The Germans could not grieve for their dead and at the same time accept the guilt that their dead had incurred. Two psychoanalysts, the husband and wife pair Margarete Nielsen and Alexander Mitscherlich, reflected on this situation in a book published in 1967 – Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern – the Impossibility of Mourning. Their country was destroyed, but it was impossible to mourn it. Although their music was not destroyed by the war, their cities – the greatest cities in Europe – were reduced to rubble, their civilian population exposed to the horrors of blanket bombing and the rapine of the Soviet Army, and the noses of the survivors rubbed in the unspeakable reality of the Holocaust. And the Germans followed him on his path of conquest, sharing his triumphs and forced very soon to share his disastrous defeat. Hitler was not just a madman: he was an aesthete and an intellectual, like Stalin and Mao he emphasised in all his speeches the history and achievements of the German people he invoked the art, music and philosophy of Germany as justifications for his cause and objects of his pride. The Nazis proclaimed themselves heirs to German civilisation. It would have been easier to deal with the memory of the Hitler years if they had been imposed on Germany by some alien power which had sought to obliterate this great nation, as the Mongols obliterated the civilisation centred on Baghdad, or as the Chinese are at this moment obliterating Tibet. The Germany that we know from art, music and literature – the Germany of the Gothic cathedrals and the gingerbread cities, of Dürer and Grünewald, of Luther’s Bible, of Goethe, Schiller, Kant and Hegel, the Germany of the romantic poets and of the greatest continuous musical tradition that the world will ever know – that Germany had been poisoned in people’s thoughts by Hitler. Germans after the war felt this about their country. But what if the departed person cannot be forgiven? What if his vices are an immoveable obstacle to all attempts to accept him? Then mourning becomes impossible. Mourning is a process of reconciliation, a work of forgiveness, in which the dead person is retrospectively granted the right to die. All funeral rites and all elegies for the dead are designed to highlight the virtues and to minimise the vices of the departed person. The work of mourning, as Freud conceived it, is a work of redemption, in which the lost figure is blessed in the memory of the one he leaves behind. And if it is true that Richard Strauss was mourning, in Metamorphosen, the Germany that he had known and which had been destroyed by the Second World War, then there is an added problem that he must certainly have encountered, which is the great difficulty we all have, in mourning what we condemn. But there are no clear precedents for the work of mourning when what is mourned is a nation, a civilisation or a place. Religions, laws and customs all provide for the ritual mourning of beloved people. Such losses leave us helpless, and even if we find a way of healing the wounds that they make, the scars will remain. The loss of a spouse can be equally traumatic, as is the loss of children, who take with them into the void all the most tender feelings of their parents. The loss of a parent, especially during one’s early years, is a world-changing experience, and orphans are marked for life by this. After such a loss, we are in a new and unfamiliar world, in which the support on which we had depended – perhaps unknowingly – is no longer available. But in this matter, it seems to me, he was on the right lines. I am not, in general, persuaded by Freud’s psychology. This is the explanation of the state that used to be known as melancholia – as he sees it – a kind of willed helplessness in which the world is seen as alien and unmanageable. Until the work of mourning has been accomplished, Freud argues, new life, new loves and new engagement with the world are all difficult if not impossible. In a significant essay entitled “Mourning and Melancholia”, Freud writes of “the work of mourning”, meaning the psychic process whereby a cherished object is finally laid to rest, as it were buried in the unconscious, and the ego liberated from its grip. Confessions of a Heretic by Roger Scruton: What is the Best Way to Mourn?Ī version of this essay appears in Confessions of a Heretic by Roger Scruton, which will be published in the U.K.
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