Trauma & Art

Political trauma…….

“To remember or forget—which is healthier? To demolish it or to fence it off? To dig it up, or leave it lie in the ground?” (Anna Funder referring to the Berlin Wall in Stasiland)

“Does telling your story mean you are free of it? Or that you go, fettered, into your future?”  (From Anna Funder’s book Stasiland)

In the previous post I wrote about war trauma. In today’s post, on a similar note, I have chosen to write about trauma inflicted by the state, by authorities and others linked to the state, trauma related to oppression, manipulation, severe freedom violations, and discrimination based on political views. I’ve been reading Anna Funder’s book, Stasiland, which as the title suggests is about former East Germany, perhaps, she writes, the most perfected surveillance state in history. It happened that I came across this specific book as I was cosidering the themes of this post. The kind of crimes and rights violations committed by the Stasi secret police in former EG have occurred and are currently taking place, to a lesser or greater extent and with variations, all over the world, definitely in dictatorships, but also, in democracies.

Funder sheds light on the human condition in times of extreme authoritarianism and severe surveillance. It is similar to Svetlana Alexievch’s book [see previous post], in the sense that Funder also meets with people to listen and document their stories, in order to reveal to us an era and bring events to light. I think that she situates her self and experience in the narrative to a greater degree perhaps than Alexievich. At some point during this process of gathering stories she reflects on her decision and intentions and realizes that she desires to make portraits of people, East Germans, of whom there will be none left in a generation. She writes: “I’m painting a picture of a city on the old fault-line of east and west. This is working against forgetting, and against time.” Similarly, Alexievich wanted to write down the stories of the Soviet women who fought in WWII before they had all passed away. She too, was working against forgetting and against time. Funder’s book contains fewer and longer interviews, whereas Alexievich’s narrative was far more polyphonic.

Anna Funder is an Australian writer. She has studied English literature, German and law and is committed to human rights. In the 90s she was Counsel in International and Human Rights law for the Australian Government before leaving to live in Berlin and write. She is a University of Technology Sydney Luminary and Ambassador. In 2011 she was appointed to the Literature Board of the Australian Council for the Arts. Her books have received awards, including the Samuel Johnson (now Baillie Gifford) Prize for best non-fiction published in the English language for Stasiland, which has been adapted for the radio and stage by The National Theatre, London, and is studied both as literature and history in schools and universities around the world.

Funder spent time working in television in Eastern Berlin in the mid 90s when, as she writes, she developed a feeling for the former German Democratic Republic, a country that no longer exists, but its remains are still there, a feeling she describe as horror-romance. She writes: “The romance comes from the dream of a better world the German Communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. The horror comes from what they did in its name.” She became interested in the Stasi, the former East German ministry of state security, and in human fortitude, that something within a human being that resists corruption despite the fear and the price one has to pay.

The Stasi was the internal army by which the government kept control. It was obsessed with detail and its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it found convenient. They had a nationwide system of post and telecommunications surveillance.  They knew who visited, whom you telephoned and what you said on the phone, read letters and diaries, confiscated books and children’s cards to grandparents, knew about your partners, spouses, extra marital affairs, what you ate, purchased and read, and collected smell sample jars. Funder notes this procedure was “overt or covert”, and there was someone reporting to the Stasi on their fellow citizens in every school, university, sports club, factory, apartment block, and pub.

Historical factors and reasons for the development of this police state and surveillance machine, is gradually revealed through the stories of the interviewees. The Stasi had files on everyone and pried into every aspect of people’s lives. Armies of paid and unpaid informers, official and unofficial collaborators, kept this machine going for decades. Ordinary citizens were recruited to spy on their fellow citizens, friends, colleagues and family members, and some estimates run as high as one for every six and a half members of the population. One interviewee mentions that it was about one in every fifty people. Funder mentions: “Stasi had 97,000 employees—more than enough to oversee a country of seventeen million people. But it also had over 173,000 informers among the population.”

