I have written before how delightful I find kismet. Those rare times when two seemingly unrelated strands converge to send you down the proverbial rabbit hole. This happened recently with a book I was reading and a film I watched. The two combined led me to ponder the roles and obligations of artists.
Stefan Zweig wrote his memoir, “The World of Yesterday”, under extraordinary circumstances. The book was published in 1941 while he was living in exile, persona non grata in the German speaking countries which were his home. Zweig had been targeted by the Nazis as soon as they took power. He had two strikes against him, being Jewish and an unabashed humanist.
The memoir looks at pre-WWI Austria, Zweig’s native land, with rose colored glasses. His take was that the empire led by the aging Franz Joseph was a semi-paradise of freedom and creativity, with ominous rumblings well in the background. While this view is questionable, he can be forgiven as he was no doubt comparing it with the horrors of repression that were to follow.
For Zweig, however, Austria was less important than Europe as a whole. He was a true cosmopolitan, equally at home in France, Belgium, Switzerland or Germany. In each of these countries he found like-minded artists. Though he wrote in German, he sought both acceptance and inspiration throughout the continent.
It was this attitude that permeates his memoirs and solidifies his views on the role of the artist. Zweig wrote, and clearly believed, that “the writer’s true mission [is in] preserving and defending values common to all humanity.” He sought to live this tenet. He was appalled by the nationalistic demons unleashed by WWI, and spent part of the war in Switzerland trying, unsuccessfully, to create a multi-national coalition of artists opposed to both the war, and its disparagement of the “enemy”.
In “The World of Yesterday” Zweig confronted a continent where the hostilities to the other went far beyond what he could have imagined even during WWI. His despair runs through the work, as does his desire to, one last time, plea for a broader view of humanity and assert the artists’ obligation to bring that about. Tragically, in 1942 despair won out and Zweig took his own life.
Frederico Fellini has had a place near and dear to my heart for a long time. The second semester of the first year of law school is incredibly stressful. It dawns on you early on in that term that shortly you will have to take a series of tests to validate the proceeding nine months. John Houseman from Paper Chase is constantly in your head, saying, “Look to your left and then to your right, and three years from now only one of you will still be here”. (Even though he never said this and it is not true).
In the midst of this, I stumbled upon a Fellini film retrospective. Every Wednesday I would shut the books and trudge 20 minutes to lose myself in his world of creativity. Starting with Variety Lights, which he co-directed, through well-known classics like 81/2 and Amarcord, and including the rarely seen documentaries Roma and The Clowns, these films never disappointed. They also helped keep my head on straight as finals approached.
Over the years, I have seen many of these movies again and again. Somehow, however, I never saw the few films Fellini made thereafter. So, when one of these films, “And the Ship Sails On”, fulfilled my week 16 Criterion Challenge (don’t ask) I jumped on it. To be honest, I was a bit apprehensive, as my sense was that Fellini’s best work was long behind him by then.
“And the Ship Sails on” is not Fellini’s best film, but it is very good and one only Fellini could make. On the eve of WWI, a group of musical artists charters a steamship to take them to an island where they will scatter the ashes of a colleague. The company is a typically Fellini mix of eccentrics, egomaniacs and neurotics.
The film gets interesting when the Captain takes on board a bevy of Serbian refugees. Initially, the passengers are mortified, but before long they find common ground in music and are celebrating life with the Serbs. Some of the most enchanting scenes are of the stuffed shirt artistes one by one giving in to the exuberance of the Serbs and shedding their reticence.
The revelry is interrupted by an Austrian warship which demands that the Serbians be turned over to them, threatening hostile action if they are not. Having bonded with the refugees, the artists will have none of that, standing by the Captain in refusing the request. Fellini uses calculated artificiality in depicting the Austrian ship, to contrast the hollowness its warlike stance with the humanity of the artist community.
Fellini reaches the same conclusion as Zweig. Art is a vehicle for bridging seemingly unreconcilable cultures and, as such, artists must assert and support that common humanity. To do otherwise is to give into the impersonal, aggressive forces that would kill in the name of ideologies that divide us.
As I look at our present situation, I struggle to identify the artists that feel that obligation as strongly as Zweig and Fellini. It seems as if art for art’s sake has taken over. Much of it is very good and quite interesting. However, it appears designed to express individual rather than collective values. It rarely embraces and promotes concepts of universal humanity.
Maybe it’s that art no longer has the place that Zweig and Fellini saw for it. The written word that was Zweig’s milieu has lost so much of its sway to the world of digital media. And while I could craft an argument that the video arts have carried the humanist banner more effectively than any other, here too most of the output seems content to rely on cheap thrills in an artificially drawn black/white, good/bad world.
Or maybe Zweig and Fellini were dreaming of a society that never was. As much as these consummate artists wanted a role for the arts, perhaps it is one that did not, or only rarely, existed. After all, Zweig could not quell the jingoism that decimated Europe. And while Fellini’s vision is beautiful, that is not how things play out in the real world.
On the other hand, the musical artists of the 1960’s raised harmonic voices in support of civil rights, and against the Vietnam War. The impact was real and palatable. Artists didn’t end the war, or secure equality, but they did influence public opinion in support of these goals.
I don’t know whether artists today can break through the swirling hate. Many do speak out, but not so much through their art, and, at any rate, their pleas seem to fall on deaf ears. I would like an artistic statement that grabs people by the lapel, shakes them out of their lethargy and forces them to see that we are all one. That our survival on this planet depends on our ability to value each individual regardless of trivial differences. Could be that I am asking too much, though Zweig and Fellini didn’t think so.
Excellent work Tom.