The Untouched Key Page 5

  Chaim Soutine, Landscape Cagnes 1990 ARS N.Y./SPADEM

  In contrast, as a child Stalin never experienced a protective and unpossessive love. Descriptions of his childhood do not reveal anyone in his life who protected him from the excessive beatings his father gave him or compensated for them with love and a watchful presence. His mother, who was very religious, is portrayed as confused and self-absorbed.

  The family of Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili was unhappy in its own special way. The boy’s father was a drunkard, a spendthrift, a man who possessed a violent temper, with no feeling for his wife or his son; he beat them unmercifully. He was a cobbler by trade, with a small shop in an obscure steet on the outskirts of Gori. The boy’s mother was a quiet, withdrawn, deeply religious woman, beautiful in her youth, who found her chief pleasure in attending church services and in contributing out of her sparse earnings to the upkeep of the priests. She earned money by performing menial tasks in the houses of the rich, laundering, baking bread and running errands. She was also an occasional seamstress, and one of the boy’s childhood friends, who was not unsympathetic to him, remembered that she sometimes earned a living by cutting, sewing and laundering underwear. She was a proud woman and kept her sufferings to herself.

  When Ekaterina Geladze married Vissarion Djugashvili in 1874, she was a girl of seventeen and her husband was twenty-two. The first three children are said to have died in childbirth, Joseph, born on December 21, 1879, being the only child to grow to maturity. Vissarion died when the boy was in his eleventh year, and Ekaterina survived her husband by nearly fifty years. She was a small, fragile, indomitable woman, who remained deeply religious throughout her life and always wore a black nunlike costume.

  The family of Stalin might have come out of Gorky’s play The Lower Depths. It was brutally unhappy. They lived in grinding poverty, constantly in debt. Sometimes the neighbors would have pity on the struggling seamstress and her undernourished son; and their pity may have done more harm to Joseph than the beatings he received from his father. Sometimes poverty drove Ekaterina close to madness, and we hear of her wandering through the streets with her hair disheveled, crying, praying, singing and muttering to herself. From a very early age the boy knew what it was to live alone in the world.

  According to Iremashvili, who knew the family well and was constantly in and out of the house, the father beat the son vengefully, remorselessly, with a kind of brooding, deliberate passion, without pleasure and without any sense of guilt or wrongdoing, for no other purpose than to provide himself with some excitement in an otherwise empty and purposeless existence. The result was inevitable. The boy learned to hate. Most of all he hated his father, but gradually this hatred expanded until it included all other fathers, all other men.

  “I never saw him crying,” Iremashvili relates, and the statement has the ring of authenticity. The boy became hardened by his beatings, and became in the end terrifyingly indifferent to cruelty. His face and body were covered with bruises, but he was determined not to surrender. Somehow he would survive his father, but in order to survive it was necessary to become as brutal as his father. He was too puny to hit back, but he could provide himself with a brutal protective armor of indifference and scorn. “Those undeserved and fearful beatings,” says Iremashvili, “made the boy as hard and heartless as his father.” …

  Church was a consolation, for no one beat him in church, no one scorned him or had pity on him. As a choirboy he walked in processions, sang hymns, wore brilliant vestments, and being close to the priests, he was closer to the source of the mystery. His earliest ambition was to be a priest; and his mother looked forward to the time when she would be blessed by her son.

  His greatest consolation however was his mother, who worked herself to the bone to provide for him and who lived for him.… Her love for her son was an intense and possessive love.…

  (It is obviously still possible for most biographers to designate as love both destructive attempts to possess one’s child and total blindness to the child’s situation.)

  He was seven when he suffered an attack of smallpox, which left disfiguring scars that remained to the end of his life. It must have been a serious attack, for the scars were large and numerous, with the result that when he came to power thousands of photographs of him had to be carefully doctored.

  An even more distressing affliction occurred when he was about ten. He only once spoke about it, and then only briefly when he was explaining why, when he was in exile in Siberia during World War I, he was not called up for military service. He told the story to Anna Alliluieva, his sister-in-law, who published it in her memoirs:

  The left arm of Stalin was badly bent at the elbow. The injury occurred during his childhood. An infection set in, and since there was no one to give it treatment, blood-poisoning followed. Stalin was close to death.

  “I don’t know what saved me,” he told us. “Either it was due to my healthy organism or to the ointments smeared on it by the village quack, but I got my health back again.”

  The vestiges of that injury remain to the present day.…

  As a result of the injury Stalin’s left arm was some three inches shorter than the right, and he never had complete muscular control of his left hand. At various times he wore a brace to support the elbow; the outline of the brace can be seen in several photographs. A distinguished orthopedic surgeon has suggested on the basis of Alliluieva’s account and a number of photographs that Stalin suffered “a compound fracture with resultant osteomyelitis and a subsequent hand deformity secondary to disturbance of growth of the arm, the hand deformity being produced by a Volkman’s contracture subsequent to improper treatment of the fracture.”