They participated on the grounds of ideology, or in order to gain power, privilege or money, succeed, belong, out of fear or because they were blackmailed.  One ex-Stasi man, working as a detective today, recounted how he was never very ideological, but he was a stickler for the law, and he’d been brought up to think this way from his kindergarten days. A Stasi psychologist, mentioned in the book, accounts for the willingness of people to inform on their countrymen, as an impulse to make sure your neighbour was doing the right thing. And more disturbingly, many simply engaged in this activity because of the gratification that the sense of having power over others gave them. For others it provided an outlet to their feelings of aggression, envy or antagonistic feelings.

She met people, who were victimized, as well as, ex-Stasi employees and officials, in order to make visible an era and the stories of pain, loss, courage and resistance that it generated, and to provide a more global understanding of what took place and how it was experienced by the local people. By placing an advertisement in a newspaper Funder arranged meetings with a number of Stasi men, including the noble renegade Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, who for years used to host a television programme critiqueing the west. He viewed his work as the work against imperialism. These men were still living in the same houses on the outskirts of Potsdam or high rise blocks in Berlin, some with their beliefs and faith intact, some cynical and power driven, and others like the regime’s cartographer, Hagen Koch, a model citizen, who as a young recruit drew a chalk line along the street where the Berlin Wall was to be erected, had their own stories of victimhood when their superiors meddled with their own life, their families’ lives and their marriage.

In the book Funder has included talks with several women, who perhaps are the main characters. These are women who suffered, lost, were punished and who exhibited courage and integrity, women whose life was greatly impacted by the Berlin Wall. One is Miriam Webster. Her story is a central strand of the book. She and her later murdered husband, Charlie, could be said to be the heroes of the book. She is still seeking answers and justice for her husband’s untimely death.

Miriam tells Funder that she “became, officially, an Enemy of the State at sixteen,” in 1968 the Prague Spring was in full swing, and the Russians had not yet brought the tanks into the streets to crush the demonstrators. The demolition of a historical building in her hometown became the focus for the expression of a widespread malaise the locals had caught from their Czech neighbours. The Leipzig demonstrations were interpreted by the East German regime as a cinder likely to ignite, and so the police doused people with fire hoses and made many arrests. Miriam and her friend Ursula felt this was not right. She says, ‘At sixteen you have an idea of justice, and we just thought it was wrong. We weren’t seriously against the state—we hadn’t given it that much thought. We just thought it wasn’t fair to rough people up and bring in horses and so on.’ So they decided to get creative and make their own leaflets, which they stuck around the town. They also left leaflets in the letterboxes of two boys they knew from school, and one of the parents rang the police.

This was the end of her adolescence and life as she had known it. Both girls were placed in solitary confinement for a month, without any visits or phone calls from their parents or lawyers, books or newspapers. And then they were let out to await their trials! Terrified of being sent back to prison, the next morning Miriam got on a train for Berlin, a place she had never been before, with the intention to somehow go over the Wall. And she almost made it, if it weren’t for a trip-wire she didn’t see. The sirens went off and she was arrested.

At sixteen she was back in isolation, interrogated every night for ten nights for six hours. The torture of sleep deprivation was intended to make her zombie like, and therefore, break her and make her remarkably pliable. She was convicted to one and a half years in the women’s prison at Hoheneck. Miriam told Funder that when she got out of prison, she was basically no longer human. She described the Baptism of Welcome in a bathtub full of cold water, the only time she thought she would actually die, and the brutality of the adult criminal prisoners, who received privileges for abusing the politicals. When she got out she was prohibited from studying, and couldn’t get any kind of job. She says. ‘Everything I applied for, the Stasi made sure I was turned down.’And then after she and her husband Charlie started living together they were constantly under surveillance, and their house would be searched from time to time.

Julia Behrend is another woman, whose life was damaged by the State in adolescence, the reason being, a mostly long distance romantic relationship, with an Italian man, she met when she was sixteen. Julia, who is subletting a flat to Funder and has become a kind of friend, talks to Funder about her family and her past. Her parents were both high-school teachers, and like most people they were somewhat ambivalent about their country, but they weren’t dissidents, and none of them had ever had a run-in with the state. She notes: we “lived with a distinct sense ‘from the minute we woke up’, of what could be said outside the home (very little), and what could be discussed in it (most things).”

