What’s in a Text?: Intentional and Affective Fallacies and the Logical Fallacy of Arguments from Silence

Posted on by Wolfgang Childerglas
Creative Writing, Geography, Literary & Linguistics, Medieval history,, Performing arts, Regional History, Social History, Society & Culture, Travel, Visual Arts, World history,

Exegesis: Relegating the author In literary and artistic aesthetics the intentional fallacy occurs when readers or viewers use factors outside the text or visual work (such as biographical information) to evaluate its merits, rather than ignoring these “external” factors and relying solely on the textual or visual evidence of the novel, play, poem, painting, etc. to assess the work in question (what’s actually in the text and nothing outside). This key precept of the New Criticism school declares that a poem (or other work of art) does not belong to its author, it is (as stated by the term’s originators WK Wimsatt and MC Beardsley) “detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it”1⃞. Authorial intention is a non-consideration in the assessment of the work. The text or work has an objective status and its meaning belongs solely to the reading or viewing public. The reader’s task in literature, advocates of New Criticism assert, is to eschew subjective or personal aspects such as the lives and psychology of authors and literary history and focus entirely on close reading and explication of the text (A Glossary of Literary Terms (4th edition, 1981), edited by M.H. Abrams).

The intentional fallacy, elaborated in Wimsatt’s 1954 The Verbal Icon

The intentional fallacy doctrine has a corollary in the affective fallacy which adheres to the same principles. Wimsatt and Beardsley affirmed that evaluating a poem by its effects—especially its emotional effects—upon the reader, is an erroneous way of approaching the task. Giving rein to the emotions a work of art evokes in you, negates an appreciation of “the (work’s) inherent qualities and craftsmanship” that an objective analysis permits (Prince Kumar, ‘Understand Affective Fallacy from Example’, LitforIndia, 23-Dec-2023, www.litforindia.com).

(source: cornerstoneduluth.org)

Semantic autonomy, Intentionalism, Anti-intentionalism: The intentional and affective fallacies as prescriptive “rules” of hermeneutics held sway from the 1940s to the 1970s, however this is not to say that there was no pushback from scholarly dissenters. Proponents (primarily American) of what is called “Reader-response theory” reject the claims of New Criticism of this prescribed mode of interpreting and critiquing a work of literature. Some of these objected to the fallacy’s nothing outside the text rigidity for constricting exploration of all possibilities of a work’s meanings. Critic Norman Holland frames it in a psychoanalytical context, the reader, he affirms, will react to a literary text with the same psychological responses he or she brings to events in their daily lives, ie, “the immediate goal of interpretation is to fulfil (one’s) psychological needs and desires” (‘Psychological Reader-response Theory’, Nasrullah Mambrol, Literary Theory and Criticism (2016), www.literariness.org). Theorist ED Hirsch in his “Objective Interpretation” essay also took issue with the expositors of the intentional fallacy thesis, arguing that on the contrary authorial intent (intentionalism) was integral to a full understanding of the work…the only meaning that is permanent and valid is that of the author in question, the reader should confine him or herself to interpreting what the author is trying to say (E.D. Hirsch, Jr, Validity in Interpretation, 1967) .

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A quite different kind of fallacious argument is the argument from silence (Latin: argumentum ex silentio). This arises when a conclusion or inference is drawn based on an absence of statements in historical documents and source materials…the argument seeks not to challenge or rebut specific things an author includes in a book or document, but is critical of the author for something they should have said but didn’t! The most common instances of the argument from silence in practice relate to biblical debates and controversies, but a contemporary classic example of a non-theological, historical nature, one generating considerable heated discourse, concerns the 13th century merchant and explorer Marco Polo and the famous book of his travels in the East.

Medieval Venezia at the time of Marco Polo (source: Bodleian Library, Oxford)

Medieval world travelogue guru?: Known by various names including Description of the World (Divisament du monde), Book of the Marvels of the World, Il libro di Marco Polo detto il Milione, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, or simply The Travels of Marco Polo, the book is one of the most celebrated tomes in the annals of literature dealing with the experiences of travellers to distant and unknown lands. The story, told and retold in numerous languages over centuries, presents Marco and his father Niccolò and uncle Maffeo embarking on an epic road trip along the Silk Road to the court of the Great Khan in Khanbaliq (Beijing). The book recounts Marco’s travels in Cathay (North China) and Manji (South China), among other Eastern lands. The consensus among most historians is that Signor Polo, despite a tendency to exaggerate and embellish the tales of his travels2⃞, did nonetheless journey to China as he claimed in the book. The publication of Did Marco Polo Go to China? by Frances Wood in 1995 controversially swam against this tide. Wood infers serious doubts about Polo’s achievements, suggesting that despite his being away from his native Italy for the best part of a quarter-of-a-century, he never reached his intended destination China. According to Wood, he got only as far as Constantinople and the Black Sea where he accumulated all of his information on Chinese society and other Asian lands (his source material for the “Travels”) from picking the brains of visiting Persian merchants.

