China
Returning to the US from China feels like returning to sleep after waking from a dream, the mild consolation of normalcy dwarfed by the depressed sense one has that the dream, in its fecundity and dynamism, was preferable to the nullity into which one is descending. It is easy to say this, of course, as a Westerner, for whom the extraordinary adventure of life in China is a dream easily woken from; for those whose lives unfold under the arbitrariness of bureaucratic authoritarianism and in a nation that features incredible destitution in its very capital, it is something other than delighted dynamism, something far closer to a fight.
But it so happens that we were Westerners and that periods of change are more interesting to us than the draining stases from which we departed. Marx’s well-researched descriptive ideas have merit: there are phases of “world historical development” and there are vicissitudes to life under emerging capitalism which seem unavoidable, reflective of its “internal contradictions”; that his ideas about how to address this problem proved a revolting farce demonstrates how much easier observation is than direction, how much simpler history is than politics. Life in Beijing seemed at times like nothing so much as London during the Industrial Revolution, while our trip to Tiananmen Square on the anniversary of the massacre reminded us that the “class struggle” has been little more than an excuse for a different elite to make war on civil society.
We did the tourist things, of course, but seldom and quickly: Jack July was too good a guide to waste time on relics reconstructed after whatever paroxysm of revolution, ordinary or cultural. Instead, we spent most of our time walking the city, meeting locals whose friendliness and amusement was welcome, accompanying expats on ‘wanders’ of the hutongs, eating and drinking endlessly, and witnessing such a variety of sights, smells, and sounds that it felt as though many days were compressed into each 24-hour period.
Always, though, there was a peculiar mode of social existence: in several places we went the locals had not seen Westerners, and stares were ubiquitous, sometimes accompanied by greetings and on one occasion a hug and kiss on the cheek. But though we were always focal points of attention, I speak no Chinese and most Chinese speak no English, not even enough to tell it apart from Russian, so that I had a kind of anonymity of identity: although we were hyper-visible physically, my personality and self were not at all scrutinized. The feeling of being invisible yet not ignored was intoxicating.
Insofar as we travel both to encounter otherness and newness and to leave ourselves behind, it was an ideal state: selfless without feeling lonely, without attributes yet without feeling dull, I was able to wander as an eager, disembodied eye. What I saw was a dense and entrancing as any dream, and I hope to see far more of it soon enough.
![Sophie Scholl, of the White Rose resistance group; killed February 22, 1943.
Clive James, despite his atheism, wrote that Sophie Scholl “was probably a saint” and compared her to Jesus Christ; her face on German postage stamps is as great a symbol of transformation as Saul’s conversion, a demonstration that neither a state nor a human is ever beyond redemption.
There is some question, however, as to whether every member of our species remains human; in their spellbound, somnambulistic stupor, the Germans of the 1930s and 1940s can be said at the very least to have permitted as inhuman a machine as was imaginable to assemble itself from their institutions and indeed their very body politic: the infernal Nazi state which defies credulity and has thus become myth. We feel that the Germans, the Wermacht, the Nazis, the Gestapo, must have been monsters, not ordinary typical humans as we are.
Whatever they were, there were few dissenters in their midst; and even if one objected to Nazism, one knew one could do nothing; and had one a family, what would running out into the street to be shot down by the SS as they came to capture one’s neighbor do anyway but assure that one’s child, too, would die in a camp, or at least be orphaned? Against sufficient power, morality is purely sacrificial; even if we can accept this for ourselves, can we accept it on behalf of others who need us?
Perhaps this is why the White Rose was comprised of the young, though not exclusively. A small, hopeless band of Germans who resisted the Nazi regime, they engaged in the simple, chiefly symbolic act of circulating essays which attempted to wake readers from the sociopathic trance in which they seemed to have been lulled by Hitler.
That students, powerless and doubtless aware that they faced assured death were they caught, turned to the essay as a means of protest is significant; they were using the expression of the West’s cultural heritage, its literary and rational tradition, as means to combat the negation of that heritage: irrational authoritarianism:
It is impossible to engage in intellectual discourse with National Socialism because it is not an intellectually defensible program. It is false to speak of a National Socialist philosophy… At its very inception this movement depended on the deception and betrayal of one’s fellow man; even at that time it was inwardly corrupt and could support itself only by constant lies. After all, Hitler states in an early edition of “his” book (a book written in the worst German I have ever read, in spite of the fact that it has been elevated to the position of the Bible in this nation of poets and thinkers): “It is unbelievable, to what extent one must betray a people in order to rule it.”
In their leaflets, which quoted Goethe and Aristotle, they argued both for intellectual resistance and for sabotage, and called attention to the slaughter of the Jews, the Poles, and others, asserting every argument against the Nazi machine they could muster: on theological, practical, political, patriotic, historical, artistic, and moral grounds they fought the lies of propaganda and the delirium of the trance-state.
As they surely knew would happen, they were caught; in 1943, all were arrested by the Gestapo, tried, and executed. There is a great deal more about their story here; it is as moving as anything I know. As one playwright noted:
The fact that [these] little kids, in the mouth of the wolf, where it really counted, had the tremendous courage to do what they did, is spectacular to me. I know that the world is better for them having been there, but I do not know why.
The emphasized last line seems crucial to me; I can only suggest that in their sacrificial courage, their refusal to abrogate their innate moral duty -which tens of millions of their peers had happily neglected-, and their sagacity despite their youth, the White Rose confirm that there was the finest sort of humanity even in the midst of that infernal machine. Maybe it is that they remind us that heroism is possible for all.
(Note: I’d written and abandoned dozens of posts about them several months ago while briefly fixated by ideas about morality, resigning myself to the customary sense of oafishness one feels when speaking of the very precious, but was reminded of them again by the eminent B. Michael’s note about Holland, 1954, a Neutral Milk Hotel song which mentions them. It isn’t surprising that Jeff Mangum alludes to them; one can easily grow as obsessed with the White Rose as with Anne Frank, and I find it hard not to search photos of Sophie Scholl for signs of her core, the source of her heroism, the looming loss).](http://1.media.tumblr.com/2KfNZVJctnqb9hzwRxnQbudFo1_r1_400.jpg)
