About Isms He was Never Wrong: George Orwell at the Café Royal

George Orwell had an interesting chance encounter with a blasé conspiracy theorist at the Café Royal in 1940. (See left).

The young man is in the grip of a dangerous fallacy. As always with autocracy and totalitarianism,  Orwell nails it.

The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. Quite a number of people console themselves with this thought, now that totalitarianism in one form or another is visibly on the up-grade in every part of the world. Out in the street the loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns prowl to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from every hoarding; but up in the attics the secret enemies of the régime can record their thoughts in perfect freedom—that is the idea, more or less. And many people are under the impression that this is going on now in Germany and other dictatorial countries   (‘As I Please’)

Why is this idea false?

Leaving aside the efficiency of modern dictatorships that close loopholed to freedom and ignoring the gaslighting and normalization of erodes the concept of and desire for intellectual liberty Orwell names one big reason:

The greatest mistake is to imagine that the human being is an autonomous individual. The secret freedom which you can supposedly enjoy under a despotic government is nonsense, because your thoughts are never entirely your own. Philosophers, writers, artists, even scientists, not only need encouragement and an audience, they need constant stimulation from other people. It is almost impossible to think without talking….

Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up. Had the Germans really got to England my acquaintance of the Café Royal would soon have found his painting deteriorating, even if the Gestapo had let him alone. And when the lid is taken off Europe, I believe one of the things that will surprise us will be to find how little worth-while writing of any kind—even such things as diaries, for instance—has been produced in secret under the dictators.

The State Can Occupy Your Mind

The lesson from Orwell here – and of course in 1984 – is that the state can occupy your mind.

The  young Café Royal artist believed he would be able to weather the invasion with his integrity intact. Orwell knew differently. In 1984 he refutes this idea when the safe haven room above Charrington’s shop turns out to be a trap.

Exposed as a thought-criminal Winston Smith is tortured in the Ministry of Love. O’Brien explains:

We do not destroyed a heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instance of death we cannot permit any deviation. – 1984

Orwell wrote about this topic elsewhere. His talk  ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’  was first published in the Listener, and Broadcast on the BBC Overseas Service, in June 1941.

The talk ends with this:

The peculiarity of the totalitarian state is that though it controls thought, it does not fix it. It sets up unquestionable dogmas, and it alters them from day to day. It needs the dogmas, because it needs absolute obedience from its subjects, but cannot avoid the changes, which are dictated by the needs of power politics. It declared itself infallible, and at the same time it attacks the very concept of objective truth. To take a crude, obvious example, every German up to September 1939 had to regard Russian Bolshevism with horror and aversion, and since September 1939 he had to regard it with admiration and affection. If Russia and Germany go to war, as they may well do within the next few years, another equally violent change will have to take place. The German’s emotional life, his loves and hatreds, are expected, when necessary, to reverse themselves overnight. I hardly need to point out the effect of this kind of thing upon literature. For writing is largely a matter of feeling, which cannot always be controlled from outside. It is easy to pay lip-service to the orthodoxy of the moment, but writing of any consequence can only be produced when a man feels the truth of what he is saying; without that, the creative impulse is lacking. All the evidence we have suggests that the sudden emotional changes which totalitarianism demands of its followers are psychologically impossible. And that is the chief reason why I suggest that if totalitarianism triumphs throughout the world, literature, as we have known it, is at an end. And, in fact, totalitarianism does seem to have had that effect so far. In Italy literature has been crippled, and in Germany it seems almost to have ceased. The most characteristic activity of the Nazis is burning books. And even in Russia the literary renaissance we once expected has not happened, and the most promising Russian writers show a marked tendency to commit suicide or disappear into prison. ….

 Whoever feels the value of literature, whoever sees the central part it plays in the development of human history, must also see the life and death necessity of resisting totalitarianism, whether it is imposed on us from without or from within.

What’s is true of literature was and is also true of the other arts. 

The Black List

When Orwell spoke to his young Peace News selling artist in the Café Royal and says that the Nazis would shoot people like himself he was not being fanciful. 

Orwell was not actually listed in the The Sonderfahndungsliste (special search list) G.B. – but he soon would have been on that enemy list to be dealt with.

The Sonderfahndungsliste is better known simply as The Black Book. It was put together by SS-General Walter Schellenberg and it lists 2820 people that the Germans intended to round up once they had control of the country.

It was Hitler’s blacklist of politicians, trade unionists, socialists, intellectuals, artists, scientists writers, journalists and emigres of all kinds who were to be immediately arrested if Germany successfully invaded Britain.

After the war, a copy of the  Sonderfahndungsliste G.B. was discovered among the papers of Heinrich Himmler. You can see and search the list here.

Orwell’s diary for that year – 1940 – has all kinds of little details and observations that help convey the tenor of the time. Here’s one:

The unspeakable depression of lighting the fires every morning with papers of a year ago, and getting glimpses of optimistic headlines as they go up in smoke. October 19th 1940

The Café Royal was not an habitual hang-out for Orwell. In 1984 it becomes the Chestnut Tree Cafe – a place for the party elite.

Osbert Lancaster made a sketch of the wartime Café Royal. Among others of the literary, editing and journalist set it has Stephen Spender in his fireman’s uniform and a pimpled Cyril Connolly in a checked jacket. 

I believe one of the things that will surprise us will be to find how little worth-while writing of any kind—even such things as diaries, for instance—has been produced in secret under the dictators.

Was Orwell correct about the production of writing under totalitarianism? The story in the Soviet Union before and during Stalin is complicated. But in general the principle holds. Read more here.  

The coming of the Hitler regime in 1933 had a chilling effect on all the arts. Many writers and artists left, if they could, fleeing for their lives. Those who remained – and who were not Jewish – had to fit into the enforced Nazi orthodoxy if they wished to be published or shown.

Those that stayed, and lived, had to find ways to adapt and survive.

All part of a systematic and brutal eradication of “non-Aryan” elements in all art forms.

Cultural Cleansing

Had the Germans invaded Britain it would have been highly unlikely that Orwell’s young man in the  Café Royal  would have been able to produce anything other than Nazi approved propaganda. And, had he resisted, then the official reaction would have been brutal. The totalitarian regimes of 20th century Europe were big on cultural cleansing.

The Nazis got going on this in the 1930’s.  Here are two catalogue covers for art exhibits in Munich in 1937. On the left, approved Nazi art and on the right degenerate art that had – until soon before then – been exhibited in galleries and museums, but was now held up to ridicule.

What Happened to the Artists?

And I started to wonder:  What happened to those Weimar Republic artists of the 1920’s who depicted the decadence and degradation of the modern metropolis of Berlin? What happened to illustrator Jeanne Mammen when the nazis came to power? 

More anon.