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M E M O I R S & P O L I T I C S Resist rottenness Global crisis and a Swedish family SARA HUDSTON OUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE Scenes of a family and a planet in crisis MALENA AND BEATA ERNMAN, SVANTE AND GRETA THUNBERG 277pp. Allen Lane. £16.99. NO ONE IS TOO SMALL TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE GRETA THUNBERG 136pp. Allen Lane. £14.99. WAITING FOR GRETA THUNBERG to speak in Bristol earlier this year, the cameras kept focusing on an eye-catching knitted doll, borne aloft in the crowd on a bamboo cane. It was a simple rendition of Greta iconography: yellow coat, brown wool plaits, angry eyes, a sign saying “Skolstrejk för Klimatet”. Who is Greta Thurnberg? The person who finally appeared on the podium at College Green looked much younger than seventeen. She was shorter and slighter than the other youth climate strikers, and the microphone stand towered over her head. Greta’s combination of anorak, woolly hat, schoolgirl hair and unmade-up face is not a style generally favoured by British teenagers. But her body language is even more different than her clothes. Although she appears shy, she lacks the genuflections towards power expected of young women in Western culture. It may be this silent absence of submission that older people, men and women but especially men, find so challenging. Watching the Bristol event live on BBC West’s Facebook page, I could see a simultaneous stream of angry comments from older viewers, most of them men. They were cross because Thunberg had a mobile phone, wore clothes she hadn’t hand-made herself, travelled to Bristol by diesel train – diesel, that is, rather than electric – and used domestic electricity. All these were cited as free choices and therefore marks of deep environmental hypocrisy. According to these commentators, Thunberg’s greatest crime was being young. They were enraged by the idea that younger generations might look to her for leadership, rather than listening to older people. Teenagers in general were too selfish, too focused on their gadgets, too indulged: “WHAT A HYPOCRITE”, wrote one man. “It’s hilarious, all these school kids preaching to us oldies that we ruined the planet! Back in the 60s and 70s and 80s not a plastic bottle to be seen it was all glass that were reused, pop bottles taken back to the shop … I think these youngsters need to take a look in a recycled mirror and think was it my wasteful generation who are ruining the planet.” Versions of this folk tale about our supposedly thrifty past generally appear in every comment thread about the environment. It’s not just social media; the myth is a staple of grassroots print outlets, cropping up frequently in parish magazines, those trusty almanacs of older, predominantly white, conservative thought. These accounts generally shift aspects of life arguably experienced in the 1940s to a more recent period. It’s typical that the Bristol man claimed plastic bottles weren’t used in the 1970s and 80s. Others remember differently: when the novelist and children’s writer Russell Hoban visited Paxos in September 1978, he found it 28 littered with plastic rubbish. “Beautiful Ionian island in the sparkling blue sea and it’s got plastic mineralwater bottles all over it”, he recalled in an essay from 1983, “Pan Lives”. “Why do perfectly good children become such rotten grown-ups?” he asked. Our House Is on Fire is a story of resistance against rottenness. It’s largely told by Malena Ernman with contributions from her husband Svante Thunberg, and is about their two daughters, Greta and Beata, who are also credited as co-authors. It tells how at the age of eleven, Greta stopped eating and speaking, unable to cope with the dissonance she perceived in the world around her. Ernman writes: “What happened to our daughter can’t be explained simply by a medical acronym or dismissed as ‘otherness’. In the end she simply could not reconcile the contradictions of modern life”. Originally published in Sweden as Scener ur hjärtat (Scenes from the Heart), the book first appeared in August 2018, three days after Greta began her school strike outside the Swedish parliament. Named after a speech she gave to the World Economic Forum at Davos in January 2019, Our House Is on Fire adds an account of her protest up until Sweden’s election day on September 10, 2018. When the book was published initially, Ernman was the celebrity in the family, an acclaimed opera singer who had also represented Sweden in the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest. The book is divided into “scenes” rather than chapters, in a nod to her performance background. This expanded and updated edition is inevitably clouded by hindsight. We know how much Greta has eclipsed her mother’s fame in the past two years. These days, Ernman is more likely to be known internationally as Greta’s mum than as an artist in her own right. It is Greta’s story we want to hear most; what is she like, how did she become such a figurehead? But Ernman wants to tell us about the climate emergency. Given our curiosity about Greta’s life, Malena’s philosophizing can become wearing at times, even if you share her viewpoint. Take this from Scene 70, entitled “Healing”: The planet is suffering from a serious disease and we need to initiate extensive medical protocols immediately. We need urgent care. But instead – in the best case – we have chosen faith healing as our treatment method. There is no insight into the illness. Not a trace. And so on, all in the same staccato style. Ernman acknowledges the mismatch between what we want to hear and what she needs to say. In Scene 42, she dramatizes an exchange between Greta and her father as they discuss feedback on an early draft. Svante says: “Okay, there are some who say the reading gets a bit heavy around Scene 41; they think it’s a lot more fun when you and Beata are present. Can TLS A public artwork depicting Greta Thunberg, Bristol, 2019 “Few of us want to read a boring