culture and barbarism

some thoughts after Leopoldstadt

Last night, I saw Leopoldstadt—Tom Stoppard’s newest play—because my mom made me. That’s ridiculous, obviously: I’m a grown woman, my momma can’t “make” me do anything. But Leopoldstadt—which is set in the Jewish neighborhood of Vienna during the first half of the twentieth century, covering a period of relative assimilation and prosperity for Jews, then the subsequent descent into the Holocaust and afterward—is the kind of play that your mom tells you to go and see. My husband quipped that it was like the Seinfeld episode when Jerry’s parents tell him that he simply has to go see Schindler’s List. Older Jews insist that Holocaust stories are important, and must be witnessed; younger Jews might roll their eyes, but they go. (And hopefully, unlike that Seinfeld episode, they don’t get caught making out in the theater.)

Antisemitism, historical or present, is something I don’t like to think about, and in fact I actively avoid thinking about it whenever possible. I deleted my Twitter account a little while ago, the day after Tucker Carlson launched his career on the site with a rant about how Volodymyr Zelensky is a “rat-like” “shifty, dead-eyed” “persecutor of Christians,” and Elon Musk responded banteringly to a tweet from a self-proclaimed “Blood Libeler” about “hating the Js.” This was too much for me, and I deactivated, maybe forever. Antisemitism is a strange oppression, though. I’m not “legibly Jewish” so I don’t face it as a form of daily discrimination; for me, it basically only exists online. I walk around Queens as a white person, with all the accrued unfair benefits thereof, and nothing bad ever happens. Still, I tend not to mention I’m Jewish, even in situations where it would be natural to do so. My neighborhood is very diverse and most of my neighbors are immigrants; when they ask “where are you from” I usually say “Michigan,” before asking where they’re from (the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Honduras, China, Nepal, everywhere). Sometimes they persist in asking where my family is from-from (a question which is supposed to be universally rude, but really depends on the context of who’s asking). Like most Eastern European Jews, my family immigrated from the Pale of Settlement, which was historically mostly in Russia but is now modern-day Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland. It’s complicated to explain this, so if pressed I tend to just say Russia or Ukraine, which are of course now extremely loaded answers. A hundred years ago, my great-great grandmother fled her small Ukrainian village after a local mob murdered her husband and her father; today, this village and others like it consist of churned-up mud and blood and bombed-out ruins. Ukraine has a Jewish president, whom a popular bow-tied American fascist has labeled a shifty persecutor of Christians...but as long as I don’t mention this stuff, and I log off, then I don’t have to know about this sort of thing, it isn’t affecting me, I don’t have to think about it.

Leopoldstadt is about a family of comfortable, assimilated Jews who don’t think they have to think about it—though of course, they think about it all the time. Probably the play’s biggest weakness is that they think about antisemitism too much and too openly. The men spend a lot of time yelling at each other about history and discrimination, with lots of facts and specifics—ten percent of the Viennese population is Jewish, Jews were overrepresented at universities and in the culture industry at the time but couldn’t get certain academic titles or gain entrance into certain clubs. These are facts that the characters ought to be well aware of, but persist on telling each other directly. Alisa Solomon wrote in a thoughtful pan for Jewish Currents that, to her, Leopoldstadt “felt inorganic, like it had been assembled from book-learning.” Too much of the dialogue is made up of undigested world-bricks, as in a bad fantasy novel, or a history lecture disguised as a play.

Leopoldstadt is at its best when it tackles more indirect topics, like sex and mathematics and fairy tales. In the 1899-1900 plot line, Hermann—a wealthy Jewish-to-Catholic convert who has been trying his damndest to fit into Viennese high society—challenges an officer to a duel after the man makes an insulting insinuation about Hermann’s wife. The officer (who has actually been fucking Hermann’s wife) refuses to accept Hermann’s challenge; as far as he’s concerned Hermann is still Jewish and Jews have no honor. Solomon points out that the structure of this particular subplot is borrowed from Arthur Schnitzler, a Jewish Viennese writer and playwright of the era, which is part of why it feels so “real” and believable—it’s more playlike, with its officers and insults and duels and affairs, more like the already-established popular artifice of that particular time period. This is largely how we understand the past—through artifice. A play, a movie, a novel about history is “real” when it captures the way that artists have already portrayed that period, artificially.

What does the “reality” of any given time actually feel like? When I’m at the gym and I look up at the TV to see coverage of the Tree of Life killer—“HE HUNTED JEWS BECAUSE THEY WERE JEWISH”—is that real? It really happened in real life, but as a scene in a movie about rising antisemitism it would be very clumsy. When I removed my headphones in the security line outside the theater to hear a woman explaining to her friend that Leopoldstadt needed this strict security in case of antisemitic attacks—I mean come on, that’s very on the nose, right? I even heard it in monologue: the woman who was doing the explaining was loud, and her friend was quiet. “You know they had bomb threats. Right after they opened. The cast went through the performance but they were scared, they cried afterward. Can you imagine that? Putting on a play about this, and it’s still happening, it’s still going on outside?” No, I can’t imagine. I actively try not to imagine. It seems impossible, heavy-handed, stupid, overdramatic. But then, well, so were the Nazis.

