I have stressed envy’s habit of transforming itself. For one thing, envy begins to “feel” like resentment, and, if a misfortune occurs to the envied person or group, it will “feel” deserved. Also, when schadenfreude is rooted in envy, there arises yet another incentive toward action because the envying person will not want to admit to his or her envious motive. Such an admission would be to concede inferiority and unjustified hostility, which in most people would cause shame. These are powerful reasons for people to deny their envy. Who wants to admit inferiority, and who wants to admit this as a reason to hate others? The shame in this blend is a terrifying threat to one’s self-worth and, as so many scholars have pointed out, leads to all sorts of less than conscious defensive strategies to avoid both the public and private owning up to these feelings. The late social theorist Leslie Farber put it well when he suggested that envy has a protean “talent for disguise” that may fool others as well as “the envious one himself, whose rational powers may lend almost unholy assistance to the need for self-deception.”43 Thus, if the envied target is harmed, the deservingness of this outcome is emphasized and justifications work backward, in part from the action to the reason for the action. The target will be vilified, dehumanized, and then seen deserving of this treatment. The invidious roots of this pattern are usually well buried or camouflaged. Disgust rather than sympathy prevails.44 As Mina Cikara, Susan Fiske, and others also suggest, the addition of the intergroup element (“us” vs. “them”) probably enhances these processes.45 Now, one is acting for the group and against the enemy. Collective, group goals rather than personal “selfish” goals seem to be the motivation for Germany and the Reich, rather than a personal grudge.
In Hitler’s case, as I argued earlier, once he could convince himself that the Jews deserved his hate, without attributing to himself an envious motive, he could vow to destroy them. And vow he did. In a speech to the Reichstag in January 1939, he foretold the fate of the Jews. He claimed that, during his long struggle, Jews laughed at his prophesies of gaining power and enacting a “solution of the Jewish problem.” But he claimed that these same Jews were “now choking” on this laughter. As if he believed he would have the last laugh, he prophesied the “destruction of the Jewish Race in Europe.”46
CIGARS AND COGNAC OVER PROBLEM SOLVED
On January 20, 1942, in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, the SS led a meeting of many leaders of the German bureaucracy whose cooperation would be needed in enacting the full-scale, systematic genocide of the Jews. The Wannsee Conference was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Nazi security agencies. Adolf Eichmann, who would later hold chief responsibility for planning the killing operation, also attended, along with various other SS officers and Nazi officials. The plans were not unanticipated by the representatives; many already knew of mass killings that had already been taking place as the German army advanced into Eastern Europe. A written record survived from this meeting, only slightly altered by euphemistic phrases to veil its full purpose. This record, along with retrospective accounts obtained later from, for example, Israeli interrogations of Eichmann, reveals the eager, accommodating attitude attendees had for the plans.47 Given our understanding of schadenfreude, I suspect there was more eagerness over it than we can know.48 But investigation by Donald McKale indicates that, after the meeting, cigars and cognac were shared merrily by Heydrich and other attendees. Eichmann, himself, later recalled how satisfying it was to know that the “Popes of the Third Reich” had put their seal of approval on the plan, thereby seeming to rid everyone of doubts. He said, “At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feelings, for I felt free of guilt.”49
In his book on the Wannsee Conference, historian Mark Roseman also infers that schadenfreude was part of how Heydrich and others Nazi leaders felt about the meeting.50 It was probably true that almost all the attendees supported the goal of exterminating the Jews, but there were a few sticking points that might have created objections. One had to do with the many Jews of mixed parentage or Jews who were married to non-Jews. Heydrich probably expected that Wilhelm Stuckart of the Interior Ministry would advocate greater protection of Jews in these categories. Not so. Just about all of the officials voiced their desires to exterminate the Jews quickly and completely. Eichmann’s recollections may reveal a desire to exaggerate the enthusiasm of the attendees so as to lessen his own accountability—nonetheless, this was his assessment:
[N]ot only did everyone willingly indicate agreement, but there was something else, entirely unexpected, when they outdid and outbid each other, as regards the demand for a final solution to the Jewish question. The biggest surprise, as far as I can remember, was not only Bühler but above all Stuckart, who was always cautious and hesitant but who suddenly behaved there with unaccustomed enthusiasm.51
Roseman notes that the “galvanized” Heydrich sent copies of the protocol to the attendees.52 In an accompanying message, he wrote that “happily the basic line” had now been “established as regards the practical execution of the final solution of the Jewish question.”53 It was now official. Genocide was the plan, and it was a cause for celebration.54
Schadenfreude in its most disturbing forms and guises was there to see, whether envy was part of the formula for its presence or not. Interestingly, the 2001 film Conspiracy, which attempted to recreate faithfully the actual Wannsee Conference, has schadenfreude as a dominant theme throughout—from the crude anti-Semitic jokes to the bursts of enthusiasm and rappings on the table generated by each step in the direction of finalizing the plans for the Jews’ annihilation. There are hints of the role of envy, masked, as would be expected, by a transmuted righteous belief that the Jews deserved this fate. At first, Stuckart (played brilliantly by actor Colin Firth), as the historical record indicates, appears to have some resistance to the extreme measures being proposed. He reminds everyone that he was the primary author of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws establishing the legal definitions of various categories of Jews that were the basis for codifying their persecution. Indiscriminate deportation of Jews by the SS, in his view, would create legal chaos. He overhears one of the SS officers saying to another attendee that Stuckart must “love” the Jews. This triggers in him a vigorous defense of his “credentials” as a hater of Jews, and a more sophisticated one at that.
