When Memory Comes

by Saul Friedlander

  My first scholarly text in a traditional sense dealt with American policy regarding Vichy-dominated North Africa during the months preceding the Anglo-American landing of November 1942. It was published by the Revue Suisse d’Histoire, whose editor at the time was Jean-François Bergier. Thirty-seven years later, Bergier presided over the Independent Historians’ Commission, of which I was a member, set up to investigate the history of the relations between Switzerland and Nazi Germany, particularly during the war.

  My first political article, a paean to Israel, an excerpt of which was published in 1962 in Le Figaro Littéraire, angrily answered an essay by the famous French sociologist, historian, and regular contributor to Le Figaro, Raymond Aron. Aron had questioned the ability of a tiny state like Israel to produce anything of significance in the fields of science or culture. As a true believer, I protested.

  Let me return briefly to Jouvenel, and to Aron in fact. In the sixties, I knew little about Jouvenel’s past, except that he had been Colette’s lover and that in 1936 he had been granted a notorious interview by Hitler (the Führer probably ignored that Jouvenel was half-Jewish). Twenty years later, thanks to my friend Zeev Sternhell’s book Neither Right Nor Left (Ni droite ni gauche: L’idéologie fasciste en France), I discovered some of Jouvenel’s shocking political choices during the late thirties and under Vichy. What subsequently astonished me no less was Aron’s testimony in favor of Jouvenel in the lawsuit that the author of Après la défaite (After the defeat), first published in Berlin in 1941, had brought against Zeev and his publisher, Seuil. I had come to like Aron personally, but his right-leaning politics may have misled him in this matter, out of loyalty to a like-minded intellectual of the postwar period.

  2

  The dissertation demanded archival work in Bonn, Koblenz, Freiburg, and London. I added quite a few interviews, even one with former admiral Karl Dönitz, whom Hitler appointed as head of state before committing suicide.

  I wanted to ask Dönitz whether, before December 1941, the German navy was preparing for the possibility that the United States would join the war on the side of Great Britain. I wished to know particularly whether the Germans were staging war games (Kriegsspiele), during which military units practice responses to hypothetical battlefield (or naval) situations involving a probable enemy. Submarines (which Dönitz commanded until 1943) would have been the weapons of choice in such exercises. I drove all the way from Geneva to Aumühle in Schleswig-Holstein, where Dönitz lived after spending the several years in jail to which the Nuremberg tribunal had sentenced him.

  I was often asked what I felt while en route to meet the man Hitler appointed as his successor on the eve of his suicide. I felt nothing.

  Regarding naval preparations for a war with the United States Dönitz not only denied that war games that assumed such a possibility had ever taken place, he even declared that, before the outbreak of the war in Europe, no games forecasting a war with Great Britain had ever been organized. This last claim seemed highly dubious, mainly in view of the tense international situation between mid-1938 and the last months of peace in 1939. In short, according to Dönitz, Germany had avoided any step that smacked of “preparing a war of aggression,” one of the indictment counts in Nuremberg.

  I then decided to confront the admiral with the Jewish issue, unaware of the anti-Semitic repertory he flaunted throughout his career. It also shows how naive I was: would Hitler have appointed as his successor somebody whom he wouldn’t have considered ideologically reliable through and through, that is, first and foremost, a thoroughgoing anti-Semite? Thus, without thinking of the obvious declarations I would get, I asked him at what point he became aware of the extermination of the Jews. “Never,” he answered. Only after Hitler’s death, once he became head of state, was he told about it, he claimed. This was even less believable than his statement about the war games. I ignored that he had made the same declaration at Nuremberg and told him that I was not convinced. The discussion went back and forth until, as a last resort, I ventured a question to which, I thought, he would be unprepared: “Herr Grossadmiral,” — I used his full German title — “do you give me your word of honor as German grand-admiral that you knew nothing about the extermination of the Jews?” The answer was immediate: “I give you my word of honor as German grand-admiral that I knew nothing about it.”

  Dönitz had misinformed me about the war games involving Great Britain before September 1939, as I soon found out. Both the head of the historical section of the British Admiralty, Commander Saunders, and a former German naval officer, Korvettenkapitän (Lieutenant Commander) Bidlingmeier, wrote to me that such war games had taken place. Bidlingmeier clinched the issue: he had personally participated in one of them. If Dönitz lied on a minor matter, then he most likely lied about one of utter importance: his knowledge of the extermination policy. As I previously mentioned, I should have expected it.

  The meeting with Dönitz reminds me of an Israeli-German documentary about Himmler, The Decent One, that we recently saw. It is essentially based on Himmler’s letters to his family. I had read his early diary, his service diary, most of his orders, exhortations, and speeches, and some of his letters. These previously unpublished private letters do not add much to what we knew of the man: obsessive, power hungry, a true believer in Nazi ideology, enthralled by Adolf Hitler. I found the rejection of his father’s entreaties to save some old friend from Dachau and the ultimate break with his father as the most interesting part. He did not attend his father’s funeral. There was a fanaticism in the Nazi leadership that Dönitz shared and just tried to camouflage after the war.

