A lesson for all humanity

The Age

Saturday September 5, 2009

Louise Adler

In defending Germany's right to forget, Bernhard Schlink shifts our gaze from the victims, writes Louise Adler. BERNHARD Schlink and I are often described as the ��second generation��. However, Schlink is the son of German citizens, bystanders during World War II; I am the daughter of European Jews, both Nazism's victims. So can we find a common language?We are both compelled to make sense of the past but our purposes are different. Schlink is concerned with the individual and collective responsibility and guilt of the Germans. I look at that collective history, weigh up the responsibility taken and wonder whether the guilt expressed is authentic and the necessary lessons have been learnt.I have written elsewhere about an Australian journalist who told me that I should find within myself the kindness required to ��forgive��, as if Germany's crimes against humanity were mine to forgive. The implication was that we vengeful Jews should adopt a Christian approach, to allow the sinner to redeem himself. The comment was also an expression of moral boredom; time to ��move on��. For this journalist, future generations of Germans cannot be held responsible for that history.The perpetrator certainly wishes that ��the past is the past��. But the victim wishes for the reverse, that the past be made present. When former prime minister John Howard refused to apologise to indigenous Australians he was being dishonestly literal in arguing that he couldn't apologise for something he hadn't personally done. He was playing political semantics, and behind the sophistry was a calculated mean spiritedness. Righting the wrongs of the past is a shared responsibility; acknowledging the past and its victims is a touchstone in a civil society. Our ability to recognise and empathise with history's victims is a foundational marker of a decent society.Germany's past requires that we keep our gaze firmly on the victims. With the victims in mind, the perpetrators are understood differently. We need to understand the psychopathology of fascism, to document and analyse the rise of national socialism, the forces at work that enabled Nazism to flourish as a popular movement, as a political party, as state institutions. It is vitally important for us to understand this history. But understanding should not preclude condemnation. The inhumanity of Nazi Germany and the cruelty of ordinary Germans as enthusiastic participants, collaborators or bystanders requires unequivocal condemnation. It was inevitable that what Daddy did during the war was going to be traumatic and sully familial relations for second-generation Germans.Which brings us to The Reader, a traditional bildungsroman, in which a young man's first sexual experiences are also his moral education. But this education comes courtesy of Hanna Schmidt, an SS guard, involved in the incineration of hundreds of Jews. To hide her illiteracy, she accedes to a false charge and is found guilty alongside her fellow guards. The inability to read is to be seen as a humanising failing in a brutal, murderous landscape. The testimony of Schmidt's victims becomes secondary to this apparent travesty of justice. We are asked to empathise with a legal injustice. And so this becomes a story of a simple woman's hard won struggle for dignity. With a peculiar sleight of hand, the focus shifts from the immorality of obeying orders to keep a church locked while innocent people burn alive, to the fate of a perpetrator within the postwar German judicial system. We should fear Hanna, but Schlink wants us to understand her.Is The Reader a metaphor? Does Hanna's illiteracy stand in for a generation's moral illiteracy, the incapacity of German individuals to make sense of Nazism? But Schlink has not written a metaphorical novel. He has stated emphatically that The Reader is not ��a book about the Holocaust, it is about how the second-generation comes to terms with the Holocaust and the role played in it by their father's generation��. This makes the novel all the more troubling and unresolved.Brecht once wrote that ��Auschwitz is the revelation that the Palace of Culture was built on dog shit��. The discovery that this SS guard, in a twisted kind of charity, had prisoners read to her, as respite prior to selection, borders on the obscene. The young man whose journey this is discovers that his former lover spent her years in jail reading the Holocaust literary canon, Primo Levi, Ellie Wiesel, Tadeusz Borowski, before hanging herself. Is the author suggesting a parallel between the guard's nascent literacy and her moral development? In fetishising literature, Schlink risks being accused of seeking to ameliorate Germany's crimes.We read to know ourselves. So is Schlink suggesting that Hanna reads the survivors' literature and finds there an understanding of herself so revolting that death is the only response? Is the suggestion here that art is transformative, redemptive? Is The Reader's argument that through reading the Holocaust literary canon, an SS guard can come to understand the enormity of her crimes? All of Germany's great cultural traditions of the 19th century, including Goethe, Heine and Beethoven, did not create moral rectitude in mid-20th century Europe. Indeed, as we now know, many among the Nazi hierarchy enjoyed these cultural icons, while calmly devising the Final Solution. The Reader is either a novel about a generation's moral illiteracy or it is about the next generation's ability to accept its legacy.In proposing that ��whoever remembers wants the right to forget��, Schlink is calling for the past to be allowed to become history. It is certainly the historian's task to make sense of the past. But citizens have other work to do with regards to the past. If we allow the past to become history than how we remember the past becomes a pressing question.Aesthetic representations of the Holocaust have been one way of remembering, but most have been sentimental, kitsch, pornographic, tendentious, or simply manipulative. Literary renditions of the Holocaust, either in its particularity or generality, have mostly failed as instructive lessons or commemorative tributes. That is not, as Elie Wiesel has proposed, because of the Holocaust's uniqueness, but rather because the act of ��imagining�� takes us further away rather than closer to the actual experience.The Holocaust now demands distance from both writers and readers. Adorno calls it a kind of coldness. Ersatz re-creations of liquidating ghettos, arty imaginings of daily life in concentration camps, channelling the act of dying in gas chambers, are at best phoney, at worst exploitative. Art that takes the Holocaust as its subject needs detachment if we are to attend to the lessons that period in history provides.In 1945 Dwight Macdonald correctly warned: we must now fear the person who obeys the law more than one who breaks it. When the SS guard turns to the judge and asks what would he have done, we are back where we started: with responsibility and guilt, understanding and condemnation. But the answer to Hanna's question of the judge is not mute acknowledgment of humanity's innate amorality. As Zygmunt Bauman argues, ��it does not matter how many people chose moral duty over self-preservation. What does matter is that some did. Evil can be resisted. The testimony of the few who did resist shatters the authority of the logic of self-preservation. It shows it for what it is in the end �� a choice��.In one of his books, The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution, my father details an encounter with a French demographer who witnessed an incident he had not been able to forget. In July 1942 he was a boy of 12 living with his parents in an apartment in the 12th arrondissement. On July 16, a Thursday and traditionally a school holiday in France, he had been playing in the street. That day the French police raided the area and were arresting Jews. Since he wasn't Jewish, the raid did not affect him or his family directly. But his play was interrupted when a young Jewish schoolmate, the son of a neighbour, came up to him. The little French Jewish boy had also been arrested but was later released because he was French-born; his parents were detained because they were foreigners.The boy had returned to the family's apartment only to find the door sealed. He then went to each family in the block begging to be taken in until his parents returned, but all refused him. Now he stood in the street, tears streaming down his face, flourishing a metro ticket. One family had covered their refusal with the price of a train ticket. After the war, the father of the Jewish boy came back from Auschwitz and went to his former apartment in search of his son. He never found the boy and a few days later committed suicide.That innocent little boy who disappeared demands of each of us that we are able to answer the question, ��What would you have done?�� It is disturbing and surprising that Bernhard Schlink allows that question to remain unanswered some 60 years later. How we are to honour that past once it is rendered history is a matter of consequence. The Holocaust remains significant only if it is understood as a lesson for all of humanity. Reducing it to a narrative of anomalous German barbarism and Jewish victimhood is to fail to recognise its importance.This is an edited version of a speech given at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Louise Adler is the CEO and publisher-in-chief of Melbourne University Publishing.

© 2009 The Age

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