[F]rom your uniform I can infer that you’re shallow, ignorant, and naïve about the Jews. Your line that the party rants on about is … is … how … how inferior they are some … some … some species. … I keep saying how wrong that is. They are sublimely clever. And they are intelligent as well. My indictments of that race are stronger and heavier because they are real, not your uneducated ideology. … They are arrogant and self-obsessed and calculating and they reject the Christ and I’ll not have them pollute German blood … he doesn’t understand … deal with the reality of the Jew, and the world will applaud us. Treat them as … as imaginary fantasy evil, human fantasy, and the world will have justified contempt for us. To kill them casually without regard for the law martyrs them … it will be their victory … when you have my credentials, then we’ll talk about who loves the Jew and who hates them.55
Stuckart, in this albeit imagined dialogue, breaks through the absurd logic of those in the room who use their distorted beliefs of the inferiority of the Jews to bolster their case for annihilation. He still wants them purged, with a passion unsurpassed by anyone in the room, however. He manages to justify this desire by embracing other negative stereotypes about Jews, as Glick’s perspective on envious prejudice would predict. These attributes seem enough for even Stuckart to discount the role envy may play in his hatred toward these “sublimely clever” people.
SUFFERING SCHADENFREUDE FIRSTHAND
Through interviews and memoirs, survivors of the Holocaust leave no doubt about the pleasure many Nazis and some Germans displayed over the suffering of the Jews. It is more difficult to know the origins of this pleasure. By reading these accounts and applying to them what we know ab
out human emotion and behavior, I think many clues can be uncovered.56 In one account, Soldiers and Slaves, Roger Cohen, columnist for The New York Times, describes a series of events that played out toward the end of World War II.57 Cohen follows the wretched experiences of a group of about 350 men who were sent to the small East German town of Berga to build an underground fuel-making factory. It was a preposterous plan that had no realistic prospects of succeeding, but Germany was in desperate need of gasoline for its war effort. Most of the men were American GIs who had been captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler’s last-gasp counteroffensive that took the advancing American forces by surprise.58 Most were selected because they had Jewish-sounding names, admitted to being Jews, or looked Jewish. None had the slightest notion that they were now enmeshed in the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews, even as they were herded into cattle cars. Cohen relates their experiences, recalled by the small proportion of men who managed to survive the circumstances of their capture, their treatment as slave laborers, and the final death march away from Berga as advancing American troops closed in on the region. He parallels their experience with that of a Hungarian Jew named Mordecai Hauer, who had also been sent to Berga after he and his family, along with more than 500,000 largely unsuspecting Jewish citizens of Hungary, had been efficiently rounded up by the Germans during the last phase of the war.
There are a number of recurrent themes in the narrative. With some exceptions, the German soldiers generally showed a clear hatred and contempt for the prisoners. Any hint of insolence or disobedience was met with instant, violent retaliation and further contempt. Humor and schadenfreude—and sheer sadistic cruelty—were also common in the camp. The guards’ responses to disobedience from the prisoner were often to beat or execute one or more of them. The dead were usually suspended from make-shift gallows as an example to the others, with the guards taunting the dead with mocking humor.59 One survivor, Private William Shapiro, struggling to comprehend the human depravity all around him, recalled a time when a number of prisoners had suffered this fate. In Cohen’s words:
Shapiro would cast a furtive glance at the gallows, anxious not to draw the attention of the SS troopers whose cruelty was often on display. Growing up in the Bronx, he had been shown photographs of a lynching in the South and had wondered at the smiling faces of the white murderers. He had never seen a hanging.60
It is one thing to witness a lynching and to ponder its meaning, but when it is accompanied by smiling faces,61 it creates disorientation:
Shapiro was at a loss. He had plunged into some netherworld where hangings were public and terrified adolescents with yellow triangles on their sleeves were made to stand at attention in the frigid air before being beaten with batons and rifle butts, but he could not say what this hell was, how it had been constituted, why it existed.62
The experiences of Hauer, the Hungarian Jew, hint more directly at how envy may have sometimes played a role in the vicious treatment of the Jews and echoes many of the ways Germans had also treated Jews from Germany and other countries. The Hungarian Jews thought they were protected from the Nazis by an agreement made between the German and Hungarian governments. As the war appeared to be coming to an end, most Jews did not fear that this agreement would change. Eichmann himself showed up in the early stages of the roundup to give a speech laced with lies that would induce the Jews to be compliant, telling them that they were being taken to camps for their own protection. However, as the situation deteriorated, the more sober members of the community voiced “dire forecasts.” Hauer intuited that many Hungarians resented and envied the Jews because of their successes. He observed that many Hungarians:
[H]ated the Jews, hated them for saving money, for not drinking, for educating their children, for moving up in the world. Now, with the Nazis in Hungary, every frustration could be vented; all that the Jews had patiently amassed would be taken.63
