Europe 1961-Notes On The Margin

...There is no cafe, restaurant, or store in all of Yugoslavia which doesn't prominently display a picture of Tito, complete with more decorations stuck on his chest than even Goering ever wore...

...The politics of Scandinavia tend to be rather unexciting...

...Polish painting follows the main lines of "Western" abstractionism, though, so far, rather in a derivative fashion...

...You can talk as freely in Poland as you can in New York...

...How right George Orwell was when he wrote that, to the working class, "the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of value, but in point of time...

...I doubt that a neo-Nazi rightwing will make much headway in the years to come...

...I do not say this in a spirit of negativism...

...During the whole Easter week, Oslo is totally deserted—all stores, even milk stores and the like, are closed and "everybody" is in the mountains...

...The people who live in Scandinavia's garden cities and Italian slums think otherwise...

...You cannot write freely, of course...

...Yugoslav officials, and many of her intellectuals, are inordinately proud of the fact that they stood up to Stalin—and got away with it...

...France, just like Germany, though perhaps for somewhat different reasons, is apathetic politically...

...I felt as if a time machine had abolished the years during which I had not been in Paris...

...You can innovate in painting, but not in political discourse...

...The labor movement is as pragmatic in its approach as the AFL in Gompers' days...

...Increases in productivity need not necessarily be cashed in through increased private consumption...

...It will gradually acquire characteristics very similar to those of the rest of the industrialized world...

...they saw him simply as the fount of Stalinist mystification...

...in fact, though in some of the Croatian and Slovenian areas such control has indeed a measure of reality, it is window dressing in the rest of the country...

...Norwegians seem to celebrate more holidays than even Medieval Catholics...

...The working class, long a pariah group within but not of the nation, is slowly partaking of the benefits that a budding mass society begins to provide...

...Poland awakened from its nightmare of dogmatic ideology in 1956, and things have never been the same again...

...The danger to German democracy is likely to come from the ascendancy of quite unideological, authoritarian strongmen like Defense Minister Strauss, rather than from fascist agitators...

...Now I fear the fat men rather than the lean...

...They now feel that this courageous stand gives them a license denied to those other satellites who showed no similar courage...

...Milovan Djilas has now been set free—several of his non-political books written in prison will soon be published here—but he has no way whatever to express his socialdemocratic convictions in public...

...The bulk of Frenchmen is disposed to laugh occasionally at de Gaulle and to see him as a slight...

...The New Class is willing to experiment in regard to economic, but hardly in respect to political means...

...students think of careers and security rather than of commitment...

...I haven't talked about the war scare because, when I left Europe in mid-September, there was no war scare in Europe...

...When the government appealed for help in the first two days of the Algerian uprising, only a few thousand men, a disproportionate number from the tiny leftwing Autonomous Socialist Party, came to the fore...

...Nowhere else did I hear people talk so often and with so much conviction in the shopworn slogans of traditional Marxism: "the mission of the working class," the "progressive" character of "Eastern democracy...

...Yet de Gaulle has a fair chance to get rid of the Algerian mortgage even though at the price of considerable demoralization in the army and right-wing circles...

...By and large, cultural life is provincial and imitative...

...The French economy is booming, consumer goods which were a luxury of the few have become accessible to the many...

...they call their police a "militia...

...But, while the term has traditionally referred to citizens doing part-time duty, to men who, in Adam Smith's words, "join in some measure the trade of a soldier to whatever other trade or profession they may happen to carry," the Yugoslav militia is, of course, a fulltime police force...

...Germany • The Wirtschaftswunder is indeed a miracle...

...Things do not seem much better in other cultural areas...

...The nouveaux riches whom one encounters everywhere are as vulgar and ostentatious as in any other country, but I have never seen so many fat men in my life...

...Egypt, but the Norwegian rate is quite low...

...There are exceptions, of course, our friends around the review Arguments among others, but there are few of them...

...In fact, it would seem to me that he is slowly being forgotten by the younger generation, since he is never mentioned in public...