Her mother told her four daughters they could be anything they wanted to be. Her father Dieter was sensitive and wanted to better what he saw as a flawed system, but one which, from its founding premise, was fairer than capitalism. For his pains, she says, “his country made him a pariah and his life a misery. Living for so long in a relation of unspoken hostility, but outward compliance to the state had broken him.” Like her father, Julia was aware of the problems and the lack of freedom, but believed in East Germany as an alternative to the west During her talks with Funder, despite the way her life was derailed by the interference of the state, Julia compares the two mentalities, the two systems, West and East. She notes that having lived in both east and west without moving house, she can discern “a difference between sexual stalking, and stalking……. in the GDR you could go out alone at night as a woman! You could leave your apartment door open….No-one was homeless as they are now.”

As a young girl Julia had loved languages and dreamed of becoming a translator and interpreter. She had pen-pals in several countries and spent her free time writng letters in French, Russian and English. Later she wrote letters to her boyfriend in Italy. She topped her year in middle school, and wanted to go to a school renowned for its language teaching, but, for reasons never made clear to her, the authorities sent her far away to a boarding school with no reputation at all, despite her mother’s complaints. Then one day in 1984 the headmaster made an appointment to see Julia’s parents at home to convince them to influence Julia to break it off with the Italian boyfriend.  After that she couldn’t get any kind of job. She was a top student who spoke German, English, Russian, French and a little Hungarian. She tried to find a position as a receptionist or a waitress, without success, probably because every hotel and every restaurant was required to check the names of all new employees with the Stasi.

Then she was summoned by a Stasi officer, who after reading to her the letters she had exchanged with her boyfriend and telling her about all the information he had about her family, he proposed she assist the Stasi and meet with them every now and then for a chat, but Julia knew she would not inform on anyone.  He had shown her that with one phone call to him “she could be in, or she could be out. She could be with them, or she could be gone.” She writes that she “felt sundered, suddenly and irrevocably, from life….It was as though all at once I was on the other side, separate from everybody.”

Julia talks about the awareness she has gained gradually. At the beginning she was angry about not being allowed to study or have a career, but now looking back on it, she has realized that it’s the total surveillance that damaged her the worst. She describes this: “It was the loss of everything until I had disappeared too.” Funder writes of Julia that today she doesn’t see a talented linguist, but “a woman, whose part-time study and part-time rental agency work keep her only partly-attached to the world,” and “who by no fault of her own, had fallen into the gap between the GDR’s fiction and its reality. She no longer conformed to the fiction. Loyal and talented as she was, she was now being edged out of the reality.”

Funder uses Alice in Wonderland as a metaphor to describe the gap between fiction and myths, and reality. Of course, national mythology and fiction, to one extent or another occurs in every country, and as a matter of fact, on different levels and variations, everything else described in the book is relevant to countries all over the world. One myth, for instance, was that Easterm Germany was not part of the Nazi Regime, whereas, in reality from being a Nazi regime one day, they became a socialist regime the next. She writes: “I’ve been having Adventures in Stasiland. I’ve been in a place where what was said was not real, and what was real was not allowed, where people disappeared behind doors and were never heard from again, or were smuggled into other realms.” During one of their talks Julia mentions that “people were required to acknowledge an assortment of fictions as fact,” and that many people withdrew into what they called internal emigration. They sheltered their secret inner lives in an attempt to keep something of themselves from the authorities. She explains that one could only avoid contact with the regime if one opted out, and went into internal emigration, but this left little room for one to belong, to move on in life, to succeed and fulfill aspirations.

Frau Paul was another courageous woman, who was forced to make an impossible choice, and whose family life was literally torn apart by the Wall and the system that sustained it. Along with the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall was one of the longest structures ever built to keep people separate. The Wall out there in the world became a structure in peope’s heads. Frau Paul put it clearly:“The Wall Went Straight through My Heart.” She woke up one morning with the Wall separating her from her seriously ill newborn baby, who had been transported to a hospital in Western Berlin, in order to remain alive. Their son remained in West Germany and was returned to them after several years, when he was able to eat without assistance.

She told Funder: “My husband and I decided to attempt illegally to leave the territory of the GDR……..I am not your classic resistance fighter….. I was not even part of the opposition. To this day I am not a member of a political party…… And I am not a criminal.’” She and her husband were each given four years hard labour. Frau Paul took Funder on a tour of the prison. Not one of the torturers at Hohenschönhausen has been brought to justice.

