My colleague came back, one day, to the subject of “this poor kind of heroism: shame.” “The trouble with shame,” he said, “is that it goes down deep or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, one throws it off as soon as he himself is injured (as, of course, in total war, he is likely to be, in his family, his property, his position, his person). If it does, if it goes down deep enough, it is a form of suicide; it was this that led some men I knew to join the Party later on, an act of throwing themselves away. None of your ‘little men,’ perhaps—”
“No, not shame,” I said.
“But one doesn’t know this easily,” said my colleague, “this deep shame. With many it took the outward form of their saying that, since National Socialist rule was here, and here for a long time to come, they would join it and reform it from within. But to be effective, they would first have to be accepted—”
“Oh, ‘effectiveness,’” I said. “That I heard from my friend the teacher. For the sake of being effective he did everything required of him, and of course he wasn’t effective. He knows that now. But then he had hopes of being able to oppose the excesses—”
“Yes, it was always the excesses that we wished to oppose, rather than the whole program, the whole spirit that produced the first steps, A, B, C, and D, out of which the excesses were bound to come. It is so much easier to ‘oppose the excesses,’ about which one can, of course, do nothing, than it is to oppose the whole spirit, about which one can do something every day.”
“All of my ‘little men’ opposed the excesses, at least the worst excesses,” I said, “and the two best of them, the teacher and the bank clerk, blamed them on the radicals who had grown up in the movement when it was irresponsible and attracted the most reckless elements—”
“Yes,” said my colleague, shaking his head, “the ‘excesses’ and the ‘radicals.’ We all opposed them, very quietly. So your two ‘little men’ thought they must join, as good men, good Germans, even as good Christians, and when enough of them did they would be able to change the Party. They would ‘bore from within.’ ‘Big men’ told themselves that, too, in the usual sincerity that required them only to abandon one little principle after another, to throw away, little by little, all that was good. I was one of those men.
“You know,” he went on, “when men who understand what is happening—the motion, that is, of history, not the reports of single events or developments—when such men do not object or protest, men who do not understand cannot be expected to. How many men would you say understand—in this sense—in America? And when, as the motion of history accelerates and those who don’t understand are crazed by fear, as our people were, and made into a great ‘patriotic’ mob, will they understand then, when they did not before?
“We learned here—I say this freely—to give up trying to make them understand after, oh, the end of 1938, after the night of the synagogue burning and the things that followed it. Even before the war began, men who were teachers, men whose faith in teaching was their whole faith, gave up, seeing that there was no comprehension, no capacity left for comprehension, and the thing must go its course, taking first its victims, then its architects, and then the rest of us to destruction. This did not mean surrender; it meant conservation of energy, doing what little one could (now that it was too late to do anything!) and consuming one’s energy doing it, to relieve the present victim (if only by brazenly saying ‘Hello’ to him on the street!) and to prevent, or at least postpone, the fate of the next victim (if only by writing a ‘nonpolitical’ letter abroad asking somebody to take an emigrant!).”
“Yes,” I said.
“You say that is not much”—I tried to protest—“but I say that it is more, under the circumstances, than ordinary life, in Germany, in America, anywhere, has prepared ordinary men to do.”
His wife was there. “I hope,” she said, “that the Anglo-Saxons”—she obviously meant the Anglos and not the Saxons—“have characteristics that will make them less susceptible to the things we Germans could not resist.”
“What would such characteristics be?” I said.
“Oh, farsightedness, I think, above all. Maybe a shorter history makes it easier for people to look ahead instead of always behind. And you are under less pressure, somehow, than we are. You are freer—I don’t mean legally, of course—to take the long view.” It was the first time, in my conversations in Germany, that the focus had been placed on the word Druck, “pressure.”
Another colleague of mine brought me even closer to the heart of the matter—and closer home. A chemical engineer by profession, he was a man of whom, before I knew him, I had been told, “He is one of those rare birds among Germans—a European.” One day, when we had become very friendly, I said to him, “Tell me now—how was the world lost?”
“That,” he said, “is easy to tell, much easier than you may suppose. The world was lost one day in 1935, here in Germany. It was I who lost it, and I will tell you how.
