Mystic Terror Revisited

By MICHAEL DIRDA

In the mid-1950s, the young critic Joseph Frank, having been invited to give the Christian Gauss lectures at Princeton, settled on the then fashionable topic "Existential Themes in Modern Literature." Since Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre both regarded Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground" (1864) as a central text of existentialism, Mr. Frank naturally plunged into an intensive study of that novella. His fascination with its anguished protagonist—who on the first page brazenly proclaims "I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man"—eventually led the critic to learn Russian and to plan a short book on the sociological and ideological roots of the Underground Man's self-hatred. But as Mr. Frank's fascination with 19th-century Russian culture and social thought grew, so did his project. In 1976 there appeared "Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849," followed by four further volumes of critical biography, culminating in 2002 with "Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881."
[BRLEDE-foto2_DV] Alamy (2); The Granger Collection, New York (signature)

Fyodor Dostoevsky's grave at the Alexander Nevsky monastery in St. Petersburg. Insets: The author's signature and a photo of him in 1879.

All five installments of this work—invariably and rightly described as magisterial—have now been reduced to a single massive volume. Editor Mary Petrusewicz cut the full text by roughly two-thirds, and the result was then read and approved by Mr. Frank, now 91 and a distinguished professor emeritus of Slavic and comparative literature at both Stanford and Princeton. "Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time" thus immediately becomes the essential one-volume commentary on the intellectual dynamics and artistry of this great novelist's impassioned, idea-driven fiction.

Naturally, some details have been sacrificed in the abridgment. For instance, in the third volume, "The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865," Mr. Frank spends several pages discussing the possible influence on Dostoevsky of Elizabeth Gaskell's novel "Mary Barton" and Edgar Allan Poe's short stories (especially "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat"). In this condensation all the Gaskell material has been dropped even though the plot of her novel about industrial suffering, murder and conscience almost certainly influenced "Crime and Punishment" (1866) and "The Brothers Karamazov" (1881). Happily, Princeton University Press promises to keep all five volumes of the full biography in print.

The poet Allen Tate, introducing Mr. Frank's first book, a collection of essays on modern literature titled "The Widening Gyre" (1963), described him as "a philosophical critic with an international point of view." Given such a background, Mr. Frank has avoided the usual sort of literary biography, the kind that strings together facts and anecdotes from a writer's public life. Instead he keeps his attention focused on Dostoevsky as an artist and thinker, one whose work represents a dialogue with the political, cultural, religious and social movements of his time. As Mr. Frank writes: "The personal entanglements of the figures in the novels, though depicted with often melodramatic intensity, cannot really be understood unless we grasp how their actions are intertwined with ideological motivations." His "Dostoevsky" is thus a hybrid of biography, criticism and intellectual history.

Dostoevsky's own life (1821-81) was itself quite full of "melodramatic intensity." His father, who had pulled himself up from poverty to become a doctor, was probably murdered by the family's own serfs. The young Dostoevsky, following the success of his first novel, "Poor Folk" (1846), joined the progressive Petrashevsky Circle, whose members were eventually arrested for treason and sentenced to be shot. Pardon was granted only when the first three of the condemned were actually standing before the firing squad; Dostoevsky was waiting his turn in the next group of three. Instead of being executed, he was shipped off to four years at hard labor in Siberia—an experience chronicled in "The House of the Dead" (1862). He did not return to St. Petersburg until a full decade had passed, during which time he had become a populist, a believing Christian and a deeper, more serious artist.
n subsequent years Dostoevsky grew increasingly religious, politically conservative, xenophobic and Slavophile, convinced that Russia's destiny was to lead the world back to God. Already suffering from epilepsy and emphysema, the novelist steadily wrecked his health with overwork. He finished "The Brothers Karamazov" just a month before he died at age 59.

As Mr. Frank shows, Dostoevsky brilliantly dramatized the ideas of his time, especially by juxtaposing the social romanticism of the 1840s—the era of the cultivated Russian daydreamers sometimes called "superfluous men"—and the nihilism of the 1860s, associated with the anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Sergey Nechaev (the probable co-authors of the notorious "Catechism of a Revolutionary"). But Dostoevsky was also constantly measuring his own work against that of the cosmopolitan Ivan Turgenev, whose "Fathers and Children" had electrified the country. Moreover, he was distinctly envious of the gentrified, landowning Tolstoy, going so far as to disparage "Anna Karenina" and its popularity: "I can't understand what they're all so excited about." Surprisingly, these two giants of Russian fiction never met.

Mr. Frank devotes individual chapters to each of Dostoevsky's major books—besides those already mentioned, they include "The Idiot" (1869), "Demons," also known as "The Possessed" (1872), and the journalistic "Diary of a Writer" (1873-1881). He stresses Dostoevsky's grotesque sense of comedy, his vision of the family as a battleground for psychic domination, his belief in the sanctifying power of suffering and his characteristic atmosphere of "fantastic realism," through which 19th-century Russian life comes to resemble Greek tragedy or biblical drama. These explicatory chapters bring to bear the critic's subtle analytic intelligence, as well as his immense learning. Still, one may sometimes disagree. For example, Mr. Frank rather casually sums up Kirillov's suicide (in "Demons") as "the self-negation and self-refutation of his own grandiose ideas." This may be true, but it rather downplays the sheer psychological drama of Kirillov's last night, as he struggles against his overwhelming desire to live. To me, there is no more harrowing scene in all of 19th-century fiction.

But then Dostoevsky is the most harrowing novelist in the world. As Mr. Frank says: "It is this union of uncommon social sensitivity with agonized religious probings that gives his work its properly tragic character and its unique place in the history of the novel." "The Brothers Karamazov" certainly belongs on the same shelf as the Book of Job and "The Oresteia," "King Lear" and "Paradise Lost." Such works are fundamentally psycho machias— representations of battles within the soul, titanic struggles between good and evil, with human salvation and redemption hanging in the balance.

After all, when you read Dostoevsky, you know that he isn't writing for the sake of social advancement, intellectual vanity or even material gain (though he always needed money, often desperately). He is writing because the Lord has touched his tongue with a blazing coal, and he must go forth and bear witness. His detractors, like Vladimir Nabokov, maintain that Dostoevsky is vulgar, sentimental and melodramatic. In fact, he makes most other writers seem precious, fussy and minor. Here, says Dostoevsky, is the human heart, racked by suffering and pain, lost in the wilderness of this fallen world, hungry for God. Until we rest in Him, our lives are simply ordeals, feverish nightmares, torment.

