Arendt was a child of that bourgeoisie, born in its twilight, in 1906, to a non-religious German Jewish family. The rest of her life amounted to being torn from that setting, seeing it pulverized around her — the Nazis, the trenches, the Depression — yet she writes, I’d say, as if the demise of her childhood world was the end of a geological era and not just one limited episode.
Emil had a similar, though more religious, background. His father owned a department store in Halle, in what became East Germany. His family was rooted in German and Prussian culture. After the Cold War, he received compensation and died wealthy, friends say. He was born a decade after Arendt, but perhaps shared her sense of bourgeois culture as an ethical baseline for human nature.
Mind you, Freud was one of many who repudiated the bourgeois view of human nature. He did so long before the Holocaust then died on its eve, having chillingly anticipated it with notions like the Id, which undermined civilization’s efforts to be civilized. Back then, there was a cottage industry in rejecting the bourgeois ethos, like Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. Nazism itself banked on anti-bourgeois disgust. In fact, it is surprising that German Jews such as Emil and Arendt could say they were surprised by the descent into barbarity. Horrified and enraged but not startled. Unless it is one thing to anticipate theoretically a breakdown of civilization, but something else to see it embodied before your gaze while you pass through the fire yourself. That might send you scurrying to an earlier world view that once seemed banal. I can sort of hear Arendt say, “Look, Artaud was theatre. Freud was theory. But this happened. No one really expected it.”
Emil underwent Freudian analysis in Toronto but remained skeptical of broader applications. He’d say, in what he called his deadpan, “That’s like treating a sick horse with a pill through a blowpipe: everything depends on who blows first.” Still, he didn’t deny it — he just said something witty about it. As for Arendt, she rejected interpretations based on unconscious motives. She felt they deprived people of dignity. “Look,” I can hear her say again, “he says that’s his reason. If I don’t take him seriously, why should I take you, me, or anyone seriously?” She believed in will and choice and would not see them disparaged. Despite that, her writings include brilliant construals of the “real” meaning of events. As if she could not refrain from them. I don’t think that makes her inconsistent. There is a realm of will and choice, and an area of murk and uncertainty. They interplay like light and shadow.
As for me and my reactions — to Auschwitz, 9/11, the cops at Low Library, and other evil moments of my times? My version of common sense tends not to be perplexed by vile behaviour. I am surprised when people act well. I’m guessing it has to do with my dad.
He was prone to exploding, for no apparent reason. I used to think it was tension over his gambling debts or his fraught relations with his older brother, Al, who dominated their little business in the garment district on Spadina Avenue in Toronto. Or resentment of his own dad, who did nothing, he said, except neglect his family and run around with women. Perhaps he was just born mean and stayed that way.
At any rate, it was brutal. Screaming, abuse, derision. Mostly at my mum, for being stupid, incompetent, when he couldn’t find a tie or we were leaving on a trip. Though they had a stupendous sex life. Everyone noticed it (except me, but that’s another story, er, novel). She later told me he still came home for “lunch” when I was in high school. Until a year before his death at eighty-five, it continued at least three times a week. I asked if she ever had an orgasm, and she guffawed (not her usual mode). “Every time.”
My brother and I had no such compensations (her word for why she stayed). Dad would wake me in the middle of the night, bellowing that we’d be on the street tomorrow and it was my fault. When I had trouble with high school authorities, he said they were right. I said, but they’re wrong! “Even when they’re wrong,” he shouted, “they’re right!”
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