rainer emig
than of essential or transcendental certainties and guarantees), the decision to kill
(whicheven in war is clearly called ‘murder’) leads to guilt. This guilt must be
consciously accepted if the decision is to be an ethical one. Making a decision
to kill here does not mean being good or acting ethically; it is merely called
‘necessary’—in the same way that an authoritarian liberty is not seen as desirable
and utopian, but as the only likely outcome of the struggle, despite its drawbacks.
The supposedly irresponsible propagandist statement is part of a careful debate,
and it never presents itself as ideal. On the contrary, like most statements in ‘Spain
1937’, it is tinged not only with a feeling of fatigue, but also with irony. Among
its intertextual ancestors is Lenin’s supposed description of Western intellectuals
who excuse the excesses of the Russian Revolution as useful idiots in the struggle to
achieve communism. Considering that ‘Spain 1937’ implicitly views a communist
position as untenable, because it wrongly releases the individual and the collective
from responsibility, the ‘necessary murder’ is as ironic as it is ethically complex.
Even the revised term ‘the fact of murder’ retains this complexity. A fact,
etymology tells us, is that which is made, not that which is given or inevitable. It
thusresultsfromthesameethicalchoiceasthe‘necessarymurder’,onlyitsseemingly
more ‘objective’ rhetoric cleverly disguises this fact. Auden himself clearly felt that
neither term was eventually adequate to express the dilemma he wanted ‘Spain 1937’
toconvey.Thattheconcludingtwoversesofthecontroversialstanzatalkaboutspent
powers, a boring meeting, and—most importantly—‘the flat ephemeral pamphlet’
is more than telling. ‘Spain 1937’ was originally published in pamphlet form. The
text declares its own impotence, and even potential failure. Yet it does not end
there, and this is important. In the same way as doubts about the possible outcome
of the struggle for the Spanish Republic do not free the individual or the collective
from the responsibility to make decisions on this struggle and take action, the poem
is not allowed to conclude in a complacent lament on its own insignificance.
The images that dominate its twenty-second (and penultimate) stanza and the last
one of its fifth part—traditionally the catastrophe of a tragedy—are all concerned
with inadequacy, and expressed in terms like ‘makeshift’, ‘scraping’, ‘Fumbled’, and
‘unsatisfactory’. But they are also concerned with community—more precisely,
and now less abstractly, with comradeship. Consolation is what starts off this stanza,
a term that could also represent a less regressive and nostalgic outlook on a possible
aftermath of the conflict than the British middle-class fantasies of the previous
stanzas. Consolation is, of course, a highly ethical affair, and one that works only
by deciding and acting, never by insisting on selfhood or higher truths. Sharing is
the second ethically loaded term introduced by the penultimate stanza of ‘Spain
1937’. Although it is part of a rather cliched wartime scenario of cigarettes and ́
card games in a candlelit barn, it also stands for justice and the fair distribution of
wealth, whose absence was one of the causes of the Spanish conflict.
After accusing Orwell of machismo, one also has to identify Auden as a
mongerer in cliches of male friendship which pander both to his homosexuality ́