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Despot or Artist?

  About five years ago I went to an exhibit of Chaim Soutine’s paintings. I had felt very drawn to this painter for some time and had always had the impression that the great intensity of his work undeniably had its roots in childhood pain. The exhibit confirmed my impression and also provided me with important information. Along with the many portraits on display were numerous landscapes, which at first I didn’t even look at because it was primarily the people—the strange, twisted, tormented figures—that fascinated me so. But when I did turn to the houses, streets, and squares, it struck me that they looked as though they might start to quiver at any moment.

  I learned from the catalogue that Soutine was a Russian Jew who died in Paris in 1943. I asked myself whether the extremely threatening situation of the Nazi Holocaust had motivated, or even compelled, Soutine to paint the world as shaking and falling apart. Then I thought of Kafka and the discovery I had made in his case that visions of the future have to do with one’s earliest experiences and that the repressed suffering of childhood can lend intensity and expressiveness to an artist’s work without his even realizing what he is portraying. I wondered what it must be like for a little child who is being beaten, lying across someone’s knee, head down so that the world looks upside down. And this upside-down world is quivering, for his body is shaken with every blow. That is how I experienced Soutine’s paintings even before I learned from the catalogue that he was frequently beaten by his parents and brothers and could count on being punished regularly because he liked to draw so much, something that was forbidden by Orthodox Jews. The biographer who presented these facts did not attribute any significance to them; he defended the thesis that Soutine had a “narcissistic and necrophilic character” and therefore loved to portray death. The following passage, quoted from Soutine by Andrew Forge, appeared in the catalogue:

  Smilovitchi, the Lithuanian village where [Soutine] was born [in 1893] the tenth son of the village tailor, was absolutely without culture. The very thought of painting pictures was heretical in such an orthodox community, and from the first Soutine was made to know that he was sinning: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth.” His struggle to find ways of breaking the Second Commandment is part of his legend: he stole from the household to buy a coloured pencil and was locked up in the cellar as punishment; he made a drawing of the village idiot, then asked the rabbi to pose for him. The aftermath reads like a parable: the rabbi’s son beat him up severely, the rabbi paid Soutine’s mother damages and with the money he was able to leave Smilovitchi to study at art school.

  Adolf Hitler, A Church in Flanders Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin

  These details about Soutine’s childhood traumas brought me back to the old question of why all battered children don’t turn into monsters like Adolf Hitler, why some grow up to be brutal, unfeeling criminals and others highly sensitive people such as painters and poets who are capable of expressing their suffering. I detected the presence in Soutine’s life history of a sympathetic and helpful witness who confirmed the child’s perceptions, thus making it possible for him to recognize that he had been wronged.

  Men of various professions frequently ask me why they didn’t become a Hitler but have lived their lives as more or less peaceful physicians, lawyers, or professors, even though they, like Hitler, were beaten every day when they were children. They use this question to argue against my thesis that brutal, unfeeling, and thoroughly destructive treatment of children produces monsters—not by chance but of necessity. Then I always inquire about the details of the person’s childhood, and on closer examination it turns out in every case that a particular witness helped the child experience his feelings to some degree. In Adolf Hitler’s childhood, such a stabilizing witness was totally lacking. I have often compared the structure of Hitler’s family to a totalitarian regime in which there is no possibility of recourse against the police state.

  Hitler’s father’s arbitrary exercise of power was the highest authority, from which there was no escape. In the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler demonstrated the extent to which he had internalized this system. Not a single feeling or humane consideration existed that might have set limits to his cruelty once he achieved sole power. His use of power paralleled exactly the way he had been brought up. Whatever course of action his parents thought appropriate was carried out mercilessly with every measure of force possible. The boy was never permitted to doubt the rightness of his parents’ decisions, for that would have resulted in unbearable torture. It was just as impossible for ordinary citizens in the Third Reich to question a decision made by the state or the Gestapo. If they tried, torture and death were the inevitable response. Brute force represented the ultimate power, and it provided its own “justification” for “maintaining order” and for the “legality” of its crimes; this practice, too, was borrowed from the structure of Hitler’s family, in which everything—the stifling of feelings and creativity as well as the suppression of all the child’s needs, indeed of almost every human emotion—was done in the name of a good upbringing.

  Hitler’s frenzied campaign against “degenerate art” also reflected what had been done to him: because colors awaken feelings in people, Hitler had to forbid them. Colors were dangerous, reprehensible, almost Jewish. So were vague lines, which excite the imagination. All signs of vitality had to be stamped out with the same thoroughness with which the child’s vitality had been crushed by his parents for the sake of establishing order. Since order established by violent means was the highest value in this system, the annihilation of creativity was the obvious result. A student has investigated in detail the similarities between Hitler’s upbringing and the concept of “degenerate art.” Drawing on my writing and using pictures, including some done by Hitler, she presents convincing evidence that Hitler’s attack on modern art was a continuation of the destructive process begun by his parents.

