Gottfried Feder on a German state built on national and socialist foundations

Gottfried Feder on a German state built on national and socialist foundations[1]

The German State on a National and Socialist Foundation
Gottfried Feder

Translated and with a Preface by Alexander Jacob

Sanctuary Press, 2019

Gottfried Feder was  born in 1883 in Würzburg and studied engineering at the Technical Universities in Munich, Berlin and Zurich. After the completion of his studies, he set up a construction company in 1908 under the aegis of Ackermann and Co. and undertook several projects in Bulgaria. From 1917 onwards he taught himself economics and political economy, and in late 1918, not long after the proclamation of the Weimar Republic by Philipp Scheidemann in November of that year, Feder wrote a manifesto on usury[2] and sent it to the Kurt Eisner government, though he obtained no response. The Treaty of Versailles signed in June 1919 which determined Germany as solely responsible for the war and liable to reparations caused Feder to fear that Germany was now firmly in the hands of the international financiers. In September of that year, Feder established a militant league (Kampfbund) with a program of ending interest slavery and nationalising the state bank. His anti-capitalism was bound also to racialism insofar as the international financiers were considered to be mostly Jews.

Feder’s nationalist efforts drew him into a close alliance with the anti-Communist activist Anton Drexler (1884-1942) and Dietrich Eckart (1868-1923), the editor of the anti-Semitic journal Auf gut deutsch and later, of the National Socialist organ, Völkischer Beobachter. The three together formed, in January 1919, the Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (DAP).[3] Adolf Hitler joined the DAP in late September 1919 and soon emerged as the leader of the party, which he renamed the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP). Hitler had, even before his joining the party, attended Feder’s lectures on economic subjects and wrote later in his Mein Kampf (1925/6):

For the first time in my life I heard a discussion which dealt with the principles of stock-exchange capital and capital which was used for loan activities. …The absolute separation of stock-exchange capital from the economic life of the nation would make it possible to oppose the process of internationalization in German business without at the same time attacking capital as such, for to do this would jeopardize the foundations of our national independence. I clearly saw what was developing in Germany and I realized then that the stiffest fight we would have to wage would not be against the enemy nations but against international capital.[4]

In the Foreword to the original 1923 edition of Feder’s work, Der deutsche Staat, Hitler wrote that in this work the National Socialist movement had indeed acquired its “catechism”.

In 1920, Hitler, along with Feder and Drexler, composed the ’25-point Programme’ of the NSDAP. This programme rejected the Treaty of Versailles and called for a reunification of German peoples along with an exclusion of aliens, especially Jews, from national life. In February 1920, Hitler held a rally in which he presented the programme to the German people. Later, in 1927, Feder published a comprehensive version of the programme entitled Das Programm der NSDAP and seine weltanschaulichen Grundlagen.[5] In 1923, Feder offered a further elaboration of his national economic views in the present work, Der deutsche Staat auf nationaler und sozialer Grundlage, which was re-issued in 1932 in the “Nationalsozialistische Bibliothek” series[6]

Feder took part in Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch against the Bavarian government in 1923 but was only fined 50 marks for unlawful assumption of authority since he had acted, for a day, as the new “finance minister”. In 1924, he was elected a representative to the parliament. In parliament, he demanded the confiscation of Jewish property and the freezing of interest-rates. which were key elements of the anti-capitalist programme of the party. In 1926 Hitler entrusted Feder with the editorial direction of a series of books on National Socialist ideology under the title “Nationalsozialistische Bibliothek” (National Socialist Library). In 1931, Feder was appointed chairman of the economic council of the NSDAP. But gradually, under pressure from big industrialists like Gustav Krupp, Fritz Thyssen and Emil Kirdorf, Hitler decided to distance himself from Feder’s socialist ideas.[7] With Hitler’s strategic alliance with big industrialists and capital, even foreign capital, for his intended war on Bolshevism, Feder lost most of his influence on the party, since foreign banks especially would not have supported Feder’s plans for a nationalised interest-free banking system. The loss of interest in Feder’s economic policies among the party members is evidenced in Hans Reupke’s book Der Nationalsozialismus und die Wirtschaft (!931), where the author stated that it was no longer necessary to deal with the “breaking of interest slavery” in “the extreme form in which it first emerged”.[8]

Thus, when Hitler assumed power in 1933, Feder was not named Economics Minister but rather only State Secretary in the Economics Ministry. However, in 1933 Feder published a collection of his essays entitled Kampf gegen die Hochfinanz as well as a book on the Jews called Die Juden. In 1934, the influential banker Hjalmar Schact was made Economics Minister since his contacts with the big industrialists made him more useful to Hitler in his rearmament aims than Feder with his stark anti-capitalist doctrines. Feder’s subordination to Hjalmar Schacht was indeed a concrete sign of his fall from grace.  After the Knight of the Long Knives in 1934, when left-wing nationalists like Gregor Strasser were assassinated, Feder withdrew from the government. In 1936, he was given a new job as professor at the Technical University in Berlin which he maintained until his death in 1941.

*   *   *

Feder’s Deutsche Staat is indeed one of the most important treatises on National Socialist economics.[9] However, it has a precedent in the Austro-Hungarian Bohemian German, Rudolf Jung’s work, Der Nationale Sozialismus (1919). Rudolf Jung (1882-1945) was a civil engineer from Jihlava (in the current Czech Republic and former Austro-Hungarian Empire) who joined the Bohemian Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (DAP) in 1909. The DAP was founded in 1903 in Aussig (now Ústí nad Labem in the Czech Republic) by Germans threatened by the increasing Jewish and Czech influence in the empire. It was renamed Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiter Partei (DNSAP) in 1918. Jung’s work Der Nationale Sozialismus: seine Grundlagen, sein Werdegang und seine Ziele (1919) was intended as a German nationalist answer to Marx’s Das Kapital.[10] The work is divided into two parts, the first dealing with ‘The Foundations of National Socialism’ and the second with ‘The Development and Goals of National Socialism’. Jung’s nationalism focusses on social and economic questions and, exactly like Feder, Jung stresses the difference between income derived from real work and that arising from interest.[11] His strong socialist and anti-Jewish viewpoint is  evident throughout this work:

All non-socialist parties are based in the main on “individualism”, i.e. the demand for the greatest possible freedom and lack of constraint of the individual. Economically it is expressed in Manchester liberalism and, further, in Mammonism. The ruthless ruler who is tormented by no pang of conscience is the goal, the weaker man falls thereby under the wheels. Now, since the Jew is the most ruthless, he can fare best thereby. Thus all non-socialist anti-Jewish orientations unwillingly support the rise of Jewry to world-rulership.[12]

Further, democracy itself is the vehicle of Jewish international capitalism:

If we were to sum up, we might say that the entire international democracy whose alleged ideals the major press and parties represent and on whose flag they swear, is nothing but the political crystallisation of the Jewish spirit and, in the final analysis, serves no other goal but the establishment of the world-rule of Jewry.[13]

Another writer who contributed to the exact identification of the Jewish constitution of international high finance was Heinrich Pudor (1865-1943), who also wrote under the pseudonym Heinrich Scham (the German translation of the Latin “pudor”). Pudor was a vegetarian and naturist who, from 1912, published several anti-Semitic pamphlets and books including an extensive series on the international connections between the various Jewish high financiers.[14] Feder refers sympathetically to Pudor in the present work. However, Pudor’s magazine Swastika was banned in 1933 by the National Socialists for its criticisms of the National Socialist leadership and the regime’s surprising toleration of Jews. Further, five issues of the series on Jewish high finance were banned including no.13, Neues über Br. Roosevelt und seine jüdischen und Kommunistischen Verbindungen (News about Brother Roosevelt and His Communist Connections) and no. 49, Judendãmmerung. “Juden unerwünscht” Keine jüdischen Rechtsanwälte mehr. Ende der Judenfinanz in Deutschland ((Judendãmmerung. “Jews Unwanted.” No more Jewish lawyers. End of Jewish finance in Germany). The pamphlets were banned on account of what a state official, Raymund Schmidt, described as Pudor’s “no longer opportune polemical methods” which were indeed exploited by the English for the purpose of counter-propaganda.[15]

*   *   *

Feder’s treatise on national economy, like Rudolf Jung’s, is remarkable for its strong moral foundation and its formulation of National Socialism as a movement for social justice as well as for national regeneration. Unlike capitalism with its “soul-destroying materialistic spirit of egoism and avarice with all its concomitant corrupting manifestations in all fields of our public, economic and cultural life” (p.31)[16] and unlike Marxism, which insists that everything should belong to the One, which might be either the State or Mammon controlling it, National Socialism wishes to revert to the mediaeval and Prussian dictum of “suum cuique”, ‘to each his own’, whereby each person will earn as much as he deserves according to his performance of work, with the fullest possible responsibility, as a duty. Economically, this moral doctrine is translated into the doctrine of serving “the public interest” before self-interest. Not profitability but fulfilment of demand is the National Socialistic basis of the economy.

Unlike Marxism, National Socialism will not prohibit private property but respect it as the privilege of the creative and productive Aryan man. On the other hand, the mobile Jewish mind has no deep connection with the land but rather exploits the production and property of the natives financially through all sorts of legal claims, bonds and mortgages, whereby “property” is turned into a profitable “possession” (p.14). In order to counter these avaricious strategies of the Jews, the National Socialist state will enforce limitations on the right to property, personal or commercial, so that in all cases the welfare of the whole, the nation, rather than of individuals will be first served. In Feder’s discussion of the party’s programme in Part II, we note that, since the social policy is “the welfare of the whole”, the financial policy of the National Socialist state is accordingly directed against those financial powers who tend to develop “a state within the state” (p.29). As he puts it:

In the last and deepest analysis, it is a matter of the battle of two worldviews that are expressed through two fundamentally different intellectual structures — the productive and creative spirit and the mobile avaricious spirit. The creative spirit rooted in the soil and yet again overcoming the world in metaphysical experience finds its principal representatives in Aryan man — the avaricious, rootless commercial and materialistic spirit directed purely to the this-worldly finds its principal representative in the Jew (p. 31).

The strength of Germany before the war was due to its unity under Bismarck and its efficient industrial sector. This advantage was undermined by the dependence of the economy on the credit system of the banks and “the inventors and bearers of the modern credit system” are the Jews (p. 36). The mediaeval system of credit was based on the belief (“credo”) of the creditor that his money could be used to greater economic advantage by the debtor whereby the debtor, if successful in his enterprise, may return a share of his profits in gratitude to the creditor. Standardised interest, on the other hand, was forbidden by the Church as usury (p. 45). Feder advocates a return to the conception of money as a token of “performed work” or of a product so that money cannot, independently of any work, be hoarded for the purpose of being lent out later at interest.

