Guilt About the Past

by Bernhard Schlink

  Already as I was speaking I did not have a good feeling. At first I thought it was the oppressive atmosphere in the room, the dogmatic airs of Volker N’s opponents so certain of their victory, the scant number of his supporters, the strong applause against him, and the meagre clapping that we who supported his admittance received, the hostility visible in some of the faces. But if that is all it had been – then would I not have felt better when we won?

  Yes, we won. In a secret ballot Volker N was admitted with eighty-seven ayes and sixty-one nays and seventeen abstentions. The younger colleagues had indeed openly applauded the older ones, their mentors for their doctorate, and their habilitation whose goodwill they depended upon for their careers and which they did not want to lose. But in secret they did not want to have anything to do with the ancient history of their political affairs.

  We who had supported Volker N’s admittance received a few compliments. How good it was that we led the discussion so diplomatically in this important disagreement. How good it was that the senior members could have lost their fight without losing face over it. How good it was that our younger colleagues could vote against the old ones without disavowing them too severely and laying themselves too open to criticism. How good it was that Volker N was accepted; they would not have believed it could be accomplished. How excellent that the whole nasty business could be settled without tearing the association apart with resignations or any other further offence.

  We won and still a thorn in my side remained, and whenever I thought about the fight for Volker N’s acceptance in the Association of German Constitutional Law Professors the same bad feeling returned.

  Years later I read a doctoral dissertation that one of my research assistants wrote about the law school faculty at the Berlin University in the upheaval of 1933. The situation was critical in the spring of 1933; the law school faculty was largely Jewish, a Jewish dean and assistant dean ran the program. Among the professors there were neither convinced national socialists nor resolved opponents of national socialism, instead there were politically moderately engaged legal scholars, irritated by the change of circumstances, peaceably going forward in their research and teaching. They got hit with pressure from above by the new national socialist Minister of Culture and from below by the national socialists among the students. It was only at the beginning of the summer semester that Jewish professors were forcibly put on leave and a new election for the dean was organised. But already at the beginning of March the dean and the assistant dean of the law school had resigned from their official positions.

  It happened quietly. The minutes of the faculty meetings make no note of any removal or resignation from office or new election; at the beginning of March the Jewish dean simply invited everyone to a meeting and a dinner in his apartment, as was customary at the end of a period in office. The next meeting at the end of April was led by an informally appointed new dean. Since this person officiated both as dean and assistant dean, the position held by the Jewish assistant dean was simply made to disappear.

  The dissertation explores the reasons behind this pre-emptory rush of obedience and cannot find its origin in national socialist zeal, in anti-Semitic malice, or even out of fear over job security and salary. It appears much more plausible that the Jewish and non-Jewish colleagues agreed to avoid every provocation and escalation. They did not want to provide anyone with a target and chose a response meant to protect Jewish as well as non-Jewish colleagues from attacks. Even later, when leaves-of-absence, firings and other machinations were enforced against Jewish professors, everyone’s efforts, those of Jewish and non-Jewish colleagues alike, were directed toward minimising the problems behind the scenes with assistance from old established contacts within the ministry in hopes to solve them through diplomatic channels. Anything not to alienate the Minister, anything not to defy the students!

  Over the spring of 1933, the law school faculty allowed itself to be corrupted. It was not corruption on account of a lust for power or money or fame. It was corruption through good intentions. No one wanted the Jewish professors to be exposed to unfavourable treatment. It is true that the non-Jewish professors did not want to be exposed to unfavourable treatment either, but that did not preclude them from simultaneously having good intentions. Corruption through good intentions, just like every other form of corruption, has its price. In 1933, when the diplomatic channels, so often relied upon in the old days, had led nowhere, it was already too late for protests which would have had to have happened earlier, and not just because they had become dangerous in the meantime. Protests would no longer have been credible after the professors had at first accepted the rules as they had been presented to them by the national socialist regime and had attempted to find a solution under the premise of these rules.

  The dissertation also documents how the law school faculties in Munich and Cologne supported their Jewish colleagues and defended them against the attacks from the ministry and the students. In the end, they were not successful either. It makes us feel good to read about them today anyway – someone at least set a good example. For the faculty members in Munich and Cologne it was not about setting an example. For them, like the Berliners, it was about success. None of the members of these faculties had predicted their failure – nor could they have. How could the professors of the Berlin law school anticipate that the diplomatic manoeuvres they had so masterfully executed before 1933 would no longer amount to anything after 1933? On the other hand, how could the professors in Munich and Cologne have any idea that their engagement, at first successful, finally would be to no avail? Each one did what their experience trained them to do in their relations with the university and the ministry, and they both acted with good intentions. But the professors of the Berlin University allowed themselves to be corrupted, and one cannot read this story of corruption without finding it disturbing.

