The whole offence is something to do with Germany.
*
Shortly after coming down from Oxford in the summer of 1928, Auden published his first pamphlet of poems, titled simply Poems, just thirty-seven pages long, printed on a hand-operated press by his friend Stephen Spender, and finished off in a bright orange wrapper by the Holywell Press in Oxford. He distributed copies to his friends. He may not have succeeded in his exams – ‘I didn’t do a stroke of work,’ he boasted – but his career as a writer had begun, he was feeling confident and he was ready for adventure. His father had promised to pay him an allowance until his twenty-third birthday, which was eighteen months away. He considered going to Paris, but then decided to go to Berlin. ‘Is Berlin very wicked?’ he asked a friend.
It certainly wasn’t Oxford.
*
Staying initially with a middle-class family in Nikolassee, a suburb on the east bank of the Wannsee, and soon joined by his old friend Isherwood, Auden became a regular at a bar called the Cosy Corner, at Zossener Strasse 7, in the working-class area of Hallesches Tor. The Cosy Corner was a kind of German dive, a place where adolescent boys were willing to have uncomplicated – or indeed sometimes very complicated – sex in exchange for money. ‘I can still make myself faintly feel the delicious nausea of initiation terror which Christopher felt as Wystan pushed back the heavy leather door-curtain of a boy-bar called the Cosy Corner and led the way inside,’ recalls Isherwood in Christopher and His Kind (1977). The Cosy Corner introduced Auden and Isherwood to another world. ‘Berlin is the buggers daydream,’ Auden wrote to a friend back in England. ‘I am a mass of bruises.’ But he wasn’t just busy picking up boys and bruises. He was also busy picking up German.
*
Until arriving in Berlin, Auden knew little of either the German language or German literature. In his 1937 essay ‘Some Notes on Auden’s Early Poetry’, Isherwood claimed that it was typical of Auden’s ‘astonishing adaptability that, after two or three months in Berlin, he began to write poems in German’. A few of Auden’s German poems have survived, and they reveal much about his interest and understanding of Germany and its culture. The poem ‘Chorale’ is typical:
Der ist ein schöne Junge
Er wohnt jezt in Berlin
Wo ich in vier Monaten
Soll wieder kehren hin.
Er hat kein’ schwere Trippe
Er ist nie nep bei mir
Er hat kein Englisch Onkel
Er sagt ‘Ick bläb bei Dir.’
…
O warte nur, mein Junge,
In England bin ich fromm
Blubber und Geld zu sparen
Bestimmt ich wieder komm.
(He is a lovely boy / He now lives in Berlin / Where I in four months / Am to go back again. / He’s got no serious VD / He’s never over-pricey with me / He has no English uncle / He says ‘I’ll stay with you’ … ‘Just wait, my boy, / In England I’m well behaved / To save blubber and money / Certainly I’ll come again’.)
*
So, Germany for Auden in his youth was a site of fantasy and fulfilment.
By 1939 it had become a nightmare.
*
The idea that the Germans, unique among the nations, are somehow predisposed towards barbarism and totalitarianism runs deep in English culture – the novelist Henry Green, in his autobiography Pack My Bag (1940), recalled, ‘We hated Germans and at school we did believe they were so short of food they boiled the dead down to get the fats, that they crucified Australians, and that they were monsters different from us.’ (Even in the 1970s, I grew up on a diet of Warlord and Victor comics and playground games in which we were endlessly restaging the great British victory over the Hun.)
This idea of monstrous German exceptionalism is sometimes called Vansittartism, after Sir Robert Vansittart, who was a permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office from 1930 to 1938, and the author of Black Record: Germans Past and Present (1941), a pamphlet based on a series of BBC broadcasts, in which he suggested that there were certain ‘features of German policy, character and action which for centuries have been a burden to humanity’. (‘No feats of scholarship’, wrote Vansittart, ‘console us for bloodshed.’) Vansittart’s broadcasts and his pamphlet were not just anti-Nazi, they were positively Germanophobic.