Feder further points out that it is the stock-market that lies at the basis of the alienation of capital from work:

Anonymisation — the depersonalisation of our economy through the stock-marketable form of the public limited company — has to a certain degree separated capital from work, the shareholder knows in the rarest instances something of his factory, he has only the one-sided interest in the profitability of his money when he has invested it in the form of shares (p.36)

Apart from the indifference of the shareholder to the quality of the goods produced by the company in which he invests, the market in general has diverted production from its legitimate task of fulfilling real needs to that of stirring up — through the Jewish market-crier’s technique of advertising — artificial needs among the public that will bring in greater profits. This fundamental transformation of national economics has been supported in academic circles by Jewish scholars who restrict their economic analyses to descriptions of the current economic system rather than investigating its social and political legitimacy. This sort of intellectual subversion is further continued by the Jewish intelligentsia in the fields of art, entertainment and the press.

The major source of the current distress of Germany is indeed the interest owed to large loan capital. The burden of interest has indebted entire nations to international high finance and forced them to become interest-collectors for the latter which they do by taxing the working people ever harder. Feder calls this false economic process an “international fraud” (p. 53). The power of international finance has however grown so great that it was able to encircle Germany as soon as it perceived that its currency was rising in strength and independence. Once they succeeded in militarily defeating Germany, the international financial powers then enforced further enormous debt burdens on it through the Treaty of Versailles. Feder therefore proposes the cancellation of the payment of the interest on these debts to the Allies (p. 97). Indeed, the remedy to the interest burdens of all nations to international finance is the legal abolition of interest (p. 94). And this is simultaneously the solution to the Jewish question itself:

The solution of the interest problem is the solution of the Jewish question. The solution of the interest problem in the sense of our explanations is the breaking of the Jewish world-rule, because it smashes the power of world Jewry — its financial power.

The fullest representation of the socio-economic interests of a nation should be the state, and its industries should be models of efficiency and commercial success. One example of such an industry in Germany is indeed the transport industry and especially the German railways. Unlike Bolshevism, which seeks to control all production, the National Socialist state will, through the establishment of storage and distribution cooperatives under state supervision (p. 917), remove only the avaricious interference of private commerce between production and consumption. As the means of exchange necessary for the exchange of goods, money will be under the control of the state through a nationalised state bank.

Instead of borrowing money from private banks, the state should, in the case of all large public works projects, finance the latter though the issuance of interest-free notes of its own. The Reichsbank’s sovereignty of issuing notes must be regained through nationalisation (p. 72). Freed of interest-burdens to banks, the state will ultimately be able to operate in a mostly tax-free manner (Ch. 22, ‘The state without taxes’). Taxes will be restricted to the coverage of non-productive tasks such as the administration of justice, the police system, medical and educational systems, if the commercial enterprises of the state such as the railways, post and telegraph, mining and forestry do not present surpluses wherewith to pay for these tasks (p. 92). International transactions should be conducted through a clearing system rather like that of the international postal union “without the international finance benefiting two or three times in all these simple mercantile operations and becoming big and fat at the cost of the productive nations” (p. 77).

But the state must be powerful if it is to effect any reforms. Unfortunately, the Weimar Republic has abjectly accepted the monstrous burden of guilt after the war with the result that “the members of the Chosen People can, on these reparations, forever lead a glamorous work-free life in all the countries of the world at the cost of German work.” (p. 19). The crisis faced by Germany after the war was facilitated by parliamentarianism and Mammonism. The “great democratic lie of the capacity of the people for self-government” is to be combated along with the real capitalistic rulers of democracies. Marxism likewise is a sham socialist system that employs the dissatisfaction of those exploited by Mammonism for the benefit of the “handlers for international capital” in order to “divert from themselves the hatred of the exploited” (p. 25).

The majority of the principal Marxists as well as Mammonists are Jews, and so “The Jewish question is becoming a world-question on whose solution the welfare and woe of the nations will be dependent” (p. 26). The solution of this question cannot be through violence since “indeed one cannot kill the plague bacillus individually, one can only eradicate it by cutting off its life necessities from it” (p. 26). A suggestion of what might be done to reduce their ill-earned gains is contained in point 17 of the party’s programme which envisages creation of legal possibilities of confiscating if necessary land that was acquired in an illegal way or not administered according to the viewpoint of the welfare of the people. This is directed thus mainly against the Jewish land speculation companies. (p. 47)

Further, removal of Jews from all public positions will cause no difficulty to the nation since “the real vitally important productive activity in industry and agriculture, in the professions and administration, is almost entirely free of Jews” (p. 38). Concomitant with the removal of Jews from the “national body” is the enforcement of new citizenship laws whereby the citizenship rights will be “acquired” by the citizens and not merely granted to them. Thus only those who pledge themselves to the German community and culture and do not continue an adherence to another nation can obtain these rights (p. 39).

The National Socialist state will be a strong state that includes all the German tribes, and its power will be concentrated in a strong leader, or autocrat, who embodies “the highest responsibility” (p. 22)[17] since the German people have traditionally wanted a strong leader, and monarchs are not always to be relied upon. The leader of the National Socialist state, on the other hand, is not envisaged as a permanent ruler but one chosen only for the re-establishment of order and the prosperity of a debilitated nation. After he has accomplished his goals, he may step aside to let other rulers take his place under the constitution. Indeed, the National Socialist state may be characterised as a constitutional autocracy (p. 31). The constitutional aspect of the state will be used especially to ensure an effective labour law and social insurance (p. 23). Obviously, in a German national state, no members of foreign races can assume the leadership of state affairs (p. 22).

Feder is aware of the adverse reaction of the international financiers to such autarkic measures, but he believes that a transformation of interest-bearing bonds into interest-free bank assets or postal cheque accounts (p. 96) whereby foreign creditors can be paid will avert the wrath of the latter. He also suggests that boycotts can be overcome through transactions with neutral countries. As for military action, he believes that it is not likely to be pursued by the foreign creditor nations since

if the German people saw the French or Jewish tax collector sitting in every tax- and pension office, and if the best cows were taken from the stalls of the farmers by these foreign oppressors — then the anger and indignation would perhaps become soon so strong that one night would sweep the foreign spectre away with a bloody broom and free Germany. (p. 97)

*   *   *

We see that, in spite of the lucidity of his economic doctrines, Feder rather underestimated the unforgiving nature of the Mammon that he was striving against. In keeping with Feder’s doctrines, the Nationalist Socialist state officially cancelled the war debt to the Allied nations and sought, from 1933 on, to combat the cumulative deflation by the creation of money and work.[18] Work was created by increasing public works activity, such as notably the building of superhighways, and other construction and agricultural projects. These projects were financed, as Feder had recommended, by the issuance of government bills.[19] The production of armaments especially was spurred by the use of the so-called ‘Mefo’ bills — named after Schacht’s Metallurgische Forschungsgesellschaft (Mefo), which served as a government holding company.[20] These bills were used by government contractors for payment of their needs and were valid as a form of currency. As Overy notes, as a result of these economic strategies, “the banks increasingly became mere intermediaries, holding government stock and helping in the job of keeping bills circulating in the way that the government wanted.”[21] Tax levels were simultaneously reduced for farmers, small businesses and heavy industry through the “remission of taxes already paid”.[22] However, Hitler was also dependent in his ambitious rearmament plans on foreign finance, which certainly would not have accepted Feder’s insistence on an abolition of interest.[23]

The National Socialist economy was an increasingly state-controlled one that sought to avoid inflation by controlling prices and wages and foreign trade. Autarkic restrictions on imports were offset by bilateral barter agreements. Whether the war that began two years after the 1937 edition of Feder’s work was, as Feder’s view of the role of international finance in the first World War would suggest, another effort to punish Germany’s financial independence under National Socialism or whether it was indeed secretly willed by the international financiers for their own geopolitical ends, the increasing losses suffered by Germany in the course of it certainly provoked Hitler into attempting to “sweep the foreign spectre away with a bloody broom”, as Feder had predicted.

But neither Feder nor Hitler may have foreseen the severity of the revenge — more cruel since more lasting than that after the First World War — that the international Jewish interests would take on Germany after its defeat in 1945. While Feder hoped that other nations of the world will also eventually follow the German example and  “mankind, freed of the Jewish oppression, will experience an age of unprecedented prosperity — and, above all, Germany — the heart of the world”, the opposite of that indeed has occurred, since most of Europe has been turned into “a slave, fellaheen, bondman and servant of the all-Jewish world-power” (p. 35). And the heart of Germany itself, drained by a tyrannical psychological control of its population, has virtually stopped beating.

[1] This article is taken from the Preface to my edition of Gottfried Feder, The German State on a National and Socialist Foundation, Sanctuary Press, 2019.

[2] Manifest zur Brechung des Zinsknechtschaft des Geldes, Diessen vor München: Joseph C. Huber, 1919; cf. The Manifesto for the Breaking of the Financial Slavery to Interest, tr. Alexander Jacob, History Review Press, 2012; Sanctuary Press, 2019.

[3] Another major early member was Karl Harrer (1890-1926), who joined the party in March of 1919. Harrer, like Drexler, was a member of the occultist Thule society in Munich, which was an off-shoot of the Germanen Order founded in 1912 by Theodor Fritsch. Eckart too was influenced by the doctrines of the Thule society.

[4] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, tr. James Murphy, London: Hurst and Blackett, 1939, pp.168,171.

[5] This work was translated by E.T.S. Dugdale as The Programme of the NSDAP and its general conceptions, Munich, 1932.

[6] I have for my translation used the 1932 edition, vol.35 of the “Nationalsozialistische Bibliothek” series.

[7] For the part played by big industries in Hitler’s rise to power see G. Hallgarten, “Adolf Hitler and German heavy industry 1931-1933”, Journal of Economic History, 12 (1952).

[8] H. Reupke, Der Nationalsozialismus und die Wirtschaft, Berlin, 1931, pp.29ff.

[9] The closest to National Socialist economics is the Social Credit movement founded in Britain by C.H. Douglas (1879-1952), whose work Economic Democracy was published in 1920 (see F. Hutchison and B. Burkitt, The Political Economy of Social Credit and Guild Socialism, London: Routledge, 1997). Douglas influenced Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the thirties (see Kerry Bolton, “Breaking the bondage of interest, part 2”, Counter-Currents, August 11, 2011, http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/08/breaking-the-bondage-of-interesta-right-answer-to-usury-part-2/

[10] It was on his suggestion that Hitler changed the name of the German branch of the DAP in 1920 to Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP).

[11] Feder’s manifesto on interest-slavery was interestingly published in the same year as Jung’s work on National Socialism.

[12] Rudolf Jung, Der Nationale Sozialismus, Munich, 1922, p.187f.

[13] Ibid., 53f.