Today we aren't used to novelists openly espousing such ardent religious belief. But faith in Christ formed the core of Dostoevsky's being and from it, as Mr. Frank shows, he confronted what he viewed as the ills and horrors—the demons—of his time. He took ideas personally, a friend once said, and actually "felt thought." His "Notes From Underground" pushes the prospect of Benthamite utilitarianism to its limits—and reveals that utter misery is what results when you allow the head to dominate the heart. That haunting book is, as Mr. Frank substantiates, a riposte to N.G. Chernyshevsky's arguments about the virtues of "rational egoism." "Demons" confirms that nihilism uses political expedience as the cover for satanic evil, deliberate cruelty and the "necessary" murder. All of Dostoevsky's greatest characters—the conscience-stricken ax-murderer Raskolnikov, the dandyish revolutionary Stavrogin, the atheistical Ivan Karamazov— reveal souls chafed and lacerated by theories. And because of Joseph Frank we know precisely what those theories are.

Still, Fyodor Dostoevsky wouldn't be remembered today if he were nothing but a polemicist or a prophet. He was, above all, a dramatist of ideas, often making his devils far more charismatic than his meekly holy characters, such as the saintly prostitute Sonya or Prince Myshkin (in "The Idiot"). "I see," says Svidrigailov, the derisive and cynical debauchee in "Crime and Punishment," "that I may strike some people as a romantic figure." To start one of Dostoevsky's great novels is to experience what the author himself once called "mystic terror": The books read like hallucinations or the frantic dreams of madmen, and in them all our darkest, most irrational impulses are acted out.

That said, this great psychological novelist didn't create ex nihilo. His work, which transcends his time, is also deeply grounded in it. To understand Dostoevsky's often savage satire or nightmarish visions or just the conversations among the Karamazov brothers, one needs to grasp not only the text but also the ideological context. To both of these there is no better guide than Joseph Frank.

Lecture on Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

Introduction
When we read this book, we are confronted with some huge
issues, many of which are a central part of the living
experiences of people in this room. For many of us, the
horrors of World War II, and especially the actions of the
Nazi government with regard to the Jews and other groups
deemed inferior and unwanted, are so much a part of our own
lives that it is difficult not to want to talk about a great
many things-the nature of evil, the "guilt" question, the
history of Anti-Semitism, the growth of totalitarian
government, and so on.

In dealing with Arendt's book, however, we must resist a
great many temptations to digress into many such complex
areas, if we wish to focus on her main point, because the
book is centrally about none of these global issues. And if
we stray too far into various matters which arise out of the
Eichmann story and do not look clearly at what Arendt wishes
us to consider, then we will miss the main point-indeed, as
I should like to argue in a moment, we may become an
integral part of the problem she wishes to deal with.

What I wish to focus on here for a few minutes, then, is
what I see as the central concern of this text. I want to
call it quickly and cursorily to our attention, so that we
do not lose sight of it in our discussions about all the
other matters. I don't have much time, so I shall be as
brief as I can be. Simply put, I want to insist that there
are two major and related lessons Arendt wishes to consider.
The first is an old-fashioned Kantian injunction that we are
all member of a single group, the human community, and that
our responsibilities are above everything else to than
community of individuals. Secondly, the failure to base our
judicial treatment of genocide on this awareness leaves us
dangerously incapable of recognizing and therefore of
dealing with the most pernicious new crime to appear before
the courts in this century. These are urgently practical
questions which concern all of us in our daily lives. Thus,
Arendt's main concern is not to educate us about the
Holocaust or about Eichmann but about ourselves.


The Issue of Justice in the Community
If this book is not primarily intended as a history of the
Holocaust, an essay on the nature of evil, a study of anti-
Semitism, an examination of the "guilt" question, or even a
complete biography of Adolph Eichmann, then what it is
about? Well, Arendt tells us many times: this is a book
about justice in the modern world. Arendt's purpose here is
clear (and repeated many times throughout): the details of
the Eichmann trial matter because they indicate to us the
nature of our own responsibilities for justice in the human
community and of the ways in which we too often evade or
ignore those responsibilities.

Some time ago, soon after we began this four-cycle
curriculum in Liberal Studies, we examined Aeschylus's play
The Oresteia. That work, as we discussed then, is about the
establishment within the human community of a system of
justice administered by the citizens of the polis. The
moment comes about as a divine gift, and there is an
assurance given by the gods that the community which
establishes justice properly and which carries it out with
integrity and respect will flourish. Of all the works we
have read in Liberal Studies, The Oresteia is the most
optimistic and the most challenging: human beings can, in
the human community, rule each other in such a way that the
community will thrive. But the play also contains an
ominous warning: the community that forgets its full
responsibilities or upsets the appropriate balance upon
which justice depends will perish.

The major point that Arendt wants us to derive from this
book is the same. For her the story of Eichmann and the
story of his trial are important primarily for what they
reveal to us about the nature of justice and about the
attempts, deliberate and otherwise to pervert it.

I do not have time here to rehearse her argument--and in any
case there's no need, since she makes it very clear herself.
But I do want to call attention to some points in it, once
again in order to emphasize that this book has a specific
point which we should not miss.

The first point that is made repeatedly through the book is
that justice-criminal, moral, and political justice is a
highly individual matter. That is, it involves the
particular actions of particular people, and the business of
rendering a judgement or making a decision is corrupted as
soon as this key point is forgotten. One of her main
indictments of the proceedings in Jerusalem is that the
trial was deliberately engineered, in spite of the attempts
of the judges, to deal with group interests-both those
during the events being judged but, more importantly, group
interests at the time of the trial (i.e., fifteen years
after the end of the war).

Thus, for example, the Israeli government wanted a trial
that would remind the world of the sufferings of the Jewish
people, that would once more raise the question of the
collective guilt of the German people, that would let
everyone know about the horrors of anti-Semitism, that would
at last allow the Jewish survivors an official hearing, and
so on. Arendt points out again and again that there was a
political agenda driving much of this trial, and in her view
that perverts justice, no matter how sympathetic we might be
to some of the motives for this use of the trial. The
strength of this political agenda was so strong that it led
to the judge's original verdict being rewritten in order to
mesh with the government's (and the prosecution's)
perceptions.

And why does this matter, when she has no doubt about the
guilt of the defendant? Her book raises a number of
important and challenging legal points, but they are, in a
sense, secondary. A trial, like Eichmann's, as she points
out many times, has a simple task: to render judgement on
this man, for these deeds, at this time, taking into account
various factors which might have significantly affected his
ability to choose how to act (e.g., was he mentally sound,
was he in a position to know what he was doing, did he have
any way of acting any differently, and so on). Anything
which shifts the business of the trial away from this sharp
particularity into wider cultural or historical issues, no
matter how important, is an erosion of justice, because it
subsumes questions of justice to political and social and
cultural questions not immediately relevant to the principal
reason for the trial: justice in the community.

