I love Leonard Cohen but sometimes he baffles me. This is what I love about him.
Most of the time I can come to a fairly definite and defensible conclusion - but this time I’m stumped;
The setting of the poem is implied but not explicit.
Cohen is talking to a German girl with whom he has some intimacy. She is taking him to meet her parents and has “warned [him] well before” that her father was “facist” and that her mother was a “whore.”
Cohen says that he was “…kind of disappointed / and bored to tell the truth” because her parents were just “Good Germans” while she was “Hitler Youth.”
*So I'm going to live in China
where you get a better deal
where your killer is a poet
and your comrade is a girl*
Now my take on it is that Cohen didn’t blame her parent’s for their beliefs - they grew up Nazi and he’s a Jew - they were just Good Germans at the time and stamps leave imprints.
She, on the other hand, grew up outside of Nazi Germany and almost certainly outside of Germany itself (I am spitting out a hunch) but she has adopted the same contemptuous (if not genocidal) views of Jews that her people had done oh so lately.
So he’s going off to China where he’ll be killed by a “poet” as opposed to a butcher and where women are his “comrades” regardless of race, not betters because of it.
Anyone have any other ideas?
All excerpts come from: Book of Longing pg 94.
Leonard Cohen, 2006 McClelland and Stewart, www.mclelland.com
