The Tale of the Black Poodle

What can Shakespeare and Goethe tell us about the rise of tyrants?

It is Easter in Germany, a chilly spring night, and sounds of celebration are in the air. Faust is out walking, and a stray poodle follows him along the street. To his surprise and pleasure it accompanies him all the way home to his study. There, the poodle turns into a demon - a particularly talkative demon, with a notably seductive verbal style. He makes Faust an attractive offer: 'I will use my supernatural powers to provide you with everything you want here on earth while you are alive - but on one condition.' 'And what is that?" asks Faust. 'When you die, you will pledge to serve the devil in Hell.'

Faust and the poodle

So goes the opening of one of the greatest ever works of literature to come from Germany - 'Faust' by Goethe. 

The play was published in the early 1800s, but has had a curious resonance for Germany throughout its history. In 1914, a hundred years after its first performance, the people of Germany pledged their allegiance to Kaiser Wilhelm, their last emperor. The Kaiser promised to make Germany great, to restore pride in the face of the other superpowers of the day - France, Britain, Russia. He had a pathological hatred of foreigners, and was, in the words of a German historian of this era: "unsure and arrogant, with an immeasurably exaggerated self-confidence and desire to show off ..."

He was the reality TV star of his day.

Almost every New Zealand town, however small, now hosts a marble or granite monument bearing a list of the names of young men who died as a result of this particular Faustian transaction. 

Twenty-five year later, the German people did the same once again, with another charismatic populist leader, and with an even more catastrophic war. 

Erich Fromm

Thus was born the notion of the Faustian Pact - something that arose from German literature, and was enacted by its peoples in the most calamitous and literal way.

It was as if this great German writer had discerned something in the soul of his countrymen that made them vulnerable to this kind of obedience - and had issued a chilling warning. 

In 1941, at the height of WWII, another great German writer, the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm published 'Fear of Freedom', in which he explained how at a time of uncertainty and economic difficulty, the people of a nation may willingly give up their freedom and autonomy and blindly follow an autocratic leader - largely out of fear. 

Rather than embrace their own power and agency, the populace may voluntarily surrender their democratic and tolerant principles, for the illusion of growth and stability promised by a 'strong man'. A truly Faustian bargain, because such a leader brings repression, chaos and collapse as he pits himself - and his subjects - against symbolic and imaginary enemies at home and abroad. As a psychoanalyst, Fromm saw this behaviour in the population as a regression to a childlike state, an abrogation of the responsibilities of adulthood.

'Please look after me ... and make my decisions for me, because it is too troubling and difficult to make these decisions for myself.' At its core, the Faustian pact is an act of cowardice. Every day, throughout the world, vast numbers of people retreat from the chance to determine their destiny, and instead delegate this responsibility upwards to authoritarian leaders.

In 1885, three years before Kaiser Wilhelm came to power, an illegal emigrant left Germany for the USA. He had avoided compulsory military training - he was a draft dodger - and was stripped of his citizenship as a punishment. He worked as a barber for six years, then gathering his life savings, he bought a piece of property in Seattle - a restaurant - with a particularly resonant name: The Poodle Dog. 

This was the grandfather of the American president Donald Trump, and it was the first of many pieces of property acquired by the dynasty that followed; which developed into a massive empire riddled with fraud, dishonesty, corruption and labour violations, and financed by loans that were never repaid.  

Right now, we are at a cross-roads in history.

Right now, the three most powerful men in the world, the Presidents of the three most powerful nations are strong-man leaders, whose instinct is to humiliate, denigrate, imprison ('lock her up!') - and even kill (nerve agent in perfume bottles) those amongst their populations who dare to oppose them. In recent months, a great nation, perhaps the most influential nation on earth, has formed a Faustian Pact with its leader.

No wonder that some historians have seen the recent US elections as the most consequential since the German presidential elections of 1932. 

Our best writers have illustrated the price a populace pays for entering such an agreement. In his timeless tragedy, 'MacBeth', Shakespeare laid bare the anatomy of such leaders, men whose 'vaulting ambition o'erleaps itself' and whose exercise of power is delivered with the explicit or tacit collusion of their followers.

MacBeth, a man animated by an insatiable desire for power, and who refused to recognise the legitimate authority in the land, is driven to deceive and murder the sitting king of Scotland. To cover his tracks, and cement his victory, he must execute a string of additional murders. By sheer force of character and - like Faust - after consulting demonic figures, MacBeth moves from one act of evil to the next, all the while demanding slavish loyalty from his court.

