Ignoble Nobel

Via Power Line, Stephen Schwartz has written in the Weekly Standard of the Swedish Academy's decision to award the 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature to the Austrian communist Elfriede Jelinek.

According to Mr. Schwartz:

"Ms. Jelinek's main recent work is a play, Bambiland, described as 'a strident attack' on the U.S. intervention in Iraq. Published in Austria in 2003, it has been translated into English and will doubtless soon appear on the Anglo-American stage. Swedish Academy representative Horace Engdahl, laboring under the belief that the whole world can be fooled forever, disingenuously announced that the award should not be considered a political one. 'When that play came out, this decision was--if not already made--then well under way,' he said.

"But Engdahl went on to describe Bambiland as showing 'how patriotic enthusiasm turns into insanity,' adding, 'she's completely right about that.' The Swedes are big experts on patriotism--they sold iron ore to the Nazis while claiming to be neutral in World War II. But you already knew that."

Jelinek was a member of the Austrian Communist Party from 1974 until 1991, of which Schwartz writes: "One must know something of the history of European Communism to realize how despicable such a political option would appear to Austrians. The Austrian Communist party was the only one in the continent never to attract a noticeable following, and never to play a significant role in any historic event. After Soviet troops were withdrawn from the occupation zone of Austria in 1955, the Austrian Communist party was little more than a KGB network."

When I was teaching in the Great Books Program at the University of Michigan in the early '90s, not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the director was more or less forced to substitute the abysmal work of East German communist Christa Wolf for a Greek play. (Grist for another blog.) A professor from the German department dutifully lectured for several days on the tragedies of the GDR (German Democratic Republic, or DDR in German). But they weren't the tragedies you might imagine -- not the construction of the Wall, the murder of persons daring to attempt a crossing into freedom, the Stasi, or the denial of human rights by the Stalinist regime. No, that was all wonderful. What was tragic was that East Germany collapsed before it had a chance to mature.

Never mind that Wolf was an informer to the Stasi, the dreaded secret police; nor that she lived the high life in such oppressive towns as Berkeley, owned a laptop (unheard of in the GDR in those days), and was an awful writer.

A friend attended a meeting of academics in Ann Arbor in the immediate aftermath of the Wall's fall and was astounded to discover scores of long-faced, depressed professors who lamented the end of the glorious experiment.

I've often commented to friends that those of us who bear a few scars from the academy risk coming off as reactionaries who grossly exaggerate campus politics when we report such things to the outside world. Surely, they must think, things couldn't be that bad in those leafy college towns. Unfortunately, the Swedish Academy isn't an anomaly when it comes to academically-oriented institutions; it's simply run-of-the-mill, but with more money and a better PR firm.