The Sleepwalk of the West

Allan Bloom traces the popular enthusiasm for criminality to the 19th century German philosophers. Culturally – according to him – the new appetite hits the mainstream with “Mack the Knife” from Brecht’s and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, in 1928 Weimar Germany. It was the first time the bourgeoisie could blithely – almost compulsively – sing along to a celebration of murder and degradation. Bloom wrote a few decades later:

Our stars are singing a song they do not understand, translated from a German original and having a huge popular success with unknown but wide-ranging consequences, as something of the original message touches something in American souls. But behind it all, the master lyricists are Nietzsche and Heidegger.
(The Closing of the American Mind – p151)

Someone described to me the plot of the Cannes Grand Prix winner – the prison drama Un Prophète – with its semi-deification of murder, drug dealing, and tribal identity. Bloom’s point immediately came to mind; it always does when pleasant civilised people tell me I simply must see whatever gritty rendition of the war-of-all-against-all is currently in vogue (The Wire, etcetera.)

Swept along by the prevailing nostalgie de la boue, I saw the film myself a week later. It presses all the right leftist buttons: the idea that the only crime is to imprison people (Foucault); the nobility of the savage (Rousseau); the sacralisation of other cultures/races (Levi-Strauss) vs. an assumed guilt for ones own (almost all 20th century French thinkers).

And guess what? The music on the closing “crime pays” redemption scene is… Mack the Knife.