[14] The pamphlets that he self-published (in Leipzig) in this series, “Die internationalen verwandtschaftlichen Beziehungen der jüdischen Hochfinanz” (The international kindred relationships of Jewish high finance’), between 1933 and 1940 present short historical accounts of the different branches of Jewry in various countries of Europe as well as in America. For instance, the first pamphlet is on Das Haus Rothschild, numbers two to four on Ginsberg und Günsberg und Asher Ginzberg, five to eight on Jakob Schiff und die Warburgs und das New Yorker Bankhaus Kuhn, Loeb & Co., nine to ten on Amsterdamer und Oppenheimer Juden, eleven on Französische Finanzjuden, twelve on Tschechoslowakische Finanzjuden, fourteen on Rumänische Finanzjuden, fifteen on Lessing und Moses Mendelssohn und das Bankhaus Mendelssohn & Co., seventeen on Polnische Finanzjuden, eighteen on Schwedische Finanzjuden, nineteen on Holländische und belgische Finanzjuden, twenty on Frankfurter Finanzjuden und die I.G. Farben, twenty-one to twenty-three on Englische Finanzjuden, thirty-four to thirty-eight and forty-three to forty-four on Tshechische Finanzjuden and thirty-nine to forty-two on Ungarische Finanzjuden. In addition, he published, in Halle, a similar work on Amerikanische Finanzjuden (1936).

[15] “nicht mehr zeitgemäßen Kampfmethoden, die sogar von den Engländern in jüngster Zeit zum Zwecke der Gegenpropaganda ausgeschlachtet wurden” (see Gerd Simon, “Chronologie, Pudor, Heinrich“, http://homepages.uni-tuebingen.de/gerd.simon/ChrPudor.pdf, p.19f.)

[16] All page-references are to my edition.

[17] The “Führer principle” was championed also by Rudolf Jung in his Nationale Sozialismus, p.177f.

[18] See G. Senft, “Anti-Kapitalismus von Rechts? – Eine Abrechnung mit Gottfried Feders ‘Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft’”, Zeitschrift für Sozialökonomie, 106 (1995), pp.18-32.

[19] According to Henry Liu: “through an independent monetary policy of sovereign credit and a full-employment public-works program, the Third Reich was able to turn a bankrupt Germany, stripped of overseas colonies it could exploit, into the strongest economy in Europe within four years, even before armament spending began” (Henry C.K. Liu, “Nazism and the German economic miracle,” Asia Times Online, 24 May 2005, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GE24Dj01.html).

[20] Hitler’s eagerness to rearm Germany is not surprising in the light of the eastern expansionist and anti-Bolshevist foreign political aims outlined by him already in Mein Kampf, Vol.II, Ch.14.

[21] R.J. Overy, The Nazi Economic Recovery 1932-1938, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p.43.

[22] Ibid., p.38.

[23]See the web-log by “Scanners”, “Gottfried Feder und das zinslose Geld”, http://www.utopia.de/blog/umweltpolitik/gottfried-feder-und-das-zinslose.The western financial powers may have partly supported Hitler’s effort to check the westward spread of Bolshevism. For American involvement in National Socialist finance, for example, see Anthony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the rise of Hitler, Sudbury: Bloomfield Books, 1976.

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Suffering in Dhamma

 Attached to The Four Noble Truths→

“When, friends, a noble disciple understands suffering, the origin of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the way leading to the cessation of suffering, in that way he is one of right view, whose view is straight, who has unwavering confidence in the Dhamma and has arrived at this true Dhamma.…and has arrived at this true Dhamma.

“And what is suffering, what is the origin of suffering, what is the cessation of suffering, what is the way leading to the cessation of suffering? Birth is suffering; ageing is suffering; sickness is suffering; death is suffering; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are suffering; not to obtain what one wants is suffering; in short, the five aggregates affected by clinging are suffering. This is called suffering.

“And what is the origin of suffering? It is craving, which brings renewal of being, is accompanied by delight and lust, and delights in this and that; that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for being, and craving for non-being. This is called the origin of suffering.

“And what is the cessation of suffering? It is the remainderless fading away and ceasing, the giving up, relinquishing, letting go, and rejecting of that same craving. This is called the cessation of suffering.

“And what is the way leading to the cessation of suffering? It is just this Noble Eightfold Path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

“When a noble disciple has thus understood suffering, the origin of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the way leading to the cessation of suffering…he here and now makes an end of suffering. In that way too a noble disciple is one of right view…and has arrived at this true Dhamma.” MN 9

not to obtain what one wants is suffering

“And what, friends, is ‘not to obtain what one wants is suffering’? To beings subject to birth there comes the wish: ‘Oh, that we were not subject to birth! That birth would not come to us!’ But this is not to be obtained by wishing, and not to obtain what one wants is suffering. To beings subject to ageing…subject to sickness…subject to death…subject to sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair, there comes the wish: ‘Oh, that we were not subject to sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair! That sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair would not come to us!’ But this is not to be obtained by wishing, and not to obtain what one wants is suffering.

The five aggregates affected by clinging

And what, friends, are the five aggregates affected by clinging that, in short, are suffering? They are: the material form aggregate affected by clinging, the feeling aggregate affected by clinging, the perception aggregate affected by clinging, the determinations aggregate affected by clinging, and the consciousness aggregate affected by clinging. These are the five aggregates affected by clinging that, in short, are suffering. This is called the noble truth of suffering. MN 141

Synonyms for he five aggregates affected by clinging

These five aggregates affected by clinging are called person (sakkāya) by the Blessed One.
MN 44

And what, bhikkhus, is the burden? It should be said: the five aggregates subject to clinging

“Bhikkhus, I will teach you the burden (bhārādāna), the carrier of the burden, the taking up of the burden, and the laying down of the burden. Listen to that….

“And what, bhikkhus, is the burden? It should be said: the five aggregates subject to clinging. What five? The form aggregate subject to clinging, the feeling aggregate subject to clinging, the perception aggregate subject to clinging, the determinations aggregate subject to clinging, the consciousness aggregate subject to clinging. This is called the burden.

“And what, bhikkhus, is the carrier of the burden? It should be said: the individual, this venerable one of such a name and clan. This is called the carrier of the burden.

“And what, bhikkhus, is the taking up of the burden? It is this craving that leads to renewed existence, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there; that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, craving for extermination. This is called the taking up of the burden.

“And what, bhikkhus, is the laying down of the burden? It is the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, non-reliance on it. This is called the laying down of the burden.”

This is what the Blessed One said. Having said this, the Fortunate One, the Teacher, further said this:

“The five aggregates are truly burdens,
The burden-carrier is the individual.
Taking up the burden is suffering in the world,
Laying the burden down is blissful.
Having laid the heavy burden down
Without taking up another burden,
Having drawn out craving with its root,
One is free from hunger, fully quenched.”

SN 22 : 22

Now this has been said by the Blessed One: “One who sees dependent origination sees the Dhamma; one who sees the Dhamma sees dependent origination.” And these five aggregates affected by clinging are dependently arisen. The desire, indulgence, inclination, and holding based on these five aggregates affected by clinging is the origin of suffering. The removal of desire and lust, the abandonment of desire and lust for these five aggregates affected by clinging is the cessation of suffering.’ MN 28

‘In this world, bhikkhus, with its devas, Māra, and Brahmā, among this population with its ascetics and brahmins, its devas and humans, that which is regarded as “This is happiness,” the noble ones have seen well with correct wisdom thus: “This is suffering” ’—this is one contemplation. ‘In this world . . . with its devas and humans, that which is regarded as “This is suffering,” the noble ones have seen well with correct wisdom thus, “This is happiness” ’—this is a second contemplation. When a bhikkhu dwells thus correctly contemplating a dyad—heedful, ardent, and resolute—one of two fruits is to be expected of him: either final knowledge in this very life, or, if there is a residue of clinging, the state of non-returning.”

This is what the Blessed One said. Having said this, the Fortunate One, the Teacher, further said this:

“Forms, sounds, tastes, odors,
textures, and objects of mind—
all are desirable, lovely, agreeable,
so long as it is said: ‘They are.’ 

“These are considered as happiness
in the world with its devas;
but where these cease,
that they consider suffering.

“The noble ones have seen as happiness
the cessation of the person (sakkāya)
Running counter to the entire world
is this [insight] of those who see.

“What others speak of as happiness,
that the noble ones speak of as suffering.
What others speak of as suffering,
that the noble ones have known as happiness.
Behold this Dhamma hard to comprehend:
here the foolish are bewildered.

“There is gloom for those who are blocked,
darkness for those who do not see,
but for the good it is opened up
like light for those who see.
The brutes unskilled in the Dhamma
do not understand it even when close.

“This Dhamma is not easily understood
by those afflicted by lust for being,
by those flowing in the stream of being,
deeply mired in Māra’s realm.

“Who else apart from the noble ones
are able to understand this state?
When they have correctly known that state,
those without influxes attain nibbāna.”

Sutta Nipata 759 - 765

So now we can add another synonyms for suffering since puthujjana's state is that of being (bhava) and the most fundamental aspect of it is the attitude "I am".

[Pleasurable is dispassion in the world,
The getting beyond sensuality.
But the putting away of the conceit ‘I am’
—this is the highest pleasure.
Udāna 11

“Friend Saviṭṭha, apart from faith, apart from personal preference, apart from oral tradition, apart from reasoned reflection, apart from acceptance of a view after pondering it, I know this, I see this: ‘Nibbāna is the cessation of being.’

SN 12 : 68

“If, friend Yamaka, they were to ask you: ‘Friend Yamaka, when a bhikkhu is an arahant, one whose taints are destroyed, what happens to him with the breakup of the body, after death?’—being asked thus, what would you answer?”

“If they were to ask me this, friend, I would answer thus: ‘Friends, form is impermanent; what is impermanent is suffering; what is suffering has ceased and passed away. Feeling … Perception … Determinations… Consciousness is impermanent; what is impermanent is suffering; what is suffering has ceased and passed away.’ Being asked thus, friend, I would answer in such a way.”
“Good, good, friend Yamaka! SN 22: 85

“Friend, though I have clearly seen as it really is with correct wisdom, ‘Nibbāna is the cessation of being,’ I am not an arahant, one whose taints are destroyed. Suppose, friend, there was a well along a desert road, but it had neither a rope nor a bucket. Then a man would come along, oppressed and afflicted by the heat, tired, parched, and thirsty. He would look down into the well and the knowledge would occur to him, ‘There is water,’ but he would not be able to make bodily contact with it. So too, friend, though I have clearly seen as it really is with correct wisdom, ‘Nibbāna is the cessation of being,’ I am not an arahant, one whose taints are destroyed.”
SN 12 : 68

Now, in the simile sekha sees the water in the well. Arahat is one who makes "bodily contact with water"; than puthujjana should be one who doesn't see the well at all, or doesn't know that actually there is water in it.

The puthujjana's state is that of suffering (dukkha), arahat realised the cassation of dukkha. How  should be described -in the terms of dukkha- the state of sekha?

