Angela Merkel's Holiday Reading? It's All About Tyrants

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Every summer, German Chancellor Angela Merkel goes on vacation in South Tyrol to hike – and read a few books. This year, she made an interesting choice: Photographers caught her with Harvard Professor Stephen Greenblatt’s “Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics,” an attack on U.S. President Donald Trump that masquerades as an analysis of the playwright’s views of tyrannical rulers and the reasons nations accept them.

Her selection is quite in character. Merkel described her reading habits in a video last year. She tends to tackle shorter books so she can get through several in the course of a vacation. As she has grown older, she has acquired a taste for history; specifically, she looks for parallels between history and modernity. She is a fan of the classics: Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”, Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller. “All of them are very, very modern today,” she said. “Tyrant” – which runs to fewer than 300 pages – appears to tick all the boxes. 

Greenblatt’s work has made quite a splash among the German elite. Last fall, the Shakespeare expert and bestselling author was invited to deliver a lecture about “Tyrant” in Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Hall, a venue popular with the city’s highbrow audiences. On that visit, the professor spent time with Michael Naumann, a former junior minister for culture in a previous Social Democratic administration. He isn’t part of Merkel’s inner circle, and no one close to her attended the lecture, but someone with a good knowledge of her taste must have recommended the book to her.

It's clear why she might want to read on past the first chapter, which promises answers to some questions such as these: 

Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers? Why do otherwise proud and self-respecting people submit to the sheer effrontery of the tyrant, his sense that he can get away with saying and doing anything he likes, his spectacular indecency?

But if Merkel really looked for answers to those questions in Greenblatt’s work, I fear she wasted some of her precious vacation time. The most she could have got out of it is a chuckle at the expense of a fellow leader she makes no pretense of liking.

Greenblatt never mentions Trump by name in “Tyrant,” but some passages follow the critical media narrative of the U.S. president as an unhinged narcissist so closely that they leave no doubt about whom the author has in mind. Greenblatt wrote, ostensibly of Shakespeare’s Richard III:

He has always had wealth; he was born into it and makes ample use of it. But though he enjoys having what money can get him, it is not what most excites him. What excites him is the joy of domination. He is a bully. Easily enraged, he strikes out at anyone who stands in his way. He enjoys seeing others cringe, tremble, or wince with pain. He is gifted at detecting weakness and deft at mockery and insult. These skills attract followers who are drawn to the same cruel delight, even if they cannot have it to his unmatched degree. Though they know that he is dangerous, the followers help him advance to his goal, which is the possession of supreme power.

Of Jack Cade, the leader of a popular rebellion in “Henry VI,” Greenblatt writes that he “promises to make England great again.” In a discussion about how banished Coriolanus, the legendary Roman general, sides with Rome’s enemies, the Volscians, Greenblatt has this to say: “It is as if the leader of a political party long identified with hatred of Russia – forever saber-rattling and accusing the rival politicians of treason – should secretly make his way to Moscow and offer his services to the Kremlin.” And modern words and expressions – “enablers,” “adults in the room” – slip constantly into the discussion of Shakespearean plot twists.

The parallels, however, are contrived and strained throughout. Trump can’t be Richard III, Cade and Coriolanus all at once. One could describe all these diverse characters as different faces of tyranny, even though this would turn the concept into such a grab bag of motivations and methods as to almost make it meaningless. But looking for Trump-like features in all of them smacks of filter bubble-induced paranoia.

Coriolanus’s revenge on Rome is nothing like Trump’s attempt to win an election at any price. Cade led a failed violent rebellion and was, of course, anti-elite – but then weren’t all rebels throughout the course of history? Richard III’s tortured acceptance of his physical deformity contrasts so wildly with Trump’s easy confidence in his good looks that using the English monarch as a prop in an attack on Trump requires impressive verbal dexterity on Greenblatt’s part.

Underneath the strained similes, what Greenblatt presents as Shakespeare’s vision of the sources of tyranny and remedies against it is a rather simplistic, naive narrative. A narcissistic, power-hungry individual appeals to the base instincts of society’s deplorables and finds enablers among the elite, who are either in it for themselves or charmed by the tyrant’s unabashed contempt for rules. Society’s fragmentation into parties that don’t listen to one another helps his rise, too. But his ascendancy never lasts because ordinary people - the non-deplorable kind – won’t put up with it. Greenblatt wrote, referring to scenes from “Richard III”, “Macbeth” and “Coriolanus”:

The best chance for the recovery of collective decency lay, he thought, in the political action of ordinary citizens. [Shakespeare] never lost sight of the people who steadfastly remained silent when they were exhorted to shout their support for the tyrant, or the servant who tried to stop his vicious master from torturing a prisoner, or the hungry citizen who demanded economic justice.

Theoretically, Merkel should be heartened by this optimistic message. Somehow I doubt she can accept it, though. Unlike Greenblatt, she once lived under an actual tyranny – a self-effacing one, based on a deadening collectivist ideology rather than a charismatic leader. Nor does the recent rise of the far right in Germany have anything to do with narcissism and Shakespeare’s royal egos. The leaders of the populist Alternative for Germany party are forgettable and replaceable.

For all Shakespeare’s genius, his plays are probably the wrong place to look for insights into modern illiberalism. But Greenblatt’s book could be useful to Merkel in at least one way: Next time she talks to Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping or, say, Viktor Orban, she could imagine them as Shakespearean actors in full costume. She could smile inwardly and remember that they will all have to leave the stage someday – even if she herself plans to exit rather sooner than they do. 

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Edward Evans at eevans3@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.