by Elie Wiesel
I returned, in 1962, not to exorcise a few aging, probably dated demons, but to make a kind of pilgrimage to the source. The criminal is not alone when he returns to the scene of the crime; he is joined there by his victim, and both are driven by the same curiosity: to relive that moment which stamped past and future for each. So I undertook to retrace my steps, to seek a double confrontation: between them and myself, between the self I had left at Buchenwald and the other self that thought it was healed.
I came away from the confrontation with my head bowed in humiliation. I had been sure of finding my hate for Germany intact; seventeen years before I had thought it eternal. But even eternity changes its face.
After the war, I had deliberately avoided all contact with Germans. Their presence sickened me physically. The blood rushed to my head whenever I received a letter from a cousin in Frankfort. I could hardly bear it. Where Germany was concerned, logical arguments no longer had any force.
Hence it was with apprehension that I prepared for the journey to the place where my hate was waiting for me. I did not know it would break the appointment. Baudelaire calls hate a drunkard in the gloom of a tavern who can never fall asleep under the table. But there are drunkards who die in their sleep.
Yet for me the task should not have been difficult. What could be easier than to detest this people? They had started and lost the most ignominious war in history, and afterward had managed to surpass their conquerors in wealth and happiness. Above all, in complacency.
In the Paris-Stuttgart plane, a man sat beside me who was a student of philosophy at Heidelberg. He asked me what I thought his country was like. I replied: I imagine it abject and kneeling, filled with ruins and cemeteries, sobbing with fear and remorse; I imagine it famished and tormented, its inhabitants crawling on the ground, begging for pardon and oblivion. He burst out laughing. I can promise you a surprise, he said.
He was right to laugh. Of course, I was not thinking of his country’s material condition, for I knew it was at the peak of its productivity. The cold war requires a “German shield,” military strength matched by economic power. German industry once again plays a preponderant role in world markets, the Krupp factories work at top speed, there is no unemployment. Berlin organizes film festivals to rival those at Cannes and Venice; Volkswagens and Mercedes streak the dusty roads of Asia, not to mention the super-highways of America. Living conditions have never been better, houses hold every comfort and convenience, the worker is better off than in France or Italy, and is, perhaps, happier too. Frankfort and Baden-Baden swarm with foreign tourists, and in Paris and Rome one tourist out of two speaks German. A journalist in Munich told me: Winning the war is good, losing it is better.
It was not all this that I found irritating, not the country’s prosperity, but the people’s complacency—a self-satisfaction unhaunted by the past. It is just we who think about the past. The Germans are not doing much thinking about the future either. People in Norway or Holland, for instance, seem more concerned with the fate of Berlin than do the West Germans. The Germans do not seem anxious about their split into two enemy camps and the possible danger this holds for the world. They look straight into your eyes when you talk to them, as if they have nothing to fear or hide—are accountable to no one. Ready to admit they are no longer our superiors, they insist on being our equals. The German does not permit himself to be judged, he is as good a man as any.
We—the victims—had not imagined, during the war, this is the way things would be after Germany’s defeat. We were convinced a great deal of water would have to flow under the bridges of the Rhine before a member of the nation of executioners would dare look with unwavering glance into the eyes of a free man.
The Germans themselves were convinced of this. They were certain that the curse would pursue them, that they would never be allowed to forget. Fear kept them awake at night: thirst for vengeance on the part of survivors, they thought, would surely be insatiable. In the years immediately after the war, if you stopped a man in Munich or Kassel he would begin trembling and stammering: “I didn’t do anything, see anything, know anything. I was at the front, in the hospital, at my office; I knew nothing of what was happening. I saw a column of smoke in the distance, but—I didn’t know, no one told me.”
