AMNESIA AND IGNORANCE Clive James doesnt much like Karl Kraus, and at times his criticisms of the latter are curiously anti-semitic. Writing of the unhappy affair between Herr Kraus and Baroness Sidonie Nadherny von Borutin, Mr.James says: He loved her for her beauty, position, charm, cultivation and savoir faire. But her intrinsic worth went deeper than that. She was the product of a social order, which Kraus had admired only for its accoutrements: i.e., he wanted its benefits without understanding their provenance. Though he was pleased to appropriate the concept of gentility as a talisman against modern opportunism, he had no real capacity for valuing noblesse oblige, which is the long-gestated product of a society of obligations, not of rights, and is almost wholly unwritten. (Cultural Amnesia, op.cit, loc. cit p.373). And on the following page, and writing of the relations between Kraus and his Jewish peers, Mr.James says that Kraus: embodied the unforeseeable tragedy - made actual only be a cruel trick of history - of those bourgeois Jewish intellectuals who caught out Jewish artists for their bourgeois vulgarity: by helping to undermine the bourgeoisie as a class, and be helping to establish Jewish origins as a classification, the intellectuals unwittingly served two future masters whose only dream was to annihilate them. (Cultural Amnesia, pp.374/5). This is first time in over 370 pps. devoted very largely to the position of Jewish artists and intellectuals in the development of modern culture that Mr.James hints at the awareness of a a problem in his whole project, which depends very largely on the assumption that the Nazi attitude was a vicious aberration limited to a collection of psychopaths, crooks and opportunists, whereas it was, more arguably, an extreme manifestation of more widespread cultural attitudes which had been gaining ground since the time of Moses Mendelssohn and which saw the Jewish involvement in European culture as both opportunistic and mutative. De-personalise the first passage; make the male pronoun stand for the Jews and the female pronoun stand for European traditions, and the piece reads just like anti-semitic propaganda. As for the second passage, you dont need to alter anything at all, except the idea that the undeniable tragedy was quite as unforeseeable as Mr.James suggests, and not something that was waiting to happen as the social order to which Mr.James admiringly refers was replaced by the vulgar, assertive and intolerant nationalism which had roots not so much in christianity, but in the systems of enlightened secular liberalism engendered by the Revolutions of 1789 and 1848. The Nazi and Communists regimes were criminal, opportunistic and vicious, but the the European culture to the surface of which they rose had long been fermenting with resentment at what it saw as the appropriation and transmutation of its intrinsically noble character by a grubby and opportunistic minority which could not decide within itself whether it wanted to destroy or be co-opted into it: a set of intellectual incunabula of which Mr James modernist preoccupations seem to leave him all but completely unaware.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 06:26:15 +0000
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