Bhikkhu Bodhi honestly describes himself as puthujjana, and his critique of Van Nanavira Thera confirms it. Here we can read:

An unbiased and complete survey of the Nikāyas, however, would reveal that the problem of dukkha to which the Buddha’ s Teaching is addressed is not primarily existential anxiety, nor even the distorted sense of self of which such anxiety may be symptomatic. The primary problem of dukkha with which the Buddha is concerned, in its most comprehensive and fundamental dimensions, is the problem of our bondage to samsāra—the round of repeated birth, aging, and death.

But if "distorted sense of self" means something, it must mean attavada, and inseparable from it sakkayaditthi. But this precisely dukkha, or suffering not recognised by puthujjana as suffering, and this is precisely what constitute difference between puthujjana:

“This world, Kaccāna, is for the most part shackled by engagement, clinging, and adherence. But this one [with right view] does not become engaged and cling through that engagement and clinging, mental standpoint, adherence, underlying tendency; he does not take a stand about ‘my self.’ He has no perplexity or doubt that what arises is only suffering arising, what ceases is only suffering ceasing. His knowledge about this is independent of others. It is in this way, Kaccāna, that there is right view. SN 12:15

So in terms of dukkha- sekha has abandoned or understood dukkha connected with attavada, and precisely this gives him direct knowledge that the attitude "I am" is dukkha or suffering which should be understood and abandon. And he sees the path leading to the cessation of the conceit "I am". Puthujjana, being the victim of upādanā (with upādanā as condition, bhava) is imprisoned in dialect being - not being.

Does sekha, being alone, and reflecting on his own experience think: "I am a sekha"? Very unlikely. Anyway, most certainly he should not think this way. Such statement is justified when two individuals (puggala) are communicating with each other, and definitely there's certain state which Lord Buddha classified as "sekha experience". But since there is direct knowledge that the attitude "I am" is suffering, the phrase: "I am sekha" is quite ambiguous and it may mean just another way of falling into sakkāyadiṭṭhi, simply another way of affirmation of ones own being, without actually seeing the escape from it.

"Simply" on the verbal level, existentially puthujjana who sees himself as ariya is in the worse situation than common puthujjana, whose self-image is less unrealistic. Average puthujjana (practicing Dhamma) at least knows that he doesn't know, so he tries to understand Dhamma, while if you do not know that you do not know, you do not even want to know.

Another way of describing experience, apart aggregates, is by sense bases. But principle is the same, dukkha or suffering is connected with not knowing and not understanding impermanence. This allows puthujjana to see the eye as "mine" or "self".

“Bhikkhus, the eye is impermanent. What is impermanent is suffering. What is suffering is nonself. What is nonself should be seen as it really is with correct wisdom thus: ‘This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.’

“The ear is impermanent…. The nose is impermanent…. The tongue is impermanent…. The body is impermanent…. The mind is impermanent. What is impermanent is suffering. What is suffering is nonself. What is nonself should be seen as it really is with correct wisdom thus: ‘This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.’

“Seeing thus, bhikkhus, the instructed noble experiences estrangement towards the eye, estrangement towards the ear, estrangement towards the nose, estrangement towards the tongue, estrangement towards the body, estrangement towards the mind. Experiencing estrangement, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion [his mind] is liberated. When it is liberated there comes the knowledge: ‘It’s liberated.’ He understands: ‘Destroyed is birth, the holy life has been lived, what had to be done has been done, there is no more for this state of being.’”
SN 35 : 1

“Bhikkhus, one who seeks delight in the eye seeks delight in suffering. One who seeks delight in suffering, I say, is not freed from suffering. One who seeks delight in the ear … in the nose … in the tongue … in the body … in the mind seeks delight in suffering. One who seeks delight in suffering, I say, is not freed from suffering.

“One who does not seek delight in the eye … in the mind does not seek delight in suffering. One who does not seek delight in suffering, I say, is freed from suffering.” SN 35: 19

The delight (nandi) Suttas define as upādāna (in this translation "clinging")

“Bhikkhus, the arising, continuation, production, and manifestation of the eye is the arising of suffering, the continuation of disease, the manifestation of aging-and-death. The arising of the ear … the nose … the tongue … the body … the mind is the arising of suffering, the continuation of disease, the manifestation of aging-and-death.

“The cessation, subsiding, and passing away of the eye … the mind is the cessation of suffering, the subsiding of disease, the passing away of aging-and-death.” SN 35: 21

The article obviously doesn't cover all aspects of suffering, the emphasis was put on suffering connected with being (bhava) and self-identification which supports the attitude "I am".

The DN 1 discusses self-identification or ignorance on reflective level, while MN1 emphasises conceiving, so it is rather addressed to sekha. One who is imprisoned in brahmajala (D 1) first must abandon suffering in the form of sakkāyadiṭṭhi.

Arahat realised the cessation of suffering. It is the sekha who should train himself in not conceiving, including conceiving "I am a sekha". Sounds strange? Let's repeat. Suttas recognise 9 puggalas. 8 ariyas + puthujjana.

Arahat is a puggala, "who" realised nibbana, the cessation of bhava (being), here and now. "Who" is put in quote marks since with the cessation of person (sakkāya) there is nobody there to afirm "I am". But when the individual -puggala- truthfully known as sekha doesn't has to communicate verbally with other individuals, direct (non-verbal) knowledge that the attitude "I am" is dukkha remains. So it is absolutely unnecessary to asert it verbally  or by thinking. Contrary, while arahat can safely use such terms as "I", "mine", "I am",  sekha, (not being free from conceiving in this terms), sees that the way leading to the cessation of "I am" includes any kind of self-image. In other words, he sees that while arahat as a puggala is definitely superior to less advanced puggalas, idea "I am superior" doesn't arise in the arahat's mind.

Nisargadatta Maharaj: I am free of memories and anticipations, unconcerned with what I am and what I am not. I am not addicted to self-descriptions, soham and brahmasmi ('I am He', 'I am the Supreme') are of no use to me, I have the courage to be as nothing and to see the world as it is: nothing. It sounds simple, just try it!
Q: But what gives you courage?
M: How perverted are your views! Need courage be given? Your question implies that anxiety is the normal state and courage is abnormal. It is the other way round. Anxiety and hope are born of imagination — I am free of both. I am simple being and I need nothing to rest on.

Nanavira Thera: The Mūlapariyāyasutta is as follows. (i) The puthujjana ‘perceives X as X; perceiving X as X, he conceives X, he conceives In X, he conceives From X, he conceives “X is mine”; he delights in X…’. (ii) The sekha ‘recognizes X as X; recognizing X as X, he should not conceive X, he should not conceive In X, he should not conceive From X, he should not conceive “X is mine”; he should not delight in X…’. (iii) The arahat ‘recognizes X as X; recognizing X as X, he does not conceive X, he does not conceive In X, he does not con-ceive From X, he does not conceive “X is mine”; he does not delight in X…’.

This tetrad of maññanā, of ‘conceivings’, represents four progressive levels of explicitness in the basic structure of appropriation. The first, ‘he conceives X’, is so subtle that the appropriation is simply implicit in the verb.

Taking advantage of an extension of meaning (not, however, found in the Pali maññati), we can re-state ‘he conceives X’ as ‘X conceives’, and then understand this as ‘X is pregnant’—pregnant, that is to say, with subjectivity .

And, just as when a woman first conceives she has nothing to show for it, so at this most implicit level we can still only say ‘X’; but as the pregnancy advances, and it begins to be noticeable, we are obliged to say ‘In X’; then the third stage of the pregnancy, when we begin to suspect that a separation is eventually going to take place, can be described as ‘From X’; and the fourth stage, when the infant’s head makes a public appearance and the separation is on the point of becoming definite, is the explicit ‘X is mine (me, not mama)’. This separation is first actually realized in asmimāna, where I, as subject, am opposed to X, as object; and when the subject eventually grows up he becomes the ‘self’ of attavāda, face to face with the ‘world’ in which he exists. (In spite of the simile, what is described here is a single graded structure all implicated in the present, and not a development taking place in time. When there is attavāda, the rest of this edifice lies beneath it: thus attavāda requires asmimāna (and the rest), but there can be asmimāna without attavāda*.) Note that it is only the sekha who has the ethical imperative ‘should not’: the puthujjana, not ‘recognizing X as X’ (he perceives X as X, but not as impermanent), does not see for himself that he should not conceive X; while the arahat, though ‘recognizing X as X’, no longer conceives X.

* This is the core of Nisargadatta Maharaj teaching, for now, puthujjana should not worry much about abandoning ignorance on pre-reflective level, but try to "purify" it from "I am this or that".

NM Coming back to the idea of having been born. You are stuck with what your parents told you: all about conception, pregnancy and birth, infant, child, youngster, teenager, and so on. Now, divest yourself of the idea that you are the body with the help of the contrary idea that you are not the body. It is also an idea, no doubt; treat it like something to be abandoned when its work is done.

Summarize, being someone is the state of suffering, being nobody is the greatest happiness. It can be achieved by someone who is ready to abandon any kind of self-descriptions, even if on certain level they are valid. Who doesn't see the way leading to being nobody, and thinks about himself "I am ariya", is just the victim of sakkāyadiṭṭhi. His self-image is no doubt quite gratifying, but ...

Nanavira Thera: ... anyone who thinks ‘When shall I become an arahat?’ is ipso facto failing to understand what it means to be an arahat (since being an arahat means not thinking in terms of ‘I’).

The Lord Chandos Letter

 A LETTER

This is the letter written by Philipp, Lord Chandos, the younger son of the Earl of Bath, to Francis Bacon (later Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Albans), apologizing for his complete abandonment of literary activity.

IT IS KIND of you, dear friend, to ignore my silence of two years and write to me as you have done. To express your concern about me, your disquiet at what you see as the mental paralysis into which I have fallen, with such grace and humor—as only great people who know in their bones how dangerous life is and still have not lost hope can do—goes beyond kindness.

You conclude with Hippocrates’ aphorism, Qui gravi morbo correpti dolores non sentiunt, iis mens aegrotat,* and express your belief that I need medicine not merely to cure my illness but to heighten my awareness of my inner state. I would like to give you the response that you deserve, I want to open myself up to you entirely, but I do not know how I am to set about it. I hardly know if I am still the person your precious letter is addressing. I am now twenty-six. Am I the same person as the nineteen-year-old who wrote The New Paris, The Dream of Daphne, Epithalamium—those pastorals, tottering under the weight of their grand words, which a great queen and a number of overindulgent lords and gentry are gracious enough to still remember? Am I the one who, at twenty-three, among the stone arcades of the Grand Piazza of Venice, discovered in himself an edifice of Latin prose whose abstract plan and structure gladdened his heart more than the buildings of Palladio and Sansovino that rise out of the sea? And, supposing I am that person, though changed, could my unknowable self have lost all traces and scars of this product of my most strenuous thinking, so completely that the title of the little treatise looks back at me, strange and cold, from your letter here before me? So completely that I did not even perceive it right away as a familiar image made of words strung together, but was able to understand it only by taking it one word at a time, as though I had never seen this combination of Latin vocabulary? But in fact that was me and no one else, and there is rhetoric in these questions. Rhetoric is fine for women or the House of Commons, but its armamentarium, so overvalued by our time, is not equal to getting at the heart of things; and I will have to show you what is inside me—a freak, a foible, a mental illness, if you like—if you are to understand that the literary works which I am supposed to have ahead of me are separated from me by a gulf as unbridgeable as the ones behind me. And those I hesitate to call my own, so unfamiliar do they seem.