book, however important its message Sara Hudston is a writer living in rural Dorset. She has been part of Extinction Rebellion since 2018 and gives the “Heading for Extinction” talk. She is a Guardian Country Diarist and writes occasionally for the Dark Mountain project something be added there?” He asks: “Can we write something about you instead?” This is Greta’s response: “‘No,’ she replies curtly. ‘Lots of personal and other stuff comes later. Mum’s burn-out and all the things people love to read about celebrities. This is a book about the climate and it should be boring. They’ll have to put up with it’”. That’s the crux of the whole book and the dilemma that the Ernman-Thunberg family confronts. They have to be interesting in order to be heard. Few of us want to read a boring book, however important its message. Our brains crave stories and characters. Scientific facts are hard work without personal context and narrative drive. This inclination to prioritize certain kinds of information above others is, of course, a reason why we are facing a climate emergency. We’d rather hear about how an indomitable child found her voice and spoke truth to power, her family’s struggles to overcome stress disorders, even the faithful love of the family dogs, than scary facts about the planet. Being interesting, however, also has its perils. Conspiracy theorists believe that Greta’s compelling public image was manufactured in order to achieve some devious aim. They accuse her of being a puppet controlled by sinister forces plotting a global eco-fascist super-state. Ernman says: “We get death threats on social media, excrement through the letterbox, and social services report that they have received a great number of complaints against us as Greta’s parents”. Much of this hatred and suspicion seems to arise from the family’s success at communicating, almost irrespective of what they actually say. Of all the family members, Greta attracts the most criticism because she is the one to whom we listen and respond the most. How does Greta catch our attention so ably? She has the gift of brevity. Her collection of speeches, No One Is too Small To Make a Difference, is a brilliantly concise meld of current eco-thinking and climate science. When she spoke at Extinction Rebellion’s Declaration of Rebellion in October 2018, she said in about ten minutes what takes nearly two hours in XR’s official introductory talk. She is also highly quotable. Slogans such as “Unite behind the science”, “I am too young to do this” and “Asperger’s is not a disease, it’s a gift” have appeared on thousands of protest banners around the world. (Thunberg was diagnosed with high-functioning autism, which she refers to as having Asperger’s.) Who knows how Greta’s story, or ours, will play out over the next few years? When she spoke to the European Parliament in Brussels on March 4 this year, the Italian MEP Pietro Fiocchi addressed her, he said, “as a father giving advice to a daughter”. His advice was impossible: “Go back to school and go back to normal life”. n JUNE 19, 2020 I M A G E S A K G ; T H O M A S / A L A M Y L E E ©
page 29
P O L I T I C S Power, populism and plots A German refugee-scholar’s papers and the politics of mass society MICHAEL SONENSCHER J ACOB PETER MAYER (1903–92) was a relat ively l i ttle-known historian of political thought. In one sense, the story of his life was like that of many other German Jewish opponents of the Nazis, shaped by the imperatives of survival and emigration and by the slow, precarious process of establishing another identity in a different language and country. In another sense, however, it was a life shaped by his own awareness of history, both of the parallels between the great social and political upheavals that have dominated Europe’s recent and more remote pasts, and of how much can sometimes hinge, politically and historically, on chance, contingency, ingenuity and improvisation. Mayer, whose papers, acquired last year, now form the largest of the collections in the Intellectual History Archive at the University of St Andrews, but have yet to be classified and digitized, had good reasons to think about both. In 1933, he reissued (under a pseudonym) a book published in 1852 by a once well-known German political commentator named Constantin Franz on the seizure of power by Napoleon III. The new title, Mass oder Volk, that Mayer gave to Franz’s more anodyne Napoleon III (now relegated to the subtitle) highlighted the parallel that he wanted to make between the plebiscitary origins of Bonapartist and Nazi politics and, too, the dangerously militarized prospect that the parallel was designed to present. Later, in Germany and in Britain, Mayer was close to the circle around Adam von Trott, now best known as one of the most individually fascinating and widely commemorated of the several highly placed plotters against Hitler. Politics, as Mayer came to conceive them, was what filled the space between the knowledge supplied by historical parallels and the uncertainty built into individual choices and actions. Born in Frankenthal in Germany, Mayer emigrated to Britain in 1936 and, at some point after the Second World War, embarked on an academic career as a member of the French department at the University of Reading. Before he left Germany, however, he was an education officer of the German Social Democratic Party, a post that equipped him with some of the skills that he was to transfer to the Workers’ Educational Association after he came to England. For a time he was also an active contributor to the monthly periodical Neue Blätter für den Sozialismus (Modern Socialist Magazine) published before 1933 by the now better-known theologian Paul Tillich. Among Mayer’s contributions to the magazine was a review of a biography of the German social democrat Heinrich Braun by his widow Julie Braun-Vogelstein, who was to emigrate in 1936 to New York, where she lived and worked as an art historian until her death in 1971. Mayer corresponded with her (as “Aunt Julie”) almost up to