Then came the Nuremberg Trials, and the execution of the major war criminals. The Germans could scarcely believe what they heard and saw: “Then they don’t blame us?… They’re leaving us alone, they’re not going to make us pay?” When they came face to face with Jews, they could not help being suspicious. “What do they want from us, what are they up to? They can’t forgive us so quickly, what’s on their minds?” But finally the Germans understood they had nothing to fear, and so their fear turned into contempt. “Look at those Jews: they’re not even capable of revenge!”—and a new phase began, the phase of self-justification. “If we are not judged, it is because we have done nothing, we are innocent. Hitler? The world could and should have stopped him in time; it did not, and it must share our guilt. The camps? Their existence was known in Washington, in London, in the Vatican: no voice was raised in protest against Auschwitz. The German people were not the only silent ones: great leaders accustomed to speaking in the name of conscience and of civilization were also silent. Why blame only us?”
Nevertheless, the Germans did admit a certain guilt toward the Jews. The Bonn government signed the reparations agreement with Israel and the Claims Conference in acknowledgment of that guilt—and that was that. What more did anyone want?
Why then should the Germans be embarrassed any longer before a foreign visitor, or play the innocent to impress anyone? They are as they are, and if you do not like them, too bad. They will neither change nor lie to please a foreigner. It is as if the Germans were saying to Israel: It is over, we no longer owe you anything. Israel has ceased being a moral problem for Germany—the issue is now political. The converse, unfortunately, is also true.
The Germany that swarmed with impersonators and cowardly liars during the years immediately following the capitulation of the Wehrmacht, it is that Germany that no longer exists. You no longer hear anyone cursing Hitler in the hope of exonerating himself. No one, these days, feels he has to exclaim: “It wasn’t me, it was those others!” One young intellectual told me: “Hitler wasn’t a bad man; he was wrong to surround himself with scum.” Another repeated what Heinrich Gruber, the famous bishop of Berlin and the only German witness at the Eichmann trial, had said to a visitor from America: “Hitler was only the scourge of God to chastise his people.” In which case are we permitted to judge the divine instrument?
The Germans no longer feel any shame, and they deny outsiders the right to intervene. They no longer feel they are standing at the bar of history.
I for one had no desire to argue with them. I could not imagine a dialogue was possible. Anything between us would not be words: language was already too much of a link.
But finally, if I was compelled to cut short my visit and take the plane back to Paris after forty-eight hours, it was precisely because I fell into the trap: I answered questions, I shook hands. I even smiled back. And then I could bear no more of this civilized behavior: having lost my taste for hating others, I began to hate myself.
The very first contact was indeed just as I had imagined. I shuddered as I set foot on German soil and caught sight of the police uniforms. When the customs officer questioned me in German I chose to answer in English, in brief, hostile phrases. “Nothing to declare?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I said: nothing.”
“Danke sehr, mein Herr.” I shrugged and walked away from him without another word. German politesse was one thing I was not interested in. The customs man stared after me—he was no longer used to this sort of hostility.
(In New York, I had run into a different kind of official. When I went to arrange for my trip, the head of the visa section of the German consulate behaved with partic
ular arrogance. It was clear he suspected every Jew who asked for a visa of scheming to emigrate to Germany. His interrogation was humiliating. When I objected, he furiously reproached me for being oversensitive: he did not understand how a Jew could be oversensitive to a German who is only trying to hurt his feelings.)
I strolled through the streets of Stuttgart, waiting for the train to Baden-Baden. Now and then my eyes rested on a face: “This one too?” I stared insistently at a middle-aged man; I wanted to perceive the invisible: what had he done during the war? Had our paths ever crossed in the world of concentration camps? I was in enemy territory, surrounded by suspect faces: on guard, as if threatened by unknown but familiar danger.
I had been walking in silence, alone, for an hour. A young woman came up and asked me the way to the station. I told her I did not know, that I was a stranger. She smiled. I almost smiled back, when my lips suddenly froze: I became aware that I had been speaking German.
Later I allowed myself to relax. The definition of man as a social animal—a polite animal—is true. I had mistakenly supposed that all definitions would have to be revised for Germany.
In Baden-Baden I took part in the taping of a radio program. Listening afterward I found what I heard incredible: there was no hate in my voice, not even bitterness, perhaps just a shade of the anger I was, unconsciously, trying to conceal. Instead of shrieking out a curse, I had merely murmured. It is difficult to live among men because it is difficult to keep still, Nietzsche said. But I should have kept still.