A page from the Polo travelogue

Doubting “Marco’s millions”: What made Wood so convinced that Marco Polo never visited China? Firstly, there is the book’s puzzling itinerary, it proceeds in a disjointed, incoherent fashion, is not uniformly chronological, has some odd detours and gets some geographical place names in China wrong. Then, while acknowledging The Travels of Marco Polo contains references to porcelain (from Fujian province), coal, rice-wine, paper currency and other items, Wood hones in on the fact that the Venetian traveller failed to mention certain other quintessentially Chinese things—namely the Great Wall of China, tea, chopsticks, cormorant fishing and the practice of foot-binding—in the pages of his “Travels’. Wood also picks up on Polo’s failure to learn Chinese during his sojourn in the Middle Kingdom. Allied to these omissions was the absence of Polo’s3⃞ name in any official Chinese document of the period, which Wood believed, further incriminated Marco as the perpetrator of a fraud.

A crumbling section of the not-so-great wall in north China built prior to Polo’s time (photo: John Man, The Great Wall)

Wood herself is perpetrating a pattern of reasoning which is problematic by recourse to an argument from silence. As Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard in The Routledge Companion to Epistemology (2010) (ISBN0-415-96219-6Routledge pp. 64–65) note, “arguments from silence are, as a rule, quite weak; there are many examples where reasoning from silence would lead us astray.” Academic critics have been quick to pinpoint the shortcomings and misconceptions in Wood’s argument. There are, they counter, manifestly valid reasons why Polo would not refer to the Great Wall, for one, it was largely not there in the period of his residency in China! The impressive edifice of the Great Wall as we think of it was primarily a product of the Ming Dynasty (from 1368, three-quarters of a century after the Polos’ stay)…what there was of the not-so-Great Wall prior to that was a much more modest, unprepossessing sight (“a discontinuous series of derelict, pounded earth ramparts”) (‘F. Wood’s Did Marco Polo Go To China?’, A Critical Appraisal byI. de Rachewiltz, http://openresearch–repository.anu.edu.au). With the matter of the Chinese penchant for tea-drinking, perhaps Polo didn’t think the topic simply sufficiently noteworthy to rate a mention4⃞. The question of the omission of foot-binding, chopsticks and Polo’s linguistic ignorance of Chinese in the travelogue can all be accounted for. China and the royal court was under Mongol control (Yuan Dynasty) in Marco’s time, accordingly Polo moved in those circles, tending not to mix with the (Han) Chinese population. and so lacked the motivation (or opportunity) to learn Chinese. Likewise, he wouldn’t have encountered many upper class Chinese women in their homes, this was the strata of society that practiced female foot-binding, not the Mongols. Again, with chopsticks, not a utensil of choice for the Mongols who Polo tended to fraternise with (Morgan, D. O. (1996). Marco Polo in China-Or Not [Review of Did Marco Polo Go to China?, by F. Wood]. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 6(2), 221–225. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25183182). As for “the Travels’” silence on fishing with cormorants, the activity was not a widespread phenomena in China during the Yuan era, confined to the remoter areas of Sichuan Province (‘Cormorant Fishing in China’, Sally Guo, China Travel (Upd. 04-April-2021), www.chinatravel.com).