her death. Sometime during the 1930s Mayer gave up on Marx, whose Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts he had co-edited for publication in 1932, and turned to Tocqueville. He was, Mayer later wrote in an introduction to a translation of Tocqueville’s JUNE 19, 2020 Souvenirs (the book in which Tocqueville set out his recollections of his own involvement in the French revolution of 1848), simply better at identifying and explaining the political dynamics of mass society. For Mayer, this meant that the real key to modern sociology was established by Tocqueville, both in his Democracy in America and in his later examinations of the hidden causes and unforeseen consequences of revolution. On Mayer’s assessment, neither of these ways of thinking about causes and consequences fitted Marx’s philosophy of history, but both captured something significant about the politics of mass society, a concept that now seems to lend itself to historical investigation in its own right. It is not clear how much of this position was Mayer’s own before he left Germany. It informed much of the content of the book Max Weber and German Politics which he published in 1944, but it is also clear from his earlier correspondence that he had established this assessment of Tocqueville soon after he came to London in 1936 with his wife, Lola, an antiquarian bookdealer in Berlin (and later London) and a political activist in her own right. Once in Britain, Mayer began to establish an expanding network of political and intellectual connections centred on the London School of Economics and, in particular, the circles associated with R. H. Tawney, Harold Laski, Kingsley Martin and TLS “Masse” (Mass), 1931 by Franz Wilhelm Seiwert Michael Sonenscher is a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. His most recent book is JeanJacques Rousseau: The division of labour, the politics of the imagination and the concept of federal government, 2020 Richard Crossman. Quite a large number of the papers now at St Andrews contain correspondence with these people and it is possible that one or other of them helped to provide the initial opportunity to produce a new, complete edition of Tocqueville’s works that Mayer began to envisage and discuss in the two or three years before the start of the Second World War. At this distance, there is something rather astonishing in the idea that a German political refugee, based in London, could talk the French into producing an authorized French edition of the collected works of Alexis de Tocqueville. Mayer, and the French publishing house Gallimard, made it happen (as also, in a more muted way, did Faber & Faber, leaving several unpublished letters from T. S. Eliot among Mayer’s papers). By the time that Mayer died, Tocqueville’s collected works and correspondence ran to some twenty volumes (the final three volumes of the whole edition are still in the press, now under the editorial guidance of the French Tocqueville scholar Françoise Melonio). It is clear, however, also from the archive in St Andrews, that both Mayer and Gallimard had quite a lot of backup, partly from the French state and the members of the various academic committees established to oversee the work, but also from a number of British and American funding bodies, most durably and substantially the American Rockefeller Foundation. Under their combined aegis, Tocqueville came to belong as much to the postwar, postcolonial, Cold War world as to the history and politics of the nineteenth century. In this sense, Mayer’s enterprise, like some of the correspondence that survives among his papers, belonged to the intellectual and political world of figures like Raymond Aron, Christopher Dawson, David Riesman, Edward Shils and Isaiah Berlin. Part of the story of that enterprise, in both its personal and its geopolitical dimensions, can now be found at St Andrews. Mayer’s activities both during and immediately after the Second World War form a significant part of the St Andrews archive. His papers contain a great deal of information about his involvement in British wartime propaganda with long discussions of the type of radio broadcast most likely to attract the attention of German listeners. There is also a fascinating correspondence with Churchill and his assistants reporting on prevailing conditions in Germany and speculating about the prospects for Germany and the rest of Europe once the war had come to an end. Among these correspondents were Clement Attlee, Bruce Lockhart, Robert Vansittart, Stafford Cripps and Richard Crossman. It would be well worth knowing more about the content and scale of these activities and discussions, as well as their bearing on Mayer’s later interests in the cinema and, more broadly, on what he, like many others, usually called mass society. Before populism, there was mass society. Although it goes without saying that Mayer’s intellectual and sociological concerns centred on the latter, not the former, it is still worth thinking about – and trying to work out – how far, and in what ways, the politics of mass society might be said to be different from the politics of populism or, more broadly, democratic politics as such. Mayer knew nothing of Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram, but he did write two books on the cinema and popular culture and, in 1955, edited a translation of a book by a German sociologist, Karl Bednarik, on the values and way of life of “the young worker today”. From time to time, in the interstices of his Tocqueville work, he planned to write something about the subject of values, where they came from and what they were supposed to be and do, although nothing seems to have come of this. It was, in a sense, a subject that fitted the story of an improvised and determined life. Something of the extraordinarily rich intellectual and personal context in which it unfolded, and many of the surprising twists and turns that led from Berlin to Stoke Poges (where Mayer died), can now be found among his papers in St Andrews. n 29

