There Is a Crack in Everything
Despite its melancholic mood, Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem” offers hope.
It is not hard to grow melancholy these days in the face of the brutality of war – above all the perpetual repetition with which it runs through the history of humanity. It is a melancholy arising from that destructive senselessness, that absurdity of human cruelties which also shapes a large part of Leonard Cohen’s musical œuvre.
The 1992 song “Anthem” is, in this, one of his best-known and – paradoxically – most hopeful songs. It is by no means a declaration of surrender. Quite the opposite: with “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”, he formulates one of the most beautiful and at the same time truest lines of musical poetry. It is perhaps comparable to Hölderlin’s “Wo Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch” (“Where there is danger, the saving power also grows”).
What is sad is precisely the calculation and the systematic method that, again and again, lies behind armed conflicts. It is a paradox that the actually most primitive and uncivilised thing in the repertoire of human actions – namely violence and slaughter – is planned, staged and carried out in such a complex, calculating way, with all the means of civilisation.
What Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer recognised as early as 1944 as the “dialectic of culture and barbarism” has long been forgotten in our world, reified, technologised and digitalised to the point of nausea. Once again, humanity seems to be steering its creative power into something deeply destructive. Yet this is neither something worth despairing over, nor something whose eternal continuation we have to accept.
In his customarily powerful, sonorous timbre, Leonard Cohen sings, accompanied by band and choir, of murderers in high places who conjure up a thundercloud, and of the metaphorical image of the battered dove of peace, bought, sold and wounded again and again. Yet there is hope in the darkness. Cohen sings:
“Ring the bells that still can ring”.
It may seem to us as though we do not have much power to end this war, and yet we must ring the bells of peace that can still ring, simply because nothing else is left to us. About those bells from this line, Cohen – who otherwise strictly refused to explain his often many-layered lyrics – is said to have remarked:
“They are few and far between, but we can find them.”
Anthem is a renunciation of perfection and of demands. A peaceful and fundamentally good society does not exist yet – at least not yet. Ultimately, the damaged is the only thing we can work with in life, because human beings are themselves damaged. One can, after all, only work with the material one has. Paradoxically, however – and Cohen expresses this so beautifully and poetically – it is in the damaged that we find the beauty and the light: namely that which makes up the positive in human beings – not the cultural achievements of civilisation, but the universally valid that makes us human: love, emotion, music, devotion, humour.
We do not always find all of that where we look for it, or when we look for it. Often it comes to us through the cracks of cruelty and destructiveness. Here we can begin to devote ourselves to it. We have no other option.
War takes three to four generations until the transgenerational horror has grown out of a society. Eighty years after the Second World War, the first generation – that of the war’s great-great-grandchildren – could lead a life no longer affected by the after-effects of that war. That these great-great-grandchildren could once again become new children of war is a profoundly sad thought, and everything must be done to prevent it.
Perhaps the hope that comes to bear in this song is able to accompany one along that path.
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