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APPLES AND ORANGES

In Praise of Comparisons

On February 21st, 1822, near the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, the Italian writer Silvio Pellico, famous for his play Francesca da Rimini, was sentenced to death. Since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the Austrians had been running the show in Lombardy and Veneto, the northern part of what forty years later was to become a united Italy, and they maintained their authority the hard way, with police interventions and active censorship. The literary and journalistic circles in which Pellico lived and moved were populated with freethinking anti-Austrian liberals, both independence activists and what we would nowadays call ‘critical intellectuals’. More or less secret meetings of like-minded individuals were routinely organized, and were soon branded as subversive ‘Carbonarism’ by the Austrian secret police, which followed up with heightened police readiness from 1819 onwards. Under the leadership of the brilliant Tyrolean jurist Antonio Salvotti, a special commission was established in Venice charged with tracking down, prosecuting, and condemning the participants. Dozens of arrests were made, and Pellico was among those to land in prison after being detained on Friday October 13th, 1820, on suspicion of high treason.

Pellico’s death sentence was commuted to fifteen years carcere duro and later reduced to seven and a half years, but given the circumstances in which he was obliged to sit out his time—in the dark and dreary dungeons of Spielberg Castle in Moravia—it’s nothing short of a miracle that the fragile Pellico managed to survive. His renowned prison memoir Le mie prigioni (1832) details the period.

Before being removed by gondola and then by coach to the sinister Spielberg on March 25th, 1822, Pellico was granted permission to write a few letters. He used the opportunity to pen a couple of lengthy missives to his father and an exceptionally groveling word of thanks to the infamous Salvotti, outrageously implausible in its hypocrisy. The same is true for the following passage from a letter dated March 23rd, 1822, addressed to the Sardinian vice-consul in Venice:

To the consolation I ask you to convey to my parents, I request in addition that you adjoin the fact of which you are well aware, namely that I have always been treated here with the most generous kindness.

I find it impossible to read this passage without being reminded of a similar declaration of farewell penned by Sigmund Freud as he was preparing to leave for England with his family, where he was to spend the last years of his life. After the Austrian Anschluss of 1938 the Freud family had become surrounded by the exuberant anti-Semitism to which the Austrian and German Nazis had now surrendered themselves as one. Before the authorities would let the elderly Freud go, they insisted that he—like so many others shamelessly harassed into leaving their country—make a statement confirming that the Gestapo had treated him with respect. Freud did indeed sign such a declaration, and in a fit of cynical humor he added the following in his own handwriting:

I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone.

The question is whether we are actually at liberty to draw such a historical parallel, between Pellico’s farewell declaration and that of Freud. Pellico was a writer who objected to the foreign occupation of his country, something about which he conversed and corresponded with others; Freud was a Jewish doctor who maintained an extensive international network. Those were their only faults. Both were scandalously treated, a reality both denied in writing in the most incredibly polite terms on the occasion of their forced departure from their homeland. Clearly neither was free to write about the reality of the situation, although from alternative sources we are familiar with the details.

These would indeed appear to be similarities, but the prevailing objection argues that such comparisons are lame, because the historical circumstances in which Pellico was transported to prison by the state police and the historical situation in which Freud was expelled from his country by the secret state police are too different. But what is it that would make drawing this comparison so inappropriate? Would it be morally objectionable? Does it run counter to academic principles? Is the objection based exclusively on the one-hundred and sixteen years that separate the events? On the fact that Austria in 1822 and Austria in 1938 are totally incomparable? So what do we mean when we say that a comparison is ‘lame’?

The accusation of lameness is often leveled at comparisons, including those between peoples—Greeks and Turks, for example, or Jews and Palestinians—and books, such as the parallels drawn by American literary critics between De ontdekking van de hemel—The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch and the work of Homer and Dante. Those who venture such comparisons are destined to face fierce resistance and will have to fight their corner. The most ingrained resistance tends to be reserved for the historical comparison, and anyone proposing the comparative method is likely to find historical comparison the toughest nut to crack. But let’s try our luck.