  At the end of 1963, my dissertation was ready. The “defense” would take place before a jury comprising at least two members external to the institute. In my case, Freymond would preside, while two well-known historians, the Paris professor Maurice Baumont and the Zurich professor Jean Rudolf von Salis, would be the external members.

  During that same year Baumont used to come once a week from Paris as guest professor at the institute to lecture on the diplomatic history of the Second World War. I hadn’t attended his course and had never spoken to him. Naturally, I worried about his attitude. As I arrived at the institute, one hour or so before the soutenance (the French equivalent of the dissertation defense), I saw Baumont sitting in one of the offices, with the door ajar, reading my dissertation. I walked in and introduced myself. “How old are you?” he asked me. “Thirty-one,” I said. “At your age,” he commented, “Jesus had almost finished his career.” I am usually quite bad at quick repartees, but at that moment, I was struck by some momentary inspiration: “Yes,” I said, “but without a doctorate.” Baumont laughed, and I knew that he would be friendly.

  The defense went well. My main argument was simple, although uncommon at the time. Instead of accepting the view that Hitler’s ideological contempt for the United States blinded him to the military significance of its eventual intervention, I showed — on the basis of much new archival material — that, notwithstanding his outbursts against the American medley of races headed by Roosevelt and his Jews, the German leader, well aware of the country’s enormous potential, made considerable efforts to prevent the U.S. entry into the war, all the more so from November 1941, when his Russian adventure was slowing down. Thus, aware of the fact that his Japanese quasi-allies were intent on conquests in the South Pacific that would mean war with the United States, Hitler tried strenuously to convince them to attack the Soviet Union in Siberia instead. Moreover, notwithstanding Roosevelt’s repeated provocations in the Atlantic (to overcome strong isolationist opposition in Congress and join the war on Great Britain’s side), the German leader manifestly avoided an escalation of the naval incidents. Once Japan attacked, however, Hitler’s anti-American rage exploded and he took the initiative and declared war.

  In the course of the discussion, I heard for the first time a comment that apparently belonged to French examiners’ arsenal of nasty remarks. It came from Baumont, but he t
urned it around from negative to positive: “One cannot say about your dissertation,” he quipped, “what has been said more than once: ‘Sir, in your work there is much that is right and there are also some original ideas, but what is right is not original and what is original is not right.’ ”* Old Baumont was a character. Later on, we used to chat, and he told me that General Maxime Weygand, whom he knew, still remained convinced that Dreyfus was guilty. Weygand was commander in chief during the last part of the campaign of 1940 that led to the French surrender (he died in 1965).

  When the post-dissertation dust settled, Freymond informed me that, notwithstanding all my good work, there was no teaching position available at the institute. But, as chance would have it, a young assistant professor, who had just started teaching, fell ill and had to take a long-term break. Freymond asked me to replace him from January 1964 on. I did so, and a few months later was asked to stay.

  The overall theme of my dissertation, namely the foreign and military policies of Nazi Germany, was attuned to the general trend of historical research and publications at that time, the early 1960s. I remember that while working in Bonn, I often discussed my work with a historian of the war generation, Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, who had already worked on an edition of the OKW (the High Command of the Wehrmacht) diary and related material. This was, all in all, a kind of history still keeping its distance from the criminal dimension of the regime, although Hitler’s military orders were duly investigated.

  It was no longer the period of overall German historiography’s silence about Nazi crimes; the first major German trials (the trial of an Einsatzgruppe in Ulm in 1959, the first Auschwitz trial in 1963), as well as the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, demanded massive documentation and drew widespread attention for a while. In that sense, the early sixties were a transition phase and the same Hans-Adolf Jacobsen must have already started research for his forthcoming publication on Hitler’s “Commissar Order” (the order to shoot all political commissars of the Soviet army, considered as the carriers of Bolshevik ideology and, for Hitler, all Jews), issued in early June 1941, two weeks before the attack on the Soviet Union. More generally, German historians of the Reich were well aware of any new material that came up in the various trials. And yet, for the general public, the open awareness of the full dimensions of Nazi crimes and the demand for full information of a largely repressed past were still a few years away.

  3

  I loved teaching and I think that for years I was a good teacher, in Geneva, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Los Angeles. One should sense, however, when to stop. Among the refugee scholars at the institute in the 1930s, one of the professors of international law, Hans Wehberg, did not heed the signs and remained with a single student sitting in his course. His widow didn’t know what to make of it: “I don’t understand; at the beginning my husband attracted dozens of students, and at the end only one stayed. Yet he taught exactly the same material.”

  In fact, apart from my decreasing enthusiasm for teaching and even for shepherding dissertations over the last few years, what particularly induced me to retire was the sense that my memory was in decline. The sudden disappearance of words or names became an annoyance in and of itself, with the added worry of facing a blank in the midst of the Q&A period, after a lecture. It is not yet a problem in writing, as usually, after a while, the forgotten word comes back. For now …

  Age is one explanation of my memory issues; the medicines I’ve taken for the last fifty-six years are another. The symptoms that led me to doctors and their prescriptions started in Israel somewhat before the time I decided to get married. No complex psychological theories are needed to explain a sudden surge of anxiety, which began with claustrophobia.

