A DEFINITION OF TRAGEDY AND THE FAILURE OF THE GERMAN REVOLUTION

In the course of my fascinating but painful readings in the history of the German Revolution, which occurred just after World War One ended, I have been struck by intense feelings of what can only be called tragedy.

Now "tragedy" has become a rather simplified and even cheapened word.  In common parlance it means simply any very bad or sad event.  Aristotle, of course, was more detailed in his analysis of tragic theatre, speaking of catharsis.  Catharsis has to do with the purgation of feelings of pity and terror.

But my own experience of feelings of the tragic, based on my readings of the German revolution, are somewhat different.  (Keep in mind the failure of this revolution eventually opened the way to Hitler's rise in 1933, and left the Soviet Revolution alienated in a world the Leftists of the world had hoped would join the U.S.S.R. in a series of revolutions.  Soviet isolation was a very large factor in the eventual failure of the Soviet Revolution as it degenerated into Stalinism.)

Imagine, then, some very terrible thing happens (somebody's death, the undoing of someone's character, the failure of a revolution, whatever).  There are two possible scenarios here, and an up-side and a down-side to each of them.  First, imagine that the terrible event was inevitable somehow.  The up-side of this is that there is no need for remorse: the bad thing was going to happen, and no one could have prevented it.  The down-side is that that very same inevitability gives one a feeling of powerlessness, a feeling that should the same kind of event approach again, no one will be able to stop it despite whatever may have been learned from the first bad event.

Second, imagine that the bad event was not inevitable.  The up-side to this is that one can take responsibility, learn, and perhaps prevent such a thing from happening again.  There is also the dignity of causality involved here.  Very often people prefer to seen themselves as guilty rather than as powerless pawns.  The downside of the event not having been inevitable, of course, is the remorse.  One can be especially tormented by the bad thing if one is conscious one might have prevented it.

Now imagine this.  (Never mind that what I am about to say is self-contradictory.  What it describes is a feeling I have often had while reading about the German Revolution, and feelings are not always accurately described in logical terms.)  Imagine that one has a feeling of the worst of both worlds.  That is, imagine that one perceives all the creepy powerlessness that comes from an apparently unavoidable catastrophe, plus one also perceives a sense of guilt, shame, or remorse that accompanies a catastrophe one believes could have been prevented.  The blessed relief of being innocent due to the bad event being inevitable is absent.  The sense of dignity in personal power and freedom to choose in a catastrophe that was not inevitable is also absent.  The down-sides of the inevitable and non-inevitable events only are present.

In other words, one gets a sense of the tragic in feeling that the German Revolution was both inevitable and not inevitable.

Might it be possible, then, to turn tragedy on its head?  What about a terrible event that was inevitable and not inevitable, but in which the positive aspects only are present?  Could the crucifixion of Christ have been this event?

TERRY EAGLETON ON THOUGHT

From Why Marx Was Right (2011):

Our thought is bound up with the world in another sense, too.  It is not just a "reflection" of reality, but a material force in its own right.  Marxist theory itself is not just a commentary on the world, but an instrument for changing it.  Marx himself occasionally talks as though thought were a mere "reflex" of material situations, but this fails to do justice to his own more subtle insights.  Certain kinds of theory--emancipatory theories, as they are generally known--can act as a political force within the world, not just as a way of interpreting it.  And this lends them a peculiar sort of feature.  It means that they form a link between how things are and how they might be.  They provide descriptions of how the world is; but in doing so they can help change the way men and women understand it, which in turn can play a part in changing reality.  (emphasis added)

THE BLACK REICHSWEHR AND THE COURTS

The Treaty of Versailles that was concluded after World War One limited the size of the German army or Reichswehr.  When the officer corps was reduced, General Hans von Seeckt was able to use this to the advantage of the political Right to ensure the remaining officers were those of that political tendency.  (By the way, if anyone ever tries to feed you that age old rubbish about how the German army was politically neutral and only supported Hitler out of necessity, you can tell them to stop listening to self-serving Nazi generals and their post WWII memoirs.)

Von Seeckt not only lead the Reichswehr, but the "Black Reichswehr," a secret army of some 20,000 men actually paid and supplied by the regular Reichswehr.  The Black Reichswehr fought an undeclared war against Polish forces in Upper Silesia, and conducted secret trials (and executions) against so-called traitors to Germany.

