999. A biography has yet to appear.)

Heller experienced war from a bomber, his compatriot Kurt Vonnegut from that of one of the bombed. Vonnegut (born in 1922) served in the U.S. infantry, was captured in December 1944, and as a prisoner of war was present in the German city of Dresden on 13 February 1945 when an Allied bombing raid laid waste the centre of the city, killing vast numbers of civilians in a firestorm. It was one of the defining moments of Vonnegut’s life and the experience which he later converted into fiction in what is arguably his greatest novel: Slaughterhouse-Five.

There are big differences between the two novels. Heller’s book is a lengthy comedy about the absurdity of war. It moves at a terrific pace and pays little attention to the conventions of standard realist fiction. There is no mannered fine writing and no in-depth description of characters or landscapes. The characters sometimes have absurd names, and a slightly cartoon quality. The novel is not a psychological drama and the plot is not suspenseful, setting up mysteries and then resolving them. It satirises the business of war from the perspective of the disgruntled, humane, ordinary fighting man of World War Two. General Peckem, for example, invents the term “bomb pattern”, cheerfully explaining that “It means nothing, but you’d be surprised how rapidly it’s caught on.” It results in bomber pilots not worrying whether or not they hit the target as long they can get their bombs to explode together “and make a neat aerial photograph”. This leads on to plans for “bombing a tiny undefended village, reducing the whole community to rubble” – a mission which is, in military terms, “entirely unnecessary”. It’s probably no coincidence that Heller started writing the book while working for an advertising agency. Catch-22 is an anti-army and anti-organisation book as much as an anti-war book, and a major theme is the jarring friction between image and reality, and language and reality. But underlying all this is the central theme of war’s stupidity and cruelty, and its irrational logic:

“Look, fellows, we’ve got to have some confidence in the people above us who issue our orders. They know what they’re doing.”
“The hell they do,” said Dunbar.

As a specific satire on the US army it has lost none of its punch:

“Now, men,” he exhorted. “We have with us today a very distinguished guest, General Peckem from Special Services, the man who gives us all our softball bats, comic books and the U.S.O. shows. I want to dedicate this mission to him. Go out there and bomb – for me, for your country, for God, and for that great American, General P.P. Peckem. And let’s see you put all those bombs on a dime!”

*

Slaughterhouse-Five is a much shorter novel and much more radical in its narrative form. The title refers to that part of a Dresden abattoir where Vonnegut and other prisoners of war were held captive, and where they had the good fortune to survive the massive bombing raid on Dresden and the firestorm that followed. Like Catch-22, Vonnegut’s novel is an absurdist satire on war, but its defining temper is whimsical – whimsical in its strictest sense: changeful, multi-formed, capricious, unconventional, crazy, unexpected, imaginative, witty, ridiculous. Its whimsicality is signalled by the eccentric title page:

“Slaughterhouse-Five OR THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE, A Duty Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. A fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod [and smoking too much] who, as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden, Germany, “the Florence of the Elbe,” a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale. This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamdore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace.”

The first sentence of the novel begins: “All this happened, more or less.” Vonnegut stands in the doorway of his story asserting that the wartime experiences described in the novel are all true, but that “I’ve changed all the names”. He also describes how he went back to Dresden in 1967. He goes on to say how he has struggled over many years to write a book about the destruction of Dresden. He complains that in the post-war years “There hadn’t been much publicity” about what happened at Dresden and when he attempted to find out more from the Air Force he was told the information was classified. He goes on to explain why the narrative that follows is a fragmentary one: “It is so short and jumbled and jangled…because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre”. Everything is quiet after a massacre, asserts Vonnegut, except for the birds, and all they say is: “Poo-tee-weet”. This meaningless bird cry turns out to be the closing sentence of the novel. After a rambling first chapter of autobiographical explanation, Vonnegut then gets on with his story.

His fictional alter ego turns out to be a man named Billy Pilgrim, who turns out to have been born the same year as Vonnegut. Pilgrim is a kind of holy fool – innocent, easygoing, placid. He is also “unstuck in time”. The novel has a complicated chronological structure, jumping backwards and forwards in time, but gradually leading up to (and back to) that moment in 1945 when Dresden is bombed. Billy believes he has been kidnapped by a flying saucer in 1967, which takes him to the faraway planet of Tralfamadore, where he starts a relationship with an abducted movie actress named Montana Wildhack.