  The Holocaust, the euthanasia law, and the concept of degenerate art are only a few examples of the way an adult perpetuates the destructive treatment he endured as a child. Hitler’s aides accepted his methods without hesitation because for them too this system of coercion and enforced obedience had always been the only right one; they were comfortable with it and never questioned it. To combat cruelty, a person must first be able to perceive it as such. When someone has been exposed throughout childhood to nothing but harshness, coldness, coercion, and the rigid wielding of power, as Hitler and his closest followers were, when any sign of softness, tenderness, creativity, or vitality is scorned, then the person against whom that violence is directed accepts it as perfectly justified. Children believe they deserve the blows they are given, idealize their persecutors, and later search out objects for projection, seeking relief by displacing their supposed guilt onto other individuals or even a whole people. And in this way they become guilty themselves.

  An artist like Soutine couldn’t possibly have come from as destructive a totalitarian home setting as Hitler. The very fact that the boy was given money as compensation for being beaten and that his mother handed the money over to him shows that, despite the primitive conditions, someone was there for him in his childhood who helped him develop a sense of justice. Thus he did not have to blame himself for his suffering, to say nothing of globally displacing his guilt onto others later in life. Thanks to the money he was given as atonement, Soutine was even able to fulfill his fervent desire to take drawing lessons and go on to become a painter.

  But there must have been other differences between Chaim Soutine’s and Adolf Hitler’s childhoods. Although they were both battered children and were severely punished for wanting to become artists, it is inconceivable that a person like Adolf Hitler could have grown up in the family of a poor Jewish tailor in Lithuania. It is just as inconceivable that Soutine the painter could have developed his subtle sense of color and his ability to express suffe
ring as the son of Alois Hitler in Braunau. The hostility toward life and the destructive power of the Hitler family are evident from the abundance of available documents. The force of their message has now been brought to a wide audience in a stage drama that draws on many examples to show how any pleasure Hitler took in playing, in having ideas, or in being inventive was nipped in the bud by his parents’ rigid emphasis on obedience and strict training.

  Soutine did not grow up in an emotional desert as Hitler did. His upbringing was less systematic and consistent, less focused on obedience, for Jewish fathers in Eastern Europe were not trained to be harsh and brutal. They were not forced, like German fathers, to suppress their soft, helpless side from childhood on. It was quite natural for them to kiss and caress little children, and this was never called “monkey love.”

  Thus, the children of Jewish fathers were more likely to be shown tenderness, which undoubtedly contributed toward reducing the harm done to them. Without such tenderness and affection, children are unable to experience a feeling of pleasure that shows them what life is and lets them know that vitality is worth fighting for. This is a different kind of pleasure from that derived, for example, by tormenting animals, a means by which an abused child can act out humiliation. Even if children aren’t given a love that is selfless, responsible, and protective, nevertheless physical closeness, caresses, and affection can arouse feelings in them—feelings such as longing, pain, loneliness, anger, and outrage but also delight in nature, in their own body, in the bodies of others, and especially in life. To be sure, this delight can be clouded or impaired by the way adults exercise their power, but again the emotional climate and the behavior of other people to whom a child is attached can make a difference. The poet Paul Celan’s life is a good example. I found the following passages about his childhood in the biography by Israel Chalfen:

  Paul’s father maintained strict discipline at home. He was not a good-natured person; he placed high demands on his son, punished him, beat him often for every minor childish infraction. Leo was small of stature, about a head shorter than his wife. One had the impression that he was attempting to compensate for his unimpressive appearance and his financial failures by being tyrannical at home. But he didn’t quarrel with his wife—he was very devoted to her! It was his son who bore the brunt of his iron rule. Paul was a very sensitive child and no doubt suffered greatly from his father’s severity.…

  Little Paul learned at an early age to be obedient and to behave in a way that corresponded to his parents’ idea of a “good upbringing.” He had to be fastidious about personal cleanliness, had to eat everything that was set before him, and was not allowed to ask superfluous questions. When he nevertheless did contradict, rebel, or display childish defiance, his father rebuked him roundly or even beat him. If the “offense” seemed especially grave, he shut the boy in an empty closet and took the key. Fortunately, the closet had a window opening onto the rear courtyard so that the women in the family could release the bitterly crying boy from his prison as soon as his father left the house on business matters. Usually it was his mother who came to the rescue, sometimes one of his aunts.…

  Paul encountered limits to his freedom of movement everywhere: he wasn’t allowed to open doors from one room to another, nor was he allowed to go ouside without being accompanied by an adult. This also prevented him from being by himself on the quiet street, Wassilkogasse, with its chestnut trees. On rare occasions he was permitted to play with the daughter, almost the same age as he, of a music teacher who lived in the same building, but only in the backyard, where there were a few trees and some sparse grass. Between the piles of wood stored there for the winter, between fence and back door lay the paradise of the first three years of Paul’s life. It is not by chance that one of Celan’s boyhood poems begins with the line “The world lies on the other side of the chestnut trees.”

