The German, at odds with himself, with deep divisions in his mind, likewise in his will and therefore impotent in action, becomes powerless to direct his own life. He dreams of justice in the stars and loses his footing on earth … In the end, then, only the inward road remained open for German men. As a nation of singers, poets, and thinkers, they dreamed of a world in which the others lived, and only when misery and wretchedness dealt them inhuman blows did there perhaps grow up out of art the longing for a new rising, for a new Reich, and therefore for new life.
The language employed by the Nazi state was also directed toward the emotions; what was important in that language was not its lexical meaning, not its analytical and argumentative side, but everything else, that which was said without being said, that which resided in the tone of the language, its voice, in speech. “You are nothing, your people is everything,” ran a Nazi slogan of the time, Klemperer notes, and this was the message, directly and indirectly repeated and repeated again. The people, came the cry, Germany, came the cry, we, we, we, everywhere.
* * *
Personally I have never felt myself to belong to any we; right from when I was small, I have always felt myself to be on the outside. Not because I have thought myself better, quite the opposite, I have never felt good enough to be a part of any we, never felt like I deserved it. Nor do I have any clear feelings of belonging to a particular place; we were newcomers to Tromøya, where I grew up, and so I had, and still have, no right to say that is where I am from. This feeling of being on the outside was most acute during my time at the gymnas, everyone could see I was not good enough, and my realization of that served merely to reinforce my outsideness, there was something odd about me. Oh, how I tingled with joy when the others let me in, like on the day of our graduation parade, and yet I knew that I did not really belong with them, but on my own. Always, I have had only one friend at a time, never more, never any we. I reconciled myself to this when I was a student, stopped hoping for anything else, tagged along with my brother, played in his band, knowing it was the only reason I was allowed to be in it. The role of the writer saved me; being on my own became legitimate, I was something special, an artist.
This summer I experienced something different for the first time. It was paradoxical, because I was on my own when it happened. Nevertheless, I felt myself suddenly to be a part of a we, and that feeling was so enormous and so good that I wept. At least that was one reason I wept. There were many others, for what I am writing about now is the Utøya massacre, when a Norwegian man only a few years younger than myself went through the woods on that tiny island shooting the young people who were gathered there one by one, sixty-nine lives in all. I wept as I would not have wept had sixty-nine youngsters been killed by a bomb in Baghdad or died in an accident in São Paolo, but the feeling that overcame me was that what had taken place had taken place at home, and this, the feeling that I actually possessed a feeling of home, was something I had never felt before. I wept when I saw the images. I called Mom, I called Linda, I called Geir, who was in Norway. No thoughts or feelings existed for anything other than what had happened. Now and then the full reality of what had taken place on the island, and its consequences, occurred to me in all its horror, but then it would go away again. It seemed all to be engulfed in darkness. It was the darkness of grief, but also the darkness of atrocity, and the darkness of death. But the broadcast images showed light, and I knew that light, it was the light of a Norwegian fjord on a rainy day in July. Indeed, all the images that came out from there were recognizable to me, the dark green of the pine trees that extended down to the water, the white-gray of the rocks, the water itself, heavy and motionless below, also gray. There, amid all that was so familiar to me, lay dead bodies, covered by plastic sheeting. From the land came images of the survivors. Some were lying on the ground receiving treatment, some were boarding buses, some were walking away, wrapped in woolen blankets. Some stood and held each other. Some were calling out, some were crying. These were ordinary Norwegian children. The ambulances were ordinary Norwegian ambulances. The police cars were ordinary Norwegian police cars. And when pictures of the man who had done this, who had gone around the island shooting all these people one by one, appeared in the media, they showed an ordinary Norwegian face with an ordinary Norwegian name. It was a national tragedy, and it was my tragedy too. I felt the need to be there, a powerful urge, for the people, the Norwegian people were gathering in huge, silent demonstrations, hundreds of thousands of people standing in the streets clutching roses in their hands. What I felt was the pull of the we I knew, the pull of belonging, of being a part of what is good and meaningful. More democracy, greater openness, more love. This was what Norwegian politicians said, it was what the Norwegian people said, it was what I said to myself as I sat and wept and watched it on TV, the pull it exerted on the emotions was so strong, so vigorous and strong, and the feelings I felt were real and authentic, they came from the heart; this had happened at home, and those gathering in the streets were my people.
Now that I am removed from them I have difficulty grasping those feelings. They seem false, induced only by the power of suggestion, I knew none of the dead, how could I grieve for them as I did? How could I feel such a strong sense of belonging? And yet the feelings were quite incontestable, and swept everything else aside during the time of the tragedy.
Only afterward did I realize that these must have been the same forces, the enormous forces that reside within the we, that came over the German people in the 1930s. That was how good it must have felt, how secure the identity they were being offered must have appeared to them. The flags and banners, the torches, the demonstrations: that was what it must have been like.