“I was employed in a defense plant (a war plant, of course, but they were always called defense plants). That was the year of the National Defense Law, the law of ‘total conscription.’ Under the law I was required to take the oath of fidelity. I said I would not; I opposed it in conscience. I was given twenty-four hours to ‘think it over.’ In those twenty-four hours I lost the world.”
“Yes?” I said.
“You see, refusal would have meant the loss of my job, of course, not prison or anything like that. (Later on, the penalty was worse, but this was only 1935.) But losing my job would have meant that I could not get another. Wherever I went I should be asked why I left the job I had, and, when I said why, I should certainly have been refused employment. Nobody would hire a ‘Bolshevik.’ Of course I was not a Bolshevik, but you understand what I mean.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I tried not to think of myself or my family. We might have got out of the country, in any case, and I could have got a job in industry or education somewhere else.
“What I tried to think of was the people to whom I might be of some help later on, if things got worse (as I believed they would). I had a wide friendship in scientific and academic circles, including many Jews, and ‘Aryans,’ too, who might be in trouble. If I took the oath and held my job, I might be of help, somehow, as things went on. If I refused to take the oath, I would certainly be useless to my friends, even if I remained in the country. I myself would be in their situation.
“The next day, after ‘thinking it over,’ I said I would take the oath with the mental reservation that, by the words with which the oath began, ‘Ich schwöre bei Gott, I swear by God,’ I understood that no human being and no government had the right to override my conscience. My mental reservations did not interest the official who administered the oath. He said, ‘Do you take the oath?’ and I took it. That day the world was lost, and it was I who lost it”
“Do I understand,” I said, “that you think that you should not have taken the oath?”
“Yes.”
“But,” I said, “you did save many lives later on. You were of greater use to your friends than you ever dreamed you might be.” (My friend’s apartment was, until his arrest and imprisonment in 1943, a hideout for fugitives.)
“For the sake of the argument,” he said, “I will agree that I saved many lives later on. Yes.”
“Which you could not have done if you had refused to take the oath in 1935.”
“Yes.”
“And you still think that you should not have taken the oath.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Perhaps not,” he said, “but you must not forget that you are an American. I mean that, really. Americans have never known anything like this experience—in its entirety, all the way to the end. That is the point.”
“You must explain,” I said.
“Of course I must explain. First of all, there is the problem of the lesser evil. Taking the oath was not so evil as being unable to help my friends later on would have been. But the evil of the oath was certain and immediate, and the helping of my friends was in the future and therefore uncertain. I had to commit a positive evil, there and then, in the hope of a possible good later on. The good outweighed the evil; but the good was only a hope, the evil a fact.”
“But,” I said, “the hope was realized. You were able to help your friends.”
“Yes,” he said, “but you must concede that the hope might not have been realized—either for reasons beyond my control or because I became afraid later on or even because I was afraid all the time and was simply fooling myself when I took the oath in the first place.
“But that is not the important point. The problem of the lesser evil we all know about; in Germany we took Hindenburg as less evil than Hitler, and in the end we got them both. But that is not why I say that Americans cannot understand. No, the important point is—how many innocent people were killed by the Nazis, would you say?”
“Six million Jews alone, we are told.”
“Well, that may be an exaggeration. And it does not include non-Jews, of whom there must have been many hundreds of thousands, or even millions. Shall we say, just to be safe, that three million innocent people were killed all together?”
I nodded.
“And how many innocent lives would you like to say I saved?”
“You would know better than I,” I said.
“Well,” said he, “perhaps five, or ten, one doesn’t know. But shall we say a hundred, or a thousand, just to be safe?”
I nodded.
“And it would be better to have saved all three million, instead of only a hundred, or a thousand?”
“Of course.”
“There, then, is my point. If I had refused to take the oath of fidelity, I would have saved all three million.”
“You are joking,” I said.
“No.”
“You don’t mean to tell me that your refusal would have overthrown the regime in 1935?”
“No.”
“Or that others would have followed your example?”
