98
ERIC BENTLEY
at the Kammerspiele the other night, when he put in an unannounced
appearance at
La beUe Helene.
The Offenbach opera had been adapted
by Peter Hacks, whose play
Worries about Power
was withdrawn in a
hurry not long ago for its political unorthodoxy. Or rather just for show–
ing that East Germany
has
its economic and human problems. Every–
body keeps staring at Ulbricht to see how he responds to Helen. At the
appropriate times, he smiles, he claps. He is much smaller than his photo–
graphs suggest, only comes up to my chin when we pass in the aisle. His
violence is no more apparent from his person than Goldwater's or Lyndon
Johnson's. How hard history is to believe! No wonder people met Stalin
and concluded he had
not
committed any atrocities: he too was very
small. And was even Eichmann banal, as Hannah Arendt says? That is
hardly the word for GOring and Goebbels, anyhow.
And what of our century's greatest hero and supreme symbol, the
man with the Charlie Chaplin moustache? I have been able to see him
on film several times since returning to Germany. Reunion with an old
friend? He copied Chaplin, and then, in
The Great Dictator,
Chaplin
copied him.
Twin
symbols of our century? And Chaplin a Communist
sympathizer. But Chaplin'S skit on Hitler is only mimicry, not portraiture.
He renders inimitably the non-German's impression of the Fuehrer's voice
and the German language. He projects actually the Cockney conviction
that everyone on the Continent is temperamental to the point of lunacy.
Above all, he gives far too favorable an impression of Hitler's technique.
In comparison, the historical Adolf, in film clips selected for public
perusal by his own propaganda ministry, is positively gauche. One can
well understand that German aristocrats with nothing against the Final
Solution would have been shocked to the soul by his awkwardness. Hitler
was a hick from the Austrian backwoods. The radio flattered him. For
if
he took lessons in gesture and body movement he never got out of the
beginner's class. In the newsreel clips, you see him fumble and hesitate
with his hands. His voice must have had a fascination for
many-se mo–
numentum quaeris, circumspice-but
what he did was chiefly to misuse
it, tormenting himself into paroxysms of would-be eloquence. The ulti–
mate in Naturalism: when oratory is not achieved at all, what we have
must
be Sincerity. The contrast with the empty stateliness of German
public speaking generally is remarkable: and there indeed one glimpses
the source of the gentleman's success. He embodied suppressed resent–
ment against the old Establishment. And his very incapacity found an
echo in every Spiessbiirger's breast: here "our own" inarticulateness was
mirrored-and was turned into its opposite, partly by growls, groans and
shrieks, but even more by action. The point is not to
talk
about the
world but to change it. Yours not to reason why, yours but to do and kill.
