War, Witness & Where We Are Now
There is a story that echoes around the beer halls of Prague. It’s as much part of the atmosphere as the folds of tobacco smoke and the groups of old men invariably huddled in the corner (who will, if the reader is prepared to pay for a round of drinks, relate the tale themselves – replete with a sworn affidavit that they knew people who saw it happen – despite the fact that it was almost certainly the invention of a Czech novelist). The story tells of an incident during the Nazi occupation of Prague, not long after the appointment of Reinhard Heydrich, the Director of the Gestapo, as ‘Protector’ of Bohemia and Moravia in 1941. Heydrich was perhaps the most zealous member of the whole Nazi leadership – even Hitler commented on his absolute lack of pity, referring to the tall Saxon as ‘the man with the iron heart’. He was utterly committed to the ideology of Nazism and his rule in Prague was supposed to be a ‘dry run’ for how newly conquered territories would be administered when the inevitable total victory of Fascism was achieved. Heydrich set about his task with great enthusiasm, displaying a callous, urbane efficiency in consigning both places and people to oblivion.
A key part of Heydrich’s programme was to demonstrate the superiority of the Reich’s Teutonic culture over all others – but especially over the ‘degenerate’ Slavic and Jewish cultures, both of which were in abundant evidence in the city of Prague. As befits the birthplace of Don Giovanni, Prague is home to myriad opera houses, musical theatres and concert halls. Perhaps the grandest of these is the Rudolfinum, a barn of a building, its roof ringed by statues of the great composers who have looked out sullenly on the River Vltava since the late nineteenth century. Heydrich, so the story goes, became aware that among these inanimate virtuosi there was a stone Mendelssohn, a composer despised by the Führer on account of his Jewish birth. Consequently, the Reichsprotektor ordered the removal and destruction of the offending sculpture. A group of soldiers were dispatched to the concert hall accordingly, only to be met with tight-lipped silence as to which of the statues was, in fact, Mendelssohn from the building’s Czech curators (who, incidentally, will of course have been regulars in whichever pub the reader chooses to have the tale related to them). Frustrated, the soldiers used good Nazi logic and, after some searching, sourced a tape measure with which they proceeded to measure the noses of each of the statues. Having established which symphonist had the most sizeable conk, they began to have it removed, only for an onlooker to shout up that the figure they were in fact removing was Richard Wagner, Hitler’s favourite composer.
The verisimilitude of the tale aside, it does highlight certain aspects of Fascism that are undoubtedly true. Foremost is its phenomenal pettiness. That one of the most senior officials of what was supposed to be a Thousand-Year Reich, destined to stretch across continents and radically change human society forever, decided to take time out of his day to fuss over the cosmetics of a music hall is astonishing. It is one of the reasons why Fascist figures, from Chaplin’s The Great Dictator to South Park’s Eric Cartman, have consistently been considered so bathetic. It is hard not to laugh at the banality of it all. And yet that banality is, as Hannah Arendt so famously pointed out, one of the most chilling things about totalitarian ideology. To fuss over the identities of a set of sixty-year-old statues is ludicrous, but to do it and then calmly order the slaughter of thousands of human beings is deeply disturbing. It is a tendency that has outlasted the particular incarnation of totalitarianism described above – from the arcane and complex ranks of the Ku Klux Klan to the propensity of dictators to pursue personal vendettas against people of proportionately little importance. Given this focus on minutiae, by equal measures amusing and appalling, it is not surprising that much resistance to Fascism consists of small acts of defiance – the smuggled loaf of bread, the individual refusal to salute, the one life saved. One tiny act of resistance is enough to prove that the totalitarian’s victory is not, in fact, total, that they will never conquer everything.
Secondly, and in seeming contrast, it shows us the enormous credence Fascism gives to its own historical and cultural narrative and the necessarily vast scope of said narrative. This is, of course, not something unique to Fascist movements – almost every ideological child of the French Revolution (whose adherents, lest we forget, tried to actually bring about Year Zero, creating a new calendar with days named after fruit baskets and crayfish) has sought to rewrite history as inexorably leading to the moment of glory. The slight problem with this historiographical exercise is that one comes up against things, ideas, people, etc. that do not necessarily match up to one’s expectations. Such a scenario presents two options: either you bend said obstacles to fit the narrative or attempt to remove them altogether. Either choice would be a tall order for anyone, let alone neurotic, external-decor-obsessed Teutons or tubby, bedsheet-wrapped Midwesterners, yet, be it through the mediation of the Kulturkammer or the misinformation of Fake News, this rewriting and reshaping of narrative is invariably a key part of Fascist projects.