*
Auden, of course, was a -phile rather than a -phobe: in America, many of his friends were Germans who had fled the Nazis, and he was indeed married to a German of Jewish heritage (having entered into a marriage of convenience with Erika Mann in 1935, with the sole purpose of providing her with a British passport when she was about to be stripped of her German citizenship).
And yet in ‘September 1, 1939’ he seems to give Vansittartism a bit of an airing.
*
This takes some explaining.
(It’s like Noël Coward’s song ‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans’ (1943), which sounds like a plea for tolerance and understanding –
For many years –
They’ve been in floods of tears
Because the poor little dears
Have been so wronged and only longed
To cheat the world
Deplete the world
And beat
The world to blazes.
This is the moment when we ought to sing their praises.
– whereas it was written, according to Coward, ‘as a satire directed against a small minority of excessive humanitarians who, in my opinion, were taking a rather too tolerant view of our enemies’. The BBC failed to see the irony and removed the song from its playlist.)
So, allow me to paraphrase.
(‘If there is a more unrewarding task than explaining jokes and allegory, I do not know what it is,’ wrote the great bearded John Berryman – or rather, the great-bearded great John Berryman – in his book The Freedom of the Poet. Berryman was right about a lot of things, but about this he was wrong, because there is a more unrewarding task than explaining jokes and allegory: paraphrasing poems.)
If one were attempting to untangle this stanza, one might say that Auden is suggesting that the offence that has ‘driven a culture mad’ may be explained by factors specific to Germany, but that in fact if you treat anyone badly they’ll do bad things. Thus, in summary, the gist of it seems to be: the roots and causes of human barbarism are particular, but human barbarism itself is universal (‘Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return’). It would be a mistake, Auden is suggesting, to assume that ordinary Germans are any different from the rest of the world’s population.
This is not adequate as a summary of the stanza, and leaves a lot out, but it’s the best I can do.
*
(I am currently reading Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral: indeed, I am currently teaching Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral. Over the years, almost all of my reading has found its way into my teaching, so now I no longer know: do I read to teach, or do I teach to read? The students absolutely hate American Pastoral: it’s too long; it’s too complicated; there are too many words; Roth is a misogynist, a misanthropist; he’s an apologist for white privilege. If my students are anything to go by, Philip Roth has well and truly had his day. Will Auden last? Auden has already lasted. Anyway, in the novel, the protagonist’s brother, a man called Jerry, decides to make a coat out of hamster skins. He’s trying to impress a girl and he can’t afford to buy her a fur coat. So he dries out some hamster skins, sews them together and finishes the thing off with a silk lining made from an old parachute. This is what Roth writes about the coat: ‘He was going to send it to the girl in a Bamberger’s coat box of his mother’s, wrapped in lavender tissue paper and tied with velvet ribbon. But when the coat was finished, it was so stiff – because of the idiotic way he’d dried the skins, his father would later explain – that he couldn’t get it to fold up in the box.’ This is a book made of badly folded hamster skins.)
*
(T. E. Hulme, in his ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’, delivered in 1908: ‘I want to speak of verse in a plain way as I would of pigs: that is the only honest way.’ It’s not the only honest way, but it’s a pretty compelling way. It’s what I’m trying to do here. Then again, as well as reading T. E. Hulme and Philip Roth, I have just been reading Charlotte’s Web with my daughter.
‘Where’s Papa going with that ax?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
‘Out to the hoghouse,’ replied Mrs Arable. ‘Some pigs were born last night.’
‘I don’t see why he needs an ax,’ continued Fern, who was only eight.
‘Well,’ said her mother, ‘one of the pigs is a runt. It’s very small and weak, and it will never amount to anything. So your father has decided to do away with it.’
‘That’s me!’ I think. ‘I’m Mr Arable, the critic, and the poor little poem is the pig.’ And then I realise: the poem is Mr Arable, and I’m the little runt. Poems aren’t pigs – but we are.)
*
In 1996, Daniel Goldhagen, a young Harvard academic, revived the idea that the horrors of the Nazis could somehow be ascribed to Germans and their Protestantism, in his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. The book’s argument was largely based on the evidence of the testimony of members of the police battalions who had taken part in the extermination of Jewish communities on the eastern front, which led Goldhagen to conclude that it was not ‘economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social psychological pressure, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades, [that] induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed, defenseless Jewish men, women and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity’.
