by C K Williams
This is a discovery the children of despised minorities make early on, nearly as soon as they intuit their place in their social world, and there can be something affecting in how unprepared Germans seem to be when you comprehend that you’re burdened with this double self. The realization must be exacerbated by how late it can dawn on you, in most cases probably only when you begin to reflect seriously on world and self. Such matters occur in a place very close to the core of self-evaluation and sense of worth, and for many, this recognition has to be appalling. The symbolic personality, which exists outside but along with the life one actually lives, must feel at first so inessential, so supremely trivial, like the beginning of a toothache. Unlike Jews or Blacks, whose symbolic definition is an ongoing dilemma that demands a dedicated and often maddening attention, a German can easily conceive of living his entire life without having to consider the implications of symbolic identity at all, and probably most Germans do precisely that.
For most of us our symbolic identity always arrives unexpectedly, with a kind of pounce. It came to me when I was eight or nine and a friend and I had been wrestling, as we all often did. My friend had tripped me up, I’d fallen, he was holding me down, we were both laughing, and then suddenly he slapped my face—Jew-Bastard!—hard, on one side, then—Christ Killer!—still harder on the other, and he kept at it until I would admit as he demanded that I was a “dirty Jew,” that I’d “killed Christ.” A tiny story, entirely a cliché by now, but still, it bothers me to this day. Not my defeat—I’d lost fights before—but my sense of utter astonishment, which was accompanied by feelings not of outrage but of despair. What had changed so much in my friend so that an ordinary afternoon in a park became an occasion for such wild animosity?
I still can’t understand. Was it his little experience of power, of having me momentarily helpless, that transmogrified him from an amiable chum to a thug, and me to his foe? Perhaps he’d never experienced the surge of confidence and certainty that goes through us when we’ve triumphed, even on such a minor scale. Maybe he felt himself released into that state of mind, which I can only imagine, where one no longer has to heed those wearisome prohibitions of good and evil, should and should not. To be not burdened for once by compunction and restraint, by those irritating injunctions from conscience that keep us oscillating in our vision of ourselves between admirable and detestable: all the ordinary exasperating turmoil with which we are afflicted. Perhaps what was so alluring to him was just that, the chance to elude the strictures of conscience and, at the same time, to be other than and greater than he knew he really was. He must have felt for that moment that he had been transformed—he was both himself, and an infinitely more significant other. An ordinary person becoming . . . What? A warrior? A soldier? An SS man? As for me, I’d known for a long time I was a Jew. My parents had told me, and of course, I’d begun to attend synagogue occasionally, and Sunday school. Now I understood what it really could mean. (How uncanny to realize that this happened just at the time when Auschwitz was most ravenously devouring lives.)
But what does it feel like to a German to have it come upon you that you are a sign, a representation, rather than a coherent, unified person? Certainly, it can seem unreasonable that after all the decades that have passed the Germans should still have to bear any symbolic onus. All those things happened long ago, they’re finished, the Germans since then for the most part have manifested an impeccable rectitude: why then should the ignominy stay so alive, so current? Why shouldn’t that writer be able to say, as he did, “Enough,” and have it be the last word on the subject? The answer is relatively straightforward: it’s because symbolic thinking is not like other acts of consciousness; in ordinary thought, facts proven wrong move into the category of error and in one way or another are put aside, and ordinary events in the past have a different sort of reality from those of the present and can be forgotten, or repressed. Symbolic thinking doesn’t work that way. Symbols have no need for reasons. They’re no more susceptible to logical explication than the elemental phenomena of perception. This is precisely the force of symbolism in religion and art. Symbols affect the emotions and the mind more primitively and more profoundly than do ideas. They’re facts, not arguments. They subsume and obviate analysis and neutralize the possible effect of any rational objection. Dante realized and embodied the uncanny power of symbolic thought in his great Comedy; he intuited that our entire spiritual universe could be transfigured to a representative realm and, ultimately, exalted.
At the same time, one of the more sinister potentials of the human mind is how readily actual living people can be transformed to symbols, and how effective this can be in affecting presumably objective thought. A physics textbook published in the Nazi Germany era attacked Albert Einstein as the perpetrator of “Jewish physics,” charging that his “theories were meant to reshape and dominate the whole science of physics, but when faced with reality, they lost all shred of validity.” Moreover, symbols, even the most pernicious, can stay in effect long beyond what seems reasonable: one of the aspects of symbolic thinking is its timelessness, its inability or unwillingness to allow what is in the past to lose its currency and force.