The Christmas 2010 edition of the Dutch weekly Vrij Nederland published an interview with Job Cohen, leader at the time of the Dutch Labor Party, in which he responded with ‘yes’ when asked whether present-day Muslims in the Netherlands were being excluded in the same way as the Jews had been at the beginning of the German occupation. His statement drew intense fire from various quarters. Writing in the national daily de Volkskrant, writer Joost Zwagerman labeled Cohen’s words ‘defamatory’, while Rotterdam rabbi Raphael Evers—an authoritative spokesman among Dutch Jews—suggested in the Nieuw Israëlietisch Weekblad that Cohen’s comparison did an injustice both to Muslims and to the history of the Jews in the Netherlands.

Another historical comparison was put to the test a little earlier by Nexus1 front man Rob Riemen, who in an essay entitled De eeuwige terugkeer van het fascism—The Eternal Return of Fascism claimed that the ideas and political movement of Geert Wilders are strongly reminiscent of the early days of fascism. Vigorous rejections followed from both historians and politicians, arguing that such comparisons should not be made because the differences between now and then are too significant.

1. Nexus is an internationally oriented Dutch cultural think tank connected to Tilburg University.

The more frequent and vigorous the opposition to historical comparison, the more I am convinced that drawing such parallels can be interesting and informative, especially when the comparison is related to contemporary events. Those who make historical comparisons from a present day perspective associate a current feature of the age, which is still happening and thus not yet crystallized, with past events, the course and consequences of which are known to us. While we are still unclear on the future significance of an ongoing reality, the comparison supplies an interpretative, perhaps even cautionary reference to one or more events from the past of which we know the outcome.

An example: after Bernard Welten, then chief commissioner of the Amsterdam police, publicly stated that he would not enforce the burka ban announced by prime minister Rutte’s first cabinet, the country’s politicians descended on him in unison, Geert Wilders tweeting at their head: Welten was expected to do his job and enforce the law. But a brief letter to the editor written by a resident of The Hague and published in NRC Handelsblad on January 10th, 2011, drew a comparison: ‘If we had had a police commissioner like Bernard Welten in 1940-’45, who insisted that the police should not drag Jews from their homes, there may have been a little less suffering and a little less post-war critique of the force.’ Lo and behold: a fine example of a historical comparison that ignores the differences and hones in on an issue by way of comparison, thereby communicating a point of view that might otherwise not have been so simple to expose, or at least not with the same succinctness. In short, the inherently selective and simplifying effect of the historical comparison is an uncommonly potent way of making something clear.

But isn’t simplification ultimately lethal if we want to acquire a proper understanding of the differences between the past and the present? Not in my opinion. In the aforementioned Job Cohen interview, in which the former mayor of Amsterdam recounts that his mother felt just as excluded at the beginning of the war as he imagined Dutch Muslims today feel excluded, the differences between then and now are as clear as day. The active and systematic exclusion of Jews by the German occupier was followed by round-ups, imprisonments, forced deportations, and intentional, wholesale annihilation. Everyone knows—including Job Cohen himself—that while the comparison with 1940-’45 was apropos, there is nothing to suggest that the same events are likely to present themselves today. Cohen’s historical comparison clearly does not state that then and now are the same, rather it signals a parallel between the feeling of exclusion experienced by one group at the beginning of the 1940s and another group in the present day. Those who draw a comparison between Napoleon’s Russian campaign and Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa don’t have to apologize for the countless differences between 1812 and 1941 as long as they do something meaningful and convincing with the parallel they posit. Likewise, Job Cohen should not be criticized for the aspects of his historical comparison that ‘fall short’. He should be judged rather on the insight he was able to derive from the comparison, to the extent that he considered it to hold true.

Another advantage of historical comparison is that it promotes the transparency and falsifiability of an argument. Engaging in polemic with implicit claims is much trickier. The majority of historical parallels tend to be implicit, in most instances already locked into the language itself. In my description of the environment in which the Italian Carbonarist Silvio Pellico lived, I spoke about ‘freethinking liberals’ and ‘independence activists’. My interpretation of Carbonarism can be determined immediately on the basis of my choice of words. I could have spoken about ‘traitors’, ‘conspirators’, and ‘rebels against legitimate Austrian authority’. My terminology alone draws an implicit comparison with other European revolutions and liberation movements. The more explicit I make the comparison, the clearer my position becomes to the reader and the easier it is to call me to account for my interpretation.