MP (source: caamadi.com/de/marco-polo-in-venice)

Filtered Marco Polo – Rustichello et al: And there’s another line of thought when considerating the book’s glaring omissions, inconsistencies and inaccuracies that Frances Wood doesn’t seem to have factored into her thesis…The Travels of Marco Polo, the published book we read today, is a different beast in form and content to the original article from the late 1290s. In fact the original manuscript which Polo dictated to his amanuensis, an imaginative romance writer Rustichello de Pisa —who had licence to inject his own theatrical flourishes and flavour into Marco’s original story—was lost early on, so “the Travels” have gone on an untraceable and interminable journey through “dozens of translations of translations, none of which are necessarily accurate” (‘The Travels of Marco Polo: The True Story of a 14th-Century Bestseller’, Anna Bressanin, BBC, 09-Jan-2024, www.bbc.com). Of the 54 extant manuscripts (out of around 150 distinct copies in all languages), no two copies are entirely alike with “improvements” and edits made by each copyist and translator. We should also remember that Marco was in prison, relying on his memory to recount a multitude of events and experiences, some of which stretched back over 20 years, hardly surprising then if readers have to contend with the recollections of a not entirely reliable narrator (‘Marco Polo’s book on China omits tea, chopsticks, bound feet’, Peter Neville-Hadley, South China Morning Post, 04-Oct-2020, www.amp.scmp.com).

The Marco Polo saga has spawned a long history of film and television versions with romantic adventure taking precedence over story accuracy

Heavily redacted archives: The issue of Polo’s claim to have been an official in Kublai Khan’s service—and in particular governor of Yangzhou—was seized on by Dr Wood who pointed out that Marco’s name does not appear in any historical official Chinese archives. Rather than being necessarily proof of Marco fabricating a presence in China as Wood assumes, other factors may explain the discrepancy…no other Italian merchants known to have visited medieval China are mentioned in any Chinese sources, even the Papal envoy to the Great Khan’s court, Giovanni de Marignolli, doesn’t rate a mention (‘Marco Polo was not a swindler. He really did go to China’, Science News, 16-Apr-2012, www.sciencedaily.com). Another factor germane to this is the fact that the Ming (Han) Dynasty that succeeded the Mongol-dominated Yuan Dynasty initiated the practice of erasing the records of earlier non-Han officials (Morgan).

(source: LibriVox)

One particularly vocal critic of Did Marco Polo Go To China?, Sinologist Hans Ulrich Vogel from the University of Tübingen, produced a research paper demonstrating that Marco’s descriptions of currency, salt production and revenues from the salt monopoly in China were of a standard of accuracy and uniqueness of detail5⃞, that produces a very high level of proof that Polo had to have been in China, close to the wheels of power, to be privy to such comprehensive knowledge (www.sciencedaily.com).

Chinese salt production (source: Wellcome Images)

The “logical fallacy of weak induction”: Frances Wood’s iconoclastic book was certainly an attention-grabber, both for medieval scholars and Sinologists and for the general public, causing a furore upon its publication in 1995 and spawning several TV documentaries. China and the world of the Great Khan is a central tenet of the Marco Polo story, making it unthinkable to most scholars, almost a sacrilege, to suggest that the legendary Venetian traveller never set foot in the Middle Kingdom! The weight of the counter-argument unleashed against Wood’s thesis throws a spotlight on the hazards of trying to “treat the absence of evidence as evidence itself”, as Steven Lewis summarises the fallacious nature of the argument from silence (‘The Argument from Silence”, Steven Lewis, SES, www.ses.edu).

(image: silk–road.com)

Frances Wood, Did Marco Polo go to China? (1995, Secker & Warburg, London)

1⃞ Wimsatt and Beardsley’s 1946 ‘Intentional Fallacy’ essay to some extent has its antecedents in the earlier debate between CS Lewis and EMW Tillyard, published as The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1939), in which Lewis argued that an author’s own personality and biography has negligible to zero impact on the literary text, while Tillyard enunciated the contrary position: that an author’s own imagination and story can have an indelible influence on a work of literature

 2⃞   and there had been doubters even in Marco’s time and later about some of his more wilder and fantastic claims, earning him the epithet Il Milione or “the Millions”) (aka “Marchus Paulo Millioni”). Wood’s particular slant on Polo’s book follows the lead of earlier German Mongolists

3⃞ who had claimed to have been an emissary in the emperor’s service

4⃞ Wood herself concedes that Rustichello may have edited out references to tea on the grounds of it being “of no interest to the general public”

5⃞ and corroborated by Chinese documents

The Stronato: Casting a Long, Dark Shadow on Paraguayan History

Posted on by Wolfgang Childerglas
Comparative politics, Regional History

Paraguay’s youthful conservative political leader, Santiago Peña, won the presidential election in 2023, promising not to raise taxes, in a country beset by widespread inequality and rising extreme poverty rates. The opposition candidate did the same, grim news for the nation’s legion of poor considering that Paraguay was already an underfunded state with the lowest tax burden in South America, a circumstance which as The Guardian notes, “greatly benefits the wealthiest in society” [William Costa, “Paraguayan looks for change as election looms. But that’s not on the ballot”, The Guardian, 27-Apr-2023, www.theguardian.com].

