Yesterday, I wrote a review of a documentary film about
people whose lives were caught up in the Holocaust and its aftermath. One of the responses I got to that blog
posting came from a cousin from the non-German side of my family.
She wrote, in part:
… while the war was going on,
what were you told about it - or were you too young? I know your Mother and Grossmutter were both from Germany…
Although the older people, especially those who remembered WWI, spoke about the
whole nation as being Hitlerites, I don't know why, but I always felt that
there were those …who were forced to do things they did not believe in.
I was struck with the innocence, even naïveté, of that
response. I don’t mean that
critically. I am very fond of this
person. But it struck me that most
people I know would still explain the world in terms of good people forced to
do bad things.
In 1960, when I first went to Germany as a student, I took a
course taught by Germans for Germans in the history of the Nazi period. I wish I had those notes. I would love to be able to recreate the
mind set and the perspective. I
was fascinated at the time, but now I’m not sure if I had the maturity to take
things in I might want to take in now.
It began a life long quest to understand the meaning of personal
responsibility. How does one
situate oneself in the world? How
does one know one’s capacity to go along or to resist?
I decided to try to answer my cousin’s implied
question. Here’s the letter I
wrote back:
________
Dear B:
The quick answer to your question is I was too young.
I was five when the war ended.
I do remember Uncle Bill going off to war - but from home movies, not from
memory.
My first strong memory was V-E Day when the factory whistles all started
blowing and my grandmother took me by the hand - I was five at the time - to go
meet my father. We missed him because the crowd pouring out of the
factory was too wild - decades before cell phones. No way to connect. I remember being swept up in the crowd
and a little nervous. I
remember people dancing in the streets.
In other words, I did not experience World War II
personally. That was the only time
I could speak of being swept up in the war emotionally.
But because of Grossmutter, I grew up with a very strong
German identity, as you know, and that gave me some serious cognitive
dissonance during the years when I began to move away from a childish
good-guy/bad-guy understanding and into a more complex analysis of human
thought and behavior. I’d say that
started when I was about twelve or thirteen and by the time I was fifteen or
sixteen, or whenever it was that I got some real understanding of the genocide
and brutality, I began wondering seriously what made the difference between the
fun-loving Germans I lived among in America and the Germans in Germany who went
along with Hitler.
Having that sense of somehow being German (and remember, I
could always shut that identity off at will, and tell myself that actually I
was an American, not a German, and I wouldn’t be lying to myself) put me out
ahead of most of my friends with other immigrant identities or no hyphenated
identity at all (they were rare) in having to contend with the notion of
collective responsibility and the beginning and end of “us.” And then having to move beyond a
simple good German/bad German framework early on because I began meeting people
who were actually involved in the war.
I remember one of my grandmother’s acquaintances who was from Danzig
(now Gdansk, in Poland) and was married to a Romanian pilot who had flown for
the Luftwaffe. Lovely people,
whose company I thoroughly enjoyed.
And then there were the photos of my Uncles Kurt and Willi in
Nazi uniforms. I would meet Willi one day, but Kurt was killed in the war.
My grandmother told me they were not Nazi uniforms. They were German uniforms. I was told he died trying to shoot down
British planes bombing Hamburg.
That story turned out not to be true – he actually went missing in North
Africa. Probably more a
creation of my own young boy fantasies, now that I look back on it, rather than
information collected from listening to family conversations.
I do remember asking my grandmother once why the Germans did
such bad things. Her answer was a
reasonable one – “there are good people and bad people everywhere.” It satisfied me at the moment, but it
was like Chinese food – I was hungry again in no time. Yes, but why should all the American
Germans be good Germans and why should there be an entire nation of bad Germans
who stayed behind. Did the good
ones see what was coming and the bad ones want to stay behind? A lot of stuff for a young boy to
process.