I have to say it’s hard for me to know how Germans actually experience being defined symbolically. For one thing, to feel a conflict within oneself between the nature of one’s symbolic identity in the world and one’s self-conception isn’t at all the same as encountering the active prejudice other more traditionally symbolic peoples confront. There can be few people left anywhere who would turn on their heel and leave a room when a German enters, but there are still many who, confronted with a Jew or a black, for instance, readily revert to stereotypical thinking. When I was in Germany in another city, at a reception after a poetry reading, an editor who had been drinking quite a bit referred to a writer about whom she and another editor had been speaking, as “that Jew.” The remark was wholly gratuitous; it had no connection whatsoever to what was being discussed. I said nothing—being a symbolic person demands such alacrity, such velocity of thinking, and you’re rarely alert enough to respond as you’d like to—but I must have flinched, or given some sign of distress, because a young television producer with whom I’d been chatting sensed it and asked me, “Are you Jewish?” When I replied I was, his attentiveness immediately increased; I could tell I was interesting to him now in a way I hadn’t been before. Although there was nothing negative in his response to me, rather the contrary, I was to him now first and foremost a Jew, and what’s more, he had no sense of how my ethnic-symbolic identity had taken precedence over everything else he knew about me, just as the drunken editor had less benevolently recast her characterization of the writer she mentioned so that his Jewishness preceded everything else about him.
Precedence. It’s always startling: one stops being one thing and becomes another. For the other person a kind of mask comes over you, and now there are a fresh set of assumptions about you, having to do with qualities that come before your actual character and experience. For a moment, one seems to be nothing at all, an absence, a conditional, while the other arranges his perception to resituate you in his new scheme of things. And in this drama, whatever else comes to pass, there is one attribute you know for certain you will no longer possess, which is uncomplicatedness, and that therefore you can no longer be a part of an unselfconscious relationship with the other person. It’s not that you’re defined as less accessible to the other; it’s just that you are much less real, and he or she don’t even necessarily realize it.
In America, when the civil rights movement was getting under way, many African Americans recounted incidents in which as children they would all at once be made to realize that they were “different.” By the nature of their physical being they were now defined by the world of whites, the majority world, which determined for the most part the values of their whole society, as other, and this otherness had dreadful connotations. Suddenly they had had to discover that there were conditions to existe
nce, conditions that had no basis in logic or ordinary modes of understanding. We don’t always appreciate how troubled children are by disruptions of logic; the young learn early on that the pathways through mind have intimate connections to the world beyond: we’ve hardly set out in life when we realize how precious the equations of cause and effect are in interpreting and affecting the world. The child experiencing prejudice, realizing that he is being disvalued in another’s eyes for no apparent reason, suffers more than hurt; he is confronted with the disintegration of what he has been taught is the essential premise of existence—cause and effect. The heart stutters to learn that all of that is invalid now, that you are being regarded through tangles of assumption about which you can do nothing, that you are no longer as you once were in the causal world. It shouldn’t be surprising that the children of oppressed minorities have more difficulty getting themselves into accord with the norms and procedures of the majority educational system. They have learned that reality is not what they had been taught it was, so why should they devote attention and energy to an alien set of beliefs about the relation of mind and world, however useful society tries to convince them it might be?
The annoyance some Germans express about the way they’re perceived by the rest of the world, and about how little responsibility they feel they have for that perception, can be both touching and exasperating. The Germans have endured their symbolic onus for several generations—the Jews have had the same fate for a score of centuries, and continue to be a resource to whom demagogues everywhere from the Duma in Moscow to Iran can turn when they need to dredge up a scapegoat. But still, the desire for “normality” does seem like a straightforward aspiration to be like everyone else, neither more nor less—though this issue, too, is monumentally complicated. Isaiah Berlin once said that to be normal means to feel that one isn’t being observed, and it certainly can be irksome to feel always on display as an odd or unusual phenomenon. But being normal might also be defined as being not bound to a symbolic identity, not being a demonstration or proof or disproof of something beyond the self. Normality implies that one has the right to assemble the qualities about oneself one decides are essential for evolving identity, even if they’re not necessarily comforting. The mortification of becoming a symbol is that one’s entire being is compressed within new parameters, that one is no longer perceived as what one has striven to be. Feelings understandably can become intense; when the matrix of the conflict from which symbols have been generated is so tragically compelling as the Holocaust, the knots of emotion can appear inextricable.