The book was widely criticised for what many regarded as its inaccurate scholarship, and for taking a few examples of German behaviour in extremis and applying them to all Germans, when it might be more proper to ascribe such behaviour to all humans, as for example Christopher R. Browning does in his book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, published a few years before the Goldhagen, in which Browning concludes that:
In every modern society, the complexity of life and the resulting bureaucratization and specialization attenuate the sense of personal responsibility of those implementing official policy. Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?
Auden’s poem, one might say, leans more towards the Browning than the Goldhagen.
*
Which is not to say that it’s necessarily correct.
*
Auden’s oft-repeated locution about what ‘all schoolchildren’ learn – which is a variant of the historian Thomas Macaulay’s phrase ‘every schoolboy knows’ – is used in his poem ‘It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens’, and in ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, as well as here in ‘September 1, 1939’.
The problem with the phrase is that it is indeed childish to suggest that the wrong of, say, invading Poland on 1 September 1939 is somehow justified by, say, the Treaty of Versailles, or that Hitler’s childhood traumas might usefully explain his adult behaviour. The Third Reich and the Holocaust were not like a shove in the playground, nor were they simple manifestations of some poor individual’s upsets.
This seems to me another low point in the poem.
*
Auden had a tendency throughout his career to reflect upon and attempt to solve and explain problems using the simplifying logic of the child.
The Poet is not only the man who is made to solve the riddle of the Universe, but he is also the man who feels where it is not solved and which continually awakens his feelings […] What is old and worn out, not in itself, but from the dimness of the intellectual eye brought on by worldly passions, he makes new; he pours upon it the dew that glistens, and blows round us the breeze which cooled us in childhood.
(Coleridge, ‘Lecture on Poetry’, 12 December 1811)
It has to be said – to Coleridge and to Auden – that there are other ways of solving problems than sprinkling glistening dew.
There are also other ways of thinking about evil.
My contention is that evil is quite literally a virus parasite occupying a certain brain area which we may term the RIGHT center. The mark of the basic shit is that he has to be right.
(William Burroughs, ‘My Own Business’, in The Adding Machine: Collected Essays)
Auden, I think, fine rightly knew that poems aren’t answers to problems, and that any suggestion that they might be compulsory wisdom is entirely false. Hence his intense dislike of ‘September 1, 1939’, which is a poem that wants desperately to be right, and which occasionally gets things desperately wrong. Anyone who’s ever tried to write a poem will perhaps be familiar with the problem: you feel that this is an opportunity to deliver yourself of some extraordinary insight and wisdom, and what happens is that you end up speaking half-truths and nonsense.
*
Also, we surely can’t but be deeply troubled now, reading the poem and knowing what we know, that this stanza’s simplistic conclusion confuses victims with perpetrators.
I do not know, and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. I know that the murderers existed, not only in Germany, and still exist, retired or on active duty, and that to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is a precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth.
(Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal)
It is worth pointing out, though, that one might still admire a poem, and indeed might spend years studying a poem, that may be diseased, sinister or affected.
One problem absorbs me above all others: it is what I will call the intermittency of genius. Why, more often than not, does a poet blossom out in his adolescence and early manhood, and then wither to pedantry and dullness.
(Herbert Read, Form in Modern Poetry)
What’s really absorbing is when a poet’s genius both blossoms and withers in the course of the same poem. Thank goodness that we don’t need writers always to be right; there’d be no writers left to study.
*
In a series of lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston in 1906, William James addressed himself to the question of pragmatism and in passing attempted to solve the problem of why a writer and thinker of such obvious insufficiencies as Herbert Spencer, with ‘his preference for cheap makeshifts in argument’ and vague ideas, remained so popular that ‘half of England wants to bury him in Westminster Abbey’. It is because, James concluded, ‘we feel his heart to be in the right place’.
Precisely.
Herbert Spencer, Philip Roth, W. H. Auden, whoever: they are not infallible.
They’re just writers.