“No.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You are an American,” he said again, smiling. “I will explain. There I was, in 1935, a perfect example of the kind of person who, with all his advantages in birth, in education, and in position, rules (or might easily rule) in any country. If I had refused to take the oath in 1935, it would have meant that thousands and thousands like me, all over Germany, were refusing to take it. Their refusal would have heartened millions. Thus the regime would have been overthrown, or, indeed, would never have come to power in the first place. The fact that I was not prepared to resist, in 1935, meant that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands, like me in Germany were also unprepared, and each one of these hundreds of thousands was, like me, a man of great influence or of great potential influence. Thus the world was lost.”
“You are serious?” I said.
“Completely,” he said. “These hundred lives I saved—or a thousand or ten as you will—what do they represent? A little something out of the whole terrible evil, when, if my faith had been strong enough in 1935, I could have prevented the whole evil.”
“Your faith?”
“My faith. I did not believe that I could ‘remove mountains.’ The day I said ‘No,’ I had faith. In the process of ‘thinking it over,’ in the next twenty-four hours, my faith failed me. So, in the next ten years, I was able to remove only anthills, not mountains.”
“How might your faith of that first day have been sustained?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he said. “Do you?”
“I am an American,” I said.
My friend smiled. “Therefore you believe in education.”
“Yes,” I said.
“My education did not help me,” he said, “and I had a broader and better education than most men have had or ever will have. All it did, in the end, was to enable me to rationalize my failure of faith more easily than I might have done if I had been ignorant. And so it was, I think, among educated men generally, in that time in Germany. Their resistance was no greater than other men’s.”
As I thought of my ten Nazi friends in the light of my talks with the philologist and the engineer, it occurred to me that the concept of collective guilt is at bottom a semantic failure. What is really involved is collective shame. Collective shame may be possible, but it cannot be compelled. Shame is a state of being, guilt a juridical fact. A passer-by cannot be guilty of failure to try to prevent a lynching. He can only be ashamed of not having done so.
Even a sovereign, self-governing citizen, such as an American, cannot be guilty of failure to try to prevent an act of State. It would be Nazism itself to take Americans off the street and charge them, in connection with, say, the bombing of Hiroshima, with having violated the Hague Regulations, to which their government, whose sovereign citizens they are, was signatory. Still less than a sovereign citizen can the subject of a dictatorship be guilty of an act of State. And, when the State requires him, personally and individually, to commit what he regards as a crime, and the penalty for his refusal to do so is very heavy, the common law acquits him on the ground of duress. “I was lucky,” said Herr Klingelhöfer, the cabinetmaker. “I didn’t have to do anything wrong.”
Collective shame is something else, but it requires not merely the fact of sovereign citizenship but the most delicate sense of it. I did not discover much collective shame among my ten friends. The President of the West German Federal Republic had called upon them to feel it and had used that very expression, “collective shame.” But how does one call, effectively, upon people to feel ashamed?
In the case of Horst Rupprecht, the university student and Hitler Youth leader, who blamed himself for the sins of Nazism, the sins of Germany, the sins of the whole German people, his mea culpa was just a little unconvincing: he was eight years old in 1933.1 think his testimony is what many non-Germans wanted to hear from the lips of every German: “No, no, it wasn’t Hitler and Göring and the rest, it was we Germans, every one of us, I more than any of the rest, who did it”; but I think they would have been disappointed when they heard it, as I was.
At his trial at Nuremberg, young Rupprecht’s highest superior, Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi Youth Leader, said: “It is my guilt, and I must bear it before God and the German nation, that I educated German youth for a man whom I thought irreproachable, but who was a murderer millions of times over.” Was this the same Baldur von Schirach who had called Hitler “Germany’s greatest son,” “this genius grazing the stars,” who had said that the altar was not in the Church but on the steps of the Feldherrn Hall, where Hitler’s Putsch had ended in 1923? It was. When, where, and how does one discover that an irreproachable man is a murderer millions of times over? Does it take the hangman’s hood on his eyes to open them?
