There is this story of stolen art going around – do I want to say “still” because it’s been like a week? I hope that one day maybe Lawrence Weschler will write about it. Anyway: It’s been referred to as a Nazi-Schatz which makes me think of the Ramones song “Today Your Love, Tomorrow Your World”: “I’m a shock trooper in a stupor/I’m a Nazi schatze.”
There is a scene in Sarah Diehl’s wonderful novel “Eskimo Limon 9” where a young Israeli finds a copy of “Sid Sings”. He’s disturbed by the label, which features a swastika formed out of four guitars. “Punk was new to him, he didn’t yet understand its rules.” This will soon change for him. I will gladly cop to still not understanding those rules – or maybe I do.
A few years ago Martin Amis wrote a book called “Koba the Dread” – a non-fiction work on Stalin and “Laughter and the Twenty Million”, that last number being the people killed by him. There are some great passages in that book – as you’d expect Amis really is on fire when he writes about the use and abuse of language and what it means – and also some howlers. The overall impression is that Amis wants to blame his own spotty reading when it comes to this part of history on everybody but him.
The idea for this book, he writes, came to him when during a public debate his friend Christopher Hitchens referred to someone as “an old comrade”, to which the audience reacted with knowing laughter. Amis asks if they’d all laughed if he had said “an old blackshirt” instead. He finds the answer to be no and is outraged.
His basic thesis is that “we” have more or less penetrated the Nazi horror or at least attempted to but that the same hasn’t happened for Stalin’s terror. So all that remains of the latter are jokes that are, pardon the phrase, campy.
This has not been my experience – in a perspective that is admittedly as limited as Amis’ in its own way, though I certainly don’t need to be told that I don’t know who Dzerzhinsky was – I find that in fact for quite a few people most of what remains of Hitler’s crimes are bad jokes (as Daniel Erk once put it) and what remains of Stalin’s is indifference.
Which, whatever, I guess. Unless there is aggressive and willful ignorance I’m certainly not “outraged”. But I do feel a certain alienation (I know, poor me) when there is some sort of “Nazi provocation” and everybody is rushing to the defense of the accused immediately. The party line is: making jokes about it equals dealing with it. When Sid Vicious wore a T-shirt with a swastika he de-loaded that symbol. The question whether that is even a worthwhile endeavor still needs to be asked though.
Ultimately it’s about dumb vs intelligent – which might even be a moral category. So I find Siouxsie’s early act and Joy Division’s work dumb but “Today Your Love, Tomorrow Your World” quite smart. Or, if you want it literary and more recent: “Les Bienveillantes” is worth to be grappled with (if ultimately deeply flawed) while “Endstufe” is stupid bullshit. Of course not everybody is Thor Kunkel – but not everybody is Jonathan Littell either.
This problem, if you want to call it that, is still with us – Nitsuh Abebe for example has written about the conflict between “right” and “resonant” in judging the work of MIA. It’s certainly not about denunciation, though there are instances where that might be called for. It’s about not pretending there isn’t a conflict there and ackownledging that there really are Thor Kunkels (and worse) in the world. It’s about talking about it.
One night I was out with a friend and his friends. I was feeling a bit catty and started talking about “Joy Division, that intellectual Nazi band from Manchester”. “Joy Division were Nazis?” one guy asked, genuinely confused. “Joy Division were intellectuals?” my friend just said. I wish I could report that a drunk passer-by yelled “Joy Division were from Manchester?” but no such luck, alas.