If anything, the ghastly presence of John Demjanjuk — charged with murder of more than twenty-seven thousand Jewish prisoners at Sobibor — in a German courtroom proves that regarding the Holocaust the law has little power over the conscience of perpetrators. No judge, no lawyer will make them break their silence. They didn’t speak much of their crimes in Nuremberg and they remained mostly silent in Frankfurt, and so far we haven’t heard a word from Demjanjuk in Munich either. Deeds without doers. Genocide without perpetrators. A German way of life.

The law may fail to make the perpetrators admit their crimes, perhaps because it doesn’t always need their collaboration. In all likelihood, Demjanjuk will be convicted based on circumstantial evidence. But there are ways to end the silence. Why did it never occur to anyone to travel to Ohio where Demjanjuk lived for decades? Not to interrogate. Just to talk, to ask a few questions, to begin a conversation. Isn’t that what civilized people do?

The question is a rhetorical one, of course. For more than six decades Germans have been more than reluctant to talk with former Nazis — and who of my grandparents’ generation wasn’t one? — about their deeds and motives outside of the tightly regulated discourse defined by the law. What is true for the Holocaust is also true for the infamous State Security (Stasi) of East-Germany — which, by the way, had several thousand West-Germans on their payroll. While other countries emerging from a dictatorship have installed Truth Commissions to help resolve conflicts between victims and perpetrators, Germany  has sponsored memorials.

Freedom means the right to remain silent. Silence can be therapeutic, purifying. But silence is also a form of aggression — directed at oneself and at the other. Often silence provokes aggression: the desire to hurt, to crush, to elicit a reaction through the infliction of pain.

In the 1970s Germany defeated the terror of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF). Why should Germans change their minds now?  Because very soon, when the last perpetrator will has passed away, the silence will be that of a graveyard. And then what?

Der Rest ist Schweigen?

The rest is silence — On Demjanjuk 2 originally appeared on unguided tour on January 23, 2010.
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This photograph of John (Iwan) Demjanjuk being wheeled into a German courtroom in Munich reminds me of my grandfather shortly before he died: an old man, ill and barely conscious; an old Nazi who lived a full life, had children, grandchildren, a nice house in the suburbs; a perpetrator who saw himself as victim; a typical “Mitläufer” who for fear of his and his family’s life joined the NSDAP,  avoided resistance,  hung a photograph of Hitler in his living room, and somehow forgot to take it down when the Nazis no longer officially ruled Germany — that’s how I remember my grandfather.

My grandfather died in 1983. He is not affected by the proceedings in the German courtroom, he doesn’t care about the outcome of the trial. To my grandfather the trial of John Demjanjuk doesn’t mean a thing. To me it means a lot.

If Iwan Demjanjuk the perpetrator may no longer hide behind John Demjanjuk the victim, I can no longer hide my grandfather the perpetrator behind the invented figure of the innocent “Mitläufer.” I look at the photograph of Demjanjuk and I see my grandfather. I look the photograph of my grandfather and I see a perpetrator. I look in the mirror — I’m glad I resemble my grandmother.

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++ Heinrich Wefing writes in DIE ZEIT on Germany’s reluctance to put non-German Nazi criminals to trial (in German)

++http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/01/nazi-death-camp-accused-trial

++http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/01/john-demjanjuk-trial-sobibor

++http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/world/europe/01trial.html?ref=world

++http://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2009/12/01/demjanjuk-survivant-de-l-holocauste-plaide-l-avocat_1274501_3214.html#ens_id=1273811

Of Victims and Perpetrators — Demjanjuk 1 originally appeared on unguided tour on December 1, 2009.
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All’s well that ends well? I still think it would be a good idea for the city of Nuremberg to acquire the gnomes and put them up for adoption.

Verboten 2 originally appeared on unguided tour on October 15, 2009.
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The SPIEGEL reports that

Earlier this year, Hörl, who has been president of the Nuremberg Academy of Fine Arts since 2005, displayed 700 of the Nazi gnomes in the Belgian city of Gent — where they were seen by over 40,000 people — and the Italian region of South Tyrol. The exhibition, entitled “Dance with the Devil,” received no official complaints in either country and garnered postive feedback from the Jewish community.

Verboten or not, here’s a suggestion. The city of Nuremberg — where the Nazi party had its headquarters and staged spectacular rallies attended by hundreds of thousands of supporters — acquires all 700 Nazi gnomes and gives them to 700 Nuremberg families. One for each family. The hosts must agree to adopt the gnome for six months. At the end of the probationary period they can either keep it or return it to the city council. Hosts must also agree to document their interaction + experiences with the new family member. The documentation (photos, letters, journals, tapes, songs, videos, etc.) shall be exhibited at the Rathaus (town hall), along with any gnomes that may have been returned.