(image: mandalaprojects.com)

Peña from the dominant Colorado (Republican) Party is on record as stating that the historic dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner was a positive for national stability and that the golpe de estado (coup d’état) that brought the army chief to power in 1954 was actually a “political agreement” [Spanish-language reports, cited in the Wikipedia article on Santiago Peña]. Peña’s controversial and heavily criticised revisionist views–sentiments mirrored by his mentor, the tainted former president Horacio Cartes—underscore the ongoing failure of the Colorado Party and Paraguay conservatism to come squarely to terms with the past𝟙, the excesses of the authoritarian despotic Stronato (or Stronismo) era of Stroessner’ rule, a dark chapter of Paraguay’s history in which the Colorados played an integral role.

Desk general: Alfred Stroessner (photo: Brazilian Report)

Caudillismo tradition: General Stroessner’s seizure of power in 1954, overthrowing the civilian Chaves government, stemmed from an internal power struggle within the ruling Partido Colorado. After a hastily arranged poll Stroessner was elected president unopposed. A military inspired coup was nothing novel for Paraguay, it had been a recurring feature of Paraguayan politics since independence–all starting with José de Francia (1814–40) whose military dictatorial rule made Paraguay an isolated hermit state–golpes were a constant threat with eight successful coups between the 1930s and 1950s and dozens of curtelazos (barrack revolts), ensuring that “militarism remains the rule rather than the exceptional state in Paraguay” [Paul C. Sondrol, “The Paraguayan Military in Transition and the Evolution of Civil–Military Relations”, Volume 19, Issue 1 (Fall 1992): http://journals.sagepub.com].

The Colorado Party maintained its own ultra-right paramilitary militias, an addition arm of the Stranato repressive appartus

Washington’s relations with Stroessner: Stroessner’s uncompromising anti-communist stance made Paraguay a valued ally for the US in the midst of the Cold War…in the mid-Fifties the president struck up a close working relationship with US ambassador Arthur Ageton who mentored Stroessner on how to best manage internal security and control. Washington money in the form of aid and military funds flowed freely and unquestioningly into Paraguay, at least until the Carter administration in the late Seventies started insisting Stroessner clean up his act in respect of Paraguay’s abysmal human rights record and rampant corruption [Klas Lundstrom, “Remembering the ‘Stronismo’: How the ghost of a brutal dictator haunts Paraguay”, Aljazeera, 29-Jun-2024, www.aljazeera.com].

Personalised fiefdom and praetorianism: Although often characterised as a military dictatorship, historians have emphasised the personalist nature of Stroessner’s rule. Stroessner’s position as head of the military was the vehicle for his attaining power, but once consolidated, El Continuador𝟚, as he was known, developed a cult of leadership based on personal authority. The president adopted a patrimonial style towards his officer corps which politicised the army…loyalty was demanded and rewarded with a share of the corrupt contraband activities widely practiced within the country𝟛.

South American Dictators Club: Pinochet & Stroessner, 1974 (source: Museo de la Buena Memoria)

At the same time spies from the secret police were used for surveillance of army officers, to identify and weed out any opponents of or potential threats to the commander-in-chief. Without any apparent external threats to Paraguay, the usual defence role of the army was subordinated to one of maintaining internal security and guarding against subversion, ie, against the threat of communist insurgence, largely extinguished by the early Sixties (Sondrol, ‘Paraguayan Military in Transition’). Andrew Nickson however argues that armed insurgency by radical groups including the Communist Party continued after this period, but was ultimately unsuccessful due largely to Stroessner’s efficient network of police informers and a ruthless counter-insurgency strategy which grossly violated the human rights of ordinary Paraguayan citizens [Andrew Nickson (01 Apr 2024): Armed opposition to the Stroessner regime in Paraguay: a review article, Small Wars & Insurgencies. DOI: 10.1080/09592318.2024.2333065].

