We Are Like Fire, by Mike Goodenow Weber: An Intellectual Review
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is a seasoned writer of psychology and speeches. On Substack he has a reputation for being an exceptionally systematic reader. He is also a fan of Timeless: something “we here” deeply appreciate. Check out his Substack here,Though a walker of scenically different parts of Planet Earth and the human mind than I, Mike is also a fan of Western civilization; both of us would like to see it restored ever since our civilizational birthright was rendered defunct by malicious deconstructionists. The title of his first novel, Renaissance Radio, is no alliterative coincidence. And neither is the Renaissance Theater, a key setting for Weber’s second novel, We Are Like Fire.
I like to think that We Are Like Fire is the product of a marriage between the historical novel and the psychological novel overseen by Ayn Rand as priestess. By that I don’t mean Weber is an Objectivist in any way (and unless I explicitly say so, an Ayn Rand reference is never an insult here at Timeless); I mean that We Are Like Fire is a novel of ideas akin to Rand’s novels. But while Rand promoted her own philosophy through carefully seeded and structured novels - I always have my personal favorite in mind, The Fountainhead - Weber utilizes We Are Like Fire to celebrate psychologist Abraham Maslow.
Many will have heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. A very relevant concept in our era of inflation and economic instability. Does your life feel unstable, unfulfilled? Then perhaps one of these needs is lacking.
Take note of self-actualization, near the top.
One of We Are Like Fire’s strongest suits is its capacity as a Maslovian novel of ideas. I found this very refreshing. Apart from science fiction, the conspiracy against objectivity in literature over the last few decades (a bit of which has to do with an unhinged anti-Rand lobby) has not been kind in providing incentives for the novel of ideas. One glance at novel production over the last fifteen years is akin to visiting the Museum of Subjectivity. Of course novels rely on subjectivity to realize literary humanism. But subjectivity is a sum part of the greater chemistry of the art of the novel.
Maslow, actually, can assist us in explaining the issue here. If the novel has a hierarchy of needs - and I think it’s safe to say it does - the subjective novel of the last fifteen years and its fixation of subjectivity alone is akin to fulfilling only one of Maslow’s needs in the above pyramid.
A second strong suit is historicity. Weber has a good feel for certain epochs of the 20th century. While his first novel is set in the Jazz Age of the 1920s - Louis Armstrong fans should add it to their list - We Are Like Fire is set in the late 1950s. Much as we like to picture how quaint that time was in our popular imagination, a lot was happening back then. Weber also understands the Shutter Island side of the 50s, and in We Are Like Fire several historical currents converge - the rise of popular Holocaust fiction authors like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi; the postwar German state of denial about the Third Reich preceding the Adolf Eichmann trial; the emotional consolidation of America’s enduring horror of and fascination with the Shoah (as it was also likely to be called back then); the rise of American middle class life and its cultural empowerment; and the experiments that eventually convinced academia that to resist totalitarianism, we had to scientifically validate psychological slavery and assume no bad actors in the future would ever use this information in any bad way.
Like by trying to convince people they have no individuality or agency, for instance, so that totalitarians who believe only in power can enslave people more easily. I digress, but then I don’t: for while this novel is characteristically American it does not engage in the naive American cultural impulse of “it can’t happen here.”
While Weber has a sound amount of historicity - it’s not too heavy in detail, very digestible - I think he could up the ante some more in his future novels. Historicity is clearly Weber’s Excalibur, artistically speaking. And a sword like Excalibur needs to be wielded powerfully. Or like James Ellroy, for that matter.
A third strong suit is its open intertextuality. Meta-segments that, together, add extra justification for We Are Like Fire’s reason to exist in the material sense. As Italo Calvino designed his early novellas like The Cloven Viscount to hold the aura of lost, ancient manuscripts found in an attic, We Are Like Fire, when found in a bookshop, has the capacity of conveying the essence of a journal (with clippings?) compiled long ago in a 1950s suburban home. The last, twinkling memento of an otherwise-unknown individual who tried to heal the German nation when it needed healing.
For that dimension of physical artistry to be maximized, this novel will have to have a different cover for its second edition. But that’s not important right now.
Other tidbits one can find in the novel include a segment of an Adolf Hitler interview, a record of an electric shock test and - the pièce de résistance - a play, or meta-play, within the novel inspired by the life of mystical German poet Friedrich Hölderlin. A titan in literature whose legacy has been most unfairly memory-holed in the Anglosphere. (Though to be fair, translating Hölderlin must be a huge challenge)
The benefit of a novel of ideas is that their novel can be a story not just of one clash - that of the characters following the plot’s progression - but of two: the characters and the ideas. There are two ways to go about it: separately (as Samuel Butler did in Erewhon) or in sync with the characters (as with The Fountainhead). Weber takes more of a cue from Butler but with a greater balance between the two than Butler deemed necessary for his quasi-primitivist utopia.
The idea clash is between Maslow’s concept of self-actualization and Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman (or Ubermensch) as popularly understood in the Third Reich. The character clash follows two stages: the first between Welsh-American protagonist Ren Prothero and German-in-denial Dieter Ulrich. While the first clash is individual, the second is collective: the combined social circle of Ren and Dieter vs. other Germans-in-denial.
While we now know that Hitler as an individual was more influenced by Schopenhauer,1 Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman had an ideological appeal to both Communists as well as their offspring, the Fascists. (And would have been the focus of popular interest back in the late 1950s) Hitler’s knowledge of Nietzsche was skin-deep, but it didn’t need to be any deeper for popular consumption. Many Germans, as a result, could easily convince themselves to be conscious Nietzscheans when in fact they were tip-of-the-iceberg Nietzscheans at best.
