[lit-ideas] Re: TUESDAY'S FORCAST


On 30-Jul-09, at 8:32 PM, Eric Yost wrote:
[Knut Hamsun] is a great author. _Hunger_ is a great book. Cases like his always raise the question of complicity with social evil and how to separate an artist and his or her work. 
...
Prokofiev and Shostakovitch straining to please Stalin; Prokofiev writing Zdravitsa to celebrate Stalin's birthday. Sometimes the collaborators get offed (Mayakovsky) and sometimes they prosper (Herbert von Karajan).
By coincidence I am watching Istvan Szabo's movie MEPHISTO, a film adaptation of Klaus Mann's roman a clef about the German actor and director Gustaf Gruendgens (renamed Hendrik Hoefgens). Last night I broke off at the point where the protagonist is told by a Nazi general (modelled on Goering) that he had a limp handshake - in the next scene he is seen practising his handshake on a clothes-stand. When an actor (a former Nazi party member) who changes his mind about the regime organizes a protest petition, he is murdered and his death announced as a traffic accident. Hoefgens defends this fiction, announcing that 'people shouldn't cross roads in heavy traffic.' 

One can see a film clip of Gruendgens playing Mephistopheles at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvi2llMFOg8&feature=related
Here is the English translation of the words there spoken (the ellipsis reflects lines left out of the original in this film production) to be found at 

http://tkline.pgcc.net/PITBR/German/FaustIScenesIVtoVI.htm

Reason and Science you despise,
Man?s highest powers: now the lies
Of the deceiving spirit must bind you
With those magic arts that blind you,
And I?ll have you, totally ?
...
I'?ll drag him through raw life,
Through the meaningless and shallow,
I'?ll freeze him: stick to him: keep him ripe,
Frustrate his insatiable greed, allow
Food and drink to drift before his eyes:
In vain he?ll beg for consummation,
And if he weren'?t the devil'?s, why
He?d still go to his ruination!
Back to the film MEPHISTO: it is truly astonishing to watch Hoefgens' 'devolution' to spokesperson for National Socialist ideology, all the while declaiming 'What do they want from me? I'm just an actor?' (I recommend the film highly, although the version I watched had English subtitles which were at times woefully inadequate, and sometimes inaccurate: e.g., where Hoefgens' uses the word 'decadent' in describing Hamlet's character it is translated as 'decent'!)
At one point Hoefgens' former wife accuses him of self-deception. I'm also at the moment rereading Dickens' GREAT EXPECTATIONS:
"All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else's manufacture, is reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make, as good money! An obliging stranger, under pretence of compactly folding up my bank-notes for security's sake, abstracts the notes and gives me nutshells; but what is his sleight of hand to mine, when I fold up my own nutshells and pass them on myself as notes!" 

Chris Bruce,
taking a close look into his
own moral pocketbook, in
Kiel, Germany------------------------------------------------------------------
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