Category Archives: Arts

Arts, History, Philosophy

Quantum Leaps: Socrates, ‘Academic and essential thinker’…

PLATO’S UNDERLING?

SOCRATES (c.470-399 BC) lived through times of great political upheaval in his birthplace of Athens, a city which would eventually make him a scapegoat for its troubles and ultimately demand his life. Much of what is known about Socrates comes through the works of his one-time pupil Plato, for Socrates himself was an itinerant philosopher who taught solely by means of public discussion and oratory. He never wrote any philosophical works of his own.

Unlike the Greek philosophers before him, Socrates was less concerned with abstract metaphysical ponderings than with practical questions of how we ought to live, and what the good life is for man. Consequently, he is often hailed as the inventor of that branch of philosophy known as ethics. It is precisely his concern with ethical matters that often led him into conflict with the city elders, who would accuse him of disrupting and corrupting the minds of sons of the wealthy elite with revolutionary and unorthodox ideas.

Socrates was certainly a maverick often claiming to the consternation of his interlocutors that the only thing he was sure of was his own ignorance. Indeed, much of his teaching consisted in asking his audience to define various common ideas and notions, such as ‘beauty’, or the ‘good’, or ‘piety’, only to show through reasoned argument that all of the proposed definitions and common conceptions lead directly to paradox or absurdity. Some of his contemporaries thought this technique disingenuous, and that Socrates knew more than he was letting on. However, his method was meant to provide salutary lessons in the dangers of uncritical acceptance of orthodoxy. He often railed against, and made dialectic victims of, those who claimed to have certain knowledge of some particular subject.

Bust of Socrates – Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. He is credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy.

Bust of Socrates – Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. He is credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy.

Socrates taught his pupils to think for themselves. He created a teaching method known today as the ‘Socratic Method’, which promotes clear thinking, and by questioning their currently accepted ways of thinking. He demanded that these accepted ways be questioned.

It is chiefly through the influence of Socrates that philosophy developed into the modern discipline of continuous critical reflection. Suspension of critical thought, Socrates said, is the biggest threat to society and the individual. How true that is of the practices used by religious and political leaders not wishing to be questioned on matters of principle who regard themselves as sacrosanct or, at times, infallible on ‘interpretation’.

Loved by the city’s aristocratic youth, Socrates inevitably developed many enemies throughout his lifetime. In his seventieth year, or thereabouts, after Athens had gone through several changes of leadership and failing fortunes, Socrates was brought to trial on charges of ‘corrupting the youth’. It would seem that the charges were brought principally to persuade Socrates in renouncing his provocative public speeches and that by convincing the citizens of Athens that the new leadership had a tight rein on law and order. Socrates was also indicted on charges of ‘not believing in the city gods’. With a plea of guilty he might perhaps have walked away from the trial and lived out the rest of his life as a private citizen.

However, in characteristic style, he robustly defended himself, haranguing his accusers and claiming that god himself had sent him on a mission to practice and teach philosophy. When asked, upon being found guilty, what penalty he thought he should receive, Socrates mocked the court by suggesting, brazenly, a trifling fine of only 30 minae. Outraged, a greater majority voted for Socrates to be put to death by the drinking of hemlock than had originally voted him guilty.

Unperturbed, Socrates readily agreed to abide by the laws of his city and forbade his family and friends from asking for a stay of execution.

Socrates trial, death and final speeches are wonderfully captured by Plato in his dialogues Apology, Crito and Phaedo.

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Arts, Books

Book Review: ‘Alone In Berlin’…

AN ACCOUNT OF RESISTANCE

Intro. More than six decades on this account of a couple’s doomed efforts to sabotage the Nazi regime remains powerful testimony.

HANS FALLADA led the kind of life that is measured in shots. Shots of every kind. At the age of 17 Rudolf Ditzen, to give him his birth name, shot one of his closest friends dead in a bizarre suicide pact, staged to look like a duel. As a result he was committed to a psychiatric institution.  This spared him the ordeal of being tried and punished for his offence, but on the downside it ushered in a life increasingly governed by drink, morphine, marital breakdown, mental illness and the Nazis.