Political and social questions are indeed important, indeed
essential, parts of the background information, so that the
individual under scrutiny can be fully understood in terms
of the various social and political pressures with which he
had to deal. But, according to Arendt, they serve as
background only. Any attempts to explain away individual
actions (or refusals to act) by reference to collective
pressures is pernicious to justice, because they strike at
the very basis of the central hope on which our civilization
rests: that human beings are individually responsible for
what they do.

Again and again in her text Arendt takes issue with those
who wish to do this, to explain away the horror by reference
to cultural generalities. One can understand people's
reasons for wanting to do this. After all, faced with the
extraordinary horror of the events, many of us find it
easier to blame something like the German people or European
Anti-Semitism or the pathological Nazis, rather than seeing
the cause in the particular actions of ordinary people.
Even in our seminar comments, often the discussion is
dominated by comments about groups, as if the collective
identity of certain people (Germans, Jews, Italians, and so
on) is the key element in understanding and judging them.
Arendt wishes to remind us that this sort of thinking
perverts justice.

The strength of Arendt's case comes, not from her grasp of
the bewildering complexities of detail (impressive as that
is) or from her moral indignation at what was done, but
rather from her uncompromising sense that in the human
community, we as individuals-no matter what group loyalties
and identities we may possess-have a personal and political
moral responsibility for what we do and that we can be held
accountable-in fact, must be held accountable as
individuals-for crimes against the human community.

We have spent a good deal of time this semester dealing with
various forms of relativism--the pragmatic relativism of
James, the cultural relativism of Benedict, and the
existential relativism of de Beauvoir. It comes across to
me as immensely refreshing to return to an old fashioned
Kantian, a moral thinker who maintains that we are
responsible to the human community for our actions, that
there are certain universal principles by which we must
conduct our actions and in terms of which we will be judged
and must judge others, that subsuming such matters under
cultural questions is a moral evasion of the first order.
This is immensely refreshing because it establishes a clear
and uncompromised sense that we are, first and foremost,
human beings and that any attempt to deal with our fellows
on any other basis is suspicious.

The Moral Compromise of Classification
This issue of group thinking becomes particularly acute when
Arendt moves to the key question raised by the Holocaust:
How could so many people from such a culturally rich place
becoming a willing agents in a diabolically evil program?
She has no doubt that the origin of the Final Solution was
in Hitler's own personality, something beyond our
understanding. She's not interesting in probing that
origin. For her what really matters is how Hitler secured
massive compliance with his irrational hatred.

Her analysis brings out very clearly how such compliance is
secured: it comes through something really common to us all,
the manipulation of our thinking and our imagination through
classification. Once we have accepted certain labels, then
we are well on the way to sanctioning different treatment.

Arendt spends a good deal of time discussing the complex
issues of citizenship in many European countries after the
first world war. This was a quagmire because, as a means of
accommodating the tense ethnic rivalries in often
artificially created countries, the peace makers after the
war had come up with various schemes of classifying
citizens, which had been more or less accepted (not least of
all by the citizens themselves). These classification
systems had, in effect, recognized human beings as belonging
to different groups and, beyond that, as fundamentally
unequal in their political rights. Hence, Arendt argues, it
became easy to think that different ethnic groups required
different treatment and had different value.

This issue of classification is one of the most important in
the book. Arendt discusses in great detail how the success
of the Nazi extermination apparatus depended initially upon
classification schemes which designated citizens as having
different status: Jews and non-Jews, assimilationist Jews
and Zionists, native Jews and refugee Jews, Jews in the
Council and ordinary Jews. The first step in the
eradication process was to insist upon the official
implementation of a publicly acknowledged classification
system. Once that was in place, then getting acquiescence
for different treatment became relatively easy.

The Green Berets supposedly had a saying: "If you get them
by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow." This
pungent saying suggests that moral attitudes are primarily a
matter of physical security and fear. As Arendt points out,
the physical dangers are important, and we should never
underestimate just how horribly the Nazis could make active
resisters suffer. But it's an important part of her case
that our moral responsibilities do not begin and end with
active resistance. In many cases, what we do have at our
disposal is passive resistance or the refusal to carry out
actions we perceive as immoral. And one thing we have to
attend to in any such system of passive resistance is the
way in which oppressors wish to sell us a classification
system.

Anyone seeking, like the Nazis, to persuade us to carry out
such actions, will generally place a high priority on
persuading us that compliance with certain actions is no big
deal because those concerned are not like us-the
classification systems we have accepted tell us that.

So Arendt's text offers a different lesson: "If you get them
by the mind, their hearts and balls will follow." And the
classification system served to do just that. It is a very
old principle, which goes commonly by the name "Divide and
conquer." Once you can get people to abandon the really
essential category of "human beings," and get them thinking
in terms of ethnic categories, most of the work is done.

[That point, to compare great things with small, is an
important point in an article this weekend on Canadian
multiculturalism arguing that dividing Canadians into
official minority categories is serving to promote hostility
rather than to foster tolerance for diversity].

I would like momentarily to digress on this business of
classification. What makes this so effective is that we are
all used to it; in fact, we cannot function without it.
Quite apart from the point that we probably cannot perceive,
understand, or remember things without having some system of
classification, there is also the fact that the modern state
cannot exist with a huge classification system which
establishes the categories, hierarchies, group identities,
and so on essential to all aspects of the modern state.

Part of the Enlightenment project was to make these
classification systems rational and fair, rather than based
upon ancient family lines, religion, tradition, or personal
allegiance. This, it was thought, could be done if,
following the liberal tradition, our state operated as a
bureaucracy, in which functions were classified, endorsed by
the sovereign power, and subject to the rule of merit or
periodic election and, as much as possible, an equal playing
field.

That is very much how we operate today. At the risk of a
very simple generalization, let me suggest that we have a
three class society. Most of the people are at the bottom;
they are the classified ones. They are the workers, and
what they have is jobs or school or welfare or jails. At
the next level are those in charge of implementing
classification systems (of pasting the labels on people).
They are the professionals, and what they have are positions
(professors, lawyers, doctors, probation officers, social
workers). At the very top is the small group of those who
make up the classification system. They are the rulers, and
what they have are names.