When you remind me of the various little projects I used to entertain during the days of such fine ardor that we spent together, I do not know which to admire more, the force of your goodwill or the incredible accuracy of your memory. It is true, I did want to give an account of the first years of the reign of our late glorious sovereign, Henry VIII! The notes left by my grandfather, the Duke of Exeter, on his negotiations with France and Portugal gave me something to build upon. And, in those happy, lively days, an awareness of form was flowing from Sallust to me, as though through conduits that had never been blocked—the kind of deep and true inner form of whose existence one can have no suspicion while still within the province of rhetorical tricks; which is no longer just lending order to the material, because it permeates it, abolishes it, and creates poetry and truth all at once; a play of eternal forces, a thing as magnificent as music or algebra. That was the project dearest to me.

What is man, that he conceives projects!

And there were other projects I toyed with. Your kind letter brings these back too. They dance before me like miserable mosquitoes on a dim wall no longer illuminated by the bright sun of a happy time, each of them engorged with a drop of my blood.

I wanted to show that the fables and mythic tales which the ancients have handed down to us and in which painters and sculptors never cease to find mindless pleasure are the hieroglyphics of a secret, inexhaustible wisdom. I sometimes thought I felt its breath, as though coming from behind a veil.

I remember this project. What sensual and spiritual desire it originated in, I do not know—I longed to enter into those naked, glistening bodies, those sirens and dryads, Narcissus and Proteus, Perseus and Actaeon, the same way a hunted deer longs to wade into the water. I wanted to disappear into them and speak out of them with their tongues. I wanted. I wanted all sorts of other things. I planned to put together a collection of maxims like Julius Caesar’s—you remember that Cicero mentions it in one of his letters. My plan here was to assemble the most remarkable utterances which I had collected during my travels in my dealings with the learned men and clever women of our time, with exceptional individuals from among the general public, and with the cultivated and distinguished. In this way I wished to combine beautiful classical and Italian aphorisms and reflections with whatever else I had run across in the way of intellectual baubles in books, manuscripts, and conversation, and also to include particularly beautiful festivals and pageants, strange crimes and cases of dementia, descriptions of the greatest and oddest buildings in the Netherlands, France, and Italy, and much more. But the work as a whole was to be entitled Nosce te ipsum.**To put it briefly, I lived at that time in a kind of continuous inebriation and saw all of existence as one great unity. The mental world did not seem to me to be opposed to the physical; likewise the courtly and the bestial, art and barbarism, solitude and society. I felt nature in all of it, in the aberrations of insanity just as much as in the most refined subtleties of a Spanish ceremonial, in the crudities of young peasants no less than in the loveliest allegory. And in all of nature I felt myself. To me there was no difference between drinking warm foaming milk which a tousled rustic at my hunting lodge had squeezed into a wooden bucket from the udder of a fine, mild-eyed cow, and drinking in sweet and frothy spiritual nourishment from an old book as I sat in the window seat of my study. The one was like the other. Neither was inferior to the other, either in its intangible spirituality or in its physical power. And so it went throughout the entire sweep of life all around me; everywhere I was in the midst of it, I never noticed anything false. At other times I had the intuition that everything was symbolism and every creature a key to all the others, and I felt I was surely the one who could take hold of each in turn and unlock as many of the others as would open. Thus the title which I had planned to give that encyclopedic book.

To someone susceptible to such notions, it may appear to be the well-conceived plan of a divine providence that my soul had to sink from such puffed-up arrogance to this extremity of faintheartedness and exhaustion which is now my permanent inner state. But such religious ideas have no power over me. They belong to the cobwebs through which my thoughts pass as they shoot into the void, but upon which so many others are snagged and remain. For me the mysteries of faith have boiled down to a grand allegory which stands over the fields of my life like a shining rainbow, at a constant remove, always ready to recede in case I think of running up and wrapping myself in the hem of its cloak.

But, dear friend, worldly ideas too are retreating from me in the same way. How shall I describe these strange spiritual torments, the boughs of fruit snatched from my outstretched hands, the murmuring water shrinking from my parched lips?

In brief, this is my case: I have completely lost the ability to think or speak coherently about anything at all.

First I gradually lost the ability, when discussing relatively elevated or general topics, to utter words normally used by everyone with unhesitating fluency. I felt an inexplicable uneasiness in even pronouncing the words “spirit,” “soul,” or “body.” I found myself profoundly unable to produce an opinion on affairs of court, events in Parliament, what have you. And not out of any kind of scruples—you know my candor, which borders on thoughtlessness. Rather, the abstract words which the tongue must enlist as a matter of course in order to bring out an opinion disintegrated in my mouth like rotten mushrooms. It happened to me that, when I wanted to scold my four-year-old daughter, Katharina Pompilia, for a childish lie she had told and impress upon her the necessity of always telling the truth, the ideas flowing into my mouth suddenly took on such iridescent hues and merged into each other to such a degree that I had to make an effort to sputter to the end of my sentence, as if I had fallen ill. I actually turned pale and, feeling an intense pressure on my forehead, left the child, slammed the door behind me, and did not recover somewhat until I was riding at a good gallop over secluded pastureland.

But this affliction gradually broadened, like spreading rust. Even in simple, informal conversation, all the opinions which are ordinarily offered casually and with the sureness of a sleepwalker became so fraught with difficulties that I had to stop participating in these conversations at all. It filled me with inexplicable fury (I concealed it just barely and with effort) to hear such things as: This matter turned out well or badly for this person or that; Sheriff N. is a bad person, Clergyman T. is good; we ought to feel sorry for Farmer M., his sons are throwing their money away; someone else is to be envied because his daughters are thrifty; one family is coming up in the world, another is on the way down. All of this seemed to me as unprovable, as false, as full of holes as could be. My mind forced me to see everything that came up in these conversations as terrifyingly close to me. Once I saw through a magnifying glass that an area of skin on my little finger looked like an open field with furrows and hollows. That was how it was for me now with people and their affairs. I could no longer grasp them with the simplifying gaze of habit. Everything came to pieces, the pieces broke into more pieces, and nothing could be encompassed by one idea. Isolated words swam about me; they turned into eyes that stared at me and into which I had to stare back, dizzying whirlpools which spun around and around and led into the void.

I tried to rescue myself from this state by entering the spiritual world of antiquity. Plato I avoided—I dreaded his metaphorical fancy. Most of all it was my intent to follow Seneca and Cicero. I hoped to heal myself with their harmony of well-defined and orderly ideas. But I could not find my way to them. I understood these ideas well—I saw their marvelous interplay rise up before me like golden spheres bobbing on magnificent fountains. I could float around them and watch how they played off one another. But they had to do only with one another, and what was most profound, what was personal in my thinking was not a part of their dance. A feeling of terrible loneliness came over me while I was among them. I felt like someone locked in a garden full of eyeless statuary, and I rushed to get out again.

Since then I have led an existence which I fear you could hardly imagine, so inanely, so unconsciously has it been proceeding. Yet it is not too different from that of my neighbors, my relatives, and most of the landed gentry of this kingdom, and it is not entirely without happy and stirring moments. It will not be easy for me to convey the substance of these good moments to you; words fail me once again. For what makes its presence felt to me at such times, filling any mundane object around me with a swelling tide of higher life as if it were a vessel, in fact has no name and is no doubt hardly nameable. I cannot expect you to understand me without an illustration, and I must ask you to forgive the silliness of my examples. A watering can, a harrow left in a field, a dog in the sun, a shabby churchyard, a cripple, a small farmhouse—any of these can become the vessel of my revelation. Any of these things and the thousand similar ones past which the eye ordinarily glides with natural indifference can at any moment—which I am completely unable to elicit—suddenly take on for me a sublime and moving aura which words seem too weak to describe. Even an absent object, clearly imagined, can inexplicably be chosen to be filled to the brim with this smoothly but steeply rising tide of heavenly feeling. Recently, for example, I had a generous amount of rat poison spread in the milk cellars of one of my dairy farms. I went out riding toward evening, thinking no more about the matter, as you might imagine. As I rode at a walk over deep, tilled farmland—nothing more significant in the vicinity than a startled covey of quail, the great setting sun off in the distance above the convex fields—suddenly this cellar unrolled inside me, filled with the death throes of the pack of rats. It was all there. The cool and musty cellar air, full of the sharp, sweetish smell of the poison, and the shrilling of the death cries echoing against mildewed walls. Those convulsed clumps of powerlessness, those desperations colliding with one another in confusion. The frantic search for ways out. The cold glares of fury when two meet at a blocked crevice. But why am I searching again for words, which I have sworn off! My friend, do you remember Livy’s wonderful description of the hours before the destruction of Alba Longa? The people wandering through the streets that they will never see again ... saying good-bye to the rocks on the ground. I tell you, my friend, this was in me, and Carthage in flames too; but it was more than that, it was more divine, more bestial—and it was the present, the fullest, most sublime present. A mother was there, whose dying young thrashed about her. But she was not looking at those in their death agonies, or at the unyielding stone walls, but off into space, or through space into the infinite, and gnashing her teeth as she looked! If there was a slave standing near Niobe in helpless fright as she turned to stone, he must have gone through what I went through when the soul of this beast I saw within me bared its teeth to its dreadful fate.

Forgive this description, but do not think it was pity that I felt. If you think so, my example was poorly chosen. It was much more and much less than pity—a vast empathy, a streaming across into those creatures, or a feeling that a flux of life and death, of dreaming and waking, had streamed into them for an instant (from where?). Where could you find pity or any comprehensible association of human ideas if on some other evening I find under a nut tree a half-full watering can that a gardener’s boy has forgotten there, and this watering can and the water in it, dark from the shadow of the tree, and a water beetle sculling on the surface of the water from one dark shore to the other, this confluence of trivialities shoots through me from the roots of my hair to the marrow of my toes with such a presence of the infinite that I want to bring out words, knowing that any words I found would vanquish those cherubim in which I do not believe? And then I turn away from this place in silence? And, when I see this nut tree weeks later, I go by with a cautious sidelong glance because I do not wish to frighten off the feeling of the marvelous remaining in the air around its trunk, to drive away the tremors of the supernatural still pulsating through the shrubbery in that place? At those moments an insignificant creature, a dog, a rat, a beetle, a stunted apple tree, a cart path winding over the hill, a moss-covered stone mean more to me than the most beautiful, most abandoned lover ever did on the happiest night. These mute and sometimes inanimate beings rise up before me with such a plenitude, such a presence of love that my joyful eye finds nothing dead anywhere. Everything seems to mean something, everything that exists, everything I can remember, everything in the most muddled of my thoughts. Even my own heaviness, the usual dullness of my brain, seems to mean something: I feel a blissful and utterly eternal interplay in me and around me, and amid the to-and-fro there is nothing into which I cannot merge. Then it is as if my body consisted entirely of coded messages revealing everything to me. Or as if we could enter into a new, momentous relationship with all of existence if we began to think with our hearts. But when this strange bewitchment stops, I am unable to say anything about it; I can no more express in rational language what made up this harmony permeating me and the entire world, or how it made itself perceptible to me, than I can describe with any precision the inner movements of my intestines or the engorgement of my veins.