* * *
Against this we stood the they of the Jews. The language by which the we was conveyed, and of which it consisted, constitutive of the new identity, may be understood in two ways, as a language invoking grandeur, the emotions that lie beyond the language, having to do with ideals and nearness to the world, but conversely also as an enormous depreciation of the possibilities of language, a violent constraint, a straitening, in which the human itself is rendered mute. Klemperer saw it like this:
And here a more profound explanation for the impoverishment of the LTI opens up from beneath the obvious one. It was poor not only because everyone was forced to conform to the same pattern, but rather – and indeed more significantly – because in a measure of self-imposed constraint it only ever gave expression to one side of human existence.
Every language able to assert itself freely fulfills all human needs, it serves reason as well as emotion, it is communication and conversation, soliloquy and prayer, plea, command, and invocation. Regardless of whether a given subject properly belongs in a particular private or public domain – no, that’s wrong, the LTI no more drew a distinction between private and public spheres than it did between written and spoken language – everything remains oral and everything remains public. One of their banners contends that “You are nothing, your people is everything.” Which means that you are never alone with yourself, never alone with your nearest and dearest, you are always being watched by your own people.
Something is denied a place in the language, on the one side the individual and the unexampled, on the other that which makes complex, which accords subtle differences, the tentative, the uncertain, and the slow, and when everything belonging to this is silenced, no longer finding space in which to articulate itself, it disappears. Whether it disappears only from the language or if what gives rise to it disappears too, ceasing to exist, is perhaps the most burning question of all raised by Nazi rule, pointing as it does toward a problem of identity that is by no means neutral, which is to say of a technical or instrumental nature, but directly tied up with the dreadful shadow cast over humanity by the Holocaust.
No one among us can say what the reason was for the Holocaust, any link between, for example, the brutalization of human minds that occurred in the trenches of
World War I, the Völkisch preoccupations of pre-war German culture, the flourishing nationalism of the interwar period, the stock market crash of 1929, inflation and mass unemployment, the growth of racial biology, Hitler’s pathological hatred and charisma, Germany’s humiliation with the Treaty of Versailles, and the extermination of the Jews is impossible to draw, for the simple reason of not being real. The Holocaust came of society, an occurrence within it, but was something to which society would or could not give name, and which already at that point, as the first trainloads of Jews trundled eastward, was something barely real, taking place at the very margins of humanity, mute and practically invisible to the eye, for if there is one thing shared by the few who witnessed it, it is that they turned away. The silence described by the Polish railway official interviewed in Shoah is telling. That silence was the extermination of the Jews. The sound of the human suddenly ceasing to exist, the stillness that cloaked the landscape in which it had echoed only a moment before. The occasional rush of wind in the trees, a faint hammering in the distance, the sounds of emptiness. How was it possible that so many people, more than a thousand, could fall so silent? Where were they? That stillness is the stillness of the void, descending when what was no longer is, and it is this that makes what took place so impossible to comprehend, for the extermination of the Jews is that which is not. Indeed, it is nothing. How are we to relate to it in any real way? If we select someone to represent it, an individual with a name and history, family and friends, we are addressing it through the fate of the individual, thereby lending it dignity, for the person in question was indeed dignified by virtue of being human, yet it was precisely that human dignity that was absent in the Holocaust, and that absence which made it possible. If we do not select someone to represent it, we are depriving the victims of their names, construing them as the six million, generalizing the atrocity, and thereby falling quite as short, since it was not six million Jews who were exterminated, but one and one and one, six million times. The two perspectives cancel each other out.
* * *
Shoah, which not once in its nine-and-a-half-hour entirety abandons its obligation to that problem, resolves it in what is presumably the only way possible, by considering the Holocaust as a contemporary occurrence on the basis that we can only fully relate to those parts of it that still exist around us, to the places as they are now, all but Auschwitz long since gone, and to the recollections or nonrecollections of those who were close to it, as guards, survivors, neighbors, railway officials, bureaucrats, and nothing else, pure present time, of which such recollections are a part. Absence thus becomes the form itself, people talking about what is not, in what is, and the impossibility of this, on every level, is the film’s theme. How can we talk about what cannot be talked about? How can we talk about something that escapes designation by language insofar as designation itself makes it something it is not?
The extermination of the Jews took place outside the language, undesignated by any linguistic form, a silent occurrence, and the Jews themselves were outside the language too, banished to their bodies, to the “it,” the nameless nothing, which eventually was itself destroyed. One of the most telling scenes in Shoah is the interview with Czeslaw Borowi, who lived next to the railway station in Treblinka during the war, then a young man who saw the trains come every day with their wagonloads of Jews, saw them wait their turn, after a time fully aware of what was going on only a few hundred meters away. As he describes what he saw he suddenly recounts the voices of the Jews from the packed wagons. Ra ra ra ra, he says. Ra ra ra ra. It sounds like animal noise, bird noise. This was their language to him.
Richard Glazar, who was on board one of those trains, in a normal carriage with passenger seats, as if on a holiday trip, recalls that after the station at Treblinka the train moved very slowly, at walking pace, through the forest, it was summer and the weather was hot, and there through the window they saw a boy gesture to them, a slice of his hand across his throat, as if to indicate decapitation. Glazar didn’t know what he meant. Two hours later his fellow passengers were ashes. Glazar himself was spared, they needed labor and he survived.