What I found, among my ten friends, was something like regret, regret that things, which they had not done, had been done or had had to be done. All ten of them, even the tailor, I think, felt bad, now, about the torture and slaughter of innocent people—not, however, about the deportation, “resettlement, relocation,” or even about the expropriation. (My friends had all lost their own possessions, hadn’t they, and who but they themselves felt sorry for them?) The six extremists all said of the extermination of Jews, “That was wrong” or “That was going too far,” as if to say, “The gas oven was somewhat too great a punishment for people who, after all, deserved very great punishment.”
My ten friends had been told, not since 1939 but since 1933, that their nation was fighting for its life. They believed that self-preservation is the first law of nature, of the nature of nations as well as of herd brutes. Were they wrong in this principle? If they were, they saw nothing in the history of nations (their own or any other) that said so. And, once there was shooting war, their situation was like that of the secret opponents of the regime whom my colleague described: there was no further need for the nation, or anyone in it, to be justified. The nation was literally fighting for its literal life—“they or we.” Anything went, and what “anything” was, what enormities it embraced, depended entirely on the turn of the battle.
Even Herr Schwenke, the tailor, proud of his having refused a Jew of old acquaintance a light for his cigarette, frankly glad that the synagogue had been burned, said of the gas ovens, “If it happened, it was wrong. But I don’t believe it happened.” And, if he were ever able to admit that it did happen, he would have to admit that it was right and, to prove it, cry out, with his wound rubbed raw, in still greater anguish against the victims and ascribe to them sins even he had not yet been able to dream of.
What we don’t like, what I don’t like, is the hypocrisy of these people. I want to hear them confess. That they, or some of their countrymen and their country’s government, violated the precepts of Christian, civilized, lawful life was bad enough; that they won’t see it, or say it, is what really rowels. I want them to plead no extenuation. I want them to say, “I knew and I know that it was all un-Christian, uncivilized, unlawful, and in my love of evil I pretended it wasn’t. I plead every German guilty of a life of hypocrisy, above all, myself. I am rotten.”
I don’t like the dolorous mask my friend Klingelhöfer wears when he says, “I always said no good would come of it, and no good did come of it.” His fieiwillige Feuerwehr ebullience is suddenly gone, and now he emerges from the wings, like a one-man troupe playing Molière, in judicious melancholy. I want to say to him, “You Schweinehund, what you said, and you said it to yourself, was that no good would come of it if it lost. And it did lose. If it had won, you’d be drinking blood with the rest of them.” But what’s the use?
I want my friends not just to feel bad and confess it, but to have been bad and to be bad now and confess it. I want them to constitute themselves an inferior race, self-abased, so that I, in the magnanimity becoming to the superior, having sat in calumnious judgment on them, may choose to let them live on in public shame and in private torment. I want to be God, not alone in power but in righteousness and in mercy; and Nazism crushed is my chance.
But I am not God. I myself am a national, myself guilty of many national hypocrisies whose only justification is that the Germans’ were so much worse. My being less bestial, in my laws and practices, than they were does not make me more Godly than they, for difference in degree is not difference in kind. My own country’s racist legislation and practices, against both foreigners and citizens, is a whole web of hypocrisies. And, if I plead that racism has been wonderfully reduced in America in the past century, that the forces of good have been growing ever more powerful, how shall I answer my friends Hildebrandt and Kessler, who believed, or affected to believe, that the infiltration of National Socialism by decent men like themselves would, in time, reduce and even eliminate the evils?
The trouble is that these national hypocrisies, which I myself am not called upon to practice in person, with my own hands, are all acts of the State or its culture. I feel bad about them, to be sure; very bad. But I do not in the least feel like a bad man, and I do not want to be punished for them. And, if I beat my breast, like my Nazi friend, young Rupprecht, and say, “It is I, I, I, who did it,” I am afraid that I shall sound just as pretentious as he sounded to me. The confession that I want to hear or that I ought to make does not ring real.
What I really want, since (while I want to let my friends off in my magnanimity) I do not want to have to reproach myself some time later with having let them escape the consequences of their unheroism, is for each of them to have cared enough at the time to have thrown himself under the iron chariot of the State, with its wheels rimmed with spikes. This none of my friends did, and this I cannot forgive them. They did not care enough.