Ottmar Hörl, Garden Gnome, photo: Daniel Karmann dpa/lby (16.07.2009), (c) dpa - Bildfunk

See also my essay on remembering the Holocaust.

Verboten originally appeared on unguided tour on July 18, 2009.
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Although we don’t know what it was Tisa learned to forgive — death camps, mass murder, the Holocaust are never mentioned in this article — Kimmelman offers forgiveness (a notoriously vague and elusive concept bordering on forgetting) as an answer to the “complexities of families, not least German ones, aristocratic or otherwise.” To give an example of those “complexities” Kimmelman writes,

“In later years she would recall that her father, despite his anti-Semitism, always treated [her Jewish husband] with respect. The love of a father for a daughter could transcend prejudice, Tisa realized. Forgiveness must be reciprocated.”

In passing Kimmelman also whitewashes one of Germany’s most influential aristocratic families, the von Weizsäcker’s. In a quote from an interview with Kimmelman, former German President Richard von Weizsäcker, during the war a loyal Nazi and officer in the Wehrmacht, who knew von Schulenberg, comes across as a resistance fighter. Who needs guilt by association? Let’s make heroes by association! What Kimmelman neglects to mention is that right after the war Weizsäcker, a lawyer by training, defended his father Ernst von Weizsäcker who was charged with crimes against humanity at one of the Nuremberg War Crime Trials. Among other atrocities Ernst von Weizsäcker, secretary of State under foreign minister Ribbentrop, was responsible for the deportation of thousands of French Jews to Auschwitz. Richard defended his father’s phoney claim that as secretary of state he did not know that Auschwitz was a death camp. In Richard’s view Ernst von Weizsäcker who believed deportations would make life easier for Jews, was a resistance fighter. This, Mr. Kimmelman, is another interesting story about “the complexities of families, not least German ones, aristocratic or otherwise.”

As every catholic knows, forgiveness doesn’t require much. It’s easy, says Tisa’s grand-niece Elisabeth Ruge who is a friend of Kimmelman’s.

“Tisa knew that to criticize the weaknesses of others you’ve got to understand your own weaknesses.”

The Holcaust as weakness?
There’s a German word for articles like Kimmelman’s: Freundschaftsdienst.

A Weakness for the Holocaust originally appeared on unguided tour on July 16, 2009.
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In January 2009 the Springfield unit of an American Nazi group called National Socialist Movement adopted a stretch of Highway 160 near Springfield (Missouri). (The New York Times reported.) Sponsorship involves cleaning the highway four times a year in exchange for an “adopt-a-highway sign” prominently featuring the group’s name. In an attempt to respond to the group’s xenophobic and anti-semitic agenda the Missouri state legislature in conjunction with the Jewish Community Relations Bureau/American Jewish Committee proposed to re-name the same stretch for the late Abraham Joshua Heschel, revered Rabbi, distinguished Jewish theologian and civil rights advocate who marched with Martin Luther King. Should the provision succeed Heschel who narrowly escaped the Nazis in 1938 — most of his family was killed in the Holocaust — will once again be subjected to Nazi ideas of cleanliness and order.

Not a good idea, objects Heschel’s daughter, Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, who criticized the re-naming as “vulgar” and “inappropriate”. “I don’t think that my father would have felt honored by this.”

As a German I am appalled by the proposition. I don’t mean to doubt the state representatives’ good intention, but sometimes intention is just not good enough. What exactly is being commemorated by re-naming the stretch of highway sponsored by a Nazi group “Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel Memorial Highway”? That Jews and Nazis belong together? That Nazis will always have a Jew to trample on? That Jews are dead while Nazis are alive?
It is the vagueness that bothers me. If the re-naming “is about making sure that we stand against bigotry and hatred,” as State Representative Sara Lampe, a Springfield Democrat who supports the provision, insist, why not speak out against racism and anti-Semitism in precise, unambiguous words? Turning to Judaism and Jewish Americans in order to remedy anti-Semitism sends the wrong message. In a pluralistic society based on equality and freedom the struggle against racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia concerns everyone.

There is a much more effective way to respond to the hateful politics of white supremacists: generously funded public education committed to building a society in which Nazi ideology is not an option.
Even though Americans spend a huge amount of time in their cars, the highway cannot replace the classroom.