  And that is why the thorn in my side and the bad feeling remained. I, too, had allowed myself to be corrupted. On account of my good intentions, I, too, had not said what needed to be said about the events in the summer of 1970 and about the unwarranted uproar in the autumn of 1992. I had wanted to help Volker N and not hurt his chances by escalating the conflict, provoking his opponents, and irritating the silent majority. This well-intentioned corruption could easily have exacted its price too, and again the price would have been credibility. Had Volker N’s acceptance been rejected, it would have been too late to say what needed to be said in the Association of German Constitutional Law Professors. Those of us in favour of admitting him had allowed ourselves to be drawn into the argument under the terms as the opponents to his admission had defined them and we could no longer have credibly withdrawn from those terms in a second attempt. Certainly, we would have been able to nominate Volker N again for membership, but only with the background and under the consideration that his behaviour as a student had disqualified him in the first round. His acceptance in the second round would have been a mere act of mercy.

  We did not have to pay that price. We were lucky and we won. That our diplomatic actions would meet with success was something we could not have foreseen. We also could not have predicted the outcome had we followed another, direct, confrontational and adversarial course of action. Would the members have rejected this course of action and then also Volker N’s acceptance? Or would the effect have been to chase away the fears, caution and hesitations that were paralysing the discussion? I must admit that at the time I did not once consider the question. I simply accepted the situation as it had been defined by others.

  Today the stories from the autumn of 1992 in Bayreuth and the summer of 1970 in Heidelberg are historic footnotes. Because the past that ended with the autumn of 1992 and the past that began with the spring of 1933 are absolutely incomparable, it appears as though the situations in Bayreuth and in Heidelberg are also of completely different types. The situation in Bayreuth looks minor, inconsequential and harmless and the
one in Berlin looms large, and portends doom and danger. But that is the perspective of hindsight. The perspective prior to the events was that there were two minor situations threatening problems, conflicts and frustrations but nothing of a really serious nature. That in 1933 the world would be turned upside down and in 1992 everything remained in good order, that in Berlin the diplomatic, though corrupted, course of action would fail and no amount of luck could help while in Bayreuth luck intervened and diplomacy succeeded – all that was hidden at the time.

  Once the consequences of any one action are largely unforeseeable; strategic and tactical calculations can offer no point of reference. So at first what I thought I should learn was that it is proper to simply do the right thing in such situations – to say what needs to be said without regard for diplomacy, but without the risk of corruption. I also thought that I should never again do what I had done in Bayreuth where I accepted the situation as others had defined it for me and did not even think to question the chances of another more direct, confrontational and adversarial course.

  Then I started to regard my behaviour in Bayreuth less harshly – as I also judge the Berlin professors’ behaviour in a slightly more favourable light. I said to myself that one cannot make things work without accepting situations defined by others. The terms of reality are mostly determined by others and to be successful in the real world we must submit to it as it stands. The success in Bayreuth confirmed that the situation was as the others had defined it and as we had accepted it. I also said to myself that my generation had refused for too long to accept reality and had held on to an unreasonable belief in our ability to create a new reality. In the early seventies we took our exams and started our careers, got married and started families – the years of moral and political zeal, and the naïve belief that the older generation is guilty and principally in the wrong and our young one is innocent and in the right, were over. But it still took a long time until the communist cells and radical sects disbanded, until among the green party a realist minority developed beside its fundamentalist majority, and until diplomacy and compromise were deemed as respectable as confrontation and conflict. From this perspective, the autumn of 1992 in Bayreuth was simply a late chapter in my long departure from an early moralistic railing against the messiness of reality. Still, the moral thorn in my side has never gone away.

  Stories about the Past

  In the first five essays I talked about perpetrators and victims, about the entanglement of following generations into the perpetrators’ guilt and the victims’ trauma and about forgiveness and reconciliation. I talked about how the past reaches into the present. In this last essay I would like to talk about present fiction reaching back to the past. Are there rules for fiction dealing with the past? Is it anything goes? There are people who were not heard or not seen and who want their truth acknowledged, traumatised people who want their trauma respected, people deprived of a dignified life who want their dignity restored. Their expectations come to the fore whenever someone writes about the past they experienced. Can these wants be dismissed or must they be honoured?

  I think the foremost question is whether fiction has to be true. What is truth in fiction? Is it that the facts that fiction presents happened or at least could have happened? But what if fiction does not claim to present facts? What if the story is clearly a fairytale, a satire, a comedy, which by definition does not limit itself to what happened or could have happened? Are authors allowed to craft fairytales, satires or comedies about anything at all? Even about the Holocaust? Adorno’s famous statement from 1951 that to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbarian, (nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch) certainly includes poems about Auschwitz and, to be sure, any Auschwitz comedy or satire. Are there events so serious and awful that they can only be documented, or at best fictionalised so that they present what happened or what could have happened?

  I have heard and read affirmation of this position more than once, but I don’t think it is meant to be taken literally. After all, a fairytale, a satire or a comedy can open one’s eyes to truth as effectively as a documentary can; and fiction presenting what happened and only what happened can create a veneer of truth that distorts by omitting what also happened. What lies behind the idea that some events may not be fictionalised or may only be fictionalised while remaining true to the facts is not about the genre, not about documentation versus fiction, not about this kind of fiction versus that kind of fiction. It is about authenticity in a fuller sense.