Coalescing military, party and government: The Stronato exercised a similar domination over the Colorado Party, the sole legal political party permitted in the one–party state, which Stroessner himself headed. To further tie the various organs of his power base together under his control Stroessner made membership of the Colorado Party a necessity for all personnel of the armed forces (and for all government employees). And as with the military Stroessner obsessively surveilled the party to purge any dissident groups or individuals detected.

Privatised land monopoly: cattle ranch in the Chaco, land subjected to intensive deforestation (source: earthsight.org.uk)

Tierra mal habida, the “Ill-gotten lands”: One of the most egregious acts of the Stroessner regime was its outrageous land colonisation program, the catastrophic ramifications of which are still being acutely felt by rural Paraguayans to this day. Vast swaths of public land was divided up and handed out to the dictator’s family, to Colorado Party cronies and to supporters under a flimsy veneer of supposed “land reform” (Lundstrom). No post-Stronato governments has made any attempt at redressing this massively inequitable land monopolisation—Oxfam estimates that just 1.6% of the Paraguay population owns 80% of land —with the single exception of Fernando Lugo’s progressive Patriotic Alliance for Change government (2008–2012). Lugo came to office promising to distribute land to the teeming masses of landless campesinos but was stymied by the combined efforts of the Colorados and the Liberal Party who forced Lugo’s removal from the presidency in what amounted to a parliamentary coup.

Underworld of illegality: Smuggling, contraband, call it what you like, illicit trade between Paraguay and Brazil was another way the Stronato cashed in big. Stolen cars, alcohol, drugs, tobacco, exotic animals and more, crossed the porous border in increasingly larger quantities, facilitated by officially-approved corruption by the regime𝟜. Stroessner funnelled revenue derived this way largely into paying off military officers and politicians in return for their loyalty and collusion in his political objectives.


Ciudad del Este (hub of the underground economy) ~ originalled named Puerto Presidente Stroessner (source: Wikivoyage)

Open door for deplorables: During the Stronismo Paraguay became “a refuge for exiled dictators, drug traffickers, Nazi war criminals and other international pariahs” – a welcome haven for the likes of Anastasio Somoza (exiled Nicaraguan dictator), French heroin kingpin Auguste Ricord and Nazi death camp chief physician Josef Mangele, “ALFREDO STROESSNER: 1912–2006 / Dictator controlled Paraguay for 34 years”, Jack Epstein, SFGATE, 17-Aug-2006, www.sfgate.com].

photo: idsa.in

End of the road for El Continuador: The 1980s arrived and Stroessner, though now ageing and subject to increasing ill-health, was still firmly ensconced at the helm. Disaffection with the Stronato, both within and outside the country𝟝, however was growing, in part due to a worsening economic situation in Paraguay (a recession in 1983). Elements of the armed forces were unhappy with their lot, specifically field-grade officers who found themselves blocked from further promotion by an officer corps that Stroessner had allowed to grow top-heavy. Most seriously of all was the emergence of a division within the ruling Colorados. One group, the Militantes, sided with Stroessner in wanting a continuation of the status quo, another group, the Tradicionalistas, clamoured for change, wanting a transition away from the personalist focus on the leader. The issue that appears to have been the trigger for insurrection however was the vexed issue of succession, Alfredo’s accelerated promotion of his son Gustavo to colonel in the Air Force was taken by Stroessner’s detractors as a signal that he was jockeying his son into position to become the presidential successor (Sondrol, ‘Paraguayan Military in Transition’).

Photo image: Getty Images

Endnote: La Noche de la Candelaria The putsch against Stroessner came in February 1989 from an unexpected source, army general, Andrés Rodríguez, who had previously been a close confidante of Stroessner and the two were in-laws (Rodríguez’s daughter married Stroessner’s son). Rodríguez with Paraguay’s strongest and best-equipped army corps at his command prevailed in a battle lasting several hours with Stroessner’s 700-strong presidential escort guard. The president was arrested and with his son sent into exile in Brasilia, Brazil, never to return to his homeland. Elected president three months later, Rodríguez’s political aims were not to bring democracy to Paraguay but to liberalise society in a limited fashion, to blunt the sharp edges of Stroessner’s authoritarian system, remove the personality cult, rescind the death penalty, allow some pluralism, all while retaining the hold of the Colorado Party over politics in Paraguay [Sondrol, P. C. (2007). Paraguay: A Semi-Authoritarian Regime?  Armed Forces & Society, 34(1), 46–66. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48608804], a pattern maintained by his successors for most of the last 30 years.