...ly ridiculous figure who mistakes the 20th century for the 16th...

...these are ambiguities with which one has to live...

...I don't know myself how it could work in certain Bosnian factories where the labor force consists of recent rural newcomers to the city who, more often than not, hardly know how to read and write...

...And the whole edifice can endure only as long as there is a firm, though unspoken, alliance between Party and Church, between Gomulka and the Cardinal...

...Yugoslavia is rapidly industrializing, as is the rest of Europe...

...Norwegians tend to prefer increased leisure to increased consumption...

...The welfare state is here to stay and political contentions, though often dressed up in terms of Weltanschauung, are in fact mainly over quite marginal issues...

...Oriental sloth can be infuriating, but so can be the red tape of a Western bureaucracy...

...Yet they are also still exceedingly stiff, lack the spontaneity which would be taken for granted on any American campus...

...Germany is the most de-ideologized country of Western Europe...

...I also sometimes found an almost fawning admiration of foreign ways...

...Swedish rates have been about three times as high as Norwegian rates since the beginning of the century, i.e., since long before Socialist parties achieved government power...

...Hence they seem not at all reluctant to ideologize simple questions of fact in a manner which seems more reminiscent of Stalinism than of Khrushchevism...

...The German upper class looks as if it had collectively tried to imitate the Georg Grosz cartoons of the twenties...

...But, in the meantime, whenever someone tells you that Yugoslav "socialism" Is somehow more admirable that the Scandinavian variety, tell him to spend a week in Sarajewo, and a week in Bergen, Norway, and then report back...

...They may still carry some weight when, in the tradition of their Dreyfusard ancestors, they make themselves the spokesmen of human rights against arbitrary acts of the men in power (their protest against army terror and tortures in Algeria was impressive and deeply moving), but they do not carry weight in ordinary political affairs...

...The people are well-dressed, and, quite evidently, never had it so good...

...Yugoslav memoryholes are quite efficient...

...One can become accustomed to the need of greasing palms before one gets service, but when one has to face an officialdom given to dilatoriness and "passing the buck" in the best manner of the French Prefecture de Police after one has greased palms, even the most levelheaded is apt to lose patience...

...But it will take a long time before this national trauma will be erased from French memories...

...Poland • Hannah Arendt to the contrary notwithstanding, Poland is a totalitarian country without ideology...

...This does not please political romantics, and I confess to my share of such romanticism, but then it may be true that happy countries have no politics in the traditional sense...

...This is, of course, most inefficient, but then Norwegians are far from worshiping before the shrine of efficiency...

...The Algerian . issue is, of course, in the forefront of discussion among knowledgable observers of the politi cal scene...

...and they seem to have opted for more leisure rather than for more consumption...

...Most German cities have an energy, a drive and bustle that reminds one forcibly of certain Midwestern cities...

...My eight-year-old son remarked after a few hours in Yugoslavia, "Why do they have so many policemen here...

...This "fact," it turns out, just isn't one...

...The Norwegian suicide rate is below the American, and among the lowest in Europe, while the Danish and Swedish rates are, indeed, quite high...

...My wife talked to about fifteen different officials for several hours in order to persuade them to issue us a ticket for the transportation of our car on a certain steamer on the Adriatic coast...

...There is much fear of a new right-wing coup of Salan's men in Algeria, and, perhaps, on the mainland...

...The automobile has become as much a part of everyday life as in the United States—though automobile ownership per capita is still lower...

...Yet on pay day, and not only on pay day, you have to be very careful driving through city or village streets for fear of hitting drunks who stumble all over the place...

...In the meantime, the overwhelming impression I got was that the bulk of Frenchmen are sick and tired of the enormous hemorrhage that the Algerian war has been, both in terms of men and money...

...Discussions in cafes and clubs last for hours and are •apt to touch a great variety of subjects...

...The German students I met at several universities were refreshing...

...The various leftist reviews all have a deja vu character...