Next day I spoke in Munich. The Bechtle Verlag, my German publisher, had arranged an evening of readings. I read from the original French text of my first book, Night, a memoir of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and the young novelist Peter Jokostra read the German translation. The audience listened in silence, then sat motionless for a while. I reassured myself: after all, there is a certain logic in my being here and relating to these Germans a few chapters of “our” history—our common history. But I could not shake off the uneasiness that weighed upon me. The Israeli humorist Ephraim Kishon has remarked: Logic, too, went up in smoke at Auschwitz.
I talked about literature and philosophy far into the night with a group of writers, young men between twenty and thirty. The subject of the camps came up seldom, always indirectly, elliptically. One man said to me: “It doesn’t interest me; only abstract ideas are worth bothering about.” Another remarked, apologetically: “Such themes are too sad. I like literature with more gaiety, more joie de vivre.” A third said: “I heard you read tonight, but I must confess that concentration-camp literature leaves me cold, I just don’t understand it.”
Of course there are some German writers tormented by a guilt they shared by the mere fact of having lived under the Nazi regime—Heinrich Boll and Paul Shaluck, for example. Others live with a memory inherited from their fathers: like Günter Grass. The burden of guilt weighs sometimes heavy, sometimes more lightly. In the writings of Jokostra, Martin Walser, Alfred Andersch, or Ulrich Becher, there is, if not revolt, at least a search for justice, an authentic protest. Their heroes sit uncomfortably in their skins, feeling their corruption. Yet these writers, for the most part, do not truly represent the younger generation. The members of that group have adopted a quasi-Brechtian attitude, seeing and judging the past from a distance, not in order to comprehend it better but to prove that they have nothing in common with it. Novelists like Hans Christian Kirsch or Uwe Johnson turn their backs on the Nazi period as something alien to them. In the schools, there is rarely a mention of what the Jewish Question was under Hitler. Dachau for the young students is the name of a peaceful village: the word has no other ring. Auschwitz is … ancient history. Yet these students have to be told something, and they are told that it is true the Nazis mistreated the Jews: but the teachers do not go into indelicate detail. Even if they did, the students would not be interested—it is all dead and gone and they can pass their tests and make their way in life without such knowledge.
I had imagined an angry German youth. I had seen reports of students making pilgrimages to Bergen-Belsen and shedding bitter tears at performances of The Diary of Anne Frank. If any youth had the right, even the urgent duty, to fling its rage into the face of its parents, it was surely the youth of Germany. Should not a young German be permitted to accuse his father? So I had imagined. But nothing I saw or heard in Germany, and virtually nothing I read bears witness to an angry youth: there is more anger in the youth of France or England or the United States. One exception is Günter Grass. He describes, in his The Tin Drum, a dwarf who refuses to grow, or talk, or escape his condition: in this way he judges his contemporaries, who may criticize the present regime but think it political whimsey to bother about what went before.
To be sure, the intellectual elite tries here and there to sound the alarm. Lectures are held, and books dealing with Jewish subjects are published. Martin Buber has for some time now been glorified, Exodus appeared on the best-seller lists, and translations have been prepared of the works of Sholem Aleichem and Mendele Mocher Sforim. To all this the general population continues to remain indifferent. It is not good breeding, in today’s Germany, to discuss Buchenwald. If Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just achieved only limited sales in Germany as compared with its reception in other countries, it was because it contained an indictment of those who made Ernie Levy their victim. The works of Paul Rassinier sell better and are more praised. In his three so-called historical sketches, this author claims to “prove” that the Nazi liquidation of the European Jews was only a myth invented by the Zionists and their friends. According to him, the Nazis did not kill off six million Jews—a few hundred thousand at the most. Gas chambers?—pure fantasy. The Germans, young and old, like to hear a “Herr Professor”—Rassinier is a professor and French—tell them such things. It reassures them. If, at a certain period, the Germans were in bad odor the world over, it was not their fault: blame the Jews.