𝟙 even to the point of expressing an unabashed nostalgia for the Stroessner days

𝟚 “The Continuer”…another, less flattering name bestowed on Stroessner was “the Tyrannosaur”

𝟛 Sondrol describes the Stronismo as equating with the archetypical praetorian society, with the presence of these features, “executive dominance, non-elective rule, golpes, continual military involvement in government and weakness (or absence) of effective countervailing political institutions”. The existence of an elite guard, a presidential escort regime exclusively for Stroessner’s personal protection further underscores the praetorian component of the regime

𝟜 contraband is an even greater problem in Paraguay today—a legacy of the Stronismo—especially the illicit, out-of-control trade in narcotics and cigarettes

𝟝 Stroessner had worn out his welcome in the US

Aiding and Abetting the Third Reich: Der Mitläufer, Passive and Not-so-Passive Followers and Sympathisers of the Nazis

Posted on by Wolfgang Childerglas
Biographical, Inter-ethnic relations, Regional History, Society & Culture

As part of the Denazification process (German: Entnazifizierung) after the Second World War and to facilitate the Nuremberg war crimes trial proceedings, the German people were classified into five discrete groups:

• Major offenders (Germ: Hauptschuldige)

• Offenders: activists, militants, or profiteers (Germ: Belastete)

• Lesser offenders (Germ: Minderbelastete)

• Followers (Germ: Mitläufer)

• Exonerated persons (Germ: Entlastete)

Of the five categories, Mitläufer is the most contentious…it absolves the person concerned from having committed any formal Nazi criminal activity but acknowledges that he or she participated in some form of loosely defined, indirect support of Nazi crimes, which might be as minimalist as passively sympathising with Nazi aims and goals [‘Mitläufer’, Wikipedia, en.m.wikipedia.org]. The extent of the offence actually perpetrated however didn’t always equate with the category description – as will clear from the examples below.

Nazi defendants at the International Military Tribunal (Nov. 1945) (source: National Archives and Records Administration)

The German term Mitläufer (fem: Mitläuferin)—literally meaning “with-walker” or “one walking with”—can be defined as “follower” or possibly a “passive follower”. Mitläufereffekt is derived from it, also called the Bandwagon-Effekt (effect), which refers to the effect a perceived success exerts on the willingness of individuals to join the expected success. A characteristic of the Mitläufer is he is not convinced by the ideology of the group followed but merely offers no resistance, such as for lack of courage or for opportunism (ie, giving in to peer pressure) (‘Mitläufer’).

Some observers make a further (slight) distinction from the Mitläufer typology, to allow for the Nazi Mitläufer, a fellow-traveller” (Mitreisende) who sympathised with the Nazis but only indirectly participated in Nazi atrocities such as genocide.

Famous Deutsch Mitläufer and Mitläuferin

Martin Heidegger: one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers for his pioneering work on existentialism and phenomenology, all of which has been overshadowed by his controversial association with the German Nazi Party. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 – prior to this the philosopher was fundamentally apolitical. As rector of Freiburg University he delivered a number of speeches extolling the Nazi cause and publicly expressed antisemitic opinions. At the end of the world war the knives came out for Heidegger, he was forbidden to teach and lost his West German chair of philosophy (the ban was overturned just three years later). Heidegger, perhaps because of the lofty esteem he was held in as a leading intellectual, was never submitted to any harsher retribution (such as a term of incarceration). Critics have noted Heidegger’s complete failure after 1945 to “honestly reckon with the realities of Nazi Germany’s crimes, including the Holocaust, and his own role in lending support to the regime” [Jürgen Habermas in ‘Heidegger’s Downfall’, Jeffrey Herf, Quillette, 22-Feb-2023, quillette.com]. A very full account of Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism makes it abundantly clear that he was neither a reluctant fellow-traveller nor (…) a nonpolitical scholar, a ‘child’ who got caught by the juggernaut of hideous political events [‘Heil Heidegger’, J.P. Stern, London Review of Books, Vol. 11 No.8, 20-April-1989 (Review of Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie, by  Hugo Ott), lrb.co.uk].

