American Views Abroad


Thursday, February 17, 2005
 
In Part Two of Timebends, Arthur Miller talks about his first wedding (to a Catholic) and meeting her relatives in Ohio in 1940. '....the serenity of that scene begins to tremble as I look at it more closely after nearly half a century. I was far less secure than I have accustomed myself to believe, and the reasons were in great part political.' He recalls how Ohio back then was 'deep in isolationism' and convinced it had no business in another European war. Nor did Miller want the US to enter the conflict but for more radical reasons. He thought the war was 'a new version of the old imperialist conflict of the previous world war.' He was troubled by the ambiguity of the situation. The obvious evil of Hitlerism 'was obvious to us in New York. The further into the country one moved, however, the more human Hitler seemed to look, simply another warlike German leader who was out to avenge his country's defeat of 1918, a not entirely dishonorable ideal, come to think of it, and in any case not our business to interfere with.'

'In short, my conscience was muddled... The end of all this inner turmoil was......it deepened the presumption that should I ever win an audience it would have to be made up of all the people, not merely the educated or sophisticated, since it was this mass that contained the oceanic power to smash everything, including myself, or to create much good. By whatever means, I had somehow arrived at the psychological role of mediator between the Jews and America, and among Americans themselves as well. No doubt as a defense against the immensity of the domestic and European fascistic threat, which in my depths I interpreted as the threat of my own extinction, I had the wish, if not yet the conviction, that art could express the universality of human beings, their common emotions and ideas. And I already had certain clues here in Ohio that at bottom we were all pretty much the same.' (Timebends, pages 81-83)

Last Sunday was the 60th anniversary of the horrible bombing of Dresden. Thousands of citizens wore a white rose in remembrance of that disaster, but also to refute any rewriting of history that a march of several hundred neo-Nazis would attempt to do.

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