As a teacher I am a professional classifier, like a lumber
grader; I spend most of my time putting labels on people.
The state pays me to do that, and students seek the services
of me and my colleagues in order to get stamped. And most
of the students I teach have one important career ambition:
to move from the ranks of the classified into the ranks of
the implementers of classification systems (to move from a
job to a position). That's exactly what Eichmann wanted.

Arendt wants us to see in the Eichmann story how
classification can produce evil, how it corrupts one's sense
of something much more important than any label-the human
being on whom you are pasting the label. What, after all,
was the start of Eichmann's professional career and his
crime? It was a classification process. He early on made
his career by distinguishing between assimilationist Jews
and Zionists and, on the basis of this difference,
establishing for himself moral differences between two
groups of human beings. Having made the initial
distinction, he now has at his disposal moral categories
"good Jews" and "bad Jews." That is why he can express a
certain bewilderment at the way people see him an such an
enormous monster: had he not admired and been friendly with
many Jews? It is perhaps a small step, perhaps even in the
context easy enough to understand. But it reveals a method
of thinking (or of refusing to think) which leads to the
most horrible consequences.

That point underlines the importance Arendt gives to
stressing Eichmann's normality. It was of considerable
importance to the Jewish people to portray Eichmann as a
monster. And we all have a stake in that form of thinking
because it's so reassuring: only monsters are capable of
such horrific crimes. But Arendt wants us to see clearly
that Eichmann was just like almost everyone else-like many
people in our own communities. He became an active agent of
horror because, in the last analysis, he didn't think
clearly or feel intelligently. He forgot his human moral
responsibility. The classification system and, just as
important as that, everyone else's acceptance of it, made
the omission easy.

The power of the classification system as a basis for the
entire operation is no more terribly ironic than in all
those details about how the Jewish communities themselves
accepted the classification systems the Nazis imposed. Once
again, one can appeal to the traditions of the country or to
the power of the Nazi machine in order to explain away the
complicity of the Jews in their own extermination. But the
point Arendt wants us to see is that those factors are not
enough: the first step is the acceptance of the system which
separates neighbour from neighbour, which establishes that
some human beings are more valuable than others and that,
therefore, there should be different treatment, different
laws, different railway destinations.

That is the reason, among others, that Arendt can point out
that the usual system of dealing with murder-arraigning the
person who actually carried out the deed, is in this case of
state crime inoperable in the usual way, because: "in
general the degree of responsibility increases as we draw
further from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his
own hand" (Arendt's italics, 247). Those people far away
from the actual crime, by their individual decisions, set in
motion the classification system and therefore the very
thought process which, if it doesn't actually carry about
the murder, makes it possible, perhaps even inevitable.

Arendt pays tribute to those countries which successfully
resisted the implementation of the Nazi extermination
program: Denmark, Bulgaria, and Italy. She makes it clear
how such successful resistance worked: the countries either
flatly refused to accept the classification system (like
Denmark) or they simply sabotaged it, making the
differentiation unworkable. And once they did that, the
Nazi officials were, in effect, powerless. More than that,
they began to question their uncritical allegiance to that
system of thinking. What's important about these examples
is that the process of evil was stopped at its first
appearance-in the moral differentiation of people according
to certain defined groups.

We have talked a good deal in LBST 401 about classification
systems and the way they affect understanding. Arendt sees
in the Eichmann story (both in his life and in his trial) an
object lesson of the dangers of classification systems in
politics. As a Kantian she will admit no compromise with
the term "human community" or "human being" and she quite
rightly sees that attempts to subdivide can lead to the most
horrible crimes committed without a pause to reflect.

So one point she wants to stress is that we must beware of
such classification systems. We must as individuals
recognize our responsibility to the human community. When
she talks about the banality of evil at the end of her book,
and refers to the lack of imagination and the
thoughtlessness at the heart of Eichmann's "evil," what she
means, above all, is the inability to perceive this
responsibility or the ease with which people get seduced
from this awareness in pursuit of social goals like
promotion or approval.

One important corollary which she does not explicitly make
in her book, although many of her examples bring the point
out, is the banality of goodness. That is, she provides
examples from many areas of a common refusal to accept the
classification system, of the refusal to treat human beings
as somehow less than oneself. Here again, the key first
step, from which all the others flow, is the refusal to let
one's perceptions of others become perception of the Other,
the Different, the Person Officially Defined as Undesirable.
Not all such efforts were successful in large heroic terms,
but, and this is a key point for her, each one made an
important difference. So in her narrative people like Anton
Schmidt and Georgi Dimitrov, otherwise unremarkable people,
emerge quite rightly as heroes. And that is precisely the
reason why the high officials of the Vatican and many others
emerge as such contemptible villains.

Collective Guilt
And how do people get seduced by these classification
systems and their consequences? Arendt makes clear that one
important feature which contributes to the seduction of the
individual's moral awareness is the compliance of everyone
else. After the Wannasee Conference, where the Final
Solution was openly proposed, debated, and agreed to by the
cream of German civil service (a meeting which took only an
hour and a half), Eichmann correctly concluded that no one
opposed the idea. Who was he to stand up to all these
superior types? This is not a matter of obeying orders.
It's a matter of the moral climate of a professional
culture.

Arendt wants us to understand as clearly as possible the
consequences of a refusal to speak out or to walk away. Qui
s'excuse, s'accuse. The most damning sentence in the entire
book for me is one that probably most people pass over
without remarking anything special. It is this (in a
discussion of the deportations of the Jews): "but the
population at large obviously could not have cared less."
Many of the Nazis themselves were understandably worried
about how their own population, which had actively protested
the mistreatment of the mentally deficient, would react to
the treatment of the Jews. One of the most confident about
how the clergy, the universities, the medical profession,
and the educated middle class would endorse Nazi policy (or
at least not oppose it) was Adolf Hitler. He was right.

For Arendt anything which tends to weaken this awareness of
our immediately moral and political responsibilities is
potentially a perversion of justice. Let me cite one
particular example. In the years of the Eichmann trial,
there was much talk of the collective guilt of the German
people. I was a student at Heidelberg during the early
1960's immediately after the Eichmann trial, and I can
remember going to lectures in which die Schuldfrage was
endlessly debated.

Our professors, all of whom had been educated and started
their professional careers during the Nazi years, had much
to tell us about their difficulties. And one could
sympathize with the very real difficulties they faced as
their classes filled up with students wearing swastikas.
Still, one wondered why they had not just turned their backs
and walked out the door the moment their Jewish colleagues
were sent packing or the day the state demanded a loyalty
oath. Some would deflect the questions aimed at them
personally to talk of the collective guilt of the German
people.