In 1944, having already endured two separate stints in prison for petty offences committed in pursuit of his drug habit, Fallada fired a gun at his first wife in a drunken incident. The couple had recently divorced. He was briefly jailed again and spent most of the rest of his life in and out of hospitals until he died of heart failure in February 1947, aged 54. Remarkably, the last 30 months of Fallada’s life yielded some of his most powerful and enduring works, among them Jeder Stirbt Fur Sich Allein (Everyone Dies Alone), first published in 1947, but only now available in English under the title Alone in Berlin.

Despite his formidable demons, Fallada was astonishingly productive. He enjoyed literary acclaim, and a rare spell of mental stability, following the publication of his 1932 novel Little Man, What Now? , which was made into a Hollywood film. But the rise to power of Hitler triggered the first in a series of breakdowns that marked his slow, painful decline.

Alone In Berlin: Hans Fallada has emerged with a novel that remains powerful 60 years after the Resistance to sabotage the Nazi regime. Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways.

Alone In Berlin: Hans Fallada has emerged with a novel that remains powerful 60 years after the Resistance to sabotage the Nazi regime. Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways.

Fallada’s relationship with the Nazis was complex. Having been branded an “undesirable author” in the early days of the regime, he was later favoured by Joseph Goebbels following his 1937 novel Wolf Among Wolves, for its negative portrayal of the Weimar republic. The following year he made plans to flee the country, aided by his British publisher, George Putnam, but lost his nerve at the crucial moment. Wary of being blacklisted again, or worse still confined to one of the Nazis’ notorious mental institutions, he was forced to bargain with the regime he despised in order to continue publishing.

Crazed killer, alcoholic, morphine addict and Nazi collaborator: Hans Fallada was always going to be a hard sell outside his native country. So it is to Penguin’s credit that it has taken the long overdue step of commissioning this English translation of his final work. It is a necessary step, too, for Fallada invokes an aspect of the Second World War that is in danger of being forgotten: the grinding horror of life in a totalitarian state.

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ALONE IN BERLIN is the story of a couple, Otto and Anna Quangel, who wage a doomed campaign of resistance against the Nazis. Otto Quangel is a foreman at a furniture factory in Berlin, a man who demands nothing from society beyond a living wage and the freedom to live as he pleases.

At the start of the novel Fallada introduces us not just to the Quangels, but to everyone in their block of flats on Jablonski Strasse: the die-hard Nazi clan, the Jewish widow on the top floor, the petty thieves hanging around the entrance. Fallada expertly weaves the stories of this disparate cast of characters, creating a clever cross-section of a society under siege.

The Quangels are no blameless innocents: they have supported the Nazis in the desperate days of the early thirties, and for many years close their eyes to the atrocities just around the corner. Otto Quangel chooses not to dwell on the sudden disappearances of workers from his factory floor or the pervasive rumours about what happens in the concentration camps. But as the crimes of the state mount up, such silent complicity is unsustainable. The turning point comes in the shape of two events. First, they receive news that their son, Otto, has been killed on the front – on the same day Germany’s triumph over France is announced, prompting an outburst of celebration among their Nazi neighbours. A few days later, their Jewish neighbour, under provocation from the same family, throws herself to her death from her top-floor window.

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NO LONGER able to ignore the regime’s disregard for human life, the Quangels begin a futile campaign of resistance that leads to their arrest, trial and death. Quangel’s method of subversion is almost pathetic in its lack of impact: every Sunday he writes a handful of postcards denouncing the Nazis and deposits them in stairwells. When he is arrested, he learns that all but 18 of his cards have been handed to the police unread: his two-year crusade has reached, at most, a handful of people. And he pays for it with his life.

There are no tricks or unexpected twists in Alone In Berlin. It reads like a whodunit in reverse, an account of a murderous state clenching its fist around another victim. Fallada’s style is straightforward, often crude (he is said to have written the novel in a “white heat” of 24 days, under failing health), with only the occasional descriptive flourish. The power – and the horror – of the novel is rooted not in the grotesque spectacle of the Holocaust, but in the commonplace brutality that underpinned it.

The Quangels’ situation is hopeless, but Fallada offers them redemption in their refusal to succumb to the Nazis’ dehumanising crusade. It is portrayed as an assertion of the primacy of human life, vindicated by the demise of the regime in the closing chapter. As Anna Quangel puts it, “The main thing … is that we never allow ourselves to be made into them, or start thinking as they do.”

– ALONE IN BERLIN, Hans Fallada [transl. Michael Hofmann], is published by Penguin Classics at £20.

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