BERLIN FINALE

From time to time I will publish blogs that just reflect my own interests, rather than the overall Shamanic theme of this blog. So please bear with me, this is one such! Though there is a connection....

This documentary novel had me gripped. It is an extraordinary account of the last 2 weeks of the Third Reich, set in Berlin as the Russians advance towards the city, while it is bombed day and night by the British and Americans. The author, a writer, spent much of the 30s unemployed because of his critical stance towards the Nazis, then during the war he was made to work on the railways. The descriptions of the ruins of wartime Berlin are very exact and detailed, yet poetic also: windows of ruined houses like blank eye sockets. 

And the same goes for his descriptions of people. He returns again and again to the psychology of different types of people under Nazism and what they became. He is positively Germanic in his forensic psychological analysis. And central to that analysis is the lack of personal responsibility, the lack of conscience, the cowardice. And you find that the problem for most Germans at the end is not Nazism itself, but the fact that it failed. And that probably tells us something general, and rather dismal, about humanity. 

My criticism of the book - which came out in serial form straight after the war, and was a bestseller - is that it is too long. It is 660 pages of not very large print, and for the first 450 or so it is gripping. But he needed to chop 100 pages out of the last 250. 

He also has a perspective on humanity that I think anthropological research has probably shown to be unfounded: namely, that early man was 'primitive', ruled by his instincts, that western culture has largely been a process of lifting man out of those base insincts, and that Nazism was a reversion to them. My experience of early cultures that are still living is that they are very civilised in the best sense, they are sophisticated and ethical. Our problem, in my opinion, is that we have large societies that are inevitably structured by impersonal rules rather than by relationships. That is a problem we have not solved.