Arendt has nothing but contempt for those who would seek to
explain this phenomenon by some notion of collective German
guilt. It may be all very well, she indicates, for young
Germans to stand up and talk about the collective guilt they
have inherited from their ancestors and so on. To her this
is simply a cheap moral evasion, designed to relieve
particular feelings without challenging the moral
sensibility in a significant way. There is no meaning to
collective guilt in that sense.

What Arendt means is that guilt is an individual matter.
There may indeed be many people in the community, including
our community, who deserve to feel very guilty about actions
from their own past. But the concept that I share a guilt
for other people's actions, that is, for events in which I
was in no way involved, is false. What I do have is not
guilt but a moral responsibility for justice. That means
that I have a responsibility to the community to fight
wrongdoing or, at the least, not to perpetuate it, not to
beat my own breast for some notion of collective guilt.

This is a matter of the highest importance. Arendt is
speaking, most pointedly, of Germany, where, amid all the
cries of collective guilt in the 1960's, there were many
very guilty individuals who were untouched by the judicial
process and, more importantly, who were allowed to go free
because there was no strong demand from the community for
their arraignment. What point is there in agonized
expression of collective guilt combined with an abdication
of political responsibility for prosecuting those who are
publicly known to be guilty of terrible crimes?

Those young German men and women who every once in a
while-on the occasion of all the Diary of Anne Frank
hubbub and of the Eichmann trial-treat us to hysterical
outbreaks of guilt feelings are not staggering under
the burden of the past, their fathers' guilt; rather,
they are trying to escape from the pressure of very
present and actual problems into a cheap
sentimentality. (251)

This is, incidentally, a lesson of particular importance to
us. Today it is fashionable for those defending the
environment or the native people to invoke concepts of the
collective guilt of some group-the capitalists, our
ancestors, General Custer, and so on. From Arendt's text we
should, I think, draw the important lesson, that such talk
is simply rhetorical posturing (except for those who really
do carry a moral guilt, and they should be voluntarily
delivering themselves up for judgement), especially when it
helps to conceal from us or enable us to evade our present
political responsibility to deal with present injustice.

In one respect, Arendt's treatment of Denmark, Italy, and
Bulgaria--the countries which resisted the Nazi
extermination program-is in some ways misleading (or at the
very least incomplete). Because the real story there
(following Arendt's own priorities) is not that the Danes,
the Bulgarians, or the Italians were, as a group, better
than anyone else. Arendt goes to great lengths to show that
that sort of thinking is very dangerous. And I personally
doubt if collectively qualitative statements like that have
much meaning. What happened in Denmark, Italy, and Bulgaria
is that particular individuals-particular Danes, Italians,
and Bulgarians-confronted with the usual requests from the
Nazi bureaucrats, decided that they would not go along. It
is not a matter of cultural natures (although such
traditions may play an important part in individual
decisions); the key idea throughout Arendt is that the best
defence against totalitarian bureaucratic horror is
individual courage, example of moral responsibility which
inspire and which, as Arendt points out, can spread. The
bureaucracy requires compliance; a rational bureaucracy bent
on state evil gets compliance only if most of the
individuals it needs to carry out the work resign their
moral responsibility. There may be all sorts of reason why
people resign their responsibility and such acts of
resignation may indeed be common. That does not make them
right; that does not make them just.

Let me add, by way of a conclusion to this first point, that
I am fully in agreement with Arendt. And that is why I have
strong reservations about "official" multiculturalism and
the idea of an officially sanctioned mosaic. Cultural
diversity and "official" multiculturalism may make an
attractive tree in the cultural garden of Eden, but the
snake in the garden is busy categorizing and classifying
differences, so that Adam and Eve may more quickly forget
that above and beyond diversity is a higher priority, the
universal demands of a common humanity.

And I would suggest that, in our discussions of this book,
we must be careful not to ourselves fall into this same
difficulty, by explaining away difficult questions by
reference to particular groups and their behaviour--the
Jews, Germans, Poles, Catholics, and so on. Such
classification, in Arendt's argument, deflects attention
from the essential guardian of or threat to justice in the
community: the particular actions of human individuals.

The Importance of Precedent
Arendt's second important point, which arises directly from
her preoccupation with individual responsibilities to the
human community, is that the Eichmann trial failed properly
to recognize the complexity of the legal issues it was
dealing with. The final chapters of the book may seem to
some readers like something of an anti-climax, for there
Arendt seems to be (from a cursory look) engaging in legal
nit-picking. After all, if Eichmann was guilty and if the
court reached that decision and sentenced him accordingly,
then why quibble about the particular laws, jurisdictions,
precedents, and so on which made the process possible? That
view is understandable enough, but it represents a failure
to appreciate why Arendt wants to explore the Eichmann trial
in the first place.

First, Arendt wants us to recognize that what happened in
Germany was not a crime against the Jews. It was crime
against the human community. The function of justice, she
points out, is not to avenge the victims; it is to protect
the human community. To forget this (for whatever political
motive) is to make sure that we will be less able to deal
with such things again. For if Eichmann's crime was only
against the Jews, then what stake do I have in it? By an
extension of this logic, what legal stake or obligation do I
have concerning any repetition of the crime, if it does not
touch my community?

This, too, is a question of classification. If Eichmann's
crime, however immense, is a crime against the Jews only
(one justification for setting the trial in Israel), then I,
as a non-Jew, have no particular stake in it. After all, by
definition, he did not hurt me. This form of thinking,
Arendt argues, is particularly injurious, especially in the
sorts of crimes exemplified by Eichmann.

Arendt goes to great lengths to argue that "genocide" is a
fundamentally new crime (new in the sense that for the first
time we are called upon to judge it in a court of law, not
new in the sense that it has never happened before). What
makes it new is that it is a crime against the human
community in total, not against a particular smaller
compartment (like the Jews). Israel's refusal to recognize
this point creates for Arendt an unfortunate example and
represents the loss of a precious opportunity.