Unlike the Black Reichswehr, the Freikorps (their political compadres) could operate openly.  They were funded by wealthy capitalists and landowners, and had no official status as an army of the state.  They were frequently used by the bourgeois establishment to thwart proletarian and democratic action through the use of extreme violence.  The accompanying picture here shows a contemporary satire of the judiciary and the police, showing the very heavy bias in the courts towards extremist Right-wingers whenever they were tried for their crimes.  (At some later point I will discuss E.J. Gumbel and his analysis of the appalling stats on this score, and how frequently the Right was not even tried for its crimes during the Weimar Republic.)

THE MELODY OF THEOLOGY

In his The Melody of Theology Jaroslav Pelikan discusses apocatastasis, or "restoration": 

Origen projected a pedagogical view of history in which "the end is as the beginning."  God would allow free will its fullest possible expression, but would--not by force but by patience--lure it back to its intended goal, until eventually, with their free will preserved intact but now fulfilled, all creatures would come to a universal restoration, an apocatastasis.  And by "all creatures" Origen meant just that: the Devil and the other fallen angels, too, would finally find a place in the renewed cosmos of divine love.

This I find not only a very attractive idea, but also theologically the most logical.  A hell wherein some experience an eternity of conscious punishment makes no sense to me whatsoever.  I cannot see it either as just or as merciful.  Now see where things seem to become a little dodgey.  Pelikan continues:

The issue of apocatastasis as doctrine was perhaps put best by the nineteenth-century Pietist churchman and theologian, Christian Gottlieb Barth (1799-1862): "Anyone who does not believe in the universal restoration is an ox, but anyone who teaches it is an ass."

This is the sort of thing that always gets me:  institutions believing in doctrines with a wink and a nod to the knowing, but clamping down on their clear and public expression.  This smacks of gnosticism to me.  If the doctrine of universal restoration is sound, why not preach it?  Are we to understand the gospel requires truth to be subordinate to efficacious lies?  What a breath of life apocatastasis could breathe into a church rendered lame by the requirement to love God though he be a torturer.

 

WORLD WAR ONE COMMEMORATION

I have been encountering sites lately that seem to be gearing up for the 100 year commemoration of WWI in 2014.  In light of my own interests in WWI history and the fact that my upcoming novel has a lot to do with it as well, maybe I should be gearing up to send out my own "barbaric yawp" against what promises to be a great deal of sentimental hogwash.  What needs to be said about WWI that has not already been worked and re-worked into the fine Flanders dust of cliché?  Well, for one thing, imperialism.

Saying that imperialism was the root cause of the war is nothing new.  But it is not one of the strains of WWI discussion that has really made it into the popular consciousness of that war.  Instead, we tend to get more shallow analyses about how this or that overly-ambitious or stupid leader zigged instead of zagged and so set the course for millions of dead.  What tends to get criticized in all this is not the system itself, only the players.  And the analysis of the players, apart from the system, is inevitably shallow.

But what was the context of all this?  How is it that the "powder keg" of Europe was even set up as a powder keg to begin with?  To answer this question we must look at the nature of capitalist imperialism.

WHAT I'M READING: FREIKORPS BASTARDS

Osprey publishes an extensive series of books on a huge number of military subjects.  One of the many books I am in the middle of reading right now (who knows, I might actually finish a few) is the one you see to your left.

I have an obsession with the Weimar Republic, which was Germany between the end of WWI (1918) and 1933, when Hitler took power.  Some of the people who were crucial to his success were the Right Wing private militias who were brought in by the army, the establishment, and the "socialist" government to put down the working class and all Left Wing activity with extreme violence.

The problem for me is, fascinated as I am by all this stuff, I get filled with rage by it.  It slows down the research.  These goon squads got away with murder (literally, and frequently) and thereby thwarted a democratic, socialist revolution.  Some of the characters in my novel, Angels of the Revolution, encounter these types.

I'M BACK

Just to say this website is not dead, but pining -- pining for the fields.  But expect things to get busier here this Summer.  I will be getting my book out this Summer on Smashwords and Amazon.