Autobahn originally appeared on unguided tour on June 26, 2009.
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Liliana Cavani’s controversial 1974 movie The Night Porter has been labeled “Nazi chic” (Roger Ebert). For some critics the film is a shamelessly pornographic fantasy of the Holocaust, a “sentimental idyll … exalting romantic love between victim and victimizer, against the brute reality of Nazi violence,” (Marga Cottino-Jones) using the Holocaust as a mere “backdrop to the erotic/sadomasochistic misadventures of Max and Lucia, Nazi and victim” (Rebecca Scherr); a “despicable attempt to titillate [the viewer] by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering.” (Ebert)
I’m not convinced.

It’s true, there is something despicable in the deadly, compulsive  & sadomasochistic relationship between Holocaust survivor Lucia Atherton (Charlotte Rampling) and former SS officer Maximilian Aldorfer (Dirk Bogarde). During the Third Reich Max, a doctor at a Nazi concentration camp, forced Lucia, a prisoner, to become his mistress and sex slave. When years later Lucia arrives in the fancy hotel in Vienna, where Max now works as night porter, they resume their relationship.

But does showing a despicable relationship make the film itself despicable? Can we understand the films ‘content’ (the story), without considering its form? Can we talk about what The Night Porter shows (and doesn’t show) without paying attention to how it is shown?

The film privileges Max’s point of view, his perception of Lucia (then and now), his memories of the concentration camp. Perpetrator memories. Repulsive memories of forced sex, of perverse sexual fantasies. Memories that many former Nazis share. Hidden memories, secret fantasies of the past.

Memories are not a matter of fact. Memories are private, subjective, intertwined with wishful fantasies. Often wish and memory are indistinguishable. Consider for instance the fantasies, (erotic or otherwise) Nazi perpetrators never acted on, perhaps never even shared with anyone. Does that mean the fantasies disappeared when the Third Reich fell apart? They did not. They became memories.

Memories are like dreams. They require a body; they are experienced by real people; they are inscribed in the mind of individuals, they must be worked through on a personal level. If we want to understand the satisfaction and enjoyment Germans + Austrians derived from being Nazis, every memory matters, every fantasy counts.

We may not want to see it, but for Max, the perpetrator, Auschwitz was and is a backdrop, a titillating setting, a turn-on.

Lucia’s/Rampling’s exquisite, if extreme, thinness — almost unbearable to look at — is less a “signifier of the real starvation actual prisoners suffered” (Scherr) than an indication that in the film’s reality (Max’s reality) she has no ‘content’, no story of her own. Lucia’s audible presence is as thin as her body. She remains silent for most of the film. Everything about Lucia suggests the presence of an absence. She is a ghost, a memory. Max’s memory.

That’s why I don’t see “exploitation of memories” in The Night Porter. I see performance and repetition. The Night Porter doesn’t ‘deal’ with the memory of the Holocaust. It is less a film about memory than a film as memory.

To expect The Night Porter to offer a realistic and truthful image of suffering in a concentration camp is to misunderstand the film’s formal concerns: to re-enact a memory, to re-evoke the sexiness of camp life as remembered by Max, the Nazi, the perpetrator.

The Night Porter made me reconsider the neatly drawn boundaries between memory and fantasy. “False memory” is a misleading term. It suggests that memories ought to refer to facts, contain the trace of some indisputable, definitive truth. When I remember something that never happened,  from the point of view of a historian my memory may seem false. But it is a true memory nonetheless.

More often than not the perpetrator’s memories lie dormant. They are reviled before they are revealed. Since they must not be repeated, the crimes whose traces they preserve cannot be mourned. I wonder, how long can an individual, how long can a society postpone grieving before it becomes delusional, denying the difference between the dead and the living?

Art can help me understand how memory works, but art cannot remember for me.
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Liliana Cavani, The Night Porter (Italy 1974, 118 min., color)

On remembering the Holocaust in Germany see my essay “Voids”.

Sources:
Marga Cottino-Jones, Marga. “‘What Kind of Memory?: Liliana Cavani’s Night Porter.” Contention 5.1 (1995): 105- 111.
Roger Ebert: The Night Porter (review), in: The Chicago Sun-Times, February 10, 1975
Rebecca Scherr: The Uses of Memory and the Abuses of Fiction: Sexuality in Holocaust Fiction and Memoir, in: Other Voices, v.2, n.1 (February 2000).
Nora Sayr: Review in: The New York Times, October 2, 1974.
Susan Sontag: Fascinating Fascism, in: The New York Review of Books, Volume 22, Number 1, February 6, 1975.

A Note on “The Night Porter” originally appeared on unguided tour on June 7, 2009.
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