I was hungry for the explanation that some people had no
choice, as you put it. If you were
young, you had to put on a uniform and fight. Uncle Willi wasn’t necessarily a bad man. He was wearing a “German uniform,” not
a “Nazi uniform.” The Nazis ran
things. Most people just went
along. We spent a lot of time
discussing how war and genocide do not cancel out the printing press and Apfel
Strudel, to say nothing of Bach and Mozart.
Little by little, step by step, I made more and more complex
distinctions as I went down the layers of explanation from good guys and bad
guys.
I remember the first time I saw the film Judgment at Nuremburg, with Marlene Dietrich playing the wife of a German
officer trying to explain to the American judge – Spencer Tracey – that her
husband was a noble man – noble in class and noble in character. “We weren’t all bad.” There’s a great line in the movie, at
the end. Burt Lancaster plays the
Minister of Justice who went along with Nazi policies. He tried to defend himself as somebody
who understood things were wrong but wanted to work for his country and make
use of his power and influence to mitigate some of the worst excesses of the
Nazi regime. He was on trial,
however, for participating in sentencing people to death because they were
infirm or mentally deficient. “I
never thought it would come to this,” he says to the judge. Tracy, the judge,
answers back, "You knew it would come to this, the first time you
sentenced an innocent man to death."
I later got interested in ethics and taught a seminar in it
for many years in which I would show that film. It’s one of the great films, like To Kill a Mockingbird and Gandhi and The Third Man, that
raise the eternal ethical questions, whether it’s about how to face the
challenge of moral principles in a world where you have to go along to get
along, or not whether, but how, to face overwhelming odds in the battle against
wrong, or the question of whether there is anything more important than
democracy and justice and human equality.
When I was twenty and went to Germany for the first time I
was still very innocent, still working out the good guys/bad guys question. I would go down to the Hofbräuhaus in
Munich on weekends and get into discussions with former soldiers and unrequited
ex-Nazis and have some interesting exchanges. It was astonishing to realize there were people all around
filled with resentment at having lost the war, and not showing any guilt. Years later, living in Berlin, I
remember a grand old lady who used to serve me cognac and bring out the
chocolates and line them up on her coffee table like tanks at the Battle of
Stalingrad and tell me if Hitler had done this or done that how he might have
won the war. She was a little
batty, but not that batty. I
realized how thoroughly the German ideology of the right to rule had spread
throughout the culture and how it was never going to be entirely rooted out and
how thin the line was between pride of German identity, which I had inherited
from my grandmother, and the belief in racial superiority, which made enablers
of so many. Not too many
years ago, a close friend of mine was mugged on her front doorstep in Berlin by
a dark-skinned immigrant. Her
daughter’s remark after the event was, “Fifty years of denazification – up in
smoke overnight.” These were people
I had genuine affection for. Not
bad guys. But arguably, in some
real way, enablers, however remotely.
I had a good friend in Berlin who worked after the war to maintain the graves of fallen soldiers. I thought of it by this time as worthy charity work, selfless, and reflective of the man's basic decency. He had served "in Hitler's navy," but that fact had lost its onus with time. I was actually on a path which might have led, with a little push, to my giving up my American passport and taking on German nationality. I had come to embrace the "das war damals" (that was then) mode of thinking and no longer needed to paint with too broad a brush.
But something happened that tested that friendship. In February of 1985, Reagan decided he owed Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor, a favor and responded positively to an invitation to meet with him at a German cemetery in Bitburg where we were told German and American soldiers were buried. The planned visit exploded when it was discovered the planners had not done their homework. Not only were there no Americans buried there, but 49 members of the Waffen-SS were. To make matters even worse, Reagan had agreed not to visit a concentration camp to avoid, he said, "reawakening the passions of the time."
For the first time since the end of the war, a serious rift developed between the "das war damals", school of thought to which most Germans belonged, and the "never forget" school of thought to which most Americans belonged to. I remember a speech on the White House lawn by Elie Wiesel, imploring Reagan to reconsider. Most people remembered Reagan in a movie with a chimpanzee named Bonzo, and a punk rock band came out with the
song, "Bonzo goes to Bitburg."