...This is, perhaps, the price they pay for having gotten rid of the compulsive nationalism of their father...

...Open, eager to learn, willing to understand foreign ways...

...This is not exactly the intellectual atmosphere from which to expect a democratic resurgence in the immediate future...

...Literature and the arts are quite free in Yugoslavia, but the newspapers are unbelievably dreary, spouting the requisite ideological platitudes in the required pompous manner...

...The cultural snobbism of the intelligentsia infuriates me...

...The Polish intellectual scene is exceedingly lively and animated...

...in the Winter, and 3 P.M...

...Frankfurt, one of the great centers of German intellectual life for many generations, is now a bustling business center, hardly touched any more by the intellectual stimulus that used to come from its rl+ University...

...Polish theaters play Tennessee Williams, Becket, Ionescu, and Arthur Miller...

...They are full-time, though hardly trained, professionals— many of them ignorant country louts unable to read, but lording it over the population with a profound conviction of their importance...

...Crime statistics, and statistics of juvenile delinquency tell the same story...

...No wonder that the cadres and the membership of the Socialist and Communist Party contain fewer young people...

...I met a number of younger intellectuals who felt it hard to understand why I still bothered with Karl Marx...

...One almost feels that a favorite means of resorbing unemployment is to put the unemployables into the police force...

...Culturally, Germany is no longer among the pace-setters of Europe...

...political superstructures seem much less important in this respect than underlying economic forces...

...As it is, the regime must continuously engage in a perilous balancing act in which concessions to the Russian masters are counterbalanced by assertions of national independence, be it in the economic, the political, or the cultural field...

...Youth is said to be bored with and disaffected from the Welfare State...

...Those innumerable porcine faces with fat cigars clamped between gold-capped teeth have a nightmarish quality...

...Even party members voice outrageous heresies with habitual nonchalance...

...The director of a major research institute in Belgrade told me that "in Yugoslavia there is no problem of alcoholism...

...Since all these countries have been living under the welfare state for a long time, their different rates can hardly be due to the "softness" of welfare measures...

...And yet Poland is behind the Iron Curtain, and Yugoslavia is not...

...Maybe the "soul" can now come into its right after the "belly" is satisfied...

...In fact, one can hardly talk of heresies where there is no orthodox Marxist Church...

...In the social sciences admiration for the gadgeteering aspect of modern...

...Were Poland located on the rim of the Russian Empire, rather than squeezed in between East Germany and Russia, its politics would have a very different character...

...The capacity to rebuild cities, which only ten or fifteen years ago were mainly rubble, into modernistic replicas of Main Street is amazing...

...France • French intellectuals are still as much given to the discussion of large ideas as they have always been...

...The very slogans which French intellectuals still spout with such assurance appear in Poland utterly ridiculous...

...I have not talked about England, mainly because most readers would be quite familiar with what I have to say...

...After office hours, you can go skiing, or swimming, or hiking, and the more you indulge in these, the more you feel that increased productivity has indeed "paid off...

...The Communist Party still can muster an impressive electoral support, but I doubt whether it could mobilize more than 10 per cent of its voters for nonelectoral political action...

...Intellectuals and political activists felt that they had been duped, that their eyes had been blinded by a screen of dogmatic assertions and just plain lies and that, from now on, they would be taken in by nobody...

...in the Summer...

...And certain radicals still feel that Yugoslav "socialism" is, somehow, more "like the real thing" than the Scandinavian variety...

...Maybe so, but in the recent Swedish elections the youngest group of voters voted more heavily for the Social Democratic Party than any other age group...

...France is a constitutional monarchy and the majority of the population admires Charles de Gaulle, though distrusting many of his collaborators...

...The country has made amazing strides in industrialization since the war, and, though living standards have risen, Norwegians still own few television sets, do not go in for conspicuous display in their homes, nor for Americanstyle cars...

...I could well have immediately started finishing the "revolutionary analysis," which I had had to interrupt when the Germans marched into Paris .. . and get it published...

...Here life follows art...