Apart from these strange chance events (which I hardly know whether to call mental or physical), I live a life of scarcely credible emptiness. I have trouble concealing from my wife how hard my heart has become and from the people working for me how bored I am by the affairs of the estate. It seems to me that the good, strict upbringing for which I have my late father to thank and my long-standing habit of leaving no hour in the day unoccupied are the only things giving my life a semblance of acceptable stability and maintaining an appearance appropriate to my position and my person.

I am renovating one wing of my house and find myself able to have a chat with the architect now and then about the progress of his work. I manage my properties, and my tenants and staff will very likely find me somewhat more taciturn but no less generous than before. As they stand with their caps off in front of their doors when I ride by in the evening, none of them will have an inkling that my gaze, which they are accustomed to meeting with respect, is passing with silent longing over the rotten boards under which they hunt for earthworms to use for bait, and ducking through the narrow, barred window into the dismal room in whose corner a low bed with colorful sheets always seems to be waiting for someone to die or be born; that my eye is lingering for a long time on the ugly puppies or the cats slinking lithely between flowerpots, and searching among all the shabby and crude objects of a rough life for that one whose unprepossessing form, whose unnoticed presence lying on or leaning against something, whose mute existence can become the source of that mysterious, wordless, infinite rapture. For my nameless joyful feeling will come not from contemplating the starry sky but more likely from a lonely shepherd’s fire in the distance; from the stridulation of the last dying cricket as autumn winds are already driving wintry clouds over the empty fields, not the majestic rumbling of an organ. And sometimes I compare myself in my thoughts with Crassus, the orator. The story is that he grew so inordinately fond of a tame eel, a dull, mute, red-eyed fish in his ornamental pond, that it became the talk of the town; and when Domitius disparaged him in the Senate for shedding tears over the death of this fish, wishing to portray him as something of a fool, Crassus replied: “When my fish died, I did what you did not when your first wife died, or your second.”

I do not know how often this Crassus with his eel has hurtled across the centuries into my mind as a reflection of my self. His response to Domitius is not the reason, however.

That brought the ones who laughed onto his side, so that the substance of the thing was diffused into a witticism. But that substance is what cuts me to the quick, and it would have been no different even if Domitius had wept bitterly and with the most sincere distress over his wives. There would still have been Crassus, crying over his eel. And an inexpressible something forces me to think about this figure—whose ludicrousness and contemptibility I see so perfectly in the middle of a Senate running the world and discussing deadly serious business—in a way that seems completely foolish to me as soon as I try to express it in words.

The image of Crassus is sometimes in my brain at night, like a splinter with everything around it a throbbing, boiling infection. Then it is as if I myself were beginning to ferment, to foam, seethe, and give off sparks. And the whole thing is a kind of feverish thinking, but thinking in a medium more direct, fluid, and passionate than words. It has whirlpools too, but ones which seem to lead not into the abyss as whirlpools of language do but into myself in some way, and into the lap of the most profound peace.

Dear friend, I have tried your patience too much with this lengthy description of an inexplicable state which ordinarily remains bottled up within me.

You were kind enough to express your regret that no more books by me have been arriving “to make up for the loss of our companionship.” When I read that, I knew—not without a pang—that I would write no books either in English or in Latin in the coming year, the years after that, or in all the years of this life of mine. There is only one reason for this, a strange and embarrassing one; I leave it to your infinite intellectual superiority to give it a place among what to your clear eyes is an orderly array of mental and physical phenomena. It is that the language in which I might have been granted the opportunity not only to write but also to think is not Latin or English, or Italian, or Spanish, but a language of which I know not one word, a language in which mute things speak to me and in which I will perhaps have something to say for myself someday when I am dead and standing before an unknown judge.

I had wanted, had it only been permitted me, to squeeze into the closing words of this, the last letter I expect I will write to Francis Bacon, all the love and gratitude, all the boundless admiration which I bear in my heart for the one who has done the most for my spirit—the foremost Englishman of my time—and which I will continue to bear in my heart until death bursts it.

August 22, AD 1603

 Phi. Chandos

(1902)

*One who is suffering from a severe illness yet feels no pain is sick in mind.

**Know yourself.

HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL (1874–1929), the poet, dramatist, essayist, and librettist, was raised in Vienna. The son of a banker, Hofmannsthal began to publish under the pseudonym Loris when he was only sixteen. Hofmannsthal’s youth, talent, and precociousness made a splash at Café Griensteidl, the epicenter of literary Vienna; critic Hermann Bahr, in particular, was astounded that someone using the pseudonym of a “well-groomed poodle” and with the figure of a “fine, slender pageboy” could write such brilliant poetry and prose. In the following years Hofmannsthal wrote successful plays and verse influenced by the Symbolist movement. He befriended such critics and writers as Richard Beer-Hofmann, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Stefan George, for whose literary magazine he wrote. A trip to Paris in 1900 introduced him to Maurice Maeterlinck, Auguste Rodin, and Anatole France. Around that time, however, Hofmannsthal turned away from Symbolist poetry; his aesthetic crisis is recorded, in part, in his famous work from 1902, “A Letter” (often referred to in English as “The Lord Chandos Letter”), in which a young nobleman confronts the futility of language. Hofmannsthal began to work almost entirely for the stage and, in 1906, met and began to collaborate with Richard Strauss. Over the next twenty years, he produced librettos for such Strauss operas as Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, and Die Frau ohne Schatten. During World War I, Hofmannsthal worked for a propaganda agency of the War Ministry; towards the end of his life, he championed Austrian culture in the hope that art could save Europe from political violence. He died in 1929, days after his oldest son committed suicide.

THE LORD CHANDOS LETTER

AND OTHER WRITINGS

HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL

Selected and translated from the German by

JOEL ROTENBERG

Introduction by

JOHN BANVILLE

The sheer madness and insanity of criminalizing your entire population

 The sheer madness and insanity of criminalizing your entire population is beyond the pale. In 2021, even the Ministry for Family and Children got two hundred fifty million euros for fighting right-wing extremism in kindergartens and nursing homes. They use Orwellian euphemisms for new anti-terror units, such as ‘Democracy Alive’ or ‘Young against Right’. Their new anti-terror laws have strange names too, such as ‘Law to promote and strengthen a well-fortified democracy’ or ‘Initiative for Human Dignity’. The oppression even got its own Ministry, the Ministry for Political Education, which is code for crackdown on the political right. Before Angela Merkel completed her sixteen-year term, she signed off a one-billion deal with semi-governmental private foundations. The money is so widely disseminated that nobody will ever be able to trace it. Some of the money is said to go to over one thousand “subsidies and fundraising against right-wing extremism” in film, radio, sports, festivals, language learning, and school exchange.

But not only the young are treated like infants. All one hundred six urban districts and two hundred ninety-four rural districts were forced to introduce new reporting stations for incorrect thought, and all four hundred forty-six universities and polytechnics were forced to establish round tables against the political right in higher education, with such dubious titles as ‘Center for Migration Research’, ‘Right-wing extremism research center’, or ‘Center for Social Cohesion’, and so on. 

 The government revived the so-called Antifaschistische Schutzwall of the former East German communist regime. Americans may have heard about it, because it spread overseas. It is called the Antifa. The Antifa or “Antifascists” is a left-wing terrorist organization [with our definition of terrorism being the carrying out of attacks against the people, which ought to be the state de iure by the constitution, but are not the state de facto, according to the government which says it is the state de re], that originated in Germany but is now active globally, that hunts down and destroys the lives of those it deems not antifascists. Which is potentially everyone they don’t like, which is perfect for the bundesregierung that now subsidizes its mercenary army of street goons, internet vandals, police informants, and hateful narcissists to rat out the enemies of the state. The US government under Donald Trump repeatedly called for the designation of Antifa as a terrorist organization but was rejected because it was not “an organization” at all. Which is correct. Antifa is not an organization—it is the German government!

 Antifa’s militia counts over ten thousand foot soldiers, forty-seven chapters, and operates several centers such as the ‘Research Institute for Social Cohesion’, and operates on a federal level, in consultations with the Ministry of Interior. It polices the “racism” in German state institutions, and is as such one branch of the thought police.

 Other branches of the thought police are the five “non-governmental organizations” for the fight against right-wing extremism, all funded by the government. The communist Amadeu-Antonio Foundation, the Correctiv against Fake News, the NetzDG Network Group, the Stiftung Digitale Chance, Deutschland Sicher Im Netz, and Click-Safe.de. 

 And while these hateful organizations use libel and defamation tactics against the civil disobedient, they work in tandem and collusion with the countless pro-government gutmenschen from SpdBT, DieGrünen, DieLinke, and their governmental lieutenants from the Volks-Inquisition: Heiko Maas, Steinmeier, Nancy Faeser, Ralf Stegner, Sven Lehmann, B Riexinger, and hundreds more virulent persecutors-in-chief who make themselves bigger by how many citizens’ lives they disrupted or sent into collective punishment.

 And just like during the formation of the Second Reich, during the formation of the Fourth Reich the Church has joined once again the persecution of the Andersdenkenden: All state churches and faith communities must join the fight against the right or become the right themselves. 

 Public squares, bus stops, fences, lampposts, and the windows of the city's cafes and boutiques are plastered with "against the right" posters and stickers. Hateful webportals such as Psiram or Report24 denounce our people. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia was taken over by nasty weasels. They are desecrating the entries on living persons with Nazi-accusations, sexism, and other dehumanizing edits. The whole country has been stirred into a genocidal frenzy against itself.

 By 2022, the government had revised the Meldestelle Gesetz. The newly revised ‘Registration Office Act’ from the socialist government in hell encourages everyone, from private individuals to companies and all state institutions, to rat out every colleague, every neighbor, every former associate or acquaintance for harboring extremist thoughts.

 In 2023, the Hinweisgeberschutzgesetz, or “Whistleblower Protection Law,” was introduced—in stealth, without consulting the public. It declares that those who rat out anybody via the Meldestelle Gesetz must not be ratted out themselves. Anyone who unmasks an informer faces a fine of fifty thousand euros or a prison sentence. The rats are being protected from being ratted out themselves, making it impossible now for the untertanen in the German Fourth Reich to ever trust a work rival, an ex girlfriend, an email conversation, Uncle Berthold from Leipzig, the friendly tax consultant, or that prying bank clerk at local Sparkasse.