Finally, I will end this article with a brief reference to what happened to this mountain of files.

The Runde Ecke, the building of the former Stasi offices, which was seized by protestors in 1989, is now a Stasi museum. Funder writes: ….”it was huge…… I shrank like Alice.” In its forty years, ‘the Firm’ generated the equivalent of all records in German history since the Middle Ages. Laid out upright and end to end, the files the Stasi kept on their countrymen and women would form a line 180 kilometres long.” When the files were opened, she says, “Large and small mysteries were accounted for. Not least, perhaps, the tics of the ordinary man in the street.” For instance, a document was on display with signals used by the Stasi and informers, like touching one’s nose, stroking one’s hair, raising a hat, laying a hand on the stomach or retying shoelaces, and so on, and what these signified.

Stasi officers had been instructed to destroy files, starting with the most incriminating. They shredded the files until the shredders collapsed, and then they started destroying the files by hand, putting them into sacks in an orderly fashion. Now in Nuremberg, the puzzle women (although there are also some men) are piecing them back together, a horrendously slow process considering the small number of puzzle people working currently.

From 1989 to October 1990 there was a heated debate in Germany as to what to do with the Stasi files.

“Should they be opened or burnt? Should they be locked away for fifty years and then opened, when the people in them would be dead or, possibly, forgiven? What were the dangers of knowing? Or the dangers of ignoring the past and doing it all again, with different coloured flags or neckerchiefs or helmets? “

In the end, some files were destroyed, some were locked away, and some opened. In the summer of 1990 the parliament of the GDR passed a law granting the right for people to see their own files, to have access to all this stolen personal information that allowed their lives to be manipulated. Funder writes: “Germany was the only Eastern Bloc country in the end that so bravely, so conscientiously, opened its files on its people to its people.

Many countries have had to confront this type of issue, and decide on whether to destroy or open files.  Greece has its own long painful history concerning millions of files with citizen’s personal information, with an emphasis on their political views, information, which was used to discriminate against, terrorize and punish its people. To write about this very long and painful page of Greek history would require at least another equally lengthy post.

I have provided some links to Greek newspaper articles, two interviews and a talk below:

And always, there are the pressing questions: What are the dangers of knowing? What about the rights of all those victimized, of all those these files belonged to? And more importantly: What are the dangers of ignoring the past and doing it all again?

1. Οι φάκελοι «πολιτικών φρονημάτων» που γλίτωσαν την πυρά: https://www.tovima.gr/2016/05/28/society/oi-fakeloi-politikwn-fronimatwn-poy-glitwsan-tin-pyra/

In August, 1989, files were transported to the blast furnace of Eleusis and the furnaces set up in the rest of Greece to burn the “archives of hate.” Αrchival material valuable for historians, as well as, important documents of the Left, was put into the incineration funnel in the name of “national reconciliation.” More than 17 millions of documents of the 20h century, from the dictatorship of Metaxa to the junta of the colonels, recorded the lives of the “stigmatized,” mainly from the Left, but not only, were turned to ashes. In 1989, only 2,100-2,500 files, of political leaders of the Left that had been executed, as well as, files of some artists, athletes, figures from the conservative scene, but also lesser-known ones, escaped the fire.

2. Με Κοινή Υπουργική Απόφαση ανοίγουν τα αρχεία της αστυνομίας / Στο φως χιλιάδες διασωθέντες φάκελοι κοινωνικών φρονημάτων: https://www.avgi.gr/koinonia/191146_sto-fos-hiliades-diasothentes-fakeloi-koinonikon-fronimaton?amp

“It was a global first for Greece to proceed with their complete destruction,” stressed V. Karamanolakis, adding that the discussion is not posed in terms of justice but of historical memory and reminding us of the enormous tug-of-war in public debates over whether the files stopped being updated in 1974 or whether they continued to be updated until 1990. The files of individuals’ social opinions began at the beginning of the previous century and flourished during the post-war period, and they were institutionalized in 1947.”