A final advantage of historical comparison is its capacity to expose in shorthand how a person approaches a given subject. Cohen’s comparison between the position of Muslims in the Netherlands today and that of Dutch Jews at the beginning of the German occupation clearly revealed—and with greater clarity than any contemporary description—the associations, sensitivities, and reference framework with which the prominent Dutch Labor Party executive approached issues of immigration and integration. What you and I think about the background of his ‘yes’ is irrelevant; the important point is that the comparison grants us an illuminating insight into Job Cohen’s moral interior. Those who agree with him are likely to be more receptive to his ideas, those who disagree will be better prepared to challenge him.

In other words: long live historical comparisons, especially when they fall short, as they almost always do. Their limitations are precisely what makes them so interesting and useful. No one has to explain that the Austrian Nazis who were so eager to cooperate with the German Gestapo to expel undesirable elements such as Sigmund Freud are not the same Austrians as those who hunted down the Carbonarists in Northern Italy. And yet, the comparison between 1822 and 1938 articulates the fact that in both cases the police actions were based on unquestioning obedience to an authority and national interest taken to be absolute, and that each of the two victims wrote highly questionable declarations about the treatment they had received at the hands of the police.

What the comparison between these incidents demonstrates is that neither instance is historically unique. It may be that this parallel nourishes a particularly negative image of the Austrian and—if you like—the pan-German police mentality. Alternatively, the comparison might indicate that in both cases there was indeed an awareness of good and evil, but that historical circumstances sometimes weigh more than humanitarian principles. All such arguments and insights can be formulated and discussed thanks to the comparison made.

By tradition, historiography has always been more preoccupied with distinguishing features than with shared features, more with the specific than the general. One early exception was Plutarch, author of parallel biographies of illustrious Romans and Greeks. However, his primary concern was more prescriptive than historical, intended to encourage his Roman readers to emulate their illustrious Greek counterparts. It was only with the Enlightenment and its more objectified and early modern world view, and thereafter the emergence of the social and economic sciences in the nineteenth century reinforced by nationalistic rivalry between the European nations, that comparison came to be favored as a research model. Sociologist Émile Durkheim and economist-historian Max Weber are particularly noted for their propagation of comparison as an interpretive method. New sorts of historical data, for example in the form of statistics, made previously unthinkable comparisons possible. After the First World War, when historians like Marc Bloch endeavored to determine on the basis of comparative analysis how it was possible, against divergent national backgrounds, for such a large-scale conflict to erupt, ‘comparative history’ evolved into an independent discipline, resulting in comprehensive surveys like Arnold Toynbee’s twelve volume history of the world and studies in which the decline of ‘the West’ (Oswald Spengler) were described. But in reality, such excessively generalistic studies were a distortion of the comparative perspective because the terms of the comparison were not always specified with equal clarity.

After the Second World War, the comparative perspective continued to flourish. Take the history of the industrial revolution, a subject that would be difficult to cover without an international comparative perspective. At the same time, however, a countermovement was gathering force among historians: comprehensive international meta-histories—with their abundance of generalistic interpretations—made way for ‘micro-histories’, in which the smallest possible constituent, the strictly particular, was studied as a model for history’s grander narratives. Examples here include Carlo Ginzburg’s Il formaggio e i vermi—The Cheese and the Worms, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, and from the Netherlands A.Th. van Deursen’s Het dorp in de polder - The Village in the Polder about the village of Graft in the seventeenth century.

In approaching their subject, modern observers of art, literature, or history always have a choice between two trajectories: they can generalize, or they can particularize. In other words, they can be deductive or inductive. People like me who enjoy comparisons tend to prefer the particularizing, inductive approach: first explore the unique, and from there move on to the universal. If both terms of a comparison are described with sufficient clarity, it creates two narratives that can be paralleled with one another, and the connections between them can be explored.

The present volume offers the reader a varied collection of pieces in which the comparative perspective is key to the debate. Whether the focus is on history, literature or art, I have sought, sometimes quite explicitly, at other times more implicitly, for a ‘stereoscopic’ view, like the two slightly differing photographs that together produce a single combined image in a stereoscope. Thanks to the difference between the two photographs, the resulting image acquires depth, a third dimension. My hope, therefore, is that these comparisons, parallels, and juxtapositions will similarly provide depth, and will offer a perspective on remoter truths.

Every historical event, every life, every book, indeed every subject is by definition unique, and as such can only be compared with itself. But since there is little to derive from such a procedure, comparison with other historical events, lives, books and subjects is both necessary and illuminating. No one ever learned much from comparing apples with apples.