Similar to what occurred in Germany and other countries, one preoccupation of the round-ups involved inspecting possessions,64 notably any valuable items. Hauer recalled his father saying that one Hungarian official claimed that the Jews had “large amounts of gold and diamonds,” and he wanted them for himself because “the Jews are leeches that suck the blood of other people.”65 Cohen notes that Hauer felt “no amount of gold would have satisfied this bigot from Budapest with his conviction that Jews had plundered the wealth of Hungary.”66 It is hard to escape the view that many Hungarians, like many Germans, envied the Jews and that the disappearance of the Jews led to the benefit and satisfaction of many. Envy, camouflaged by rationalized indignation and resentment, would help explain why the Hungarians could do the things that they did to the Jews or stand aside while the Nazis pursued their murderous goals. Hauer never heard anyone say they envied the Jews, but it seemed in the air, no matter how made over or masked.67
One of the puzzles raised by Cohen’s account is why the SS guards continued to push the prisoners to their deaths and, further still, march them away from the advancing American lines when it was clear that doing so was foolish. It made their behavior more incriminating in the probable event of their capture by the Allied forces.68 I have emphasized earlier that a key point is that envy changes the nature of what one is “interested in.” Envy inspires a hatred in which the most important goal is to bring the envied person down, even if it is costly to the self in other ways. Arguably, because of a mix of factors—envy being one—the Jews were hated in this way. Here is Hauer’s recollection of what a newly arrived SS commander said to the prisoners who were assembled for their march away from the Berga camp:
The enemy is nearing this town … but you won’t be left here. The war is not over yet. The Fuhrer has promised us victory, and I believe him. He has a secret weapon, more terrible than our enemies have ever known. This weapon will turn the tide in our favor! But even if we should lose, there is nothing in it for you. You should know that I volunteered to serve in the SS because I hate you dirty Jews. We have enough machine guns and ammunition to execute a group ten times larger than you are.69
When the war was over and Hauer made the disheartening trip back to his hometown in Hungary to search for survivors and evidence of prior life preserved, he came to discover how much had been taken away. He went by the house owned by a Dr. Grossman. It was one of the nicer homes in Goncz, but Dr. Grossman, of course, no longer lived there, nor did any of his family. They had all likely perished. In a cruel twist, the man who opened the door was someone named Veres, a man reviled by Hauer and his family. He had been an especially open anti-Semite and was proud of it. But now, Veres was full of good cheer and claimed to be only watching over the house until Grossman’s return. He also claimed to have tried to help Hauer’s family when the Nazis overran the town. Hauer was invited to eat with him and his wife to celebrate his surprise return home, but Hauer left in disgust.
A few years later, Hauer ended up in the United States, where he would carve out a good life for himself as a family man and as a teacher. But the Auschwitz tattoo—A9092—would be forever on his arm. To a degree, he was able to step back from the horrors he experienced and become almost accepting. He could see, for example, the capacity for schadenfreude in everyone, even himself. Cohen powerfully captures Hauer’s thoughts in this way:
The dog was in every man, a beast that could be unleashed. That, at least, was Hauer’s conclusion. Man was a divided being. In the right circumstances, with enough encouragement, the dogs would rampage. He recalled how in the camps, on a bright day, he might sit in the sun and feel happy for a moment as he crushed the lice that crawled all over him. Killing them was some measure of revenge on a living thing actually weaker than him. The pleasure was ephemeral. But in everyone there lurked some potential to find contentment in another’s pain. In Germany, all constraint had been cast off, the beasts had run wild.70
Hauer also found comfort, perhaps a little schadenfreude, in realizing that Germans would have to live with the knowledge of what th
ey had done. This would be a heavy burden, and it was comforting to make such a downward comparison. And Hauer was lucky, at least in the sense that he survived. He, like the few lucky Americans soldiers who also survived, picked up the pieces and had successful lives. GI William Shapiro returned home, earned a medical degree, and had a long career as an obstetrician. His sentence in the hell of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis ended when, during the forced marched away from Berga, he and other fellow soldiers were resting in a barn and heard the close advance of American troops. Shapiro, emaciated and weakened, staggered out of the barn to see a white star imprinted on a Sherman tank approaching his way. The SS guards had scattered. An American jeep drove up, and Shapiro heard the friendly words spoken by an American soldier, words that were in such contrast to the barking commands he had heard from the guards: “Climb in, soldier.” And with those three words, a better world welcomed him.71
CHAPTER 11
HOW WOULD LINCOLN FEEL?
No one who actually knew the president ever quite understood Chevy Chase’s Saturday Night Live impersonation of him as a genial dolt who stumbled over doorsteps. … Even the slightest misstep was taken as more proof that this graceful and athletic man, who had played on two national championship football teams at the University of Michigan and turned down offers from the pros, was, in fact, a bumbler.
The Joy of Pain Page 19