Suddenly, I no longer knew why I had come. To tell them about the camps? Convince them that such things had really existed? To describe the Nazi era which was, in Malraux’s phrase, a “time of scorn”? I did nothing of the kind.
Aside from that one reading of a few pages of Night, I treated Auschwitz as taboo. I found absurd the notion that a Jewish writer should come and tell the Germans about their crimes. Reveal, perhaps, but tell? What was there that had not already been told? Each time my interlocutors out of politeness tried to broach the subject, I changed it. But it was only later that I understood why: I was no longer capable of hating.
A few months before, at a party in New York, a young woman had come up to me and said: “Deep down, I’m afraid of you. I know you hate me.” I was stunned: “Why should I hate you?” She was of German origin, she confessed. I blushed: “Of course I couldn’t hate you, you’re too lovely.” She was in fact known for her opposition to Hitler and had spent many months in Nazi prisons, but I did not know it at the time. I had blushed simply because I was ashamed of being accused of hate: so I had explained it to myself. The real truth was different: I had blushed because I was ashamed of having permitted my hate to get away from me. It was this shame that overwhelmed me in Germany: I was betraying the dead. Instead of judging the Germans, then, I judged myself.
After the war, one question had absorbed me: how to explain the absence of an urge to vengeance on the part of the survivors? When Buchenwald was liberated, the Russian prisoners lost no time commandeering American jeeps and driving to Weimar, where for hours on end they machine-gunned inhabitants for having led a normal—if not peaceful—life on the other side of the barbed wire. The liberated Jews did nothing like this. Why not?
In Palestine, in kibbutzim and around Palmach camp-fires, the idea of vengeance was violently argued—and rejected. The basic principle was that Nazi crimes must be opposed by humane justice: hate must not be fought with hate. We had to show the executioners our moral superiority, prove to other peoples that Jews are incapable of deeds of hate. Hatred
of the enemy—especially in his defeat—has never been a Jewish habit. “Rejoice not on seeing thine enemy struck down,” Solomon teaches.
There is a passage in the Midrash which describes the wrath of God against his angels who had begun singing his praises as the Jews were crossing the Red Sea. “My creatures [the Egyptians] are drowning and you are disposed to sing?” And though he lost his throne for it, Saul refused to kill Agag, the Amalekite king who is the symbol of Israel’s hereditary enemy. Typically, in the few places where hatred does figure in the Bible, it is always of family, of tribe, or of neighbor—not of foreigners. Jews are suspicious of foreigners, they do not hate them. The Torah bids us remember Amalek, not hate him. In modern times, the ghetto Jews expended upon the Judenrat a more concentrated hatred than upon the Germans themselves, and during the British occupation of Palestine, the secret political organizations hated each other more than they hated the English.
The night Eichmann was executed, a friend made a remark which at the time left me perplexed: he could not help feeling a kind of pity for this functionary of death as he stepped to the scaffold. I protested violently. It was, indeed, not until I re-entered Germany that I understood about hate, a hate that was more than desirable: a justified hate. It escapes us, disappears as the events that engendered it have disappeared.
A Jewish poet in an extermination camp prayed: “O God, give me the strength to hate.” He had more than enough reasons, it was only strength he lacked. Two thousand years of persecution had failed to prepare the Jewish mentality for hate, had only immunized it against hate. Jewish history is full of examples, from Akiba to Hillel Zeitlin, of how the Jews have always been able to meet beast with man, massacre with prayer, cruelty with faith.
It must be said, moreover, that relations between Jews and Germans—aside from the business of propaganda—had always been, in the time of the apocalypse, devoid of hatred. This seems strange, yet it is what gave—and still gives—the tragedy its true dimension of horror. “I am not an anti-Semite,” Eichmann proclaimed in his trial at Jerusalem: the very Eichmann responsible for thousands of death trains. Absurd as it seems, he was probably telling the truth. He killed off Jews—and he did not necessarily hate them. The Nazis saw Jews not as human beings—stimulating hatred or justifying it—but simply as objects, minerals, numbers: one does not hate numbers. As for the Jews, they saw the Germans as a machine crushing life and spirit, reducing them to ashes: one does not hate a machine.