3. Φάκελοι πολιτικών φρονημάτων: Οταν το τραυματικό παρελθόν έγινε στάχτη για να ξεχαστεί κακήν κακώς: https://www.efsyn.gr/ellada/koinonia/196051_fakeloi-politikon-fronimaton-otan-traymatiko-parelthon-egine-stahti-gia-na#goog_rewarded

“The question that permeates the book by assistant professor of history Vangelis Karamanolakis, published by Themelio Publications, concerns the reasons that led to the burning of the files kept in the Security Service, by decision of the ND-SYN coalition government, on August 30, 1989, an event to which the majority of Greek society either tacitly consented or remained indifferent, with almost the only objection raised by historians, for reasons of preserving historical memory, and not of rendering justice to the victims, as happened in other countries.”

“And he concluded: “In the unanimous approval of the burning of the files, we see a society that fears the past, and fears it because it has not faced it, has not discussed it. Politics can remove fear, but not eliminate it. The solution, at a political level, is the rule of law. But the rules of law are not enough, you also need the courage to face the truth, and in Greece, the case of the burning of the files shows that we have lacked this courage.”

4. LIFO Podcast: https://www.lifo.gr/podcasts/istoria-mias-polis/kaigontas-toys-fakeloys-ton-epikindynon-politikon-fronimaton-1989

Agiati Benardou talkswith the historian and author of the book “Undesirable Past – The Files of Social Thoughts in the 20th Century and Their Destruction”, Vaggelis Karamanolakis.

5. ERTECHO      01/06/2019     Ο Δημήτρης Τρίκας με τον καθηγητή ιστορίας στο ΕΚΠΑ Βαγγέλης Καραμανωλάκης στο στούντιο για το βιβλίο του “Ανεπιθύμητο παρελθόν”.https://www.ertecho.gr/radio/trito/show/bookfly/ondemand/77290/vaggelis-karamanolakis-symeon-stampoulou-01062019/
6. Το ανεπιθύμητο παρελθόν. Οι φάκελοι κοινωνικών φρονημάτων στον 20ό αιώνα και η καταστροφή τους: https://www.blod.gr/lectures/fakeloi-koinonikon-fronimaton-bwl/

A speech in two parts, based on the book of the same title, awarded the Academy of Athens Prize, by Professor Vangelis Karamanolakis

Part One

A suffocating present (1944-1974): Files of social/ political opinions, surveillance and control of citizens in post-war Greece

“The certificates of social opinions, the loyalty councils, the files of the State Security, the Army, etc., were parts of a huge mechanism of discrimination of citizens, which determined personal paths and professional outlets. A mechanism that attempted, by controlling the lives of citizens, to educate them in the idea that they should remain inactive, not develop their own political action, or find themselves on the side of the authorities, which otherwise had the power to crush them. It was a “punitive” state, which used a wide repertoire of punitive practices in the context of the reorganization of the state mechanism dissolved by the Occupation and through the experience of the civil conflict. In this orientation, the past was omnipresent, it was a key element in the investigation of the beliefs of the suspected citizen, but also of their relatives and friends. The civil war was a war that had not ended with its military conclusion, it remained a nightmarishly traumatic past that determined a suffocating present.

Part Two

From the Traumatic to the Undesirable Past. Social Thought Files and Collective Memory in the Post-Junta Era

“The ashes of the files covered the reluctance of a society to look at the wounds of the past, they covered its transformation from traumatic to undesirable.”

Places

and a memoir

Today’s post includes four drawings of places, a series of drawings I’m phasing out or bringing to an end, at least temporarily, for many reasons, one being the large number of drawings I’ve churned out over the last six months or more. It’s been an intense drawing activity and I feel I need a break. I’m gathering all these drawings in the Art work section of the site with the title PLACES 2024-2025. However, if I were to exhibit the series in a physical space I would probably include some of the accompanying texts or articles I’ve posted along with the drawings for they are complementary to or interwoven with the artwork.

I’m also posting a piece about a book I’ve just finished by Lee Siegel.