  Such a diagnosis is, of course, largely speculative. The medical records of Stalin have never been published, and it is unlikely that they will be published for some years to come. What is certain is that the left arm was warped, lacked the strength of the right arm, and caused him pain and discomfort throughout his life. The awkward shoulder brace was a constant reminder that he suffered from an incurable deformity, and he had only to look at his left hand, which never opened properly, to remember that he was not like other men. He went to considerable trouble to conceal his deformity, which could only be successfully hidden when he was wearing a heavy greatcoat with unusually long sleeves. The crooked arm probably had a profound effect on his emerging character.

  There is no clue as to how the injury occurred. It seems likely to have happened as a result of one of the ferocious beatings he received from his father.

  Chaim Soutine, Portrait of a Child 1990 ARS N.Y./SPADEM

  Untreated fractures of the left arm are a frequently occurring phenomenon in battered children. The adult holds in his right hand the broomstick or clothes hanger used in a frontal attack on the child standing before him, and the child’s left arm is exposed to the greatest danger.

  Stalin’s family was very poor, and his mother had to work. But Charlie Chaplin’s mother was poor too. She even had to put her child in an orphanage, but she visited him there and gave him the assurance that he was loved, that he was valuable and important to someone. The experience of being loved can be sensed in all the Chaplin films. In spite of hunger, misery, and calamity, there is always room for feelings, for tears, for tenderness, for life.

  For Stalin—who, like Hitler, was born after the death of several siblings—there was nothing but loneliness, the constant threat of beatings, the belief in his own ostensible worthlessness and guilt, and nowhere another human being to protect him from constant persecution and abuse, to tell or show him that he was not guilty. There was no one of influence in his life who could avert his fate, just as there was no mercy later for the millions of prisoners in the Gulag Archipelago. Without even being sentenced, they could be tormented, tortured, killed—or released—for no apparent cause. Everything was determined by the arbitrary whim of a tyrant who suspected enemy attacks from all sides because he had experienced perpetual threats at a
n early age and because there had been no witness to teach him that the whole world was not like his father: wicked, dangerous, unpredictable, frightening. When a child’s boundless powerlessness never finds sheltering arms, it will be transformed into harshness and mercilessness; when, in addition, it is spurred by a mother’s ambition, it can result in a great career that introduces all the elements of the child’s repressed misery into world history. Then millions of human beings are marched to Russian prisons or to Nazi gas chambers without knowing why, because once a little boy didn’t know why he was being punished. How long are we going to tolerate these senseless marches now that we finally are in a position to discover their underlying causes?

  Friedrich Nietzsche, 1861 Ullstein Bilderdienst

  TWO

  Friedrich Nietzsche:

  The Struggle Against the Truth

  A Mistreated Child, a Brilliant Mind, and Eleven Years of Darkness

  Several years ago I wanted to demonstrate that the works of writers, poets, and painters tell the encoded story of childhood traumas no longer consciously remembered in adulthood. After having made this discovery in my own painting and in the writings of Franz Kafka, I was able to test it against other life histories. I wanted to share what I had found with biographers and psychoanalysts, but I soon learned that I was dealing with forbidden knowledge, by no means easy to share with “the experts.”

  And so I decided not to publish my study but to keep the knowledge I had gained to myself, devoting myself to other pursuits such as painting and confronting my own early childhood. Through these activities I gradually realized that my disappointment at the blindness of society and of the experts had something to do with my own blindness and that I really felt compelled to try to prove something to myself that a part of me refused to believe. Of course, I had long been aware of my parents’ weaknesses, of the injury they had inflicted on me without knowing it, but my early idealization of my parents was still unresolved. I recognized it in my naive belief and confidence that the biographers of Hitler, Kafka, and Nietzsche must be capable of seeing and affirming what I had found.

  That they were not capable of recognizing such forbidden knowledge finally became clear to me when I realized how strongly I was clinging to my childhood idealization of my parents. For a long time I couldn’t stop hoping that my parents would someday be ready to share my questions with me, to stop evading them, react to them, and not be afraid to join me in seeing where they led. This never happened when I was a child, and I thought I had long since gotten over my deprivation. But my astonishment at the reactions of people whom I had expected to be more knowledgeable than I revealed that I still had not given up the image of clever and courageous parents who could be convinced by the facts. Once I became conscious of the connection, I no longer had any need to publish my study.

  Now I have a different motivation for publishing. I would like to share the knowledge I have gained with people who can face the facts. They need not be experts but, rather, people who may be inspired by my work to read Nietzsche and to make a connection between their impressions of him and their own experience.

  The need to share my findings with others was not my only motive in writing about Nietzsche. My work with the Nietzsche material had made me realize that society’s ignorance about the injuries inflicted on children represents a great danger for humanity. Sentences from Nietzsche’s writings could never have been misinterpreted in support of fascism and the annihilation of human beings if people had understood his words for what they were: the encoded language of the child who was forbidden to express his true feelings. Young men would never have been willing to march to war with his words in their pack if they had known that his ideology promoting the destruction of morality and traditional values such as charity and mercy stood for the raised fist of a child starved for truth who had suffered severely under the domination of hypocrisy. Since I myself had witnessed the way the deadly marching of the National Socialists in the thirties and forties was indirectly spurred on by Nietzsche’s words, it now seemed to me worth the trouble to find and call attention to the genesis of these words, thoughts, and feelings.