Eventually, spurred by their repugnance and horror at MacBeth's deeds, the opposition coalesces against the tyrant: he is held accountable for his crimes and brought to account.

In these fictional narratives, Goethe and Shakespeare invite their audience to contrast the better angels of their nature with the seductive demons that may beset them - loyalty to a leader who may deceive, lie, or establish tyrannical power over them. Since WWII, there has been little doubt that in the West, at least, these better angels have been in the ascendancy.

What is astonishing and unprecedented in post-war history, is that a major Western power, a nation looked to as a beacon of democracy around the world, is now so close to stepping out of that arena and into the realm of tyranny.

An earlier version of this blog was published in Nov 2020

Three years living with Māori activists ...

In which John discovers a few things about our history ...

At the end of my degree, I moved into the headquarters of the Māori youth activist movement, Nga Tamatoa, and my education really started.

The house, a rambling old Victorian villa, was perched at the top of the Dixon Street steps in Wellington. A wooden totem pole, or manaia - phallic, upright and weather-beaten, stood on the front lawn. Next to my room on the first floor, lived Hiria, recently arrived from Tuhoe country in the depths of the Urewera range, fixedly watching TV all day. In an ironic mirror of my own journey, she was wrestling, through the television, with this alien European culture she had been plunged into. Fluent in Māori, she struggled to understand my English.

Potiki centre, JC far right

Her boyfriend, the Māori singer and poet Brian Potiki, posted cryptic poems on the wall of our upstairs hallway each week, in the elegant calligraphy of black ink.

He gave me three novels which revolutionised my view of the world: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude; John Fowles' The Magus, and Yukio Mishima's Spring Snow. I suddenly saw that literature didn't have be exhumed from the dusty morgue of Eng Lit, but could be magical, wild, and contemporary.

Below me, on the ground floor lived Tiata Witehira and Liz Marsden. Liz was the matriarch of the household and she sternly convened the monthly meetings of Nga Tamatoa in our living room, next to a huge web off-set printing press. The press was weighty, black and red, and smelled faintly of machine oil.

It was tended like a massive inert pet by Mark Derby, eccentric and ecstatic, a man who boasted like Potiki that he never wore underpants, and he used it to print off classics of left-wing literature, like historian Dick Scott's account of the 1951 waterfront lockout in Auckland, '151 Days'.

Prior to our moving in, the house had been home to a Black Power motorcycle gang, who had driven their bikes up and down the capacious hallway, and left large oil stains on the floor.

Dun, characteristically unclothed, at Parliament, 1976

Dun Mihaka, when he wasn't being hosted at Her Majesty's pleasure in Mount Crawford Prison, would often be crouched in our living room. He wore shorts in the middle of winter, exposing massive kauri thighs - but never the muscular naked buttocks he displayed to Prince Charles and Princes Diana at Wellington Airport in an insult or whakapohane that gave him international notoriety (and put an indelible curse on their match).

Dun had about him an intense, pugilistic manner, and he was the only visitor I felt genuinely fearful of.

After his return to Mount Crawford we would go to watch his occasional appearances in the Supreme Court on Lambton Quay, where he would defend himself from the dock against charges of assaulting prison guards in rambling, oracular monologues.

He was invariably found guilty.

Tom Scott's famous cartoon of Dun's whakapohane

The most gentle, charming person who ever graced our hallway, was Tamati Kruger, a magnetic, laughing 21 year old, who became the leader of the Tuhoe tribe, and their Chief Negotiator in their watershed $170 million settlement with the Crown in 2012. His good nature shone off him like a beacon.

One of his quotes:

"Tuhoe love to fight first and then get down to business later. They test a person's character and resolve by getting them frustrated and angry to see how they operate under pressure, what their humour is like and if they think themselves precious and pious. That way they judge their usefulness."

Others called to the high council meetings of Nga Tamatoa, to discuss the Māori occupation of Bastion Point in Auckland, and the attempt to reclaim the Raglan Golf Course, were Eruera Nia, always sporting a copy of U.S Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver's 'Soul On Ice' and the film-maker Merata Mita who when she stayed with us, brought a retinue of impossibly handsome German movie makers, Gerd Pohlmann and the Strewe brothers, who with Merata were making a documentary on the historic Bastion Point occupation.

