Fatal Lies

character. Other books that were informative on the subject of education in fin de siecle Vienna were Arthur Schnitzler's My Youth in Vienna and The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig. Quotations from Nietzsche are mostly from A Nietzsche Reader (selected and translated with an introduction by R. J. Hollingdale). Translations of songs were by William Mann, Lionel Salter, and Richard Stokes. Studie U was a real document—and is referred to in chapter four (“Politics and Powers”) of Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture by John Lukacs. Descriptions of “Venice in Vienna” were based on photographs in Blickfange einer Reise nach Wien published by the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien.

Information on the history of the inkblot test (before Rorschach) can be found in “The Origins of Inkblots” by John T R. Richardson, an article published in The Psychologist in June 2004. Biographical details on Justinus Kerner can be found in The Discovery of the Unconscious, by Henri F. Ellenberger. Frau Becker's dream is based on case material reported by Freud in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, lecture 7. The opening of Freud's university lecture is a transcription of lecture 20 from the same work. Freud's episode of jealousy is exactly as described by Ernest Jones in The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud.

The description of Mahler's “funny walk” and leg movements can be found in Gustav Mahler: Letters to His Wife (edited by Henry-Louis de La Grange and Gunther Weiss in collaboration with Knud Martner). Randall Lyd gate's description of Toltec civilization is taken from The Myths of Mexico and Peru by Lewis Spence, published in 1913 by George C. Harrap and Co. The absinthe ritual (as performed by Trezska Novak) is described in Barnaby Conrad's Absinthe: History in a Bottle. The Erotes —translated into English as Affairs of the Heart — was once attributed to Lucian but is now thought to be the work of an unknown author referred to as Pseudo-Lucian. I took a few liberties with my interpretation of what Pseudo-Lucian wrote—but Herr Sommer's fundamental arguments based on this work are accurate. Liebermann's advice to Amelia Lyd gate on waltzing is adapted from a description of the waltz that can be found at

http://www.vienneseball.org.

Frank Tallis

London, 2007

THE INSPIRATION FOR ONE BOOK often comes from reading another—and for Fatal Lies that other book was The Confusions of Young Torless by Robert Musil (1880-1942). It is not particularly well-known among English and American readers, but it is regarded as a classic in Austria and Germany.

Musil was born in Klagenfurt and attended military school from the age of eleven but eventually decided on a career in engineering. After a short stint writing technical papers, he resumed his studies in Berlin, where his subjects were philosophy and psychology. The Confusions of Young Torless was completed in 1905, several years before he was awarded his doctorate.

Musil's most celebrated work is the monumental The Man Without Qualities—still unfinished at the time of his death. It is often linked with James Joyce's Ulysees and Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and together these three books are said to represent the apogee of twentieth-century modernist fiction.

As you might expect, The Man Without Qualities is not an easy read; however, The Confusions of Young Torless is very accessible. It is fewer than two hundred pages long, is set in a military academy (just like the one Musil attended), and catalogues the psychological development of a young man as he struggles to make sense of a world in which bullying and ritual humiliation are commonplace. Musil's novel is much more ambitious than it first appears. It is a chilling exploration of the origins of fascism.

At one point, a bully provides a justification for violence that owes a debt to Friedrich Nietszche (1844-1900), the philosopher who suggested that the Ubermensch or superman, does not respect moral constraints. The idea of making a new morality—beyond conventional notions of good and evil—was one endorsed by the Nazi party for obvious reasons. The conceptual leap required to construe genocide as a reasonable goal is a very considerable one and required new intellectual tools that Nietszche unwittingly provided.

In Fatal Lies, I named the headmaster of the military academy Eichmann, in order to raise the spectre of Adolf Eichmann—the Nazi who proposed “the final solution to the Jewish question.” It was Eichmann who inspired Hannah Arendt to coin a phrase that has since found its way into numerous works of history and social commentary: “the banality of evil.”

Arendt attended the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 and was amazed by his ordinariness. He was more like a petty functionary than a monster. He had become totally preoccupied by the organizational problems and technical details of genocide, at the expense of any moral concerns. He was a simple man who was just obeying orders. Arendt responded poetically, asserting that Eichmann demonstrated the “fearsome, word-and- thought defying banality of evil.”

During WWII, “normal” German citizens—when in uniform— were able to commit appalling acts of violence. This phenomenon was so perplexing to postwar social psychologists that they conducted numerous experiments in order to elucidate the factors and processes that might transform teachers, accountants, and doctors into mass murderers. This tradition began with Solomon Asch s studies of conformity, continued through Stanley Milgram's studies of obedience—and culminated with Philip Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment. Collectively, this body of work yielded results that were entirely consistent with Arendt's notion of “the banality of evil.” It seemed that ordinary experimental subjects could be persuaded to inflict pain on others with remarkable ease. Under the right circumstances, almost anyone can become a monster.

This conclusion became received wisdom in the social psychology literature, and was seen as such for more than thirty years; however, in a recent article that appeared in The Psychologist (published by the British Psychological Society), Professor S. Alexander Haslam and Professor Stephen D. Reicher have raised significant questions concerning the legitimacy of this long-held view.

It is a surprising fact that Hannah Arendt never saw the end of Eichmann's trial. If she had, her conclusions would have been very different. Early on, Eichmann made efforts to present himself as an innocent “pen-pusher”— only doing his job. But in due course, the mask began to slip, revealing a Nazi ideologue and committed anti-Semite. He appeared, to later observers, as an individual who'd set about his work with visionary zeal and who was proud of his “achievements.”

Eichmann and his fellow Nazis were capable of atrocities not because they were ordinary decent folk in uniforms but because they believed passionately in their cause.

Recently, a number of revisionist books have been published highlighting this point. In addition, the validity of the classic experimental studies of conformity and obedience—which supported the banality-of-evil hypothesis— have since been challenged on several counts (including methodological weaknesses). Professors Haslam and Reicher assert:

…from Stanford, as from the obedience studies, it is not valid to conclude that people mindlessly and helplessly succumb to brutality. Rather both studies (and also the historical evidence) suggest that brutality occurs when people identify strongly with, brutal group that have a brutal ideology.

According to this new view, people commit atrocities because they believe what they are doing is right. Ordinary people are not closet monsters after all; however, they can become monsters if they subscribe to certain beliefs. Today, social psychologists should no longer be asking the question: How is it that ordinary people can be persuaded to do terrible things? A better question would be: What are the factors that cause ordinary people to identify with brutal belief systems? In the modern world, the answer to this question is needed with some urgency.

The wide appeal of fundamentalist ideologies—of which national socialism is an example—reveals a flaw in our intellectual and emotional apparatus. The world is a complex place, and we yearn for the comforting solidity of