I sided with Elie Wiesel. My friend Achim sided with the
72% of Germans who thought the celebration of German-American friendship should be the focus and not the unnecessarily righteous stand the Americans were taking. Suddenly we were faced with evidence that four decades after the war, even people who had more in common with each other by far than either had with their fellow countrymen of forty years earlier, instead of answering questions like how do good
people do bad things, were still asking "who was us?" and "who was them?"
I never reached a point where I could explain German
behavior during the war. What
happened instead was that I came to see that behavior in the broader world around
me, and therefore less justifiably attributable to something essentially German. The United States, to pick just one example, cannot escape the genocide of the
North American Indian, slavery, land theft, and civil war as integral parts of its history. Today we are an aggressor nation that
kills people by the thousands under the rubric of fighting for freedom. We took forever to come to the
realization that Ho Chi Minh, if you just turned the lenses slightly, could be
labeled a freedom fighter and father of his country. We took the French colonial domination of Vietnam and made
it ours. In the end, we recognized
that to win the war we would have had to resort to a kind of Hitlerian “total
war” and we backed off. That makes us better, arguably, than the Nazis, but only in degree, not in kind. And, it seems to me what moral high ground we might have claimed by that voluntary withdrawal from mischief in the affairs of others we lost when we engaged in the same folly again a generation later, this
time in Iraq, where we followed people who would be understood as war criminals who lied us into war, if we had lost that war to more powerful forces.
There is reason to reject the argument that our evil is comparable to the Nazi evil. They were world-class aggressors; we merely interfere here and there to satisfy our national interest. They went for total war; we send in only 1% of our population while the rest of us shop and vacation as usual. But there are similarities. We don’t foster genocide, but we
have thrown away the Geneva Conventions and countenance and justify
torture. We bankrupt ourselves and cover everything in sight with the flag to mask the fact we find money for battleships but not for taking care of the thousands with missing limbs and mental illnesses. You can argue over equivalency, but you
can’t argue, it seems to me, that the evil that arose among the civilized
people of Germany in the 30s is recognizable in the neocons of the Bush era whose goal was the expanse of empire and in the policy makers of today whose problem-solving mechanism of choice is military invasion.
This leads to the question of the extent of our participation. How much are we responsible for “going
along”? During the Vietnam War,
every year, I would march in the streets of San Francisco, down Market Street,
to a rally of 70,000 people to protest the war. It felt good.
It felt right. And then the
next day the newspapers around the country would not even carry the San
Francisco event and the war went on and we realized our impotence – right up to
the end when the tide finally turned.
So marching in protest wasn’t really enough. What then? Douse myself with kerosene in front of the Federal Building
and burn to a crisp for truth?
I remember one time standing in a crowd watching the Chinese
New Year’s Parade in San Francisco.
A military band marched by as one of the contingents. It was the late 60s. I had only recently gotten out of the
army and was filled with cynicism and disillusionment. Suddenly, I heard myself shouting at
the band, “Paid killers! Paid
killers! Paid killers!” Over and over again. A woman standing next to me turned to
me with daggers in her eyes. “How
dare you! My son is fighting for
your freedom. He wears that
uniform proudly!”
I couldn’t tell her I had only recently taken off that
uniform and was still suffering from some sort of shock. I sometimes dream that I can go back in
time and find her and apologize.
She deserved not to have her fears for her son trampled on like
that. But I had seen awful things,
soldiers taken out and beaten, corruption and incompetence among officers. The scales had fallen from my eyes and
I could no longer think of America as a land of heroes. My mother had written me once when I
was stationed in Berlin and told me how proud she was that all three McCornick
boys were in uniform – Brian in the Air Force, Billy in the Marines. I wrote back and told her if she ever
mentioned that again I’d never write to her again. Wouldn’t even open the envelope, I told her. Clearly I had lost my balance and it
would take years to get it back.