In volley-ball games played on the street outside our house, the Germans cleaned us up, because of their height, athleticism, and because, well, Germans have a certain clinical attitude to these things that our disparate, anarchist household simply couldn't match.

Merata Mita: queen of Māori film-makers

Merata made the defining movie of the 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand, Patu! which when I saw it in a London cinema two years later, had the entire audience on its feet, cheering and weeping.

I was nearly evicted from 143 Dixon Street - not because of some failure to understand the take of the Māori activists - but because of my stereo speakers, which I had constructed out of two massive stolen concrete drainpipes, and which stood two metres tall on their ends in my bedroom.

Having grown up in a family of classical musicians, I would play J.S. Bach through these colossal improvised speakers late at night, and at the prodigious volumes that 23 year olds believe everyone wants to hear.

One night, the matriarch of the household, Liz Marsden, who was heavily pregnant at the time, stood at the top of the stairs and screamed at me to: 'Turn down your degenerate Western music.'

There ensued a furious argument on the merits of the Western musical tradition, with the two of us shouting at each other over the deafening sound of the Brandenburg Concertos. Within an hour, Liz had gone into premature labour with her first child, and had to be rushed to hospital. It was my facetious suggestion to her white-faced partner, the brawny rubbish collector Tiata Witehira, that they name the baby after me, that nearly got me the bum's rush.

They were a motley bunch, the Nga Tamatoa crew, but I had no illusion that history was not being made around me in that strange, hybrid household, full of laughter, ferocious debates, and occasional tears.

There was something about the place, and its eccentric energy that attracted the most unlikely people.

One night, the violin prodigy, Donald Armstrong, now the Concert Master of the NZ Symphony Orchestra, a slim nervy man, was playing a Beethoven sonata in our living room. Also improbably, Murray Chandler, at the time the world's youngest international chess master at 16, moved in for the summer of 1977. At the annual Dixon Street party he played a 'simul' with fifteen different players on a trestle table outside while blind-folded - and beat all but one of them.

But what struck me generally, was the good humour of the Māori I lived with, despite their revolutionary understanding of what we had done to their land, their mana, and their history. Everywhere in Aotearoa, Māori had been driven into marginalised, and often poverty-stricken communities, and the Maori renaissance was in its infancy.

Although I had grown up only a stone's throw from the site of the first Māori Parliament, established in 1917 at the Rukamoana Marae in the Waikato, I knew nothing of its history or significance.

The Parliament, which was modeled on the House of Commons, was set up in response to land confiscations after the Land Wars in the 1860s, a time when more than two million acres of prime agricultural Māori land was confiscated by the government. In my ten year's of education in Morrinsville schools, its history was never mentioned.

Until I moved into 143 Dixon Street, I, like most other New Zealanders of that era existed in a state of what can only be called 'militant ignorance'.

My first response, after I realised how deep was my ignorance, was anger.

And after that, a growing humility and sense of shame at what had been done to the indigenous culture of our land. This was a very visceral demonstration of the truth that the victors write the history books - and it lead me to a deep distrust of the official version of events, and ultimately, into a career as a journalist and writer.

It was another ten years before the NZ Court of Appeal under Sir Robin Cooke made a momentous decision in favour of Māori in 1987, recognising the systematic alienation of Māori land, and paving the way for hundreds of millions of dollars of compensation to be paid to the tribes.

What I realised at 143 Dixon Street, with a sense of shock, and dawning gratitude, was that these Māori had shattered the notion I had of the identity of my own nation; of its history and of its much-vaunted 'fairness'. In doing so, they brought about a determination to do what I could, however insignificant, to help change things.

This lead me to spend three years working with Māori as publications and media manager at the New Zealand Human Rights Commission, and then in 1993, I was privileged to help set up Mana Magazine, the first four colour glossy magazine to celebrate the emerging Māori cultural renaissance. In 2005, as editor of our nation's largest circulation magazine, which went into half the homes in the country and had a million readers, I themed a whole issue on the emerging Māori cultural renaissance - despite the intense opposition of my bosses.

Māori, and those of us who support their aspirations to equality under the Treaty of Waitangi, have many more decades of struggle ahead. 

An earlier version of this blog was published in 2020