 So there we have it, a call for action and a sense of deadly urgency: If Berthold does not rat out Karl for racism by Friday, Karl is going to snitch Berthold as an antisemite on Monday. From top to bottom, this system is organized to terrify and suppress. If you still have any sense of freedom, you must flee this hellish dystopia before they employ you. If you

cannot do this, you better up-end your role-playing skills, for if you live long enough among rats, you’ll shriek like one. 

Arrest Them All!

 In 2020, the government called the Youth Division of the Alternative for Germany “right-wing extremist,” to be observed by Verfassungsschutz. This targets tens of thousands of white native teenagers and students, meeting the criteria for ‘preparing the genocide’ according to the United Nations human rights convention, but who gives: This is the Fourth Reich and all resistance will be arrested for resisting.

 The government defends the first stages of the genocide of these people by saying they are nationalsozialisten filth or reichsbürger (Reich citizens) and must be disorganised, split up… then cleansed from the surface of the earth. The fact that there have been no National-socialists or Reich citizens for the last seventy or one hundred ten years does not bother the new fascists. The new fascists have talked themselves into a blind rage of lefteousness, and a murderous fit even, and they believe the old fascists in their new human animal form must be paralyzed or this regime falls. 

 Most of the current stack of German rulers are on record for vile threats and unbelievable hatred against the revolting people, and they are well aware of their horrible accusations against their citizenry. That is why they also criminalized the mere mention of their crimes: National-socialism-speak. Sharing the speeches of the government is now copyright infringement. Mentioning the names of the prosecution: A Call for violence. Mentioning the court proceedings: Endangering the witnesses. All publications, videos, compilations, websites, documents, and screenshots of the government’s crimes are now prohibited—Hate speech! People who are unhappy with the government: Assisting a foreign power! In 2020 alone, tens of thousands of citizen-dissidents were summoned to court, and ten thousand five hundred were convicted.

 Germany officially has no political prisoners, because it is politically impossible not to like this government, its democracy, its tolerant ways. Saying otherwise is antidemocratic agitation which is punishable with up to three years in the pen, which is not at all a political but judicial decision. Besides, the all-seeing government has five hundred other ways to blow your dissident lights out. Practicing broadcasting without a radio licence? Pirating and harmful negative impacting. Asking for donations to fight the government in court? Wire fraud and misuse of communication. Telling your boss that you were planning a round-the-world trip? Risk of flight and immediate custody.

 Already in 2016, it had become evident that the Germans prepared for revolt. In the political opposition, it was hard to find a household that had not been scourged through constant administrative fines, criminal charges, raids, and all sorts of chicanery.

 Worse, god-like politicians abused the judiciary system and hired an army of greedy lawyers on tax payers‘ expenses to sue and criminalize the wits out of the unruly plebeians. Prosecutors are state appointed and give nothing about the plight of the people. Chief justices are government appointed too. One female minister of state, Sawsan Chebli, gloated on state tv that her lawyer team sued thirty citizens a week over hateful remarks on social media. And all the political parties and even the Foreign Ministry and its boss, Analena Baerbock, regularly file criminal complaints against everybody they don’t like and want the state to crack down on. Everybody could see know clearly that the law was not just punishment but an extortion racket: The alleged perpetratorspolitical enemies were taken into custody just for fun, fined arbitrary fines, and made to pay exorbitant lawyers fees, court fees, medical bills (many break down under the stress), and were forced to engage in even more susceptible activities because they lost their hopes, their income, their jobs, their livelihood.

 Now that US social media gave those disgruntled Germans a platform, the true scale of the Fourth Reich horrors came to light. The lives of thousands of academics, historians, artists, and other intellectuals had already been destroyed. They uploaded letters and video broadcasts to the Internet, often viewed by millions of the oppressed and disenfranchised. It was a zivilisatorisches Massaker that we almost never heard about.

The Verräters of the Second Reich now became the Volksverhetzer or “demagogues” in the Fourth Reich. [Demagogues literally means the leaders of the demos, the people.]

The terminologies change, but the nature of evil does not. We learn from the truth tellers that this Fourth Reich is not a democracy (check), that the media is lying (check), and that systematic oppression is... well… very systematic (double-check). Sharing this information is your ticket to jail. Being processed as a thought criminal is a legal status.

 It restricts employment, travel, housing, and even mating. We now have enough oppression in this terror state that we could write several Nobel-prize winning Archipelago Gulags; alas, we all know it is not going to happen, not in Germany, because Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about the crackdowns in the Russian Empire, not the European Union. The crackdowns in the European Union are just “Russian disinformation,” you see.

 The government is going after staatsbeamte (civil servants), office clerks, community volunteers, philosophers, writers, traditional families, the unemployed youth, and the migrants…; in earnest, the government is going after EVERYONE critical of the government. This is the nature of this tyrannical state. And nobody can change it, because the law forbids it.

 A network of denunciation was erected that puts the former East German State Security STASI to shame. Germany is the most censorial nation in Europe, according to everyone who lives here AND the American tech companies doing business with bundesregierung. Every town has an anti-hate speech contact person, a special anti-discrimination unit, and an anonymous mailbox such as the Berliner Register for the rats ratting out their fellow citizens. 

 Ask any German person you‘ll ever meet to complete the following sentence—“The biggest scoundrel in the land,...“ and they will complete: „...is and remains the government informant!“ This saying comes from the Second Reich, from von Fallersleben, shortly before his 1848 exile. Germans informing on their fellow Germans—this is any Good German’s highest berufung [Lord‘s calling] and his selfless civic duty. 

 By 2022, the government had cleansed the Bundeswehr (the defense forces), the police force, the education system, the media, the company floors... from Alternative for Germany sympathizers, science-deniers, Trump-supporters, Reich  citizens, Putin-fanboys, Demokratie-Verächter, China-hands, and the Querdenker (aka the conspiracy theorists).

 The damage done to German society and the economy is now irreversible. Tens of thousands of qualified, intelligent, and morally intact individuals, mostly white men, have been demoted because they are a danger to the system. Replacements are extremely hard to come by. The government, the universities, and the business community are all in cahoots and call their self-inflicted thinning the “shortage of skilled laborers.” The corrupt rulers are forced to employ unqualified migrants, all women, all the mentally handicapped, homos and sex changers, and the sadistic personality types who prey on their underlings. The entire country, its former productivity, its innovation, its trust, its genius… crippled and gone.

 Deprived of their future, many of the broken people do-say something stupid and don’t care what the rats’ listen’. And that's when the blue buses roll and the Staatsschutz commandos break in with the door.

The Nature Of The Law

 The Roman Law, today the German Law, or European Law in general, is the greatest tool of oppression the world has ever seen. It is part holy-religious, part dark magic. Under Holy Roman-Germanic Empire law, the government declares somebody a criminal, upon which he legally turns into that criminal, like a curse or a death spell. So everybody walks around all the time trying not to be that “somebody’s declared a criminal” the authorities are looking for. Everybody obeys “the law.” 

 Until they can’t obey the law, that is. Men who have nothing, steal. Powerless men resolve to violence. Men who are oppressed revolt. The rich, powerful, and unassailable rulers don’t need to steal, they have all the power, and they would be moronic to revolt against themselves. 

 Therefore, the rulers will effect a law that outlaws theft, violence, and revolt—with their property, safety, and stability in mind. Such a law is not equal, it can never be social, it is never for the good, and it certainly cannot be just. Roman Law is never on the right. (...)

Fourth Reich, The Law, And The Fifth Dimension

T J Pattberg

  Oppression In Germany

 The Death of Ivan Illyich (1884-1886)

To a greater or lesser extent there goes on in every person a struggle between two forces: the longing for privacy and the urge to go places: introversion, that is, interest directed within oneself toward one's own inner life of vigorous thought and fancy; and extroversion, interest directed outward, toward the external world of people and tangible values. To take a simple example: the university scholar—and by scholar I mean professors and students alike—the university scholar may present sometimes both sides. He may be a bookworm and he may be what is called a joiner—and the bookworm and the joiner may fight within one man. A student who gets or wishes to get prizes for acquired knowledge may also desire, or be expected to desire, prizes for what is called leadership. Different temperaments make different decisions, of course, and there are minds in which the inner world persistently triumphs over the outer one, and vice versa. But we must take into account the very fact of a struggle going on or liable to go on between the two versions of man in one man—introversion and extroversion. I have known students who in the pursuit of the inner life, in the ardent pursuit of knowledge, of a favorite subject had to clap their hands to their ears in order to shut out the booming surf of dormitory life; but at the same time they would be full of a gregarious desire to join in the fun, to go to the party or to the meeting, to give up the book for the band.

From this state of affairs there is really not a very far cry to the problems of writers like Tolstoy in whom the artist struggled with the preacher; the great introvert with the robust extrovert. Tolstoy surely realized that in him as in many writers there did go on the personal struggle between creative solitude and the urge to associate with all mankind—the battle between the book and band. In Tolstoyan terms, in the symbols of Tolstoyan later philosopy after he finished Anna Karenin, creative solitude became synonymous with sin: it was egoism, it was the pampering of one's self and therefore a sin. Conversely, the idea of all mankind was in Tolstoyan terms the idea of God: God is in men and God is universal love. And Tolstoy advocated the loss of one's personality in this universal God-Love. He suggested, in other words, that in the personal struggle between the godless artist and the godly man the latter should better win if the synthetic man wishes to be happy.

We must retain a lucid vision of these spiritual facts in order to appreciate the philosophy of the story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich." Ivan is of course the Russian for John, and John in Hebrew means God is Good, God is Gracious. I know it's not easy for non-Russian-speaking people to pronounce the patronymic Ilych, which of course means the son of Ilya, the Russian version of the name Elias or Elijah, which incidentally means in Hebrew, Jehovah is God. Ilya is a very common Russian name, pronounced very much like the French il y a; and Ilyich is pronounced Ill-Itch—the ills and itches of mortal life.

Now comes my first point: this is really the story not of Ivan's Death but the story of Ivan's Life. The physical death described in the story is part of mortal Life, it is merely the last phase of mortality. According to Tolstoy, mortal man, personal man, individual man, physical man, goes his physical way to nature's garbage can; according to Tolstoy, spiritual man returns to the cloudless region of universal God-Love, an abode of neutral bliss so dear to Oriental mystics. The Tolstoyan formula is: Ivan lived a bad life and since a bad life is nothing but the death of the soul, then Ivan lived a living death; and since beyond death is God's living light, then Ivan died into new Life—Life with a capital L.

My second point is that this story was written in March 1886, at a time when Tolstoy was nearly sixty and had firmly established the Tolstoyan fact that writing masterpieces of fiction was a sin. He had firmly made up his mind that if he would write anything, after the great sins of his middle years, War and Peace and Anna Karenin, it would be only in the way of simple tales for the people, for peasants, for school children, pious educational fables, moralistic fairy tales, that kind of thing. Here and there in "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" there is a half-hearted attempt to proceed with this trend, and we shall find samples of a pseudo-fable style here and there in the story. But on the whole it is the artist who takes over. This story is Tolstoy's most artistic, most perfect, and most sophisticated achievement.