There are at least two possible ways of reading the story. We can accept Billy’s version of reality literally, in which he really did visit the planet Tralfamadore and lead a surreal life, or we can interpret the narrative as the tale of a man broken by the wartime horrors he has witnessed, and who drifts in and out of consciousness, sometimes lapsing into fantasy as he reviews his life and reinvents it. All kinds of stories overlap in this novel, including Billy’s wartime experiences, his career as an optometrist, his marriage to Valencia Merble, his experience of an air crash and his abduction by extra-terrestials. The narrative structure of Slaughterhouse-Five breaks all the usual conventions of fiction. Apart from the autobiographical material which begins and ends it, the book includes discussion of a trashy sixties bestseller (Valley of the Dolls), newspaper reports and events which occurred while Vonnegut was writing it (“Robert Kennedy…was shot two nights ago”). It comments on the novels of the fictional science fiction writer Kilgore Trout (who sounds at times a bit like PK Dick), who pops up as a character. It also refers scathingly to current US foreign policy: “every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam.”

That other great American master of 1960s whimsy, Richard Brautigan, saw his critical reputation, commercial success, and readership evaporate in the 1970s (Brautigan committed suicide in 1984), but Slaughterhouse-Five has kept its readers and earned its place as a modern classic, despite being quite unlike the average novel. This may be because it is a very, very funny book and, in spite of its complicated narrative structure, it has a chatty, laconic, whimsical narrative voice and is not a difficult book to read. As a satire on modern American life it has lost none of its edge. The writing is often startlingly fresh and inventive in a wholly original way. What other writer has described orgasm and ejaculation like this? – “Billy made a noise like a small, rusty hinge. He had just emptied his seminal vesicles into Valencia”. That the whole edifice spins on a very dark axis – the Dresden firestorm – also gives it a moral seriousness and a satirical bite which is frequently lacking in American comic writing, and which is noticeably missing in Brautigan’s fiction, which all too often tips over into a kind of self-satisfied high-sugar-content cute sentimentality.

*

There is a problem with Slaughterhouse-Five, however. Vonnegut not only used his own personal experience and memories in writing the book but also drew on David Irving’s The Destruction of Dresden (London, 1963). The 1964 American edition published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston is even brought into the hospital in Vermont where Billy Pilgrim is a patient and handed to the Harvard history professor who he shares the room with.

Irving is now notorious as a right-wing extremist, Holocaust denier and a shoddy, unreliable historian, but that was far from obvious in the 1960s, when he appeared to be a reputable scholar. His book was an international bestseller, and popularised a number of central beliefs about the bombing raid on Dresden. One was that Dresden was a wholly innocent target of no significance, maliciously and scandalously flattened by the Allies; in a short, the air raid and the ensuing firestorm amounted to a war crime. In Slaughterhouse-Five Billy Pilgrim is told by an English prisoner of war that Dresden is supposed to be a beautiful city: “You needn’t worry about bombs, by the way. Dresden is an open city. It is undefended, and contains no war industries or troop concentrations of any importance.” Secondly, Irving claimed that at least 135,000 German civilians died in the Dresden firestorm. This is recycled by Vonnegut, who recounts how “Nothing happened that night. It was the next night that about one hundred and thirty thousand people in Dresden would die.”

At the beginning of the novel Vonnegut mentions how, when he first started working on it, hardly anybody had ever heard of the raid on Dresden: “Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance. I didn’t know that, either. There hadn’t been much publicity.”

Slaughterhouse-Five also briefly recycles an atrocity story publicised by Irving in which American fighter planes machine-gunned survivors of the firestorm. Vonnegut’s novel, like Irving’s history book, became a bestseller, and enormously influential in promoting the idea that the bombing of Dresden was a war crime.

It now turns out that David Irving’s historiography was utterly unreliable. A massive new history of the raid published last year by Bloomsbury – Frederick Taylor’s Dresden: Tuesday 13 February 1945 – asserts that Dresden was a normally functioning Nazi city containing many vital sites of manufacturing, communications and services of great importance to Germany’s war effort.

