Two Conversations About Culture

Assessing the state of a continent's intellectual and cultural life in any detail, or in a sharp pattern, is an all but impossible task. Perhaps the most useful and pleasantest way to consider the whole is in conversation--preferably with a multilingual, polymathic scholar. Last week TIME correspondents discussed the world of arts and ideas with two of Europe's leading intellectuals: Dr. George Steiner, a French-born American thinker who is currently a fellow of Cambridge's Churchill College; and Dr. Joachim Kaiser, principal critic for Munich's Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

ALMOST all of British intellectual and cultural life, said Steiner, is suffering from a lingering case of "historical fatigue," except perhaps in the field of science. "In the physical and exact sciences British achievements remain staggering. But in the humanities, if you ask where the great philosophical movement is, there is only a long silence. It is an awfully dead period. There have been 40 years of restoring order, sweeping and tidying up what had been all the rampant, unkempt, even outdated collections of philosophical theories. Now everything is clean, in perfect order and ready for bold new departures. But nothing has happened, so everyone goes on polishing.

"In our literature we have little Englandisms--you close the doors and try to be intensely yourself. In contrast to the conspicuous consumption of America, we have developed a sense of inconspicuous hoarding. Great energy is suspect here. It looks vulgar to the English eye. England has the enormous psychological problem of having 1,000 years of history behind it. The question is: What is there left to do? The past here has become so present that the great mood is looking back--sometimes it seems as if there is nothing on television every night but war films, all looking back, at any war--the Boer

War, Crimea, you name it.

What are the books that sell 100,000 copies? Mary Queen of Scots, Wellington. What are the hit television films? The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Lord Clark's Civilisation. It's like a museum."

Steiner sees most of the provocative new ideas in Britain as coming from the Continent. "The intellectual traffic over here is tremendous, particularly French Marxism and French structuralism. Psychoanalysis, which has ground to a halt everywhere else, is being given a transfusion of radical sociology in France in psychopolitics: Freudian categories are being applied to the problems of labor, industry and the middle class. Bored with pragmatism and objectivity, the young of Europe are generally moving into an age of myth and irrationality.

France, at the moment, is the most beautiful producer and exporter of myths, in politics and the social sciences."

"German literature is fantastically alive--extremely radical, anything goes. The writers feel responsible for the omissions of the past--what Daddy did during the Nazi period. German theater and German poetry are also alive and crackling," says Steiner, citing the work of Peter Handke, 30, whose baffling, audience-infuriating plays (Kaspar, Offending the Audience) are not so much theatrical dramas as experiments with new language forms. "Also, Peter Weiss's theater of cruelty (Marat/Sade, The Investigation) will probably come to be seen as an experiment of enduring change." Among poets,

Steiner is most impressed by Paul Celan, who recently committed suicide, and by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who, he says, is "trying to break open the whole clogged German form of style."

Summing up, Steiner proposes that "the major question for Europe is where the best of American civilization, with its great efficiencies, its uses of color, space, fabric, its ideas of comfort and speed of communication, can successfully meet with the values and traditions of the old world." Perhaps surprisingly, Steiner finds that ground of "creative collision" in Northern Italy, particularly in Milan. Thanks to the ancient strengths of the country--part Catholic, part Latin, part landscape --Northern Italy "has successfully avoided the second-rate Americanisms you see elsewhere in Europe--gas stations that don't work as well as they do in the U.S. but are just as ugly." As for Italy's intellectual life, he believes it to be "under very grave pressure from the imminent danger of the collapse and corruption of its overcrowded, overburdened university system."

The most significant fact about Central European culture, observes Dr. Joachim Kaiser, is its conservatism. "This is true for two reasons. First, a great many institutions, very much to the regret of the young left, have remained unshakable. These include the theater, the opera, publishing and the world of intellectual and critical journals. In other words, our large culture market functions to semi-freeze developments by maintaining certain traditions, such as the preservation of the classics in our theaters and the repertories of our great orchestras and, above all, our operas.

"The second reason is that the more expert and knowledgeable the audience, the more reactionary is likely to be its attitude. This is why the Vienna State Opera is about the most reactionary cultural institution in the world. It is not because the Viennese know so little about opera, but because they know so much about it."

As a specific example of aesthetic conservatism, Kaiser said, the most interesting theatrical events in Central Europe last year were two productions in West Berlin of Prinz Friedrich von Hamburg by Heinrich von Kleist (17771811), a five-act romantic drama of heroism in battle and requited love. "Here we have a play that less than five years ago was rejected by the radical left. Suddenly that same play starts to fascinate young and old alike--so much so that it results in the most interesting theatrical evenings of the season."

Kaiser thinks that Europe has undergone something of a cultural revolution in recent years, stemming from the student rebellions that culminated in May 1968. But that revolution, said Kaiser, merely challenged old bourgeois values without replacing them with anything new. In reaction against anarchy, people are gradually returning to the traditional. "To put it another way, there are no young girls around, so in order to remain modern somehow, we are putting our cultural grandmothers into hot pants. In music, for instance, Richard Wagner a few years ago had been almost written off as a Nazi and Chopin had been dismissed as a kind of 19th century pop composer. Now those two composers are intoxicating the same people who five years ago were smoking hashish."

Although Kaiser is impressed by such Italian theatrical and musical artists as Milan's Director Giorgio Strehler, Conductor Claudio Abbado and Pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, he is bored by the country's literature. "There are not many good Italian novels, probably because the Italian language has become over-rhetorical." Like Steiner, Kaiser is impressed by the intellectual ferment in France, particularly "the discussions influenced by Claude Levi-Strauss and the structuralists on one side and the Sartre pupils on the other." But except for the novels of Michel Butor and Claude Simon, whom he considers the most talented exponents of the nouveau roman, the "new novel" that is no longer very new, he is unimpressed with French belles-lettres. "One can already find an epitaph for the new novel--'too boring.' "

Kaiser also agrees with Steiner that German literature is in an era of creative ferment, partly because of the country's tradition of being open to influences from the East. On the other hand, he is skeptical of Russia's growing body of literature of dissent. "One shouldn't forget that everything that came from Prague in 1968 was, for purely political motives, a bit overestimated. One closed both eyes and found it a bit better than it was. This might also be the case with Solzhenitsyn today."

Kaiser concludes that "as a cultural whole, Europe does not exist." In fact, he feels that there is considerably more intellectual continuity between New York today and the Berlin of old, for instance, than between Munich and Florence. "I was in Florence yesterday," he said, "and I really had the feeling of being on another continent." If ever there is to be a common culture for Europe, he believes that it will be the result of cross-fertilization from the Anglo-American orbit--not so much in art or literature as in lifestyles. "These influences range from the habit, new to Europe, of calling people by their first names, to the social influence of radio and TV shows, to the way that fashions develop outside traditional centers in Europe."

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