The Greater Tragedy Imposed on the Small: Art, Anachrony and the Perils of Bohemia in Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows

Abstract

On 3 October 1946, Rebecca West, who was covering the Nuremberg Trials as a reporter, was in a Prague cinema watching Brief Encounter with one of the prosecutors. They were escaping from Nuremberg. The whole context — the co-presence of this peculiarly British film and its dutiful but uncomprehending Central European audience — is presented by West as a bizarre montage, like a photographic double-exposure, of cultural expectations alien to each other, of artistic representation and historical event, and of whatever could be counted in that moment of limbo as ‘past’ and ‘present’:

The drab and inhibited little drama seemed to unfold very slowly before this audience, which so plainly felt that if such cases of abstinence occurred in a distant country there was no need why it should have to know about them; and there was drowsiness in the air when an American voice spoke loudly out of the darkness. A minor character had crossed the screen and at the sight this voice was saying in horror, ‘By God, that man looks just like Göring.’ It was one of the American lawyers from Nuremberg, who had fallen asleep and had awakened to see the screen as a palimpsest with the great tragedy imposed on the small.