JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 666
Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas George Eliot.
A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
Saul Bellow
First (and other early) impressions get made once, for the very first time, and then re-invented, re-examined every time after that, especially as the first impressions start to age and get forgotten, slipping around the windsock of time. But every so often these antique first impressions come back onto the playing field, and it is remarkable, really, what lessons can be learned of them.
A review of a very early biography of Adolph Hitler appeared in the pages of The Illustrated London News for 27 August 1932—this was the year before Hitler assumed formal control of the government and nine years after he began his rise to power. The book was Hitler, by Emil Lengyel, published by Routledge in 1932; it is the subject of a very sharp-eyed review by “C.K.A” in the pages of the ILN. It was also reviewed so to speak by the Nazi leadership, which ordered that Lengyel (1898-1985) be picked up and disappeared at any early opportunity for being an enemy of the state. Some of the interesting bits that the reviewer pulled from the Lengyel book include the following—I’ve included several here because of his particular and early insight):
“There are no limits, however, fantastic, to which this fanaticism will not go; though what the Jews have done to Germany to deserve this frantic vendetta remains obscure.
“It is almost incredible to Englishmen that this barbaric mania (Jew hating) should be erected to the position of a fundamental political tenet…”
“Some of the Party principle are Olympic in their sweep and scope. Thus:” “offenders against the interests of the community, usurers, profiteers, etc., are to be punished with death…” Much virtue in your ‘etc.”!
“Behind all stand the emotional political impulses—repudiation of war-debts, hatred of France, hostility to the League of Nations, fanatical exaltations of race,…All this was to be expected…it is not too much to say that by the Treaty of Versailles the allies brought the Nazi movement upon themselves. The marvel is that it has been so long postponed.”
“What Hitler’s flag stands for he has never revealed beyond irresponsible generalizations and decrepit platitudes…”
“(On Lengyel’s Hitler): He is a vox et praterea nihil—a shallow, paltry, neurotic person, with no constructive ability, a woodly intelligence, and little to comment except glibness and passionate prejudice. This is difficult to believe but by no means impossible.”
“It may well be…that Hitler the man is as empty as his absurd Swastika”.
The Yellow Spot, The Extermination of the Jews in Germany (1936) was the earliest printed document on the coming of the Nazi Holocaust, the earliest
catalog on the mistreatment and systematic dehumanization of the Jews, and the
earliest book to associate “extermination” with Nazis and the Jewish people. (The “yellow spot” part coming from the early history of racially marking Jews–it appeared first it seems in the 11th century in Islamic lands and then used periodically around Europe and the middle east for hundreds of years afterwards. Using the Star/Shield of David seems be a 20th century invention.) It was also one of the earliest books on Hitler and what he represented. (My friend Andy Moursund has published a very
compelling poster on the early books regarding Hitler and Nazism and can be
seen here.) Another sort of first
impression that makes it mark is a series of pictures by the great Margaret
Bourke-White (who seems to have been everywhere from the Depression to the
Korean War and wrote and photographed what she saw brilliantly) made at the
Buchenwald Deathcamp just after liberation.
She did make photographs of the horrors of the place, but she also turned
the camera around to record the faces of the locals who were forced to tour
and view the camp in their communal midst. You can see very clearly in the
faces of these people—for whom 
the camp could not have been a mystery unless it was internalized so—how much they wanted to not see what they were looking at.
And speaking of Hitler, Henry Ford’s contribution to the
ethos of the American standardization and robotization of the workforce—the industrial
production line—was well portrayed in the first cinematic appreciations of the
idea. (Writers had long since made
observations on the evils of industry and society, going back at least as far
as Charles Dickens—but its representation in the most democratic medium of the
first half of the last century–the movies–received it first treatments in two strong
impressions in the 1930’s. The film that
comes quickest to mind is Charlie Chaplin’s still-brilliant and
still-applicable Modern Times (1936,
though originally named The Masses)—a
dire film (in one place dissolving sheep entering a slaughterhouse with a scene
of workers entering a factory) that offered no solution to the factory. Aldous Huxley wrote about the sickness of
production in his Brave New World (1932)
which is even scarier in its own right—though the scary image of the future
delivered with the dark humor of Chaplin is tough to surpass—if for no other
reason than it winds up discussing the “principle of mass production applied to
biology”. But earlier still is the
little-seen film by Rene Clair (1931) A
nous la libertie (Give Us Liberty/Freedom),
which presents the mass production system as a thin metaphor for a prison labor
system. (Upton Sinclair said that the
Ford assembly plants should be presented in “Museums of Unnatural History”.)
This really is an endless and mammoth subject as what I’m
talking about is a history of perception, and all I’ve done here really is to
draw a few things together that I have within reach. It seems an interesting pursuit, following the
threads of thought regarding early impressions of major (and minor) events, and
one could easily construct a large Borgesian encyclopedia of them. Check under “C”, for cable, for example: the physicist Jacques Babinet thought it
impractical and far too expensive to construct a communication line under the Atlantic ocean (as did many others, seeing the starts and
fits of the various cable companies that were begun to try to capitalize the
operation. The cable business barely had
a heartbeat, at times, in the mid-century even.
And speaking of heartbeats, William Harvey withstood blistering attacks
on his correct statements on the circulation of the blood (costing him nearly
all the patients in his practice).
Though at least Harvey
lived to see a brighter day: Michel
Servetus, on the other hand, didn’t, and was burned at the stake for his heresies,
one of which was the centering of the circulation of the blood in the heart
rather than the brain. The list goes on
and on: Semmelweis was killed but did
wind up ion an asylum; Galileo didn’t wind up in an asylum but did wind up
imprisoned; Copernicus wound up in neither place, escaping possible clerical
criticisms by dying just as his revolutionary work was published. Phillippe Lebon’s ideas for illumination by
gas were seen as ridiculous, as were the revolutionary ideas of Edward Jenner
and Luigi Galvani. Einstein’s 1905 ideas
weren’t happily received in France
for a decade, and David Hilbert’s impressions of mathematics in the middle of
the third decade of the 20th century was that it was “done”. (Actually the young Einstein was also
cautioned about going into physics because that field was seen as pretty much “completed”.)
There was of course the other side of
the impressions coin to all that I’ve mentioned above—for example, the resistance
to Copernicus was not actually as
fearful as we think of it today, most thinking people were ready for it and
were relieved with his 1543 publication. The idea of looking at first impressions may actually have some utility in seeing how we view new things in our contemporary culture–or at least it would give us the sense of wideness and of the future, and to be at least circumspect about newness.
*A note on the production technology using interchangeable parts–this idea really did have its seat in American industry. Colt’s “system of manufacturing” (c. 1851), Charles Tomlinson’s
1853 Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks, rifle manufacturing at
the Springfield Armory in the early 1850’s, Eli Whitney and the cotton gin, Singer Sewing
Machines, (ca. 1865) phonograph machines
produced on conveyors by Thomas Edison, and so on, till you get to Ford’s own
Highland Park Factory around 1913. All are indicators of this sort of conveyor belt, standardized parts, interchangeable units that marks this brand of manufacture. For an early, interesting reading see Charles Fitch’s “Report
on the Manufacture of Interchangeable Mechanism” (1881) as part of one of the reports of the massive
overall report of the Tenth U.S. Census,
and also “The Rise of the Mechanical Ideal”
in the Magazine of American History
(1884)
