My Youth in Vienna
and
The World of Yesterday
by Stefan Zweig. Quotations from Nietzsche are mostly from
A Nietz sche 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
Blickfänge 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 Günther 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 Übermensch 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
