BesondersWeg

Don’t let me forget to write about this lecture.

“In his speech in Frankfurt’s St. Paul’s Church, Peter Esterházy negatively summed up the status quo of European memory: “What was supposed to be united has been torn apart in self-hatred and self-pity… Besides the untruth of the exclusive perpetrator, there is the untruth of the exclusive victim, and the unspoken ‘we’ of the national memory lies hidden beneath both… A common European knowledge about ourselves as both perpetrators and victims is not yet in view.” “

I think one of the strongest arguments for developing complex stories about the past is that it also develops our sense of empathy and of self-awareness, our sense of ourselves as simultaneously potential victims and potential perpetrators. What a perfect quote.

It makes me think of Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the Judenräte, Jewish councils that served as liaisons between the Nazi authorities and the Jewish communities. Raul Hilberg uncovered their role in having compiled lists of Jews and Jewish-owned property, in having kept order in the Jewish communities, and in having followed Nazi directives to pick groups of Jews for slave labor.

Arendt criticizes the Judenräte for having cooperated at all, saying that if they had chosen a different strategy, like a strategy of resistance, certainly Jews would have died, and those Jewish leaders may have been the first ones to die, but the final death toll would have been nowhere near six million. It’s something she can do with the benefit of hindsight, but she makes a valid point about the mechanics of the Holocaust (and you can make the same argument not just about Jewish leaders, but about the leaders of most of the Nazi-occupied governments–more French Jews would have survived if the Vichy government hadn’t handed over files listing all their names).

That’s one of the primary reasons that she was condemned as a “self-hating Jew” in the Israeli and American press–because she wasn’t holding up the story of Jews as perfect victims.

But the more you learn about this, the more you realize there are no perfect victims. The Arendt argument doesn’t blame the Judenräte for the Holocaust–how could it?–so much as it uncovers one of the primary mechanisms of Nazi force, and I would argue of a lot of other types of force: that of terrorizing your victims into being complicit in their own destruction.

There are also, and I can’t decide which of these is harder to swallow, but there are also no perfect perpetrators. We don’t have super-villains who drop from the sky in this world, we have individual people who feel like victims, often because they are victims, and who turn that sense of victimization into a desire to punish and to victimize others. I shouldn’t have to cite any statistics here, although I’ll try and turn up a nice punchy article about victimization-myths-in-fascist-movements for you soon.

Having a “sense of empathy,” for me, is centrally about being able to appreciate the slippery nature of these two roles, these two behavioral dynamics, that of the perpetrator and that of the victim, and being able to reject self-aggrandizing and totalizing myths in favor of a more nuanced understanding of what makes people and nations behave the way they do.

If that’s the European idea, I think it’s a beautiful one.