Taylor remarks in his Preface that “As a student in the 1960s…like so many others of my age, I had learned of the city’s destruction principally through a work of fiction: Kurt Vonnegut’s acidly surreal masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five.”

Taylor estimates that between 25,000 and 40,000 died in the raid – a lot less than the figure promoted by Irving and vastly less than the number of those who died at Hiroshima (100,000 out of a population of 400,000, rising to 140,000 from radiation sickness by the end of 1945, rising to 200,000 five years later.) Taylor also rubbishes the idea that American fighter planes deliberately strafed and massacred survivors.

*

The question then arises: what are the implications of this new historical knowledge for Slaughterhouse-Five? Perhaps not as great as those of us who admire the novel might have feared. Clearly it’s very unfortunate that Vonnegut inserts statistics into the narrative which now turn out to be utterly unreliable and wildly exaggerated. However, this only occurs on three or four occasions. They could be changed and I think should be changed.

The strafing episode is less contentious as it’s relatively perfunctory, consisting of just seven sentences. Taylor makes it clear that some survivors may indeed have been hit by bullets fired by fighter planes but insists that this would have been the consequence of a low-level dogfight involving the 356th Fighter Group and not a deliberate machine-gunning of civilians. (In the context of the crimes of the modern US army Taylor’s conclusion might provoke incredulity but he appears to be right.)

There are other historical errors. Vonnegut describes soap and candles “made from the fat of rendered Jews and Gypsies and fairies and communists, and other enemies of the State”. However, according to Anton La Guardia, this is legend, not fact (see his book Holy Land, Unholy War [John Murray, London, 2002], pp. 163-4).

Slaughterhouse-Five has dated in other ways, apart from those historical aspects highlighted by Taylor’s book. No novelist would nowadays use the word “fairies” for gay people. Vonnegut uses “schizophrenic” as an adjective, something now regarded as offensive by mental health groups. He also uses the terms “spastic” and “Mongolian idiot” for sufferers from Down’s syndrome – vocabularly now widely regarded as unacceptable. However, it would be foolish to insist that Vonnegut now altered that vocabulary. His novel is a snapshot of the language and attitudes of its time, just as every novel or piece of creative writing is.

The central core of the novel – Vonnegut’s own experience of the aftermath of rhe raid and his account of Billy Pilgrim among the ruins – survives with its integrity intact. The much bigger question raised by Taylor’s book is how justified is it to see the bombing of Dresden as a war crime.

The two most interesting discussions I’ve come across are by David Cesarini (in the Independent, 13 February 2004) and Michael Bradley (in Socialist Review, March 2004).

Cesarini remarks, “Like Frederick Taylor, I grew up with a sense that the RAF's bombing of Dresden on 13-14 February 1945 was a stain on the Allies' war record. My unease owed much to Kurt Vonnegut's novelised memoir of his experience in Dresden as an American PoW, forced to disinter the corpses of German civilians who had been suffocated or baked to death in cellars beneath the ruins of their once-beautiful city. I read Slaughterhouse-Five in one sitting, and it has haunted me since.”

Cesarini complains that the Dresden raid became a propaganda tool for the German right, and was:

“used to relativise and so diminish the scale and singularity of atrocities perpetrated by the German army, the Luftwaffe and the SS between 1939 and 1945. At best, Dresden distorted the moral balance sheet of the Second World War. At worst, it was a tool for polemicists blurring victims and perpetrators. This disturbing trend has gained force in Germany over the past few years.

“In 2002, Jörg Friedrich published Der Brand, an account of how ordinary Germans experienced the air war. Friedrich argued that the suffering of German civilians had always been unjustly overshadowed by the fate of the Jews. It sold 200,000 copies within months. Friedrich followed it with an illustrated history, using images previously considered too horrific to bear publication. This time, he accused the Allies of committing a war crime by continuing the intensive bombing of German cities between January and May 1945.

“Last year, the late WG Sebald's controversial lectures On the Natural History of Destruction appeared in English, arguing that Germans had repressed memories of the air raids. He maintained: "In spite of strenuous efforts to come to terms with the past, as people like to put it, it seems to me that we Germans today are a nation strikingly blind to history and lacking in tradition." The formula "coming to terms with the past", or Vergangenheitsbewaltigung, is more usually employed to describe Germany's reckoning with the Nazi persecution and mass murder of the Jews. By using it, Sebald juxtaposed memory of the bombing with memory of the "Final Solution" and turned history on its head.

