GERALDINE BROOKS
People talk like that. They talk like that. Let’s deal with that.
—Jay-Z
On the facade of the Stadtkirche in the eastern German town of Wittenberg, a thirteenth-century bas-relief of a Judensau, or “Jew’s pig,” shows a rabbi with his hand up the rear end of a sow while members of his congregation suckle her teats. Since the entrance to the former Jewish ghetto lies just beyond, the medieval Jews of Wittenberg were constantly confronted and humiliated by this obscene image. Once common throughout medieval Europe, Wittenberg’s Judensau is one of the last still in its original place. In 1988, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, the East German government commissioned a sculpture by the artist Wieland Schmiedel. It’s a simple, eloquent attempt at interpretation and atonement. Set in the ground below the Judensau, it depicts paving stones, heaving, tilted out of place, as a noxious, black poison pulses powerfully from beneath.
When I visited Germany in 2009, I found the dialogue between these two works the most potent of all the numerous Holocaust memorials, museums, and historic sites we toured. The Judensau, on the facade of the very church where Martin Luther preached, was for me the loudest and grossest indictment of anti-Semitism—its entrenchment, acceptance, and official sanction not just under the Nazis but throughout centuries of immiseration. The Schmiedel work, with its understated Maya Lin-esque minimalism, both acknowledged this and addressed the probability that the vileness remains—maybe paved over for a while, but ready to bubble up and spill out into our own carefully curated idea of ourselves as a somehow more evolved and superior generation.
Terminiello v. City of Chicago, in which the ACLU was amicus, brought the Schmiedel work vividly to my mind. Arthur Terminiello, a Catholic priest from Birmingham, Alabama, was convicted of breach of the peace by the Chicago courts following a riotous night during which he whipped up a meeting of the Christian Veterans of America with anti-Semitic slurs and Left-baiting, while an even larger crowd of opponents protested violently outside the auditorium. Glass shattered as bricks flew through windows. Would-be audience members had the clothes torn off their backs as they tried to enter the auditorium. Police had to form a flying wedge to get Terminiello into the hall through the wall of bodies blocking the way and howling “Hitlers,” and “damn fascists.” Attempting to keep order, police dodged ice picks, rocks, and stink bombs.
Struggling to be heard over the roar of the protesters, Terminiello exhorted his “fellow Christians” against the “slimy scum” that he said were “going on to destroy America.” Among these, he singled out “Zionist Jews” and leftists. “We have fifty seven varieties of pinks and reds and pastel shades in this country and all of it can be traced back to the New Deal” and “Queen Eleanor [who] is now one of the world’s communists.” Calling Franco “the savior of what was left of Europe” and excoriating unnamed “non-Christian” American servicemen, doctors, and nurses who, he alleged, had tortured and sterilized and infected Germans with syphilis—“Do you wonder they were persecuted in other countries in the world?”—he concluded by urging his followers not to be like the timid Apostles before the coming of the Holy Ghost: “We must not lock ourselves in an upper room for fear of the Jews.” Chicago’s court fined Terminiello one hundred dollars. He appealed to the Illinois Appellate Court and the Illinois Supreme Court, both of which affirmed his conviction. But the US Supreme Court overturned it.
As I read the Court’s almost sixty-year-old opinion, it wasn’t Terminiello who was on my mind. I found myself thinking instead about a night of flames and shouting in 2017 when a Terminiello-like provocateur, also given to wild and ugly defamations, also left-hating and anti-Semitic (although in this case the Semite victims of his slurs generally are Muslims), faced antifascist rioters at a speech he attempted to deliver on campus at Berkeley.
“A function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute,” wrote Justice William O. Douglas for the majority in Terminiello. “The vitality of civil and political institutions in our society depends on free discussion,” he wrote. This right “is therefore one of the chief distinctions that sets us apart from totalitarian regimes. Accordingly, it may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea.” Douglas goes on to assert that this kind of speech is protected “unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance, or unrest.” There is, he writes, “no room under our Constitution for a more restrictive view. For the alternative would lead to standardization of ideas either by legislatures, courts, or dominant political or community groups.”
About the same time as hate-speaking exhibitionists bee-lined to Berkeley, hoping to stir up more protests, the town of Wittenberg prepared to celebrate the anniversary of Martin Luther’s Reformation. As it did so, the Internet lit up with petitions seeking removal of the Judensau. Put it in a museum if you must, said the petitions, but take it out of the public square.
But to put it in a museum is to remove it from its potent context. In a museum, we will no longer imagine the daily lives of the Jews who couldn’t go to or come from their homes without passing beneath that hateful image. More dangerous, putting it in a museum consigns it safely to the past. It’s as if to say that all this is over and done with, a relic of a barbarism that no longer exists. It’s to assert that we’re better than that, when the evidence to the contrary is everywhere around us, bubbling up from beneath, just barely paved over.
Yes, the image still causes pain. Today’s alt-right hatemongers cause pain. Terminiello’s words no doubt caused pain. But pain is better than the ineffable, unsustainable fantasy of the anesthetized opium dream.
Our pain, in the end, is what provokes us to seek healing.