There are occasional visits from antisemites in Leopoldstadt: the officer who is fucking Hermann’s wife, and a Nazi officer in the 1938 plot line who terrifies the family and turns them out of their home. There’s no real attempt to explore the why of antisemitism—it’s treated as a blood and soil reality, based on the Jews’ permanent brand as ethnic others and vulnerability as a people without a homeland (Israel comes up frequently in the exposition-brick conversations but is fortunately never treated as an answer.) Basically there is no reason offered as to why it happened, no reason why so many Austrians became enthusiastic Nazis, why they turfed their Jewish neighbors out of their homes and beat them and stole their stuff. The assimilated Jews of Vienna felt they were secure, as guardians and producers of culture; but, as one character says in the 1955 plot line, all their sophistication and cultural production meant nothing: “Barbarism will not be eradicated by culture.” In 1955, Vienna has culture again: the new opera house is finished and will be inaugurated by a performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio conducted by an “ex-Nazi” (possibly a reference to Herbert von Karajan, whom I only just learned was a Nazi thanks to Frances Stonor Saunders’ book.) The three lone survivors of Leopoldstadt’s huge family have endured unspeakable loss, but they’re personally safe—in a world that they can’t trust, among cultured neighbors who could turn at any moment and devour them. This is a very uneasy and frightening proposition; it seems to suggest, as Solomon wrote, and as my parents would probably unironically agree: “nothing to be done but to keep a wad of cash under the mattress and a suitcase ready….Leopoldstadt points at industrially murderous antisemitism and shrugs with dismay.”

Leopoldstadt does make some subtle nods toward more contemporary concerns: the rise of fascism and the worldwide refugee crisis, but ultimately, Solomon feels that it serves mostly to comfort its presumed wealthy, white and Jewish audience with the didactic terror of their helplessness, rather than suggesting intersectional approaches to contemporary evils. I think this is fair, to a degree, but it depends in part on how you read the purpose of Holocaust narratives and the oft-repeated dictum of “never forget.” It would be a mistake to think—as Jews too often do—that the pattern of history repeats itself exactly, and Jews are always in a state of special danger, more specially endangered than everyone else. But it’s true that—for us and others—everything that feels safe and cultured may not be so. All the established artifice of reality can dissolve in a few fast years; it’s happened before, and while it’s painful and scary to acknowledge, we should never forget that it can happen again.

Still, it’s important to also remind ourselves that our contemporary problems are different; the current wave of U.S. fascism is terrifying but that doesn’t mean it’s physically identical to Nazism, or that the pattern it follows will be in any way similar. The diversity of the U.S. may makes it difficult to successfully select one or two minorities for rounding-up and mass murder; there are, at this point, too many competing interests. The Austrian empire may have thought it had some diversity—Hermann runs through a list of them in the play, Czechs, Magyars, Slovaks, others—but these are people whose cuisine you couldn’t pick out of a lineup. We don’t see the same intimate, personal violence of neighbors collectively turning on neighbors that marked the Holocaust (or lynchings in the American south for that matter); most of our contemporary white supremacist violence comes in the form of individual acts of stochastic terror, groups of thugs trying to intimidate gatherings, or the smooth bureaucratic horror of the police state and the immigration system running largely unchecked and in silence.

“We don’t have intimate neighborly mass violence like that yet” you could say, but who cares about the “yet” when what we have is the “now.” The present isn’t a movie about a time period; the present is happening all around us, without any thought for artfulness. Leopoldstadt’s repeated numerical factoids are weird, annoying, artificial—10% of the Viennese population is Jewish, Jews made up 50% of university graduates—and yet, though I still found the execution clumsy, I respect that it might have been intentional. Nathan the mathematician, one of the few survivors in the 1955 plot line, finds out that the U.S. could have taken more Jewish refugees from Austria—they were, in fact, 10% under their quota. (I may be misremembering, lotta numbers in this play, but I’m pretty sure the number given was 10%.) Nathan, whose parents and sisters were killed in the Holocaust, and who only narrowly survived himself, bursts out laughing—and then starts to sob. It’s not just neighborly violence but numbers that kill, numbers that stop people at borders, numbers that condemn people to death. Numbers are inorganic; facts are ugly; reality is shapeless and non-narrativized and has no answers and no predictable pattern. This is still no excuse for clumsy art, but art is often a clumsy and inexcusable version of real life. Barbarism will not be eradicated by culture; it may not even be explained by it.