After All Hopes Have Died: Picasso and The Fall of Icarus T. J. Clark
not inclined necessarily to see it as a respite from ongoing “decay” and “powerlessness” at the level of civil society—it could no longer be written about (or depicted) in epic terms. The Fall of Europe had happened, tens of millions had perished; but the Fall of Europe had not proved to be a new Fall of Troy. After it had not come the Savage God. Maybe “the essential structure of civilization” had broken; but the breakage, in the years after 1950, had failed to give rise to a new holocaust or a final nuclear funeral pyre. In place of the “banality of evil” there had emerged the banality of Mutually Assured Destruction.
Two world wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining world powers. This moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died. We no longer hope for an eventual restoration of the old world order with all its traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses of five continents who have been thrown into a chaos produced by the violence of wars and revolutions and the growing decay of all that has still been spared. Under the most diverse conditions . . . we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.
“Two world wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions.” For Arendt’s generation the revolution that summed up the previous horror— staging, as it had seemed to, the essential combat between fascism and communism with special concentrated violence, and drawing into it Left and Right partisans from across the world— was the Civil War in Spain. It was, for them, the epic event of the mid-twentieth century. Picasso’s Guernica had given the epic appropriate, unforgettable form.
It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives. On the level of historical insight and political thought there prevails an ill-defined, general agreement that the essential structure of all civilizations is at breaking point. Although it may seem better preserved in some parts of the world than in others, it can nowhere provide the guidance to the possibilities of the century, or an adequate response to its horrors. —Hannah Arendt, preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, Summer 19501
It still does, of course. For the essential further point to be made is this: Arendt may have been right to feel a twinge of embarrassment at the tragic, exalted, “catastrophist” tone of her 1950 preface and to have thought, by 1966, that the fate of mass societies in the late twentieth century needed to be approached in a different key. But her thinking has not carried the day. The late twentieth century, she argued, would only truly confront itself in the mirror if it recognized that the epic of the century’s first fifty years had ended. It had given way (this is Arendt’s implication) to a form of “mock-epic” or dismal comedy—still bloodstained and rootless, but divested at last, by the evidence of Auschwitz and the gulag, of the deadly dream that “everything is possible.” And it is this post-epic reality we should now learn to live with, she thought—maybe even to oppose. We shall only do this, says her 1966 preface, if we manage finally to look back on the epic of the “totalitarian” period with thorough bemused disillusion. We have to learn how not to grant the earlier twentieth century heroic status. We have to detach ourselves from its myth.
When Hannah Arendt wrote a new preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1966 and looked back at her original judgment of the state of Europe in 1950, she was a little apologetic. The Origins had been worked on from 1945 to 1949, and in retrospect it registered, she thought, as a first effort to understand what had happened in the opening half of the twentieth century, “not yet sine ira et studio, still in grief and sorrow and, hence, with a tendency to lament, but no longer in speechless outrage and impotent horror.” “I left my original Preface in the present edition,” she wrote, “in order to indicate the mood of those years.”2
But this has proved impossible. Guernica lives on. Or to put it more carefully: what is striking about so many twenty-firstcentury societies, especially those involved directly in the wars and revolutions Arendt had in mind, is the fact that they go on so stubbornly living—at the level of myth, of national selfconsciousness, of imagined past and present—in the shadow of the struggle of fascism and communism. It is their fantasy relation to this tragedy that continues to give them or rob them of their identity. Germany remains the prime example, in its interminable double attachment to (its guilt and revulsion at) the pasts of Nazism and the Stalinist “East.” Russia—with its neoBolshevik hypernationalism—is the paranoid case of entrapment
One understands her unease. Already by 1966, the moment of The Origins of Totalitarianism’s new edition, the tone and even the substance of her 1950 reckoning with fascism and Stalinism had a period flavor. The world—or at least, the world of European and European-in-exile intellectuals—had decided that the twentieth century’s long catastrophe was over. Many thought that 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, had marked its ending. And whatever crisis of civilization had succeeded the earlier terrible catastrophe—Arendt and her friends were far from certain how to characterize the new situation, and certainly
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