STEREOTYPES

There's this "European Heaven/European Hell" joke. European heaven is where the French are the lovers, the Swiss are the bureaucrats, the Italians are the cooks, and the English are the rulers. European hell is where the English are the cooks, the Italians are the bureaucrats, the Germans are the rulers and the Swiss are the lovers.

The joke gets carried out beyond to the distinctive characteristics of the other nationalities of the European "Union" and, like all stereotypes, it's funny and resonates because at a meaningful level it's true.

I read 2,000+ pages of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and I posted here previously about how wonderful the book was and about how much it taught me about myself and love but I had to put it down some time ago because of it's relentless concentration on sex: Proust's failures with Gilberte, his conquest of Albertine, his failures with other women, his more numerous conquests of still others. It became boring and tedious because it was so repetitive. It was like being forced to sit straight through twenty four hours of Woody Allen movies, or porn. I love Woody Allen movies, and I'm abashed to say I love porn, but sex, of all things, should not be made boring.

So I put down Proust and read some Dickens--no boredom by repetitive sex there; no sex there--and when I was done with Bleak House I bought Stendhal's The Red and the Black thinking that a German would be another good counterpoint to the Frenchman Proust.

I didn't know that Stendhal was French, nee Henri Marie Beyle. HEY, "STENDHAL," SOUNDED LIKE A NICE GERMAN NAME TO ME, OK? FUCK YOU.

I'm fifty pages into the book and nineteen year old Julian Sorel is on the cusp of seducing Mme de Renal, the beautiful, voluptuous thirty year old wife of his employer. Jeezus these people are obsessed.

I went out and bought some more books. This time making no mistake I chose Faust by JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE.

William Shirer wrote in The Rise and Fall... of his amazement that a culture that could produce "a Goethe, a Schiller, a Bach, a Brahms, a Beethoven" could have produced Hitler. But as Shirer went on to say, this was also the same culture that produced more morally complex figures like Wagner and Nietzsche, and it all began with Goethe. He was the ultimate ubermensch, the equivalent of Leonardo to Italy or Jefferson to America and perhaps no single person ever has had the influence on a culture that Goethe did on the German and his influence was because of Faust.

So it's revealing and, in retrospect ominous, to realize that the influence of this one man and this one book were based on the main character having made a bargain with the devil. Faust was a real live person too, and a German, who lived in the late fifteenth century and taught school, molested the boys and dabbled in magic.

As if this is not poisonous tree enough for the tainted fruit of an entire culture to fall from, Goethe's Faust is saved, is redeemed. He doesn't get eternally punished. Here is the proto-Nietzsche who was to declare that Christianity was a "slave's religion."

Walter Kauffmann wrote the introduction to the Anchor Books edition of Faust that I have and he wrote, "What at first glance may seem Christian and traditional is actually the antitheis of the traditional and Christian treatment of the theme. Goethe's Faust is saved." The antichrist was fathered by Goethe.

The consequence of Goethe's influence over all of German culture and of his treatment of the Faust legend is summarized by Kauffman: "Millions of young men decided they were like Faust, and some found the German destiny in boundless, ruthless, Faustian striving" (emphasis added).

There's really nothing else that needs to be said about the inevitability of Hitler in Germany. Hitler
could have happened in the late eighteenth century after Faust: A Fragment was published, or in the
nineteenth century after Goethe completed the work but Hitler was going to happen in Germany.

By contrast with the sex-obsessed French, the sex-less but humorous English, and the Faust-propelled Germans, there is the American.

Our political and cultural genesis is the Declaration of Independence and the operative part here is, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Famously, the last of these was changed from the original "property."

The first serious American writer was James Fennimore Cooper and his first serious work, and the first in the Leatherstocking series, was The Pioneers which was also the most realistic of that series and so provides an accurate glimpse of American life at around the same time that Faust was written and that Dickens was writing.

The Pioneers is an utterly charming book and what is striking about it are it's characters' characteristics. They are modest, common, consciously and unconsciously funny, happy and engaged full-time in the pursuit of happiness.

"Only in America" could Elnathan Todd be accepted as a physician; only in America could Marmaduke Templeton be a Judge or his cousin Richard be anything other than the village idiot, much less the village architect promoted to Sheriff; only in America could the Frenchman Monsieur Lecroix, the German I-forget-his-name, the English "seaman" Ben Pump and the Quaker Templetons coexist much less live so happily, so tolerantly of and so delightedly revel in their national differences.

Stereotypes are generalizations and thereby unfair in individual instances but we cannot make sense of the world without generalizing from the individual. In the works of Proust, Dickens, Goethe and Cooper we see national stereotypes that do not explain all, that can be easily contradicted by individual counterexamples, but which are nonetheless striking, especially in retrospect, for their descriptive power.

And so if there is ever a president with real presidential powers over Europe as a whole may his or her first directive be to prohibit a Frenchman from adopting a Germanic pseudonym.

-Benjamin Harris

(First posted March 11, 2005 at 6:54 pm.)