I’ve got it back now.
I’m once again proud and happy to be American, actually, even though I
think the country is in terrible trouble – was, at least, until this last
election, which has given me some of the early faith back. I no longer see nationality or ethnicity as meaningful
categories for assessing people, though.
I no longer look for heroes and villains but at whether or not
individuals are being taxed beyond their capacity to behave with decency. It’s less interesting to me to ask
whether there are good guys and bad guys.
Of course there are.
And whether good people are sometimes forced to do bad things. Of course they are. I’m much more interested in how people
contend with the world around them when they are overpowered by events. If they cave, what makes them
cave. If they resist, where they
go to find the power to resist.
I’ve known pathological liars, people who seem to lack all common
decency, people who take pleasure in the misery of others. I’ve also known people with great moral
strength, and people totally lacking in guile. I’m interested in
the strategies of most of the rest of us in between, how we develop strategies for staying upright, for recognizing
responsibility, how we aid in making sure we and others don’t get taxed beyond our
capacities. How we generate moral
leaders. Of course it’s
nice, once in a while, to see real heroes – the fireman rushing into a burning
building. But I am more
interested, frankly, in the ordinary person and watching the strategies they
develop for getting the most out of life and helping others to do the same.
As a student of anthropology, I became intrigued by the
question of whether there could be what one might call an “evil culture.” Apparently some anthropologists think
so. There are certainly
dysfunctional cultural practices.
The culture of destruction generated by the Nazis, which entirely too
many people went along with, shows the depravity of which we are capable. But so does our cultural practice of sticking our
old people into homes for other people to take care of. So does our willingness to surrender our inner cities to drug dealers and our natural resources to corporations interested only in short term profits. We are content to live in gated communities according to an "I got mine" ethical code where we look down on the poor without health care and think, "There but for the grace of God go I." Many of us are quick to label the less fortunate as ignorant and lazy moochers. These impulses, if not corrected, lead to destruction as surely as bombs do. But how many of us have what it takes to engage and try to turn things around?
Of course we go along with evil. We can’t fight every battle. We can’t give our all to do the right thing. We lack the ability to see the future
and understand what going along will mean in the long run. We take it one day at a time.
Some years ago I had a gay student come into my office. He said something to me that I wasn’t
prepared for. “I so admire you,”
he said. “You’re not afraid to be
open about being gay. I’m a long
way from being there. I hope some
day I have your courage.”
I didn’t have much time to bask in the compliment before I
had to explain to him that we were in very different places in our two lives. He was barely twenty. He lived at home with parents who
supported him. He had to worry
about graduating and getting a job and making his way into a still fairly
homophobic world. I was in my
fifties at the time. I had a
tenured job and didn’t have to worry about being fired. I had worked out most of my personal
identity questions, knew who I was, what my strengths and weaknesses were, more
or less. If somebody came at me, I
had defenses. I was able to carry
myself with the kind of self-assurance that dissuaded anybody who might want to
try and make me small. It wasn’t
courage that I had and he didn’t.
It was security. I lived in
a world where the tigers were mostly caged and where I had the benefit of
health, wealth and life experience many people in the world lack – I played a
part in that, of course, but it was largely chance where I had ended up.
We can imagine ourselves in
more challenging situations. We
can wonder what we would have done in the time of the Holocaust.
Could we have hidden a Jew in our attic? Would we have divorced the father of our children if he
decided to join the SS? Could we
have lived with ourselves if we had, like Truman, dropped the atomic bomb, or
like the founding fathers, allowed slavery in order to unite the colonies into
a nation?
One cannot spend too much time with questions like this or
one would never get dinner on the table.
But it’s important, I think, that we revisit them from time to time so
we don’t forget who we are and where we’re going.