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M E M O I R S & P O L I T I C S

Resist rottenness Global crisis and a Swedish family

SARA HUDSTON OUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE Scenes of a family and a planet in crisis MALENA AND BEATA ERNMAN, SVANTE AND

GRETA THUNBERG 277pp. Allen Lane. £16.99. NO ONE IS TOO SMALL TO MAKE A

DIFFERENCE GRETA THUNBERG 136pp. Allen Lane. £14.99.

WAITING FOR GRETA THUNBERG to speak in Bristol earlier this year, the cameras kept focusing on an eye-catching knitted doll, borne aloft in the crowd on a bamboo cane. It was a simple rendition of Greta iconography: yellow coat, brown wool plaits, angry eyes, a sign saying “Skolstrejk för Klimatet”.

Who is Greta Thurnberg? The person who finally appeared on the podium at College Green looked much younger than seventeen. She was shorter and slighter than the other youth climate strikers, and the microphone stand towered over her head.

Greta’s combination of anorak, woolly hat, schoolgirl hair and unmade-up face is not a style generally favoured by British teenagers. But her body language is even more different than her clothes. Although she appears shy, she lacks the genuflections towards power expected of young women in Western culture. It may be this silent absence of submission that older people, men and women but especially men, find so challenging.

Watching the Bristol event live on BBC West’s Facebook page, I could see a simultaneous stream of angry comments from older viewers, most of them men. They were cross because Thunberg had a mobile phone, wore clothes she hadn’t hand-made herself, travelled to Bristol by diesel train – diesel, that is, rather than electric – and used domestic electricity. All these were cited as free choices and therefore marks of deep environmental hypocrisy.

According to these commentators, Thunberg’s greatest crime was being young. They were enraged by the idea that younger generations might look to her for leadership, rather than listening to older people. Teenagers in general were too selfish, too focused on their gadgets, too indulged: “WHAT A HYPOCRITE”, wrote one man. “It’s hilarious, all these school kids preaching to us oldies that we ruined the planet! Back in the 60s and 70s and 80s not a plastic bottle to be seen it was all glass that were reused, pop bottles taken back to the shop … I think these youngsters need to take a look in a recycled mirror and think was it my wasteful generation who are ruining the planet.”

Versions of this folk tale about our supposedly thrifty past generally appear in every comment thread about the environment. It’s not just social media; the myth is a staple of grassroots print outlets, cropping up frequently in parish magazines, those trusty almanacs of older, predominantly white, conservative thought. These accounts generally shift aspects of life arguably experienced in the 1940s to a more recent period. It’s typical that the Bristol man claimed plastic bottles weren’t used in the 1970s and 80s. Others remember differently: when the novelist and children’s writer Russell Hoban visited Paxos in September 1978, he found it

28

littered with plastic rubbish. “Beautiful Ionian island in the sparkling blue sea and it’s got plastic mineralwater bottles all over it”, he recalled in an essay from 1983, “Pan Lives”. “Why do perfectly good children become such rotten grown-ups?” he asked.

Our House Is on Fire is a story of resistance against rottenness. It’s largely told by Malena Ernman with contributions from her husband Svante Thunberg, and is about their two daughters, Greta and Beata, who are also credited as co-authors. It tells how at the age of eleven, Greta stopped eating and speaking, unable to cope with the dissonance she perceived in the world around her. Ernman writes: “What happened to our daughter can’t be explained simply by a medical acronym or dismissed as ‘otherness’. In the end she simply could not reconcile the contradictions of modern life”.

