Now That Mackie Is Back In Town

Laurel Snyder's Faithhacker post about Jewish artists reminded me that I’d been wanting to comment on the Met’s terrific exhibit, “Glitter and Doom.” It’s a retrospective of Weimer impressionism, featuring the works of Otto Dix, George Grosz and Max Beckmann – without whom David Lynch is pretty well unimaginable.

I doubt I can improve on Ian Buruma’s excellent essay in the New York Review of Books about the paradoxical lure and repulsion of Germany’s brief Second Reich. Suffice it to say, a thin veil of decadence was draped over a ravaged society reeling from horrors of the First World War and well on its way toward the Second. Art cleverly (if scandalously) inverted this effect by embellishing the pathological the expense of the decadent. The central tropes here were not far removed from those of our own Gilded Age, plus sex. Blimpish, cigar-chomping tycoons; frivolous bourgeois playing cards or cutting a rug; graying Prussian aristos selling themselves and their country; hideously mangled and prosthesis-patched veterans; and whores – whores everywhere you turned.

Grosz was a rara avis, even for such a vertiginous time. He changed his name in 1916 to from Ehrenfried Groß out of an abiding enthusiasm for America, derived from his reading of James Fenimore Cooper (his judgment on the canvas far outmarshalled its counterpart on the page).

Something of a Luxemburgian socialist by nature, he was arrested during the Spartakus uprising – or abortive German revolution – of 1919, the same year he joined the Communist Party. Five months in Russia was all it took to disillusion him on this sordid affiliation. After adding more than his fair share to the prevailing Weimar aesthetic, he hopped it for the states shortly before Hitler became Chancellor, an eventuality Grosz and others of his set saw coming.

If you’ve read Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories, or perhaps seen Cabaret, you know about the whistled nihilism of the German twenties. Don’t think we’re quite “over” that decade’s cultural impact just yet. I remember being equally amused and shocked to discover in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind the true origins of the song “Mack the Knife,” whose shark teeth were so winningly yanked out by Louis Armstrong in his pop standard of 1954.

This cheery, Anglicized jazz number, used to great effect in closing scenes of Quiz Show, was composed by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill for their Threepenny Opera, which is now in revival on Broadway with ex-Cabaretman Alan Cumming in the lead role. Mackie Messer was a character based on a highwayman in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. He fatally slashed those who failed to pony up. Sort of a Natural Born Killer before his time.

Bloom thus traced the lineaments of our postmodern fascination with murder and celebrity sociopaths to a Europe dangerously poised “between the wars” and just at the cusp of world-historic disaster. Auden, who spent some time in Berlin with Isherwood, knew what he was talking about when, in summarizing Whitehead in the Portable Greek Reader, he wrote:

"Civilisation is a precarious balance between barbaric vagueness and trivial order. Barbarism is unified but undifferentiated; triviality is differentiated but lacking in any central unity; the ideal of civilisation is the integration into a complete whole and with the minimum strain, of the maximum number of distinct activities."

The philosophical hysteria of a tweedy cultural conservative this may be, but I wonder if “Mack the Knife” were re-written today that its title wouldn’t be, “If I Did It.”