It's unfortunate because it will happen again. And we will
lack the measures for dealing with it. For Arendt, the
great failure of the Eichmann trial (like the Nuremberg
Trials) is that they failed to strengthen International Law.
Why should this matter? Arendt explains as follows:

It is essentially for this reason: that the
unprecedented, once it has appeared, may become a
precedent for the future, that all trials touching upon
"crimes against humanity" must be judged according to a
standard that is today still an "ideal." If genocide
is an actual possibility of the future, then no people
on earth--least of all, of course, the Jewish people,
in Israel or elsewhere--can feel reasonably sure of its
continued existence without the help and the protection
of international law. Success or failure in dealing
with the hitherto unprecedented can lie only in the
extent to which this dealing may serve as a valid
precedent on the road to international penal law.
(273)

If, that is, we want justice in the full human community, we
must not, as happened in Jerusalem, serve the interests of
particular sections of that community, no matter how
sympathetic we might feel towards that section of the
community. To the extent that the Nazi crimes were
committed against Jews, it was appropriate that the trial be
held in Jerusalem. To the extent that the Nazi crimes were
committed against the human community, the refusal of the
Israeli authorities to move the trial out of Jerusalem or to
admit an International Tribunal into Jerusalem was a serious
mistake. It may have served the political interests of the
Ben Gurion government, the deep need of the Jewish survivors
for a public hearing, for a formal justification, the
interests of many other countries (including Germany,
France, Argentina, Canada, and many others) which had shown
great reluctance to bring Nazi war criminals to account.
But it did not serve justice.

Orhan Pamuk and Modernist Liberalism

Is there a global culture today? I think there is. Its images come from movies, old and new, and from television; its sounds are rock-and-roll, rap, and heavy traffic on the street. But only the novel has the Faustian chutzpah to try to connect all the dots, to put this immense world together. Orhan Pamuk, one of the world’s great novelists, lives and works within shouting distance of Dissent. The least we can do is shout to our readers that he’s here. I don’t know him, but it’s a thrill to know he’s nearby. He spends half the year in New York, where he teaches comparative literature at Columbia, the other half in his hometown, Istanbul, where he speaks truth and gets in trouble.

Even if Pamuk weren’t this physically close, he would be easy to connect with. Most of his books are easy to get and remarkably easy to get into. They are at once brilliant debates and psychedelic trips. All are set in Turkey, last year or five hundred years ago. Pamuk country is weirdly other, yet he makes us feel we’ve known it all our lives. Now in his fifties, he is working at the height of his powers. People worried not so long ago about “the Death of the Novel.” Pamuk’s books, along with Roberto Bolaño’s, reassure us that this is not true. The novel is still what D.H. Lawrence said it was a century ago: “The one bright book of life.” Only now the light and the life are coming not just from a few centers, but from all over the world.

Pamuk’s novel Snow appeared in the West amid widespread anxiety triggered by the attacks of September 11, 2001. It was easy for reviewers and readers to frame it in the context of what one author (Daniel Benjamin) called “the age of sacred terror.” Pamuk turned out to be a terrific writer of melodrama, and his melodrama got incorporated into our collective melodrama. Snow became an instant bestseller. Now, living in a saner time, we can read it again and see more and find more between the lines. One thing we can find is first-rate dialogue on the question of what it means to be modern.

“Don’t be afraid, these people are modern.” Sunay Zaim, a cultural bureaucrat of the Turkish Republic, says this just before the end. He says it to Ka, a self-consciously “modern” poet. Ka has been in exile in the West for years. He has come back to this miserable border town to write an investigative article on a wave of religious—or pseudo-religious—suicides among teenage girls. We never do learn what is driving these girls; but we learn that, in Turkey at the end of the twentieth century, out-of-control violence is erupting in everybody’s everyday life. Sunay says that if people have faith in the republic, it will all work out. But in Pamuk country, the primary crop is irony. It grows all year round, even when all other crops fail. The Turkish people live on it, but there is plenty left for export. So when any Pamuk character tells any other not to be afraid, we can see the author ringing alarms. When a character says being modern will make the Turkish people stable and happy, we can hear the author’s ironic laugh, even when we’re not sure we get the joke. The one thing that seems to resist irony here is the snow itself, layer piling on primal layer, smothering history, freezing life, blotting out the sun. Yet we know it’s Pamuk’s snow, as artificial and as modern as everything else in his work. This snow falls on the beach and in the jungle as much as it falls at the poles; global warming offers no protection against it; it envelops the world.

Sunay offers his reassurance at the start of one of Pamuk’s most brilliant scenes, which forms Snow’s dramatic climax. He is a veteran actor, producer, show-biz tummeler, and overall wise guy who somehow has found a niche working for the Republic as a provincial cultural bureaucrat. He is a broadly comic character, as if on loan from some road production of Pal Joey or Guys and Dolls; it is surprising to meet him in the solemn world of Snow. His job in Kars is to be a kind of public relations man for modernity, for the Enlightenment, for secular humanism. Sunay overflows with cliché versions of ideas that most readers of Dissent believe in, and that some of us would die for. (Probably so would Pamuk.) This makes his presence truly grueling. We listen to his spiels, and we think, Is that what I believe in? Oy! But once we read to the end, we see we have to feel for him, because of what he goes through—or rather what Pamuk puts him through. He transforms his comedy into tragedy.

Sunay tells his friends not to be afraid. In Pamuk country, this message sets off every alarm. What disaster lies ahead for this poor man? Snow is almost over, so at least we know we won’t have long to wait. But in another way we’ll have to wait forever. Pamuk’s answer will only raise more questions and will open up a Moebius strip of what he calls “secret meanings.” It is typical Pamukian irony that this PR man for clarity and openness is about to become a mystery case that will never be closed.

Snow is set in a time of troubles that culminate in a military coup d’état. Some of my Turkish students think Pamuk means the coup of 1980; others deny a precise date, and say his point is to create a “typical post-1970s coup.” But first, Sunay wants to put on a theater piece that will rally the people of Kars to the republic. He thinks it can overcome their troubles—economic depression and mass unemployment are the worst—if they will only believe in it. He has faith that in the end they will. When he says the people are modern, he means they are self-aware, they are willing to fight for the right to think for themselves, for the right to love, for the right to be happy. Even if conflicts arise between modern people, or between modern values, “Don’t be afraid.” This is a classical humanistic vision of modernity; it could have been embraced by Stendhal, by Emerson, by Victor Hugo, by George Eliot, by John Dewey, by Margaret Mead. Sunay sees the pre-coup Turkish Republic as a realization of this classic vision.

Sunay says not to be afraid, and at once we worry. There is trouble with Kedife, his leading lady and old friend. He has composed a weird, disturbing script where his character urges her character to throw off her Islamic headscarf, in the name of human freedom. She resists, then hesitates, then gives way, and then after she does it, she turns on him and shoots him to death. For the curtain call, the actors will appear hand in hand, the best of friends.

Kedife is reluctant to take the role. There are nasty and belligerent people in the house, and she is worried about provoking them. But Sunay bullies her and she lets him and, at last she agrees to go on. Everything goes smoothly until the climactic moment: then it turns out that the gun is loaded, the bullets are live, the blood that drenches the stage isn’t stage blood, and Sunay really dies. People start screaming. Soldiers come in, a little late. The house is in a state of chaos and pandemonium. We know that if anything like this were to really happen, Pamuk the man and citizen would be horrified. But in a dramatic scene where ordinary life morphs into bloody horror, Pamuk the author is happily at home.