PART A

“Eftychidou Street”[in Pagrati] by Chrysa Fanti

“As difficult as it is for you to grasp the signs of time on you, it is even more difficult to follow its traces backwards, and along with these traces of the people who lived in this neighborhood, to wander into familiar haunts, shops where you bought various things that you kept unused for years and others that, without a second thought, you threw away on the very same day; to list those that, from one day to the next, closed their stores without passing the baton to others, to bring them back to your memory, even though you do not know or cannot find the reason. […] Even if you are granted access, you are afraid that it will be almost impossible for you to restore the sense of routine and everyday life of its former residents, to recall the sound imprint of their speeches and quarrels that once reached your ears; their place will have been taken by rapid disintegration, the slow but sure decomposition of the concrete, the dull creaks of the cement, the half-rotten frames and the stained floors, signs of a neighborhood that in recent years has been in decline” (pages 375-376).

On historical preservation

In her 2017 article, La Salle University Threatens Germantown Landmarks, Arielle Harris writes: “Given La Salle’s demolition track record, what does survive on their campus from the late 19th century is all the more special. 2101 W. Clarkson Avenue [The Mary & Frances Wister Studio at 2101 W. Clarkson Avenue…. was unanimously approved by the Philadlephia Historical Commission for placement on the local register…….] and Little Wakefield have unique individual histories and contribute to a broader historical landscape established by prominent Quaker families in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and thus are worthy of designation and protection from demolition.”                                                                You can read more at: https://hiddencityphila.org/2017/02/la-salle-threatens-germantown-landmarks/

 

PART B

Introduction

The Draw by Lee Siegel, a widely published critic on culture and politics, and the author of five previous books, is a memoir that covers the life of the author from childhood to around his mid-twenties. It’s a candid reflection on his life, and on class and how money or the lack of it can dismantle families and dreams. Siegel explores his New Jersey upbringing, unsparingly, baring his emotional scars and traumas. He painstakingly maps the familial legacies that shaped him with psychologically informed introspection and insight, shedding light both on the generational transmission of traumas, and the ravashes of lack of money or even worse poverty.  It’s also a portrait of the writer on the make, a story of his struggle to.break through the barriers of family, class and money, in order to obtain the freedom to choose his own path in life.

It’s also refreshing that Siegel contextualizes his life story. He talks about Higher Education in America, class, money, poverty, authority and power: “I started to tremble. An encounter with power has an effect similar to a car accident. All at once, it wakes you up from the daily slumber of familiarity and routine, and it causes you to feel that you are inhabiting a dream.” He writes about a society, in which the lack of money and the struggle to obtain it can turn people’s innocent weakenesses into weapons of self-destruction. There are many threads running through this narrative, but class and money, often taboo topics, usually not centre stage in memoirs, are central here. Finally, Siegel’s memoir does not only contain a sociopolitical commentary, but also has psychological depth perhaps reflecting his own engagement with psychoanalysis / therapy, where he has  explored his fear of ambition, the process of earning money, saving it and spending it wisely.

Origins                              

The book begins with the writer revealing his Russian Jewish origins, through his grandparents’stories. His maternal grandfather, Menka, an important figure in the writer’s life, with his younger siblings, had sailed to America, after the 1905 Odessa pogrom during which much of their family had been killed. Siegel writes about the stories he heard from his grandfather: “As he told the story of his escape into a new life, with its blatant omissions, exaggerations, and possibly wholesale fabrications, his face took on a glittering sardonic aspect, hard and grasping and touched with malice. You could not imagine that face wrinkling into tears unless you had worked out the equation between excessive feeling and paucity of empathy.” In America Menka worked at various jobs until he found a position as a bellboy at the President Hotel in Times Square, much beloved by Harlem’s artistic elite. Siegel describes how the fact that his grandfather worked, not for rich white people but for rich black people, made a lasting impression on him. His grandmother, Rose, Menka’s wife, was born in Minsk, and had emigrated to America with her parents in the 1920s. She had also lost her family. Her four older sisters with their husbands and children had remained in Minsk and had been shot in a mass grave by the SS after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.

Family

Siegel believes that, above all, it was mutual vulnerability that drew his parents to each other, both reassured that the other was incapable of inflicting pain, and that he found himself between two parents with artistic talents and inspirations, an ineffectual father and a mother with violent outbursts and a rather histrionic personality.

