Odds and ends
Last week, I shared a few of my favorite posts from my first year on Substack. Here are a few oddball posts on some of my favorite extracurriculars (folktales, travel, trying to make sense of totalitarianism):
On Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales:
Rivers of milk run through these fables, and there are dark forests with bright clearings, slumbering kingdoms, sorcerers and beggars (sometimes sorcerers in disguise), unspeakable curses and enchantments, unbreakable bonds, contrary and deadly sentinels (“if her eyes are open, she’s asleep; if closed, she’s awake”), cross old women peeled wrinkle by wrinkle, the misadventures of consecrated wafers. Bold protagonists tame by charm, calling snakes macaroni and blood wine and bile milk, thread the needle of impossible desires and futile precautions, and observe mysterious and exacting rites that must be performed without any hope of ever being understood.
There are terrible secrets that can never been revealed lest the teller turn to stone; and mothers who cut their sons in two, one half to stay home and one half to venture out into the world; and scalded lovers who vanish with bitter words: “You broke the spell and will never see me again, or only when you have wept seven bottles of tears and worn out seven pairs of iron shoes, seven iron mantles, and seven iron hats looking for me.” There’s a bed that gives birth to a little bed, and the coffer to a little coffer, and the table to a little table, when the queen bears a long-awaited child. And Death pursues an inventive young man, rattling a cart full of shoes the reaper has worn out in the hunt.
Returning to my old research topic, 20th-century totalitarian regimes:
And [Mayer] explores the pressures of "mitschwimmen," or swimming along. Nazism appealed to the ambitious and also offered a refuge to the politically suspect. One of the men, a teacher, anti-Nazi by disposition, joined the party to deflect scrutiny of his socialist past, which constantly threatened to be revealed. This teacher talked about how a chill settled over educators at the gymnasium level, while their colleagues at primary schools succumbed rapidly to the new ideology: ‘Speed is an instant so short that a grade-school teacher hasn’t time to change his politics.’ He speculated that primary-school teachers, who must know a little bit of everything but don't have the opportunity to develop deep expertise in any one subject had little ground to challenge Nazi ideology. Who were they to say what was right or wrong or plausible or implausible? So real expertise in some subject area can be protective -- it can give you ground to stand on.
As for what was taught in the classroom, he observed that “everything was not regulated specifically, ever." But without a clear list of prohibitions to give an idea of where the land mines were buried, teachers became ever more cautious about what terrain they strayed into:
“Everything was not regulated specifically, ever. It was not like that at all. Choices were left to the teacher’s discretion, within the ‘German spirit.’ That was all that was necessary, the teacher had only to be discreet. If he himself wondered at all whether anyone would object to a given book, he would be wise not to use it. This was a much more powerful form of intimidation, you see, than any fixed list of acceptable or unacceptable writings. The way it was done was, from the point of view of the regime, remarkably clever and effective. The teacher had to make the choices and risk the consequences; this made him all the more cautious.”
Looking back, the teacher described the terrible turmoil he experienced before he joined the Nazi party:
“I fooled myself. I had to. Everybody has to. If the good had been twice as good and the bad only half as bad, I still ought to have seen it, all through as I did in the beginning... But I didn’t want to see it, because I would then have had to think about the consequences of seeing it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent… after the decision [to join the Nazi party] it was better, always better. I enjoyed doing those little things at school, ‘defying’ the Party, not because what I did was right (that, too, of course) but because I showed I was clever and, above all, because I ‘belonged.’ I belonged to the new ‘nobility,’ and the nobility can get away with certain things just because they are the nobility; merely getting away with them proves that they are nobility, even to themselves. So I slept.”
Mayer writes that "responsible men never shirk responsibility, and so, when they must reject it, they deny it. They draw the curtain. They detach themselves altogether from the consideration of the evil they ought to, but cannot, contend with."
One book I think about a lot is Charlotte Beradt's long out-of-print Third Reich of Dreams, which pores over hundreds of dreams she collected during the years 1933-1939 in Germany, mapping the psyche under totalitarianism, and setting out to disprove from the first page its epigraph, an NS-Reichsorganisationsleiter’s musings that "the only person in Germany who still leads a private life is the person who sleeps."
Not so fast.
There's the doctor who dreams that he's settling down with a book in his apartment one evening when an announcement comes over the loudspeakers proclaiming the abolition of walls, and all at once the walls disappear: he's totally exposed. What private life?
And then the housewife who dreams that her Dutch oven repeats "in a harsh and penetrating voice" every joke the family has ever told to the Stormtrooper who shows up at their door. And in fact many people report dreams about everyday household objects that suddenly testify against them and go on and on, revealing everything.
Beradt writes: "Here we see a person in the process of being fashioned by a very elusive and even today not fully understood form of terrorization, a terrorization that consisted... of sheer uncertainty about how complete this surveillance was..."
The city steeps in silence. You can walk for a long time without seeing anyone but cats, who squabble, slink, purr, lurk, snooze, flee, and die on every corner. They’re leaner and dirtier and warier than the cats of Crete and Santorini and Naxos. And here, too, the wind howls. The city sits with its back to the setting sun and darkness settles quickly, sinking first into the deep alleys and stairwells before swallowing the city whole, so that only the city’s three great churches gleam out. Under the moonlight, when the city’s remaining inhabitants sleep, when the night fills in the city’s empty facades, it seems like Ermoupoli will awake in another time—that the streets will fill again with life and the port with traffic and the alleys with fat, well-traveled rats.
Ooh dreamy and haunting. A lovely departure from the uszh. 🧡
Unless I missed it, I’m struck that you haven’t shared this one (which left an impression on me, at least): https://elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/escape-routes