Many of Pamuk’s readers will find themselves as mystified by this climax as the people on the spot, or as the authorities trying to piece the case together later on. How could Sunay not have known about the gun? Are we meant to think he arranged to be killed? If he did, he didn’t let the killer in on it. Pamuk makes it clear that once Kedife sees what she has done, she is distraught. But even if she didn’t mean to kill him, the fact that she did will destroy her life more effectively than any religious veil.

What was he thinking? What inner demons drove this man who denied the demonic? In this mystery one thing is clear: these shots have blown to pieces Sunay’s sunny vision of modern life. The night has turned out to be, as he planned, a display of the modern. But it is a nightmarishly twisted modern, largely unconscious of itself, dense with psychic reversals and existential traps like landmines, where people become suicide bombs and destroy people they love as they destroy themselves. Sunay meant to show the glories of modern life; but somehow modern death steals the show. In fact, that irony haunts much of twentieth-century history. (Will it be better in the twenty-first? It’s too soon to know.)

As Sunay’s vital powers ebb away, his visionary power grows. He gets only one line before he dies: “They’ll never be modern,” he says, “they know nothing about modern art.” This is a great piece of black humor, dead serious. But why should a people want to know modern art? What can it give them? Pamuk doesn’t offer a single ringing answer, but here’s a start: A global horizon and an expansive flow of empathy, a feeling for irony and complexity, a capacity to embrace contradictory ideas and believe and love them both. The poet John Keats, as he lay dying, called this power “negative capability.” The anguished last sentence in Sunay’s life is also his first work of art. The heavy changes that Pamuk puts him through can help us see how modern art could be something to die for—or to live for.

IN SNOW, and in all his best writing, Pamuk creates a drama of modern life in the process of moving toward radical polarization. Modern men and women are under pressure, and they know it. What is to be done? There are two radically different roads people can take: (1) They may reach out toward the most open and generous inclusiveness; this, for Pamuk, is the meaning of modern art, the reason it has flourished, and still lives. Or else (2) they may plunge into the most rigid and violent exclusions; among the first to go will be modern writers and artists, whose love for modern life is greater than anyone’s. Pamuk makes it clear that he is rooting for Plan (1), but he worries about the raw demagogic power of Plan (2). He identifies with (1) because he thinks it is morally right, but also because, in the real modern world, it can bring us a happiness that is not only more intense and “hot,” but more solid and lasting. However, he thinks, in order to fulfill its human promise, (1) has to find a way to envelop (2). In other words, Modernism has an existential task, to somehow assimilate the people and the powers that want to destroy it.

One thing that will magnify this task—but also make it more profound and absorbing—is that the prime enemy of modernism is not, as people used to say when I was young, “tradition,” but something much weirder and more complex, which we might call Modernist Anti-Modernism. (For short, I’ll call it MAM.) More than any writer since Thomas Mann, Pamuk grasps the world-historical importance of MAM.

In the triumphs of the Third Reich, MAM shook the world. When the Nazis were defeated in 1945, liberals like my parents thought that it was gone for good, and that an age of honesty and openness had dawned. Alas, it didn’t work out that way. MAM has had a continuing enormous human appeal, and despite many defeats it keeps coming back. It fits comfortably into the most diverse political cultures; it unites parts of the left—not my part, and not Pamuk’s—with parts of the classical right. It haunted the whole second half of the twentieth century, and it is still alive and well.

MAM both frightens and fascinates Pamuk. It inspires one of his most brilliant characterizations, the handsome womanizer and charismatic demagogue Blue. The main voice of modern art in Snow is the poet Ka. The conflict between Ka and Blue is one of the book’s driving forces. Much of their conflict is focused on Kedife’s sister, Ipek, an impressive and independent woman, and one of Pamuk’s best characters. She loves them both, she sleeps with them both, and they fight for her soul. Will Ipek embrace the poet of modernism or the genius of MAM? Pamuk gives her an inner radiance that makes us really care; for a little while, we feel that the fate of the world is riding on the outcome of this love triangle. (Pamuk has said he doesn’t think people appreciate his women and his writing about love. I hope there’s a way to let him know he’s wrong!)


KA AND BLUE spend lots of time talking. Or rather, Ka talks. He tries to converse and argue. Blue rants; he talks to one person in exactly the same language he would use before a jammed football stadium. “Democracy, freedom, human rights, don’t matter” in the West, Blue says; “all the West wants is for the rest of the world to imitate them like monkeys…” Ka tries to explain that the West, at the end of the twentieth century, places value on human diversity. Blue just waves him aside. “There is… only one West and one Western point of view. And we take the opposite view.” Who are “we” in this sentence? Is Blue using the royal “we”? Is he trying to claim the whole non-Western world as his own? Whatever this is, it is a perspective from which people are interchangeable. This is how he treats women, and he finds plenty of women (including some pretty strong ones) who are glad to be treated that way. It’s also how he treats innocent militant kids: he manipulates his youthful followers into provoking the army and getting themselves killed—but “please don’t tell our mothers,” they say from their hospital beds before they die.

Blue is a leader of a militant Islamic movement, but he shows not the slightest trace of religious feeling. He is cold, detached, cynical, opportunistic, manipulative. If there’s one word for him, it’s a word that the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century put on the map. The word is nihilist. Ka’s first encounters with him reduce the poet to despair. He feels like the helpless suckers in W.B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Blue denounces the sexual license of the West, but, nihilist that he is, he is utterly blasé about conducting simultaneous love affairs in Turkey. His girlfriends include both Ipek and Kedife. There are more, and they all seem to know it. They throw themselves at him like groupies at a rock star; they regard him with total devotion, and eagerly offer up their whole being. (Ipek and Kedife would be a perfect sister duet for a classic torch song—say, “My Man” or “All of Me.”) Blue’s sex life is a kind of travesty of the vanished Ottoman sultans and pashas with their harems. But his power over women is postmodern; what turns him on is submission of the free. Pamuk puts arrows on the sidewalk that point us back to Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. What do women see in Blue, anyway? When they try to explain, the one thing they come up with is Blue’s unwavering total certainty, which throws some of them into a kind of hypnotic trance.