His mother had been an aspiring actress, who after declaring to his grandfather that she wanted to be an actress and a singer received a slap and a short speech about all actresses being whores, thwarting her ambition in one instant. Siegel writes: “Menka could turn his mother from a wife and mother into a little girl. She would freeze and start to stammer.” His mother unable to reflect on her traumas passed on trauma and the ways of her ancestors.

His father, a jazz pianist and an amateur painter, gave up his career to get a job as a realtor to pay the bills. He was was a kind, decent man, who amassed a crushing debt to the real estate firm he worked for, which had been paying him an advance against future commissions. When the recession hit in the mid 70s he ran out of commissions and was unable to pay back the firm.This lead to being fired, to unemployment,  problems with the law, a divorce and bankruptcy while Siegel was in college. He eventually ended up giving piano lessons and living in poverty.

About his father Siegel notes, “He possessed another superlative quality, too. He was kind. Other men, the men he had worked with in real estate, got rewarded for their coldheartedness, and often for their dishonesty, while he, Monroe Siegel, who had never hurt and would never hurt anyone, had to groan and stumble through life simply because he could not operate at a similar distance from his feelings. Did not kindness deserve an income?” Actually, the theme of kindness, appears in various parts of the book.

“Kindness,” he writes, “theoretically speaking, begets kindness. The next time you are standing behind your overloaded cart on line at the supermarket, invite the quiet, thoughtful young man waiting behind you with a bottle of Coke and a Snickers bar in his hands to go ahead of you. When he bursts into the movie theater where you are sitting with your wife and children, shooting people in their seats with a semiautomatic rifle and seven handguns, he might recognize you and allow you and your family to live. People often remember the nice things that you do. Alas, cruelty responding to cruelty is more of a certainty than the reciprocity of kindness. The push on the playground or in the bar provokes a counterpush….A slight, once embedded in someone’s mind, metastasizes into rage.”

Elsewhere, he refers to a very wealthy and very cultivated writer friend of his, who once described someone as being “almost pathologically kindhearted,” which has agitated and perplexed him. He asks us: “If a person’s kindness causes his destruction, then wouldn’t the pathology be on the other side?”

About his younger brother, Siegel tells us that they were not able to form a strong bond and console each other. His moither was responsible for this impasse because as an only child she could not conceive of sharing their love.and felt threatened by the possibility of an alliance between the siblings and at times viewed her eldest child as an adversary. He writes: “She sought our complete estrangement from each other….. He grew closer to her but at the same time managed to keep his distance. I moved in the opposite direction. For all my resentment of her, I could not bear to hear my mother suffer.”

Siegel himself was an asthmatic child, who at the age of eleven caught pneumonia. Laid up in bed for weeks or months at a time he watched television and read the armloads of books that his mother brought from the library. He found solace, joy and power, in books and intellectual reverie, his comic streak and capacity to make people laugh, and an inner voice that he invented, which would comment on painful events with detachment. Among the books that he read the long spells he spent in bed were countless books about the Holocaust. Siegel refers to this as an involuntary passion. He refers to a passage in one of the books that buried itself in his imagination, in which an SS officer distractedly mutters to a Jew he finds annoying, Why don’t you just kill yourself? The inmate shrugs his shoulders, and then hangs himself.

His attempt to escape home and pursue his inclination to write propelled him to college, Norway, and finally to Columbia University. Through a series of menial jobs and department stores, where he found work, he dreams of the sanctuary of a good university. In order to do this he takes out loans, which he cannot realistically earn enough money to repay, in some sense, unwittingly repeating his father’s trajectory. He brilliantly situates this trajectory within the socio- economic context. As he notes Charles Manson was serving time in prison, Vietnam was seared by napalm, the genocidal Khmer Rouge was coming into power, Nixon’s henchmen had broken into the Watergate Hotel, and his father was alone in a rented room…. Meanwhile, he conceived of events “as being isolated from each other by inevitable ruptures,” unable to grasp the importance of cause and effect in life, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. He writes: “That was the nature of reality. All of a sudden, where you thought you had a modest stepping-stone into the future you wanted for yourself, you found yourself falling through a trapdoor.”