Heidegger, intellectual backing for the Nationalist Socialists (image: simplycharly.com)

Leni Riefenstahl: a Berlin-born actress-turned-filmmaker, one of the few German women to direct a motion picture during the Weimar period. A favourite of Hitler, Riefenstahl was an important instrument of the Nazi propaganda machine, producing highly successful propaganda documentary films like Triumph of the Will and Olympia for the Third Reich. After the war Riefenstahl was arrested and found to be a Nazi fellow-traveller, sympathetic to the Nazi movement but not a party member[ᗩ] She however avoided being charged with any crime. Riefenstahl claimed she was an “apolitical naïf” and denied any knowledge of Nazi racial policies or the Holocaust, describing a concentration camp she had visited where the Roma and Sinti were detained as “a relief and welfare camp”[ᗷ] [‘Burying Leni Riefenstahl: one woman’s lifelong crusade against Hitler’s favourite film-maker’, Kate Connolly, The Guardian, 09-Dec-2021, amp.the guardian.com].

Leni: “My favourite dictator”

Wilhelm Stuckart: to the casual observer Wilhelm Stuckart’s steady progress up the Nazi hierarchy corresponds with that of the classic career Nazi. The Nazi lawyer and senior Interior Ministry official’s fingerprints were on some of the most nefarious Nazi concoctions against humanity (eg, co-author of the Nuremberg Laws, involved in the planning of the Final Solution). For someone involved fundamentally in the framing of genocidal policies Stuckart was absurdly classified as category IV (follower), copping a sentence of just three years from the tribunal. The leniency shown to Stuckart and other accomplices, Gruner attributes to the sophisticated defence strategies employed by former Nazis and their lawyers. Only a short time after Stuckart regained his freedom he was back drafting provincial German laws, one of which ended Denazification in Lower Saxony [Gruner, Wolf. The Journal of Modern History, vol. 86, no. 3, 2014, pp. 727–29. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1086/676745. Accessed 10 July 2024].


Wilhelm Stuckart on his SS uniform. (source: Yad Vershem)

Footnote: As illustrated above, classifying someone as Mitlaüer was a good way of allowing them to avoid the more serious categories and their consequences. Some high-profile unofficial servants of the Nazi regime managed to avoid being categorised as a Mitlaüer altogther. One was famous Austrian conductor Karl Böhm. Böhm was never a member of the NSDAP and never brought before the Denazification tribunal. However, as the historian Oliver Rathkolb has remarked, he was the artist who “had presumably been the most active (non-party) member to provide propaganda for the (Nazis)” and was lavishly rewarded with plumb conducting positions, culminating in his appointment as director of the Vienna State Opera [‘Karl Böhm – Salzburg Festival’,salzburgerfestspiele.at].

[ᗩ] Nazi party membership of itself didn’t necessarily result in a more serious classification than Mitläufer…in the case of the celebrated Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan joined the NSDAP twice (membership nos. 1607525 and 3430914), he was exonerated of illegal activity during the Nazi period at his Denazification tribunal hearing and classified as a Mitläufer

[ᗷ] trenchant critics in the West take an unflinching and unforgiving view of her role, labelling her an “unindicted co-conspirator” (Simon Wiesenthal Center), “a Nazi by association” (Sandra Smith) and “the glib voice of ‘how could we have known?’ defence” (Bach, Steven. “The Puzzle of Leni Riefenstahl.” The Wilson Quarterly (1976—), vol. 26, no. 4, 2002, pp. 43–46. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40260668. Accessed 11 July 2024)


The hungry i – a Fifties and Sixties SF Institution for Folk Musicians and Ground Breaking New Comedians

Posted on by Wolfgang Childerglas
Leisure activities, Music history, Performing arts, Popular Culture, Society & Culture

The “hungry i?” Sounds like a trendy, up-market boîte on Eat Street, but it is—or rather was—a live music and stand-up comedy venue located in the “hip” North Beach neighbourhood of San Francisco. Its original owner, self-styled beatnik Eric “Big Daddy” Nord, sold it to beret-sporting impresario Enrico Banducci in 1951. Under Banducci’s direction the SF joint set about making a cutting edge name for itself. For much of the next two decades the hungry i nightclub became the spot where many of the big acts in American entertainment got their start and others honed their performing skills to perfection❶.

Enrico Banducci rocking a cardy!