The attraction of Nietzsche to 20th-century murderous ideologues can be traced back to Jack London’s fiction. London openly celebrated the Superman even as London himself was ostensibly egalitarian as a socialist. ( The Sea Wolf and The Iron Heel rely on Nietzschean Supermen) Those who love Jack London - and I tentatively count myself as one, being Californian - will be shocked, not unlike Dieter, by the insufferable use of Nietzschean ideas in The Iron Heel in particular. Fun fact: it was the inconsistency of the supposedly egalitarian Vladimir Lenin’s admiration of London that made a young Michel Houellebecq suspicious of Communism. The future French author of Atomized and Submission rightly saw that the hypocritical Lenin could not reconcile his maniacal desire to be a Superman with Communism’s theoretical equality for everyone following a proletarian revolution.
While the incorporation of Nietzsche into 20th-century ideology began with Communists, one of Fascism’s ideological innovations was to be more “honest” about totalitarianism’s ideological reliance upon Nietzsche. Or at least the two-dimensional understanding that passed as common currency in Nazi Germany.
In We Are Like Fire, Weber (or Ren at least) is unsympathetic to Nietzsche. This is partly out of necessity, given the era in which it is set. And partly because it’s not difficult for a morally conscientious person to dismiss Nietzsche. But the other reason Nietzsche cannot shine here is based on a pertinent question that, in my humble opinion, was answered too simplistically and by psyches ravaged by tragedy following the war: what ideas should be pursued that would lead not just to the healing of the German nation from its ideological corruption. But also lead to a postwar reconciliation?
Reconciliation is the name of the game in We Are Like Fire. Haunted by powerful and persistent ghosts of his past, Ren Prothero sees in the furthering of a Germano-American postwar reconciliation an outlet to bring peace to the specters of his life. And on top of that, Ren - like many Americans of that time - is equally disturbed and fascinated by the Shoah. (An earlier term for the Holocaust) Ren decides to do this through culture, allowing We Are Like Fire to comfortably remind the reader of the great power, sublimity, beauty and authority of the Greater Western culture. A macro-culture that includes German culture. Ren obtains grant money and stages plays to help spread the word about the Shoah and celebrate the rich German culture that had been marginalized by Nazi ideology; and in doing so, help the Germans reconnect with the sublime essence of their culture. This is a boon for the average American reader since in addition to Hölderlin We Are Like Fire also introduces us to Gotthaim Lessing, another titan of German literature whose legacy does not appear to have endured beyond the German language sphere.
Whether Weber intended it or not, the cause of rehabilitating German culture also doubles as a rehabilitation of the greater Western culture. Almost like the Steppenwolf fulfilling his unfulfilled individual dimensions, Ren and his wife Vera are (in the beginning) quietly and subconsciously guilty of not knowing much, if anything, about the great Germans of the past, including Hölderlin. Their German friends - Dieter and Gisela - have to supply them with the names. The journey to the mystical world of Hölderlin’s poetry is shared by all parties involved. (Not long after that, it’s clear in the novel that Ren has done a lot more of his homework)
Even though German literature is recognized as part of what translation scholar Michael Cronin calls the “translation triumvirate” alongside English and French, our cultural perspective of the world literature canon indicates that this is false. Cronin might have been more accurate had he cited Russian literature. For commendable as it is to hold Alexander Pushkin as high as Keats or Wordsworth in consumption as well as quality, to accept the great bard of a language like Russian in English is very unusual.
We in the Anglosphere have not fully accepted the German canon of greats into our vision of world literature the way we have with the Russians and the French. And I don’t think it’s because of Nazis. From German we have welcomed Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse and of course Goethe into our vision of world literature without hesitation. Authors who did support Nazism - like Melchior Vischer (author of the first Dadaist novel) and fantasist Hanns Heinz Ewers - are willfully forgotten, with the enduring and enigmatic exception of WWI author Ernst Jünger. But authors like Lessing, von Kleist and Hölderlin do not fall into that category.
Take Friedrich Schiller, for instance - the second-greatest poet and the first poet in the German language to live off his pen alone. His greatness in Germany is beyond question even if, like Juliusz Slowacki in Polish, Schiller is rarely more than No. 2. If I went on Amazon now - or somewhere else - I could find translations of his plays easily. (Including his version of William Tell) I could also find his essay, On The Aesthetic Education of Man. But for the longest time his poetry was only found in these weird reprints. It was only in 2019, thanks to the Schiller Institute, that new translations of his poems emerged in English again. (Those who visit Weimar will also find that unlike the Goethe Museum, the Schiller Museum only has signs in Germans) While I hope these new translations will re-introduce Schiller’s poems to a modern audience, the long absence of contemporary translations of his poetry is a huge one on the list of translation crimes.
As a traditionalist, I naturally agree with this approach. But not solely from sentiment. The best culture can only take inspiration from the best culture that came before it, as legendary critic Harold Bloom would have elaborated. Brecht, though a talented poet, was not the best Germany could offer at the time. And German literature has suffered for it since those ruminations among the rubble.
We Are Like Fire is a novel of lost opportunity. But it is not a tale of hopelessness; on the contrary, it is as positive as one gets without surrendering to the fakeness of the “happy directive.” The powers of Western civilization at its best retain their power to both inspire and heal. It was not, after all, the culture that was broken during the Second World War. It was the people whose link to their cultural inheritance was broken, along with their civilizational will. They needed the power of artistic sustenance then; and we need that sustenance today more than ever.
My source for this is Hitler’s Private Library, by Timothy Ryback.
Very cool Felix! Great that you’re doing this.
Completely changed the cover!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKW89DDJ/ref=pe_386300_440135490_TE_simp_item_image