...The small minority of intellectuals still drawn to ideological concerns live in a kind of inner emigration, full of bitterness about Wirtschaftswunder, glamor and vulgarity yet unable to provide viable alternatives or Utopian vision...

...The Swedish divorce rate is high, though not as high as that of the United States or of...

...The economic impact of Algerian independence will not be as great as is sometimes feared —provided Algeria still remains open to French capital...

...In any Yugoslav town or city the most prominent streets are named after Tito, and other assorted dignitaries of the regime...

...And indeed, I have never seen so many "cops" anywhere in the world as in Yugoslavia...

...The combination of the two in Yugoslavia is well-nigh unbearable...

...German scholarship is still quite excellent but there is little that reminds one of the intellectual effervescence of the twenties or early thirties...

...Contemporary Germany has turned away from ideological politics, be they of the Left or the Right...

...The same man told me that Workers' Control operated splendidly all over the country...

...The key determinant of Polish politics is not ideology but geography...

...Many leftwing intellectuals to whom I talked spent a great deal of time enumerating the errors and crimes of the Gaullist regime— only to abruptly turn around and speculate with horror about what would befall France if de Gaulle were suddenly to disappear...

...Yugoslavia • In Norwegian cities one street is likely to be named after each of Norway's dead kings...

...It almost seems as if, when other badges of status have been devaluated, the German upper class went in for conspicuous display of fatty tissue...

...She finally "persuaded" the captain of the ship to take us on board the very same day...

...Instead, they are proud of the fact that offices dose at 3:30 P.M...

...Many old partisan fighters now have high office in the government...

...Nothing sums up better the French ambivalence about de Gaulle...

...But censors are not very intelligent men, and, if you use the proper Aesopian language, you can get by with a great deal...

...but they are farther removed from influence on the political life of the country than ever before...

...The intellectuals talk, but they find no repercussions in wider circles...

...I cannot remember having been lied to so openly, and with so much apparent good conscience as in Yugoslavia...

...American research goes side by side with the clinging to superannuated theoretical approaches —many leading scholars still feel that there is something "dirty" about psychoanalysis...

...Most of them felt that she would have to wait several months...

...r.s...

...The Yugoslays are masters of Newspeak...

...There is a good deal of innovation in the field of economic management and planning, but hardly in political life...

...They literally freeze to attention when confronting a foreign or domestic "Herr Professor...

...But I met others standing sadly on the sidelines, remnants of an earlier, more heroic age, regaling youngsters with tales of their exploits, or strumming partisan songs on battered guitars to an audience of successful youngsters from the New Class...

...Norway demonstrates that industrialization need not have automatic repercussions on life style...

...German theaters flourish, but no important German playwright has come forward since the War...

...The youth is more interested in motor scooters than in Weltanschauung...

...This divorce from the realm of political action has further fostered the perennial French tendency to think in abstractions...

...there are options...

...Yet I must admit that I was sorry to see the old Marseilles harbor district with its pimps, prostitutes, Arab restaurants, and Greek cafes, replaced by an antiseptic public housing development...

...Maybe contentions about cultural matters will increasingly replace those strictly political and economic contentions which were in the forefront before the welfare state...

...If someone forced me at gun point to choose between Poland and Yugoslavia as a place to live, I would choose Poland any day...

...Many of them seem to feel that anything foreign, especially anything American, is ipso facto admirable...

...Respectable topdogs in upper management and upper public administration rather than discontented underdogs may attempt to undermine the, as yet, insecure foundations of democracy...

...Much like some American literary critics who deplore the leveling of cultural diversity in America because "there remains nothing to write about," many American visitors deplore the lack of "picturesque" slums in Scandinavia, and go into ecstasies over the smell, dirt, and "character" of Naples or Genoa...

...but the very people who joke about him will tell you in the next breath that, without him, there would have been chaos, military dictatorship, fascism...

...Freud once wrote that the behavior of primitive races toward their chiefs and kings is controlled by two principles: they must both be guarded and be guarded against...