Czeslaw Borowi uses the same gesture during his interview, a slice of his hand across his throat, and likewise, in quick repetition, two brothers who lived on the farm next to the camp and would hear the screams of terror and smell the rotting, burning corpses daily as they plowed the soil and tended their livestock, the smell hanging in the air even kilometers away. It must have been one of these brothers Glazar saw from the train, the gesture, if not directly sadistic then at least full of Schadenfreude, was the only communication that took place between them and the Jews. Ra ra ra ra was the language from the Jews to them, the slice of the hand across the throat was the language from them to the Jews. What is apparent in that particular scene is that those interviewed are oblivious to what they reveal. They are clearly anti-Semites, and although they are among a very small number of witnesses to the extermination, they are ignorant of what this means and display no perspective whatsoever on the dimension of that human disaster. The fact that they put their fathomless ignorance on show in this way is extremely painful to watch, because they do so in all innocence. They simply have no idea.
Quite as powerful is another scene in which some inhabitants of Chelmno are interviewed. Chelmno was where the industrial extermination of human beings first took place. Human beings have been exterminated throughout history, but what occurred in Chelmno represented a qualitatively new step, something that had never occurred before. Those who were to be killed were transported to a castle where they were forced to strip naked before being herded along a corridor onto a ramp and into a truck. The doors were closed, and a tube attached to an exhaust pipe filled the truck with carbon monoxide. When everyone was dead, the truck drove into the forest outside the village. There, the bodies, gathered around the doors they had instinctively tried to prize open, were tipped out onto the ground, and thrown into mass graves. After a time a huge incinerator was set up in the forest and the corpses that had been buried were dug up again and burned, all other bodies from then on simply being incinerated. What was new about this was that it was not a single occurrence, but took place several times a day over a period of two years. Today the castle has been demolished, the incinerators dismantled, and the only thing that remains is some rubble in a clearing.
Dark is the forest, and still. A river runs by below. Here the flames leaped into the sky, Simon Srebnik recalls, a boy of thirteen in 1941, who worked at the incinerator. More trucks were deployed to increase capacity, and after a while the arriving Jews were gathered in the church rather than the run-down castle. It is outside this church that the people of the village are interviewed, Simon Srebnik, whom they all remember, in their midst: he sang for the German soldiers, was almost their mascot, they taught him German songs, and as they stand there gathered around him, the boy now a middle-aged man, it is with the obvious joy of reunion. They recount what happened in detail, the things they saw. How the church behind them was filled with Jews, the vestry piled up with the suitcases they had brought with them, the number of trucks required before the church was emptied. One of them steps forward and recalls a rabbi he heard about at the time who said the Jews were to blame for the death of Jesus, that his blood was upon them, and when the interviewer asks him if he believes it was the Jews’ own fault, he replies that he is merely repeating what the rabbi said. More accounts follow, in the same detail, and more villagers congregate in front of the camera, which they stare at with ill-concealed interest and glee, like children. Soon after, a procession comes out of the church and the villagers busy themselves making sure no one gets in the way of the camera, holding the children back so that it can film the procession, a proud tradition of the village. They are oblivious to what they are showing us, have no idea what the camera sees, no grasp of what happened there, it is something they regret, naturally, that much is understood, but nothing of it has sunk in. As all this is takin
g place, in front of the church where hundreds of thousands of Jews spent their final hours, in the midst of this flock of villagers, stands Simon Srebnik. It is impossible to tell what he is thinking. His face is unfathomable.
Later he says the only thing he wanted when he was tending the incinerators, thirteen years old, was five slices of bread. He had no understanding of what was going on, he was too young, he says, and used to people dying in the ghetto, people dropped dead all the time. When the Germans left, they shot him in the head, but he survived, and in the film he returns for the first time, sitting in a boat on a narrow river singing the old German soldier songs. In another village those now living in the former homes of the Jews are interviewed, one of them proud of her child’s education, another saying that the Jewish women stole their men, and one of the men saying that he is pleased the Jews have gone but not that they went the way they did. Most of all they seem simply to be flattered by the attention. All these people were there at the time, from their midst, their local communities, the Jews were collected and taken away, in their districts they were gassed and burned. The interviews took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By then some thirty years had passed, and what happened had become an occurrence among other occurrences. The obvious anti-Semitism they display has an element of innocence about it, since they have absolutely no idea what they are revealing of themselves, or rather to whom they are revealing it. It is small-minded, socially inherited, a function of poverty and no education. But is it evil? Were the people evil who appropriated the houses of the Jews and were glad of the improved living standards that came with them? Are they evil, these people who so eagerly swivel round to point to where the suitcases of the Jews were piled up, excited at the prospect of being on television? They know not what they do, for they are innocent. They would not be capable of perpetrating such crimes as they witnessed. The extermination of the Jews organized and carried out by the Germans was qualitatively apart, something other and far greater than popular Jew-baiting.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 93
