The program for the destruction of severely handicapped and mentally ill Germans, […] set up two years before the Final Solution: Here, the patients, selected within the framework of a legal process, were welcomed in a building by professional nurses, who registered them and undressed them; doctors examined them and led them into a sealed room; a worker administered the gas’ others cleaned up; a policeman wrote up the death certificate.
Questioned after the war, each one of those people said: What, me, guilty? The nurse didn’t kill anyone, she only undressed and calmed the patients, ordinary tasks in her profession. The doctor didn’t kill anyone, either, he merely confirmed a diagnosis according to criteria established by higher authorities. The worker who opened the gas spigot, the man closest to the actual act of murder in both time and space, was fulfilling a technical function under the supervision of his superiors and doctors.
The workers who cleaned out the room were performing a necessary sanitary job — and a highly repugnant one at that. The policeman was following his procedure, which is to record each death and certify that it has taken place without any violation of the laws in force. So who is guilty?
[…] Once again, let us be clear: I am not trying to say I am not guilty of this or that. I am guilty, you’re not, fine. But you should be able to admit to yourselves that you might also have done what I did. With less zeal, perhaps, but perhaps also with less despair.
That’s from Jonathan Littell’s ‘The Kindly Ones‘.
Reading the novel’s first few pages (all of the above appears before, like, page 10. This book is Not. Fucking. Around.), I keep wondering if the post-WWII generation is the first in history to live with this understanding, that they might have acted monstrously if they were born in different circumstances.
I don’t know how previous generations and civilizations looked upon their history, but I doubt it was with as much guilt and apology as we do. From colonialism to slavery to segregation to 1980s shoulderpads, everything I’ve learned about history combines to form a sort of collective cringe.
I wonder if this began with the struggle to teach Nazism to the people who had survived it, fought against it, participated in it. When I learned about Hitler’s Germany, it was always with an acknowledgement that it could have been me on either end of the rifle or the gas chamber. I was asked to empathize not only with the victims, but with the perpetrators, in a way I wasn’t with other historical episodes.
Maybe it’s because the history is so proximate. Maybe it’s because the people committing the crimes, and dying of them, look like our friends, dress like our grandparents, write and talk like our movies. Maybe it’s because a whole society was at fault. Maybe you learn about the moral capsize of an entire civilization, and you just naturally put yourself inside it.
I have no idea if this is genuinely new to the time or place in which I grew up. I don’t know if French schoolchildren in the early 1900s were asked to imagine themselves committing atrocities during the Napoleonic wars. I don’t know if Spanish kids were told that it might have been them branding apostates during the Inquisition.
But I’m glad to be reading Littell, I’m glad we look at our histories this way. Honesty beats triumphalism, I hope. I wonder how it changes the way we think. I don’t know if it makes us guilty, but I certainly hope it makes us careful.
Great post – the question you’re raising is really interesting, and the book sounds fascinating. When I can clear the decks for a 900-pager I will certainly read it.
I love reading your blogs. You make me think and reflect on my own life. This is a powerful post.
My sister introduced my to your blog, and I love it. (Incidentally, I lived in the Bryant neighborhood in Seattle for 6 years, miss it terribly, and am now living in surburban east coast Pennsylvania- loved “An Open Letter to the Girl….”) I now am trying to catch up on all past blog postings. Thanks for all the hilarious, thought-provoking posts.
Actually I don’t ever recall being challenged in history classes growing up to consider how I would act were I in the perpetrator’s shoes during Nazi Germany or any other recent historical event. I consider myself a moral, compassionate person, but do wonder how I would’ve acted in similar situations… Sure hope my kids will have the benefit of this sort of reflection in their own social studies classes; a very valuable exercise indeed.
We were asked to consider those questions in high school, but way too late I think, and not about Danish history. Conveniently it was about Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiment etc., so safely distanced from our own national transgressions. It’s my impression that the German self-examination is pretty unique in its ruthlessness and different from a more pervasive liberal/white-man’s burden/guilt that you might find in your average college campus across America and Europe. It seems a more personal inquiry somehow, and it’s impressive and terrifying in equal measure.