Money and class

Money, as I mentioned above, is a thread that runs through the whole story from the opening description of the full moon shining like an “incandescent coin” to the subsequent events and the significant role that money played in the falling apart of his family. At one point he writes: “In my horrified eyes, material worry reduced them to scrimmaging chunks of matter themselves; to things….” Concerning his grandparent’s financial status he writes: “They [his grandparents] stayed afloat because their rent was protected by the city, and by means of Menka’s modest savings,” and on Menka’s view of money: “The other side of Menka’s idea of money as something like snow, there for the taking, was his fear that once he possessed it, the money would vanish.” Later he mentions, “Like the smell from a gas leak, money began to seep its way into every aspect of their relationship.” If my mother wanted money to buy something, Menka said NO.

Siegel wonders whether money is a natural feature of human existence. and if there would be the equivalent of money in any world, in any universe, the way there must be the equivalent of oxygen anywhere there is human life or if money as the abstract of everything, is something artificial that human beings must contend with, “weary generation after weary, beleaguered, exasperated, fed-up……” He refers to the Dutch philosopher Spinoza, who wrote that “money has presented us with an abstract of everything.” He ponders on how money is the medium for the human desire to possess: territory, objects, even other human beings, and how it puts everything within reach, but also on the problem of acquiring money. As a result, he comments, “every exertion, or enervation, of intellect, will, and emotion eventually becomes an economic event.”

He consders whether his father’s self doubt and lack of confidence would have had a different outcome if money had not been the means by which they produced their effect. His father was an innocent, and he had strayed from the realm of music, where he had received and offered pleasure, and which was the world he felt comfortable in, and had found himself in a world of calculating hardness, business. He writes: “But whatever forces of character and circumstance determined my father’s relationship to money, money was the decisive factor in everything that came to pass. In a universe or a society, where money was not so gravely consequential, would his personality have destroyed his life?”

Siegel defines poverty as a type of terror, a disease that enters your metabolism and a circumstance that consumes your insides, and as one adpts to poverty, even as they are struggling to escape it, one strengthens the forces that keep one there. He poses the question: why personal qualities like wit, kindness, and intelligence that society claims to value, society has no interest in sustaining if those qualities are all a person had to offer.Siegel also discerns between lack of money, poverty and abject poverty.

I’ve provided two relevant extracts below that create clear visual images of what worrying for money or even worse, having no money looks and feels like…..

“A famous magazine cover portrays the average New Yorker’s mental map of the world as consisting of a vast foreground that is Manhattan, after which appears a small rectangle representing the country beyond, followed by the barely visible rest of the world. If you had excavated the minds of my parents and my friends’ parents, you would have found a map of the world in the form of a giant kitchen table. In the middle of its Formica surface sat an enormous pile of bills and small savings-account books with vinyl covers. The pile represented their lives in northern New Jersey. Pushed to the edge of the table, the salt and pepper shakers and napkin holder stood for the rest of the country, and the rest of the world. Budgetary conclaves around the kitchen table were weekly, sometimes nightly rituals for our parents.”

“These people, sitting or lying on the sidewalk, pressed against the side of a building, also found refuge in the newspapers. They covered themselves with pages of The New York Times or the Daily News or the Post as they slept. I found it cruelly ironic that people so hurt by the cold, hard facts of life could seek protection underneath them. Perhaps they felt reduced to a cold, hard fact themselves. Or they instinctively felt that the newspaper’s rational organization of the facts would shelter them. The homeless and their rituals disturbed me.”

Finally, he addresses the issue of meritocracy and the reality of American higher education. Concerning the latter one cannot help to wonder why the richest country in the world has not been able to provide free higher education [many smaller and poorer countries have, to some extent at least, succeded in doing so]. One cannot also wonder about the high tuition fees and the prevelant reality of student loans and debt. Siegel writes that the idea of a society based on merit is inspiring, but beyond this, there is the way things actually work. He refers to community colleges for the poor, and the state schools, where the children of the middle class can also earn a college degree, but “after graduating use up the youngest, most vital part of their lives as slaves to the debt they piled onto themselves in order to go to college, unable to buy a house, start a family, or follow their talents and inclinations.They are unable, that is to say, to lay the groundwork for their own children to shift around the ladders of inherited luck that make up the beautiful idea of American meritocracy and to rise up in society themselves…….”