Bob Patterson, Examiner columnist (writing as Freddy Francisco) on the hungry i circa 1950s: ❝a basement Disneyland, peopled by beatniks, left-over bohemians, on the nod junkies, and other waifs and strays from reality.❞

Hothouse of new comedy: The roll call of names associated with “the eye” (as it was affectionately known), especially of American comedy, is mightily impressive…it was the launchpad for many famous performers including Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Tom Lehrer and Jonathan Winters. Other iconic comics to perform there at the formative stage of their careers include Woody Allen, Phyllis Diller, Richard Pryor, Dick Gregory, Godfrey Cambridge, Bill Cosby, the Smothers Brothers, (Mike) Nichols and (Elaine) May and Joan Rivers❷. The soon-to-be comedy stand-up legends performed against a red brick wall that later became the standard stage backdrop of comedy clubs across America [‘1960s Folk Music at the hungry i and SF Folk Music Club’, Claire Huang, FoundSF, (2019), www.foundsf.org].

The hungry i at the height of its popularity (source: Barbra Archives)

Banducci embraced the Fifties non-conformism of the emerging “rebel cafe” culture taking root simultaneously in North Beach and in Greenwich Village, NYC. He welcomed musicians, comedians, writers and painters—“bohemians of every stripe, from North Beach bohos to Berkeley brainiacs”—to the nightspot [Stephen Duncan Riley, ‘The Rebel Cafe: America’s Nightclub Underground and the Public Sphere, 1934–1963’, (Unpublished PhD dissertation, 2014, University of Maryland)]. Uncommonly for a nightclub owner Banducci really looked after his charges, unlike many of his contemporaries who were content to sit back and count the night’s takings – Enrico always ensured that the club’s artists performed in a safe and quiet environment…patron chatter during performances was verboten and (remarkably) drinks were not served while the acts were on [‘The hungry i (1963)’, Barbra Archives, www.barbra-archives.info; ‘The ‘I’ That Stormed Through North Beach, Circa 1950’, Art Peterson, hoodline, 06-Jun-2016, www.hoodline.com].

A way-station for aspiring folk and pop artists: The hungry i provided a similar massive leg-up for music performers still in the basement of their careers. The nightspot provided the springboard for some, propelling them on the path to pop and folk music immortality, or at least to national/international recognition. The Kingston Trio, Barbra Streisand (her first gig headlining), Peter, Paul and Mary et al, all cut their teeth at the famous San Fran venue in their early days. The Kingston Trio recorded its first live album at the club (“…from the “Hungry i” (1958)). Glen Yarbrough and the Limeliters were a regular act, John Phillips (of the Mamas and Papas fame) fronted the eye’s house band (The Journeymen) in the early Sixties. By the early 1960s the hungry i had hit its heyday…in 1967 it moved to Ghirardelli Square (San Francisco’s Marina district), by this time it was mainly being used as a rock music venue❸. By 1970, Banducci deep in debt and with a flawed business model was forced to close down his cherished nightclub.

Enrico’s echo of hungry i: Banducci switched his attention to “Enrico’s”, a restaurant-café at 504 Broadway (SF) he had started in 1959. Enrico’s spot played cool jazz and drew in a mixed crowd and was for a time the place in SF to be seen, everyone from celebrities like FF Coppola, Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant to complete nonentities…Banducci’s lack of business acumen again ultimately proved its downfall with Enrico’s folding in 1988. The name “hungry i” lived on somewhat ignominiously in the form of a strip club at 546 Broadway (today operating as a Karaoke bar).

hungry i in its later incarnation
Enrico’s: Banducci’s Broadway café/jazz club (photo: William Martin/Facebook)

Endnote: the Purple Onion The hungry i, by most observers’ reckoning, was the apex of live venues presenting the new wave of stand-up comics in the 50s and 60s, but it existed very much in a shared universe. The very same up-and-coming but still unknown talents featuring at the eye also plied their trade at other SF venues, most prominently at the hungry i’s local rival the Purple Onion, a small basement club on Columbus Ave with a similar storied history [‘North Beach History: Careers Sprouted For Almost 6 Decades At The Purple Onion’, Art Peterson, hoodline, 20-Jun-2016, www.hoodline.com].

❶ Banducci liked to describe the hungry i as a theatre rather than a nightclub

❷ a less stellar comedy name frequenting the stage at the hungry i was “Professor” Irwin Corey whose unscripted, abstruse improvisational monologues earned him a dedicated cult following

❸ in 1967 you could catch the early Ike and Tina Turner Experience at the eye