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Wednesday
A few weeks ago I led a discussion about the enjoyable German film Goodbye, Lenin. In it, a loyal believer in the East German Communist Party (at least people think she’s a believer) suffers a heart attack and goes into a coma. The wall comes down while she’s out of it, and upon her coming to, the doctor warns her family that a second shock will kill her. As a result, her family works to create an alternative reality, going to extraordinary lengths to assure her that nothing has changed.
The film, I believe, owes something to the Henrich Böll short story “Christmas Not Just Once a Year,” written six years after the end of World War II. I bring it up today because I think it helps explain Donald Trump’s continuing hold on his followers. Even though it appears that the president’s measures will hurt everyone who isn’t wealthy, Böll’s story makes it clear that people will endure a great deal of pain to keep an illusion alive. While liberals are hoping that people will turn from the president as inflation soars, people lose their jobs, and entitlement programs are slashed, “Christmas Not Just Once” cautions that disenchantment will not come easily or quickly.
In the story, which can be regarded as a black comedy parable, a beloved aunt insists on maintaining beloved Christmas rituals despite the war. Eventually, however, the apologetic narrator—apologetic because he doesn’t like to revive unpleasant memories—relates how the ceremonies come to an end:
Again at the risk of making myself very unpopular, I must mention in passing that the number of air raids on our city was indeed considerable, to say nothing of their violence. At any rate, my aunt’s Christmas tree fell victim—the thread of my narrative forbids my mentioning other victims—to modern warfare; foreign ballistic experts temporarily snuffed out its existence.
Once the war is over, however, the ceremony resumes:
I well remember the day we were invited to my uncle’s home. It was in January 1947, and bitterly cold outside. But indoors it was warm, and there was no shortage of things to eat. And when the lights were put out, the candles lit, when the dwarfs began to hammer, the angel whispered “Peace,” and again, “Peace,” I felt transported back into an era that I had assumed to be past.
This longing for the past, however, becomes a real problem. Even though times change, Aunt Milla can’t change with them, and the ending of Christmas precipitates a crisis:
When my cousin Johannes, on Candlemas Eve, after the tree had been lit for the last time, began to detach the dwarfs from their clips, my aunt, until then such a gentle soul, set up a pitiful wail, a wail so violent and sudden that my cousin was startled, and lost control over the gently swaying tree. Then it happened: there was a tinkling and a ringing, dwarfs and bells, anvils and all-surmounting angel—everything crashed to the floor, and my aunt screamed.
Nor does the screaming stop, even though neurologists and psychiatrists are brought in:
Only the strongest medication yielded a few hours of quiet; however, the dose of Luminal that can be given daily to a sixty-year-old woman without endangering her life is unfortunately rather small. But it is torture to have in the house a woman screaming at the top of her voice; by the second day the family was already totally distraught. Even the comforting words of the priest, who always celebrated Christmas Eve with the family, had no effect: my aunt screamed.
It so happens that she can be calmed only by a resumption of Christmas festivities. Before long, the family finds itself celebrating Christmas every day.
Despite the uncle’s firm hand, which insists on everyone participating in the charade, eventually the strain becomes too great, tearing the family apart. By the end of two years, two members have fled the country, one has been institutionalized, the uncle is engaging in shady business practices to finance the operation (he has also taken a mistress), and a nephew has joined a monastery. Meanwhile, professional actors have taken the place of the older family members. At one point the narrator stops by and witnesses the following scene:
It was a warm summer’s evening when I passed by there, and even as I turned the corner into the chestnut avenue I could hear the words “Christmas glitter decks the forests …” …I crept slowly up to the house and looked through a gap in the curtains into the room: the resemblance of the playactors to the relatives they were representing was so startling that for a moment I could not make out who actually was in charge—as they call it—that evening. I could not see the dwarfs,
but I could hear them. Their chirping tinkle is on wavelengths that penetrate every wall. The whispering of the angel was inaudible. My aunt seemed genuinely happy…The children were playing with dolls and toy wagons in a corner of the room: they looked pale and wan. Perhaps something really should be done about them, after all. It occurred to me that they might be replaced by wax dummies, the kind used in drugstore windows to promote milk powder and skin cream.
When Böll wrote his story, many Germans wanted to pretend that World War II had never happened and that they could return to the good old days. Watching the narrator slide around the facts of the war is like watching Trump voters pretend that he never instigated an attack on the Capitol or that he is not currently assaulting the Constitution and handing the country over to Russia. Note the narrator’s hurried insistence to get back to what interests him:
During the years 1939 to 1945 there was a war on. In wartime there is a lot of singing, shooting, talking, fighting, starving, and dying—and bombs are dropped, all disagreeable things with which I have no intention of boring my contemporaries. I must merely mention them because the war had a bearing on the story I wish to tell. For the war was registered by my Aunt Milla merely as a force that began as early as Christmas 1939 to jeopardize her Christmas tree.
Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
A number of Americans are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to push back the clock and pretend that the last 60 or so years never happened. Some are still traumatized that we had a Black president and almost had a second one. Their dream is to return to an America where white men are in charge, where everyone goes to Christian churches, where abortion and homosexuality are illegal, where women and people of color and Jews know their place, and where gas is 30 cents a gallon. They will scream—and scream and scream—until Daddy steps in and gives them back the reality they long for.
Meanwhile, thanks to their determined efforts, the nation falls apart around them. But at least they’ve won the “War on Christmas.”
Historical note: My father, who was a translator during World War II, spent several months in Munich after the Germans surrendered. (He saw Dachau three days after it was liberated.) A very sweet man, I saw him express anger only twice in his letters home and once was over the refusal of everyday Germans to take any responsibility for what they had done. Böll captures this evasiveness in his story.