“Although his lectures concentrated on the alleged failure of post-war writers to describe the destruction and carnage caused by bombing, Sebald deployed terms such as "annihilation" and "extermination" to evoke Allied policy - terms that are customarily Nazi euphemisms for genocide. The lectures triggered a huge correspondence from Germans who lived through the raids, some of which - he acknowledged - showed the persistence of an unapologetic Nazi outlook.

…In setting out to create "a more complex moral and ambivalent framework", Taylor gives us the voice of civilians and bomber crews, teenage flak gunners and Jews facing deportation. For such Jews, so often omitted from the moral equation, the incendiaries and high explosive bombs were less a deadly rain than manna from heaven.”

*
For Cesarini, Dresden was not an innocent city.

For Michael Bradley it was. (Bradley’s was a lone voice; most reviewers seem to have adopted a position which paralleled Cesarini’s.)

He argues that in spite of the evidence put forward by Taylor, the raid was still a war crime:

“At the heart of Frederick Taylor’s new book on the attack on Dresden lies a very simple argument: the bombing of Dresden was justified. For all the pages of new research a very old message lies beneath. It’s the same message that was put across by Winston Churchill and ‘Bomber’ Harris, the man held chiefly responsible for the attack.

“Taylor’s book is part of a wave of revisionist histories of the Second World War. The war is seen as a moral certainty, a fight between good and evil. But the truth is that the Dresden raid, along with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is clear evidence that the Allies were capable of war crimes too.

“…The Dresden raid was by no means exceptional. It went according to the usual Allied plan. By this stage in the war the RAF had turned ‘area bombing’ into an art form. An exact mix of high explosive and incendiary bombs was used to start the kind of fires that burned Dresden. Such bombing was as much about cracking ‘morale’ by killing civilians and destroying a city’s infrastructure as it was about destroying German factories. This was terror bombing - no matter what spin you try to put on it. Even the US’s so called ‘precision’ attacks would cost thousands of lives through what they described as ‘spillage’.

“Taylor rubbishes the argument that the bombing was carried out in the knowledge that the end of the war was in sight. Many Allied leaders believed the war with Germany could drag on for months. Therefore they saw a ‘military logic’ to the bombing. But Taylor does admit that by this stage of the war the sheer amount of money invested in the bomber force had created its own logic. Millions had been spent on building the bomber fleets and training the crews. So why not carry on bombing?

“…The raid was part of a bombing campaign that all but destroyed cities across Germany. Ordinary workers were just a part of the war machine that the Allies were out to destroy. As such they were not even seen as ‘collateral damage’ but as ‘legitimate targets’.

“The Second World War wasn’t just a war about destroying German fascism. The Allies were out to destroy the German regime in order to control the postwar world. They were prepared to divert huge military resources into shaping that postwar world even if it meant weakening the fight against Germany. Britain sent thousands of troops into Greece to prevent the left wing resistance movement seizing power, and with the US rushed to disarm the left wing movements that had fought the Nazis in France and Italy. But notoriously the Allies, for all their huge air power, were not prepared to divert resources to bomb the railway lines that led to Auschwitz. They could stop Greek Communists but not the death trains.

“Taylor’s book is well worth reading. Many of the survivors of the bombing speak out in its pages. The interviews with Allied aircrew are fascinating - many of the young men had real doubts about what they were doing. But at the heart of the book is the moral ambiguity of a bombing campaign designed to destroy German fascism that targeted the innocent. For this was not a ‘good war’ against Hitler. It was a conflict between major powers who were out to dominate the globe.

“The bombing of major cities did not contribute the ‘knockout blow’ that bombing planners like Harris promised. The bombing campaign began as revenge for attacks on cities like London and Coventry. The British military wanted to show it could hit back. But area bombing raids targeted civilians. And the raids came no closer to destroying the German ‘will to fight’ than did German raids on British cities.

“In such a war of revenge attacks ordinary people in enemy countries were not seen as potential allies. They were not seen as an important force that could potentially undermine totalitarian regimes from within. They were legitimate targets. And at the end of that line of logic came Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

*

I’m not totally persuaded persuaded by