  Even though Paul Celan’s father ruled tyrannically, taking out on his son his own insecurity, the father was very devoted to his wife, and this in itself set limits to his tyranny. Mother and aunts could come to Paul’s aid and let him out of the closet when he was imprisoned. These were the witnesses who rescued him, who helped him to understand that along with cruelty, rigidity, and stupidity there can also be mercy and goodness and that he was not guilty and wicked but was even lovable, although his father hadn’t noticed.

  Because of the women who came to his rescue, the boy was able to integrate into his consciousness the injustice he experienced, the pain of being imprisoned and tormented, without completely repressing it. But since he was raised so strictly, he was not permitted to see that he was being persecuted and held back in life by his own father. He had to keep his father’s image sacred and displace his feelings onto other people and situations. All poets do this; they have to. That is why all his life Paul Celan could never break away from the theme of the concentration camps, which were a menacing backdrop to his young adulthood and in which his parents died. He wrote poems about imprisonment that, significantly, were much admired in the postwar period, a time of strong intellectual defense against feelings in literature and art. These poems helped Celan express the sufferings of others in a masterful, restrained, and detached language. Yet his own childhood suffering, which was emotionally inaccessible, remained hidden from him.

  Chaim Soutine, Landscape with Houses 1990 ARS N.Y./SPADEM

  The reason for Celan’s suicide in 1970 at age forty-nine is not to be found in his war experiences, which he shared with many other survivors. If a person no longer has any room for hope, the cause—which has been repressed—lies in the far distant past. With his suicide, Paul Celan concluded the destructive work begun by his father, who denied his son the simplest, most harmless pleasures, even if they would not have cost anything, out of sheer meanness and for no apparent reason. It is so easy to do this to children because they are defenseless and at the mercy of adult whims, for better or worse. It is difficult for parents who were wounded as children to resist the temptation to exercise their power. If they were not allowed to play freely as children, they will keep finding reasons to deprive their own children of this enjoyment, which is so crucial for development. Or they will pervert play by an overemphasis on achievement—in sports such as ice skating or in music lessons—and destroy the child’s creativity by instilling a compulsion to excel.

  Celan’s experience as a child was that the weak have no rights, but he was not allowed to know it about himself on the conscious level. Instead, he described in poetic language the situation of the camp inmate whose life is also impaired without any reasons having to be given. The guards are able to destroy the enjoyment and dignity of a defenseless person as a matter of course because they too have learned this lesson at such an early age. Thus, Celan’s poetry is authentic, even though its highly personal dimension remained hidden from the poet himself and from most readers. If he had understood the source of his suffering, he would have found meaning in life and might have enjoyed it.

  It helped Celan to articulate his suffering by displacing the experience of his childhood onto the situation of the camp inmate, but it did not save him from suicide. If his father had not been murdered in a camp in 1942, Paul Celan might have found his way to the feelings of his childhood; perhaps he could have confronted his father inwardly and thereby saved his own life. But a person whose father has been cruelly murdered will find it very difficult to call him into question, even if for the sake of clarifying their relationship. It is easier to search for a way out in mysticism, whereby the person can close his eyes and conceal the truth in eloquent symbolic images. Yet sometimes this approach becomes virtually intolerable too because the power of the quite prosaic truth, the truth of the “little self” so disdained by the mystics, can be inexorable. Particularly for people who at some point in their childhood experienced loving care, this truth won’t allow itself to be silenced completely, even with the help of poetry, philosophy, or mystical experiences. It insists on being heard, like
every child whose voice has not been completely destroyed.

  The absence or presence of a helping witness in childhood determines whether a mistreated child will become a despot who turns his repressed feelings of helplessness against others or an artist who can tell about his or her suffering. I could cite an abundance of further examples, but I will mention only a few. I must leave it to the reader to verify my statements, to supplement my evidence with new material, or to refute my arguments, as the case may be.

  It’s a fact that Dostoyevsky’s father forced his children to read the Bible and tormented them with his greed. I don’t know whether he mistreated them physically, and I must base my assumptions on my knowledge of his son’s novels. But we do know that after his wife’s death, he “led the life of a wastrel, drunkard, and tyrant. He treated his serfs with such cruelty that in 1839 they murdered him most brutally.”

  In mid-nineteenth-century Russia, cruelty toward serfs was almost the rule. The elder Dostoyevsky must therefore have treated his serfs especially brutally or perfidiously to drive them to such a dangerous act of revenge. How was this father likely to have treated his own sons? Perhaps a good deal could be gleaned from The Brothers Karamazov. But this novel also shows how difficult it is for sons to acknowledge a father’s wickedness without feeling guilty and without punishing themselves. The serfs were able to free themselves from the domination of their master, but the children were not. Fyodor Dostoyevsky suffered from epilepsy; he searched for God, Whom he could not find. Why didn’t he become a criminal filled with hatred? Because he found a loving person in his mother. Because of her he experienced love, and this was crucial for his later life. Can the explanation be that simple? Yes. But the way his life turned out hung by a thread; it could easily have been completely different.