  The symptoms spread. At first, I couldn’t sit in the middle of a row in theaters. After some time, sitting near the exit didn’t help either, and I started avoiding enclosed spaces in general. Imagine what flying to New York meant during my last year with Goldmann, the more so that I was afraid of flying. Those unbearably lengthy trips offered one saving grace: in the age of propellers or turbojet engines, the planes had to land every few hours: Tel Aviv–Rome; Rome–Shannon; Shannon–Gander; Gander–New York. I tried drinking myself to oblivion: it didn’t help much.

  When my anxiety and phobias started, the medicine prescribed (Equanil) didn’t work, and dizzy spells, very frequent ones, followed my bouts of claustrophobia. Much worse were the repeated nightly attacks of tachycardia: I was terrified and no physician could convince me that I suffered only from anxiety and wasn’t dying. Such assurances would work for a few days and then the anxiety returned. The symptoms became much worse shortly before our marriage, when Hagith and I, during a few days of waiting for some documents from Israel, left London for a very welcoming inn in Hartford. I simply could not stay in the restaurant without feeling that I would faint, so that on several occasions I had to leave dinner and flee to our room. The same occurred — even more intensely — at the hotel in Flims, a Swiss resort where we spent three weeks after the wedding. I was desperate and Hagith utterly at a loss.

  From Flims we were to travel to Zurich and from there fly to New York, via Paris. We used the opportunity to make an appointment with a professor of psychiatry at the University of Zurich whose name I have since forgotten but who had a great reputation. After hearing me out and performing a few tests, he recommended a stay at a famous clinic established by Ludwig Binswanger. In short, my psychological state didn’t bode well. We left for New York nonetheless and I started my last stint of work with Goldmann. I don’t know how many doctors I saw, but it was a long list that included several psychoanalysts. When I told the analyst I saw in Israel that I planned to leave my job with Peres in order to resume my graduate studies, he answered with authority, “I am not sure that given your state you will be capable of concentrating enough to pursue any studies.”

  Strange as it sounds, apart from those closest to me, nobody noticed a thing. Even stranger was the fact that I could do my work and later pursue my studies. In Geneva, anxiety became almost unbearable: agoraphobia (the fear of open spaces) was added to my claustrophobia. At that point, I became tempted to drop everything. I thought that I would never recover and that, ultimately, I would have to be relegated to a psychiatric institution, as the Zurich specialist had recommended. But how would I pay for it? Putting an end to my studies and returning to Israel remained the only option, as in Israel comprehensive health care was available to all.

  Still, work on the dissertation never stopped, and, as I mentioned, sometime in October 1963, the manuscript was ready. When I was about to take a copy of the text to Freymond, I got so dizzy that I fell. Hagith had to deliver the manuscript, explaining that I was suffering from an upset stomach and a fever.

  In Geneva, I saw an analyst for four years. She was a very congenial lady from North Carolina who had married a Swiss psychoanalyst, the son of the famous linguist and Geneva patrician, Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure junior died and his widow Janice went on living in one of the most impressive palatial homes of the old town. Unfortunately, for patients the entrance was through a side door. At least it helped one to fantasize about Janice’s hidden palatial life.

  The analysis (five times a week) seemed orthodox Freudian. I read all I could about it (I “enjoyed” particularly Otto Fenichel’s Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis) — supposedly not a good idea as it created intellectual obstacles to spontaneous reactions. Yet I liked J. de S. and looked forward to my visits (let’s call it a bit of “transference”). I do not remember much of the therapy itself beyond some of my recurrent and obvious issues, except for a short dream that, without knowing why, I never forgot. I am walking down a mountain road when I see, coming in my direction, a strange herd guarded by two or three policemen. The thirty or forty members of the herd are “monsters” physically speaking, but clearly they are humans, deformed humans with contorted human faces; they have breasts, although they appear to me to be men. I ask one of the guards w
here they are leading this strange group. “We are going to kill them,” he tells me, and adds, “It’s horrible.” Then he adds again: “It’s horrible because they cry.” Could the tears be those I was unable to shed in real life?

  At the time I believed in the therapeutic effect of analysis more than I do today, so that I cannot say whether it was the analysis that kept me afloat or whether, ultimately, hefty daily doses of Librium, then of Valium, and years later of Xanax, Zoloft, and Klonopin did the trick, although sporadic bouts of anxiety never entirely disappeared. Perhaps a measure of academic success became the real therapy. Whatever helped, the fact is that gradually the various manifestations of anxiety from which I had suffered day in and day out for some five to six years lost in intensity and then disappeared, as did the fear of flying and other phobias as well. But in the meantime, I had become addicted to tranquilizers.

  I have left the most obvious question for the end: How did all of this affect my marriage? When Hagith and I met, I was nothing more than Nahum Goldmann’s employee, without much to show for myself, and I soon started to get mysteriously ill. No physician, psychiatrist, or analyst seemed capable of curing me of ailments that were evidently psychological with some psychosomatic consequences. The Jerusalem analyst who attempted to dissuade me from leaving the job with Peres for uncertain studies had seen Hagith in private and told her outright that she had to separate from me.