Fascism is, broadly speaking, a phenomenon of the West and, of the skeletons in the West’s cultural cupboard, there can be little doubt that Christianity looms as one of the largest. The relationship between Christianity and Fascism is an inordinately complex one and the topic of many a weightier tome than this. Undeniably, Christians have been complicit in the projects of Fascism, in both its rewriting of the past and its horrific attempts to fashion a new future. Often, Christianity is seen as a pliant, client religion whose historic association with the cultures of the West makes it an easily co-opted ally. From the Ustaše of Croatia to the Reich Church in Germany, from activists of the past to apologists today, there are plenty of examples of Christians, lay and ordained, who have either convinced themselves that collaboration with and propagation of political systems that express themselves through radical, exclusivist authoritarianism serves the establishment of the Kingdom of God or that ‘render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s’ gives carte blanche for silence in the face of persecution of God’s children. Crucially, this book does not seek to minimise these problematic figures but, by drawing attention to those who acted so differently, to show how wrong they were and continue to be.
There are those within Fascist movements (and, indeed, many other totalitarian ideologies) too who have made considerable attempts to bend Christianity to be that pliant and easy ally. Nazism held Christianity to be fundamentally a distraction from its goals, but one that could at times be useful. The Nazis famously suggested that women focus on the three Ks – Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). It is testament to their views on Christianity that it didn’t occur to them that it was precisely because of dedication to Church and children that a number of women made the decision to actively oppose the horrors of the regime. Nobody, to the author’s knowledge, entered into resistance against Fascism for culinary reasons (although Canon Félix Kir, of Kir Royale fame, undoubtedly had strong opinions on the superiority of French cuisine). In private, Hitler expressed scorn for the ‘meekness and flabbiness’ of the Christian faith and vowed that one day he would ‘have the Church on the ropes’, a day that, in part due to people acting on the meek and flabby precepts of Christianity, never came.
Latter-day Fascism (be it in Hungary, France or the United States) has made more of a concerted effort to enlist Christianity in its appeals and statements. Yet invariably it is appealed to as an ethnographic identity rather than a religious one – with modern-day proponents of Fascism seeking to defend Western Christendom from its enemies. There are two particularly delicious ironies in this. Firstly, according to most estimates, between 60 and 70 per cent of all Christians now live outside the West: Nigeria has more than double the number of Protestants that Germany has and Brazil has well over double Italy’s number of Roman Catholics. The West hasn’t been as non-Christian as it is now since the Dark Ages – the Global South, by contrast, has never been more Christian than it is today. To identify Christianity as Western, therefore, is a bit like identifying football as English – yes, there are historic links, but its homeland is really nothing to shout about. Secondly, since the days of St Paul, Christianity has had a lack of internal ethnic distinction as a key tenet of its teaching (if not, regrettably, always of its practice). Paul wrote that ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female; all are one in Christ’. Indeed, a key part of Christianity’s demographic success and a core explanation as to why it gave birth to the secular ideologies of the Enlightenment was its stated rejection of the idea that righteousness or truth belonged to any particular ethnographic grouping.
Inevitably, however, both the Fascists of the past and of today contrived and continue to contrive intellectual gymnastics to try and get past these tenets and, just as inevitably, they came up against and continue to come up against the figure of Jesus Christ. Firstly, they have to explain away his teachings: ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’, the parables of the prodigal son, the unmerciful servant and of the Good Samaritan are all pretty considerable stumbling blocks to any political system based on the narrowing of neighbourliness, the refusal to forgive and forget and the propagation of arbitrary violence. But they also come up against him in thousands of ordinary Christians who did and still do take those teachings to heart. They came up against the figure of Christ in the bombastic priest who blew up Nazi fortifications in a Resistance jailbreak; in the imperious Archbishop who openly condemned their treatment of Jews and facilitated the escape and hiding of thousands; in the young seminarian who took a bullet intended for a young black girl whose only crime had been to try and go to school; as the hand of the Scots spinster-missionary calmly held that of a frightened Hungarian child as their train drew into Auschwitz. This book is a collection of some of those stories and is written in hope that, should Fascism rear its head in the West once more, it might come up against the figure of Christ again.