  Would Nietzsche’s ideas have been useless to the Nazis if people had understood their source? I do not doubt it. But if society had understood, then the ideas of the Nazis would also have been unthinkable or at least would not have found the broad acceptance they did. The simple, commonplace facts of child abuse are not given a hearing; if they were, the human race would have greater understanding and wars could be prevented. Only if they are presented in a disguised, symbolic form can they arouse great interest and an emotional response. For the disguised story is, after all, familiar to most of us, but its symbolic language must guarantee that what has been repressed will not be brought to light and cause pain. Therefore, my thesis that Nietzsche’s works reflect the unlived feelings, needs, and tragedy of his childhood will probably meet with great resistance. The thesis is correct nevertheless, and I will offer proof in the pages that follow. My proof can be understood, however, only by someone who is willing to temporarily abandon the adult perspective to gain insight into and take serious account of the situation of a child.

  Which child are we talking about? The boy who learns in school to suppress his normal, human feelings and always act as if he didn’t have any? The little boy who is trained day after day by his young mother, his grandmother, and his two aunts to be a “strong” man? The very little boy whose beloved father “loses his mind” and goes on living with the family for eleven months in an unstable condition? Or the even younger child who was punished most severely and locked in dark closets by the father whom he loved and was occasionally allowed to play with? It is not one or another but all these children rolled into one who had to bear so much without being allowed to express any feelings or, indeed, even to have any feelings. He was not supposed to cry, to scream, to be in a rage. He was only supposed to be well disciplined and to do brilliant work.

  Friedrich Nietzsche survived this childhood; he survived the more than one hundred illnesses in one year of secondary school, the constant headaches, and the rheumatic ailments, which his biographers have assiduously listed without searching for their cause and which they finally attribute to a “weak constitution.” At the age of twelve he kept a diary, the kind an adult might have kept, written in a well-adjusted, reasonable, well-behaved way. But in adolescence his once suppressed feelings burst forth, resulting in works that would deeply move other young people of later generations. And then at age forty, when he could no longer bear his loneliness and, since he was not able to see that the roots of his life history went back to his childhood, he lost his mind and everything became “clear”: historians locate the cause of his tragic ending in a venereal disease he supposedly contracted as an adolescent. The outcome is in keeping with our moral standards: the just, though delayed, punishment, in the form of a fatal disease, for having visited a prostitute. This is similar to the present attitude toward AIDS. Everything seems to turn out for the best, and hypocritical morality is restored. But what those who raised and taught Nietzsche actually did to the boy did not happen so long ago that we can no longer find out about it. Young graduate students can uncover the story, read the letters from his sister and others, write dissertations about their findings, and reconstruct the situation that gave rise to his later works, such as Beyond Good and Evil, The Antichrist, and Thus Spake Zarathustra. But this can be done only by students who were not mistreated as children or who have worked through their mistreatment and therefore have open ears and eyes for the suffering of battered children. Their research is not likely to be greeted with enthusiasm by their professors. If they can persevere in their research nonetheless, they will produce evidence that the crimes committed against children have serious effects on all humanity. They will also be able to illustrate the unexpected ways in which these effects occur.

  FAMILY LIFE

  In my search for the facts about Nietzsche’s early chil
dhood I learned the following:

  Both parents were the children of Protestant ministers and numbered several theologians among their forebears. Nietzsche’s father was the youngest child from his own father’s second marriage; when, at age thirty, he married a seventeen-year-old woman, he also took in both of his older, unmarried sisters and, later, his mother. Friedrich was born a year after the marriage, in 1844. When Friedrich was two, his sister was born and soon after that a brother, who died at the age of two shortly after the death of the father. According to reports, the father was a warmhearted and feeling person who from the first loved his son very much and frequently had him by his side when he improvised at the piano. This important experience and the warmth the father may have shown his son probably played a role in enabling the boy to experience strong feelings in spite of his rigorous upbringing. Despite his affection, however, the father strictly forbade certain feelings and severely punished his son for expressing them. There are reports of temper tantrums, which stern measures soon put to an end.

  His father, when he had time, liked to spend it with his oldest child, once the boy had learned to talk a little. It didn’t disturb him either when Friedrich came into the father’s study and watched him “quietly and thoughtfully,” as the mother writes, while he was working. But the child was completely spellbound when his father sat at the piano and “improvised.” Already at the age of one, little Fritz, as everyone called him, would then sit up in his carriage, listen, quiet as a mouse, and not take his eyes off his father. Otherwise, however, he was not always a well-behaved child in those first years. If he didn’t get his way, he threw himself to the floor and furiously kicked his little legs in the air. His father must have taken very energetic measures against this behavior, yet for a long time the boy was still stubborn and recalcitrant when he was denied something he wanted, although he no longer rebelled but withdrew silently into a quiet corner or to the privy, where he vented his anger by himself.