I've realized that everything in this world is geared to destroying mankind, to destroying me, among others. Everything: even the faith I once had. The Party, the triumphant revolution, I used to believe in all that. Deep down I still believe in it, but only as one believes in a dream after waking... I am on my own. I have the right to want to live, even through the decline of Europe.
Some notes here from my recent read of Victor Serge's Unforgiving Years, a pressing meditation about European Communists on the run in WWII even more from Stalin than from Hitler.
True to the concerns of this itinerant Communist's other written works -- humming with a force vitale that ranges from the polemical to the historical to the poetic, taken together they comprise some of the 20th Century's most "committed" literature -- the energies at stake in this novel are political and, above all, psychological. From page one unsettled characters are on the run and remain so for five years (1940-45), in four countries, on two continents, and through 340 pages. They juggle aliases and addresses while beset by trenchant reassessments -- sometimes shared, often private -- of the state of the Class Struggle In A Time Of War.
Come to think of it, a tantalizing twist on Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon would be had Serge managed to compress his tale into one continuous narrative rather than four successive ones. The novel could then be titled (more intensely, likely, and certainly with more economy) Unforgiving Hours. As it stands, the narrative offers two sections whose major machinations unfold amid real warfare, but where battle is but the backdrop -- the mise en abîme of Leningrad under Wehrmact seige, and later the fin de Reich leveling of the city of Altstadt before its American liberation.
Serge's primary purpose is not martial, but civil. For a ruthless agitator, he stares with considerable sympathy into the fragile frontiers of everyday minds overrun by extraordinary, totalitarian ideologies. One passage especially near the end of the Altstadt section struck me. Here an elderly Nazi school instructor speaks his mind to an American journalist:
"A very great people the Americans ... The United States is presently the foremost industrial power in the world, and superior at waging war ... On the other hand, there is a certain lack of social cohesion and spiritual tradition..."
"You think so?"
"Beyond a doubt.... You will realize that in fifty years."
"Phew, we got time to turn around then."
(p. 263)
In these lines is the crux of the "culture war" we came to by the 1990s -- stoked by the "adversary culture" (which Norman Podhoretz elaborated in The Bloody Crossroads), then superseded by the "counterculture" -- which rages and festers today. These lines are also, let it be noted, nearly identical to those which "The Philospher of Islamic Terror," Sayyed Qutb, drew in the sand during his nearly identical years in America. Yet note as well the journalist's reflexive, rolling-up-our-sleeves, can-do attitude. Only in America can history be -- or, to a European, seem, at least in part -- neither pathetic nor heroic.
So much of 20th Century European history is unpardonable, yet so much of 21st Century American history remains unfinished.