Originally published in Sweden as Scener ur hjärtat (Scenes from the Heart), the book first appeared in August 2018, three days after Greta began her school strike outside the Swedish parliament. Named after a speech she gave to the World Economic Forum at Davos in January 2019, Our House Is on Fire adds an account of her protest up until Sweden’s election day on September 10, 2018.

When the book was published initially, Ernman was the celebrity in the family, an acclaimed opera singer who had also represented Sweden in the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest. The book is divided into “scenes” rather than chapters, in a nod to her performance background. This expanded and updated edition is inevitably clouded by hindsight. We know how much Greta has eclipsed her mother’s fame in the past two years. These days, Ernman is more likely to be known internationally as Greta’s mum than as an artist in her own right. It is Greta’s story we want to hear most; what is she like, how did she become such a figurehead?

But Ernman wants to tell us about the climate emergency. Given our curiosity about Greta’s life, Malena’s philosophizing can become wearing at times, even if you share her viewpoint. Take this from Scene 70, entitled “Healing”:

The planet is suffering from a serious disease and we need to initiate extensive medical protocols immediately. We need urgent care. But instead – in the best case – we have chosen faith healing as our treatment method. There is no insight into the illness. Not a trace. And so on, all in the same staccato style. Ernman acknowledges the mismatch between what we want to hear and what she needs to say. In Scene 42, she dramatizes an exchange between Greta and her father as they discuss feedback on an early draft. Svante says: “Okay, there are some who say the reading gets a bit heavy around Scene 41; they think it’s a lot more fun when you and Beata are present. Can

TLS

A public artwork depicting Greta Thunberg, Bristol, 2019

“Few of us want to read a boring book, however important its message

Sara Hudston is a writer living in rural Dorset. She has been part of Extinction Rebellion since 2018 and gives the “Heading for Extinction” talk. She is a Guardian Country Diarist and writes occasionally for the Dark Mountain project something be added there?” He asks: “Can we write something about you instead?” This is Greta’s response: “‘No,’ she replies curtly. ‘Lots of personal and other stuff comes later. Mum’s burn-out and all the things people love to read about celebrities. This is a book about the climate and it should be boring. They’ll have to put up with it’”.

That’s the crux of the whole book and the dilemma that the Ernman-Thunberg family confronts. They have to be interesting in order to be heard. Few of us want to read a boring book, however important its message. Our brains crave stories and characters. Scientific facts are hard work without personal context and narrative drive. This inclination to prioritize certain kinds of information above others is, of course, a reason why we are facing a climate emergency. We’d rather hear about how an indomitable child found her voice and spoke truth to power, her family’s struggles to overcome stress disorders, even the faithful love of the family dogs, than scary facts about the planet.

Being interesting, however, also has its perils. Conspiracy theorists believe that Greta’s compelling public image was manufactured in order to achieve some devious aim. They accuse her of being a puppet controlled by sinister forces plotting a global eco-fascist super-state. Ernman says: “We get death threats on social media, excrement through the letterbox, and social services report that they have received a great number of complaints against us as Greta’s parents”. Much of this hatred and suspicion seems to arise from the family’s success at communicating, almost irrespective of what they actually say. Of all the family members, Greta attracts the most criticism because she is the one to whom we listen and respond the most.

How does Greta catch our attention so ably? She has the gift of brevity. Her collection of speeches, No One Is too Small To Make a Difference, is a brilliantly concise meld of current eco-thinking and climate science. When she spoke at Extinction Rebellion’s Declaration of Rebellion in October 2018, she said in about ten minutes what takes nearly two hours in XR’s official introductory talk. She is also highly quotable. Slogans such as “Unite behind the science”, “I am too young to do this” and “Asperger’s is not a disease, it’s a gift” have appeared on thousands of protest banners around the world. (Thunberg was diagnosed with high-functioning autism, which she refers to as having Asperger’s.)

Who knows how Greta’s story, or ours, will play out over the next few years? When she spoke to the European Parliament in Brussels on March 4 this year, the Italian MEP Pietro Fiocchi addressed her, he said, “as a father giving advice to a daughter”. His advice was impossible: “Go back to school and go back to normal life”. n

JUNE 19, 2020

I M A G E S

A K G

;

T H O M A S / A L A M Y

L E E

©

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