Thanks to the fact that Guerney has so admirably translated the thing I shall have the opportunity at last to discuss Tolstoy's style. Tolstoy's style is a marvelously complicated, ponderous instrument.

You may have seen, you must have seen, some of those awful text books written not by educators but by educationalists—by people who talk about books instead of talking within books. You may have been told by them that the chief aim of a great writer, and indeed the main clue to his greatness, is "simplicity." Traitors, not teachers. In reading exam papers written by misled students, of both sexes, about this or that author, I have often come across such phrases—probably recollections from more tenderyears of schooling—as "his style is simple" or "his style is clear and simple" or "his style is beautiful and simple" or "his style is quite beautiful and simple." But remember that "simplicity" is buncombe. No major writer is simple. The Saturday Evening Post is simple. Journalese is simple. Upton Lewis is simple. Mom is simple. Digests are simple. Damnation is simple. But Tolstoys and Melvilles are not simple.

One peculiar feature of Tolstoy's style is what I shall term the "groping purist." In describing a meditation, emotion, or tangible object, Tolstoy follows the contours of the thought, the emotion, or the object until he is perfectly satisfied with his re-creation, his rendering. This involves what we might call creative repetitions, a compact series of repetitive statements, coming one immediately after the other, each more expressive, each closer to Tolstoy's meaning. He gropes, he unwraps the verbal parcel for its inner sense, he peels the apple of the phrase, he tries to say it one way, then a better way, he gropes, he stalls, he toys, he Tolstoys with words.

Another feature of his style is his manner of weaving striking details into the story, the freshness of the descriptions of physical states. Nobody in the eighties in Russia wrote like that. The story was a forerunner of Russian modernism just before the dull and conventional Soviet era. If there is the fable noted, there is too a tender, poetical intonation here and there, and there is the tense mental monologue, the stream of consciousness technique that he had already invented for the description of Anna's last journey.

A conspicuous feature of the structure is that Ivan is dead when the story starts. However, there is little contrast between the dead body and the existence of the people who discuss his death and view his body, since from Tolstoy's point of view their existence is not life but a living death. We discover at the very beginning one of the many thematic lines of the story, the pattern of trivialities, the automatic mechanism, the unfeeling vulgarity of the bureaucratic middle-class city life in which so recently Ivan himself had participated. Ivan's civil service colleagues think of how his death will affect their careers: "So on receiving the news of Ivan Ilyich's death the first thought of each of the gentlemen in those chambers was of the changes and promotions it might occasion among themselves or their acquaintances.

" 'I'll be sure to get Shtabel's place or Vinnikov's,' thought Fyodor Vas-ilievich. 'I was promised that long ago, and the promotion means an extra eight hundred rubles a year for me besides the allowance.'

'Now I must apply for my brother-in-law's transfer from Kaluga,' thought Peter Ivanovich. 'My wife will be very glad, and then she won't be able to say that I never do anything for her relatives.' "

Note the way the first conversation has gone but this selfishness after all is a very normal and humble human trait because Tolstoy is an artist, above castigation of morals—note, I say, the way the conversation about Ivan's death then slips into a piece of innocent kidding when the self-seeking thoughts have ended. After the seven introductory pages of chapter 1, Ivan Ilyich, as it were, is revived, is made to live his whole life again, in thought, and then he is made to revert, physically, to the state depicted in the first chapter (for death and bad life are synonymous) and spiritually to pass into the state so beautifully adumbrated in the last chapter (for there is no death once this business of physical existence is over).

Egotism, falsity, hypocrisy, and above all automatism are the most important moments of life. This automatism puts people on the level of inanimate objects—and this is why inanimate objects also go into action and become characters in the story. Not symbols of this or that character, not attributes as in Gogol's work, but acting agents on a par with the human characters.

Let us take the scene between Ivan's widow Praskovya and Ivan's best friend Peter. "Peter Ivanovich sighed still more deeply and despondently, and Praskovya Fyodorovna pressed his arm gratefully. When they reached the drawing room, upholstered in pink cretonne and lighted by a dim lamp, they sat down at the table—she on a sofa and Peter Ivanovich on a low, soft ottoman, the springs of which yielded spasmodically under his weight. Praskovya Fyodorovna had been on the point of warning him to take another seat, but felt that such a warning was out of keeping with her present condition and so changed her mind. As he sat down on the ottoman Peter Ivanovich recalled how Ivan Ilyich had arranged this room and had consulted him regarding this pink cretonne with green leaves. The whole room was full of furniture and knickknacks, and on her way to the sofa the lace of the widow's black shawl caught on the carved edge of the table. Peter Ivanovich rose to detach it, and the springs of the ottomon, relieved of his weight, rose also and gave him a bounce. The widow began detaching her shawl herself, and Peter Ivanovich again sat down, suppressing the rebellious springs of the ottoman under him. But the widow had not quite freed herself, and Peter Ivanovich got up again, and again the ottomon rebelled and even creaked. When this was all over she took out a clean cambric handkerchief and began to weep. . . . 'You may smoke,' she said in a magnanimous yet crushed voice, and turned to discuss with Sokolov the price of the plot for the grave. . . .

" 'I look after everything myself,' she told Peter Ivanovich, shifting the albums that lay on the table; and noticing that the table was endangered by his cigarette ash, she immediately passed him an ash tray. . . ."

As Ivan, with Tolstoy's assistance, revises his life, he sees that the culmination of his happiness in that Life (before he fell ill, never to recover) was when he got a nice fat official position and rented an expensive bourgeois apartment for himself and his family. I use the word bourgeois in the philistine sense, not in a class sense. I mean the kind of apartment that would strike the conventional mind in the eighties as moderately luxurious, with all kinds of knickknacks and ornaments. Today, of course, a philistine might dream of glass and steel, videos or radios disguised as book shelves and dumb pieces of furniture.

I said that this was the peak of Ivan's philistine happiness, but it was upon this peak that death pounced upon him. In falling from a stepladder when he was hanging a curtain, he had fatally injured his left kidney (this is my diagnosis—the result was probably cancer of the kidney); but Tolstoy, who disliked doctors and medicine in general, deliberately confuses matters by alluding to various other possibilities—floating kidney, some stomach ailment, even appendicitis, which could hardly have been in the left side as mentioned several times. Ivan makes later a wry joke that he was mortally wounded when storming the curtain, as if it were a fortress.

 

From now on nature, in the disguise of physical disintegration, enters the picture and destroys the automatism of conventional life. Chapter 2 had begun with the phrase, "Ivan's life had been most simple and most ordinary—and therefore most terrible." It was terrible because it had been automatic, trite, hypocritical—animal survival and childish contentment. Nature now introduces an extraordinary change. Nature to Ivan is uncomfortable, filthy, indecent. One of the props of Ivan's conventional life was propriety, superficial decency, elegant and neat surfaces of life, decorum. These are gone now. But nature comes in not only as the villain of the piece: it also has its good. Very good and sweet side. This leads us to the next theme, of Gerasim.

Tolstoy, as the consistent dualist he was, draws a contrast between the conventional, artificial, false, intrinsically vulgar, superficially elegant city life and the life of nature personified here by Gerasim, a clean, calm, blue-eyed young peasant, one of the lowly servants in the house, doing the most repellant jobs—but performing them with angelic indifference. He personifies the natural goodness in Tolstoy's scheme of things and he is thus closer to God. He appears here first as the embodiment of swift, soft-walking but vigorous nature. Gerasim understands and pities the dying Ivan but he pities him lucidly and dispassionately.

"Gerasim did it all easily, willingly, simply, and with a good nature that touched Ivan Ilyich. Health, strength, and vitality in other people were offensive to him, but Gerasim's strength and vitality did not mortify but soothed him.

"What tormented Ivan Ilyich most was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and that he only need keep quiet and undergo treatment and then the results would be very good. . . . He saw that no one felt for him, because no one even wished to grasp his position. Only Gerasim recognized and pitied him, and so Ivan Ilyich felt at ease only with him. . . . Gerasim alone did not lie; everything showed that he alone understood the facts of the case and did not consider it necessary to disguise them, but simply felt sorry for his emaciated and enfeebled master. Once when Ivan Ilyich was sending him away he even said straight out: 'We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble?'—expressing the fact that he did not think his work burdensome, because he was doing it for a dying man and hoped someone would do the same for him when his time came."

 

The final theme may be summed up in Ivan Ilyich's question: What if my whole life has been wrong? For the first time in his life he feels pity for others. Then comes the resemblance to the fairy tale pathos of the Beast and Beauty ending, to the magic of metamorphosis, the magic of return tickets to princedoms and faith as rewards for spiritual reform.

"Suddenly some force struck him in the chest and side, making it still harder to breathe, and he fell through the hole, and there at the bottom was a light. . . .

" 'Yes, it was all not the right thing,' he said to himself, 'but that doesn't matter. It can be so. But what is the right thing?' he asked himself, and suddenly grew quiet.

"This occurred at the end of the third day, two hours before his death. Just then his schoolboy son had crept softly in and gone up to the bedside. . . .

"At that very moment Ivan Ilyich fell through and caught sight of the light, and it was revealed to him that though his life had not been what it should have been, this could still be rectified. He asked himself: 'What is the right thing?' and grew still, listening. Then he felt that someone was kissing his hand. He opened his eyes, looked at his son, and felt sorry for him. His wife came up to him, and he glanced at her. She was gazing at him open-mouthed, with undried tears on her nose and cheeks and a despairing look on her face. He felt sorry for her, too.

" 'Yes, I'm making them wretched,' he thought. 'They're sorry, but it will be better for them when I die.' He wished to say this but had not the strength to utter it. 'Besides, why speak? I must act,' he thought. With a look at his wife, he indicated his son and said: 'Take him away—sorry for him—sorry for you, too—' He tried to add: 'Forgive me,' but said 'Forego—' and waved his hand, knowing that He whose understanding mattered would understand.

"And suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not leave him was all dropping away at once from two sides, from ten sides, and from all sides. He was sorry for them, he must act so as not to hurt them: release them and free himself from these sufferings. 'How good and how simple!' he thought. . . .

"He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. 'Where is it? What death?' There was no fear because he could not find death.

"In place of death there was light.

" 'So that's what it is!' he suddenly exclaimed aloud. 'What joy!'

To him all this happened in a single instant, and the meaning of that instant did not change. For those present his agony continued for another two hours. Something rattled in his throat, his emaciated body twitched, then the gasping and rattle became less and less frequent.

" 'It's all over!' said someone near him.

"He heard these words and repeated them in his soul.

'Death is all over,' he said to himself. 'It's no more.'

"He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died."

Nabokov 

Lectures on Russian Literature