  If I understand correctly, what lies behind the refusal to fictionalise an event such as the Holocaust, or to reject its representation in certain ways or forms, is the fear that the full truth might get lost. It is a fear that truth might disappear not only through the imaginings and fabrications of well- or ill-intentioned authors but also through true but singular and misleading aspects of what happened. Even if there might have been a funny moment in Auschwitz, even if there might have been a decent concentration camp guard, even if there might have been a fairytale element in someone’s rescue from persecution and horror – couldn’t a novel, a play, a comedy about this make the reader or viewer forget that the full reality was profoundly different? It’s understandable how this fear gives way to the demand that an event like the Holocaust should be documented but not fictionalised or only fictionalised in a way that makes the full truth visible. A good documentary can make us understand the full truth – just remember Shoah – and fiction is able to do the same; it can capture and represent single moments and episodes in a way that makes us aware of the large picture – just think of Primo Levi’s or Imre Kertész’s work. And it can fail. I, at least, could not find the whole picture in Benigni’s comedic movie Life is Beautiful about a Jewish father and his son being deported into a concentration camp where the father manages to present everything to his son as a complicated game with complicated rules that the son has to master to win the prize: an American tank. And I understand the twofold criticism that has been levelled at the film: its myopic perspective and its strange use of comedy were both misleading.

  But to turn that fear into a demand for only certain types of representation reveals both too much and too little faith. The demand that artistic representations of the Holocaust be presented so that the whole picture becomes visible shows too little faith in viewers’ and readers’ ability to create the whole picture for themselves. Now that such a multitude of books and articles, plays and films have come out, whether individual works show only certain aspects of what happened matters much less. The whole picture is present anyway. The demand that the Holocaust not be presented in a comedic or otherwise reductive way, on the other hand, shows too much faith in the power of social norms – excluding any other type of norm for the moment. The norm would not succeed and would even be counterproductive. More than anything else it would trigger the wish to come up with something provoking and scandalising.

  Germany and some other countries have a norm against reductive representation of the Holocaust that is also codified as a legal norm in the penal code that makes Holocaust-denial a criminal offence. The law signifies that our society is united in its willingness to accept its past and deal with it – it is a tangible demonstration of that acceptance addressed at ourselves as well as others. It also somewhat protects Jews for whom the Holocaust has become an integral element of their individual and collective identity. But one unintended effect of the norm is that those who set out to deny the Holocaust don’t do it bluntly any more. Rather they minimise what happened in a very skilled and subtle manner. The vice president of my university once gave me a print-out of one of the internet pages that minimise the Holocaust; it had been sent to him anonymously and he had given it to the police. But the police knew it already and couldn’t do anything because the denial was too subtle. Instead of any blunt Holocaust denial, it presented and documented facts and asked questions like: the graves of all the great massacres of the last
century have been found, from Katyn to Cambodia and Kosovo – why is it that the graves of Jews murdered by Germans found in Eastern Europe don’t by far add up to the four million murder victims that are the official number? The graves found at Babi Yar and elsewhere prove that German troops, or rather their local helpers, committed regrettable atrocities but nothing on the scale of the official numbers. I read the internet page with my students and, even though they had been taught extensively about the Holocaust, they found it far from easy to counter its arguments. So here the effect of the norm is not a will to provoke, since a provocation would be punishable, but something else similarly undesirable: a distortion of the truth that is not easy to detect and refute. There is always a social price for norms that limit what one is allowed to say – sometimes the price is worthwhile but, often enough, it’s not.

  A common version of the demand on fiction to show the whole truth demands that it be representative. So if a book about a Jewish student in the Third Reich contains a German teacher as one of its characters, that figure should exhibit the traits of a typical German teacher from that period, if a movie shows the sufferings of a Jewish family it should not end with an unusually lenient fate for them. An SS officer in a story about persecution and annihilation should be the typical SS officer, and a movie or book about a German helping a Jew should make clear that such help was exceptional.

  I agree that an atypical character, a nonrepresentative situation, or an exceptional turn of events may be presented in a way that distorts the truth. And yet there may still be good reasons for liking those stories. Take von Donnersmarck’s recent film The Lives of Others, which is set in the waning years of the GDR. In it a Stasi officer assigned to spy on a playwright comes to admire his life and to see the beauty of art and the value of freedom. In doing so he recognises that what he does is evil and helps the playwright whom he is supposed to control and denounce. The film definitely distorts the truth; the good Stasi officer is a fairytale figure. But the film was praised and well-liked in Germany as well as abroad; it was a fairytale that reconciled the still-divided East and West Germans, and it invited viewers abroad to set the legacy of the Cold War to rest. Its healing message that there is always some good in the bad was irresistible.