Ka realizes he needs to sort out what his convictions are, and to offer Ipek some sort of happiness that she can’t get in Kars. Having been an exile in the West, mostly in West Germany, for more than a decade, he needs to remember what he has learned there:

They don’t live that way in the West. It’s not as it is here; they don’t want everyone thinking alike. Everyone, even the most ordinary grocer, boasts of having his own personal views…

Ka comes to realize that the freedom of “the most ordinary grocer” in a Western city in 2000 is a tremendous historical achievement; a modern poet can be proud to affirm it. (Any of Kafka’s Ks would have been glad to shop in this grocer’s bodega.) More good things go with these: honesty, complexity, respect, real love, a lifetime of intimate dialogue, communication with other people, exposure to relatively free and open mass media, and a ticket to a place where Ipek’s individuality will be recognized, where she will enjoy freedom of the city, and where she won’t be totally dependent on a family or a man. Ka develops a vision of them as a couple who would not only have a great time, but who would stand for something. The thing they would stand for could be called Modernist Liberalism. The biggest problem for this vision is that, as Pamuk sees it, it can’t be realized at home. They’ve got to get out.

Ipek is thrilled by this vision. For awhile she wrenches herself out of Blue’s grip; she and Ka have several love scenes, at once hot and tender; and she comes to yearn for a new life with him, in Germany, right now.

“When we get to Germany, we’re going to be very happy,” said Ipek, with her arms around Ka’s neck. “Tell me about the cinema you’ll take me to.” “There’s a cinema in the [Frankfurt] Film Museum that shows undubbed American art films late on Saturday nights,” said Ka. “We’ll stop in one of the restaurants around the station and have doner and sweet pickles. After we come home, we can relax in front of the television set. Then we’ll make love. We can live on my political exile allowance and the money I’ll make doing readings of this new poetry book of mine—and neither of us has to do anything more than make love.” “That’s beautiful,” she said.

This fantasy is so sweet! One thing that makes their love so hot is our knowledge that they have had to build the bed themselves. If sexual love means, as John Donne says, that a couple “make this little room an everywhere,” we get to see this couple construct their room, create the existential space they share. Before they could be there, they have had to fight both others and themselves: he, to break out of his inner isolation and focus on another person; she, to break away both from a loving but enveloping family and from a domineering lover to whom she still yearns to submit. In order for modernism to deliver on its human promise, it has to be shared. To reach that point of mutuality takes tremendous struggles, struggles that good people can easily lose through no fault of their own.

Ipek’s line, “When we get to Germany we’re going to be very happy,” is so poignant and heartbreaking that it deserves scrutiny on its own. I know the German-Turkish connection goes back centuries, to a time when Germany was provincial and Ottoman Turkey was perhaps the most powerful country in the world. What does it mean today, that a smart and soulful Turkish woman should dream of Germany? Turkey and Germany have a deep darkness in common: both nations have been perpetrators of genocide. The darkness goes even deeper. In 1942, when some of Hitler’s intimates worried about the long-term scandalous impact of the Nazis’ “extreme measures” against the Jews, the Führer is said to have exclaimed, “Who remembers the Armenians?” So, Turkey’s mass murder of Armenians during the First World War was not only monstrous in itself, but served as a precedent for an even greater mass murder. Moreover, genocidal policy stemmed from a belief that it was feasible to extinguish not only people’s lives, but even the memory of their lives; so that genocide, if done “right,” would never be criticized, because the victims would never be remembered.

But in fact, post-Nazi German governments have made extraordinary efforts to remember—the people who were killed, the ways in which the state killed them, the people who participated in the crime, and the mechanisms with which the whole thing was covered up and denied. Genocide is so humanly inexplicable that we still don’t really grasp how it could happen; the struggle for memory and understanding has to go on and on. But this struggle has helped to make Germany a more open and humanly caring society than it ever was before.

Meanwhile, it seems, Turkey has worked equally hard to forget. About half a century ago, Alcoholics Anonymous coined a phrase that fits Turkey very well: in denial. Both Ipek and her creator seem to believe that a country in denial is poisoning its springs of life and inviting more darkness. This is why Ipek is thrilled at the chance to get out, and why many Turks today see Germany and German culture as sources of light, against the background of their shared darkness. Germany has made a commitment to being open and honest about its genocidal past. This has to be one reason why, half a century after the first Turks began going to Germany for work, many Turkish intellectuals still see Germany as their promised land.

It may take heroism for Ka and Ipek to get there. But the life they look forward to, once they do get there, will be unheroic, ordinary, “normal.” When I was growing up in the Bronx, in the years after the Second World War, it was full of Jews who had just survived the Holocaust. When I met them, they were butchers, bakers, jewelers, tailors, cab drivers, owners of hardware and stationery stores. They were just like Ka’s “most ordinary grocer”—plain Bronx Jews going to the movies and yelling at their children (who were often my classmates and friends) to do their homework. But although most of them didn’t like to talk about it, many of them had been heroes of resistance movements against the Nazis only a few years before. They suffered horribly, but when they survived, they had a chance to become something like the people Ka and Ipek hope to be.

In the history of modern culture, the archetypal couple presiding over Ka’s and Ipek’s fantasies and hopes come from the moment of the French Revolution: they are Papageno and Papagena, from Mozart’s Magic Flute. Ka and Ipek, two centuries later, would be a modernist variation on Mozart’s theme. Their embraces will be accompanied by all the latest mass media, by movies and television, by computer hookups and hyperlinks, and by dreams of America—of undubbed America (Pamuk highlights this), an America in as raw and direct a form as they can imagine. Americans can feel proud to be part of their dream life and their pursuit of happiness.

Why shouldn’t they have all this? In fact, it is only drastic last-minute plot intervention by the author that keeps the heroine off the train to freedom. Maybe Pamuk thought it would be a better story this way, and if he did, who knows, maybe he was right. Maybe stories of love crushed are more poignant than stories of love fulfilled. Or maybe the best story is love crushed after it’s fulfilled: for readers, it might be a way to have the best of both worlds. Think Romeo and Juliet; or, closer to our time and our world, think A Farewell to Arms.

But there’s a difference between the logic of a story and the logic of history. At the start of the twenty-first century, our history may be more open than our literature. A great many people have got out of nightmarish situations all over the globe, and America has given them space to breathe. On any Saturday or Sunday afternoon, at Herald Square, on Telegraph Avenue, in shopping malls in all sorts of American places I and Pamuk have never heard of, you can find couples that look a lot like Ipek and Ka (they are often of different colors), schlepping their babies around in ultra-modern snugglies, overflowing with new life. We could give them a super-title: Modernist Liberalism Lives.

Marshall Berman teaches political theory and urbanism at CCNY/CUNY. His most recent book is On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square (2006).