Truly, the Third Reich had a frightening genius for bringing forth symbols of radical figurative force, phenomena that still resonate with a charge of violence and fear. The swastika; the yellow star, and the pink and red; the panzer, the Stuka, the Luger, the jackboot, the lager; even the words: lebensraum, blitzkrieg, Kristallnacht. Even in translation the words retain their power: master race, the Night of the Long Knives, book burning. And all this is beside the imagery of that time, the glimpses of inhumanity that have such convulsive force for us: the cattle cars, the barracks, the gas chambers and ovens and chimneys; even the greasy smoke that was said to permeate the very earth of country around; even the odors, the singular stench of human bodies burning. What other moral system is characterized even by its odors?
All of these symbols have entered the lexicon of historical and ethical reflection. We can believe these dreadful evils were a wild aberration, the result of a particular historical happenstance or anomaly, but they are still facts that humans have to explore in the world and in ourselves in order to be certain that our moral vision is as comprehensive as it must be. How long they will maintain their intensity, their power to put conscience in a state of alert, will probably depend on what new desecrations human beings find to inflict on themselves. But in our time we’re derelict if we don’t take them into account in our ethical meditations. World War II and the Holocaust have become references, measures, scales; they are the very essence for us of unreasonable violence, of malignant and limitless political rapacity. Further, even the relatively peaceful period leading up to the Reich, the apparent atmosphere of tolerance during that time as contrasted with what came after it, embodies other paradoxes our societies still confront. That Germany was so apparently civilized a nation, with so consummate a culture, and that so much evil could be regurgitated from beneath that decorous veneer, makes it integral to any consideration of collective moral hypocrisy.
When certain Germans plead in essence to be left alone, to be normal, they’re not only being naïve in their assumption that we can select the symbols we wish to have attached to us, but they misread history, innocently attributing to it more solicitude and generosity than there is much evidence it has. The unfortunate truth is that one isn’t allowed by the world to renounce one’s symbolic identity: its qualities and resilience are determined by others. The reasons history keeps alive or allows a symbolic identification to fade away is complicated, not to say capricious.
The image of the relentlessly vindictive SS man still ineluctably informs the German symbolic identity, but even ordinary Germans of that time evoke daunting issues of individual choice and will. It has never really been explained how Hitler managed to induce an entire nation to perpetrate the kind of savagery, the gross depravity and corruption that it did. Did Hitler have some knowledge more effective than that possessed by any emperor or king or barbarian chieftain that allowed him to cajole his people—his subjects, I suppose they should be called—to sanction crimes inconceivable to the most madly cruel and arbitrary tyrant? It’s occurred to me that Hitler himself, even in his life, may have been in some ways an entirely symbolic creature, to have neither had nor wanted any other sort of existence. We know his body was never a source of pleasure for him. Early on he gave up any commitment to the corporeal: no real sex, no delight in eating; at the end a doctor in constant attendance to keep his physical shell in order, but no more. This sense of himself as a symbol might help explain his obsession with the Jews, whom he had designated as his adversaries, we might say his symbolic opposites, and why he was willing to sacrifice so much—the entire German nation, really—in his combat with them. It might also help to understand why admirers coming into his presence found themselves affected with something like vertigo, the sense of losing their spiritual bearings. Some explained this as a result of Hitler’s magnetism, or their awe before his power, but perhaps it wasn’t merely power Hitler manifested towards these lesser beings, but scorn, for their existence as mere personalities, afflicted with ambiguity and need, rather than having been elevated beyond all such banal concerns as he had been.
Yet none of this answers the question of the Germans’ homicidal then suicidal fealty to Hitler. Yes, Depression, yes, debilitating war reparations, inflation, yes, all the propaganda, but still, again, how that? It is an abiding quandary and surely one of the reasons why there is an ever ongoing analysis of the German psyche of that time. Some of those inquiries have been distressingly crude, positing an eternal and all-determining anti-Semitism on the part of the Germans. This conclusion is morally repugnant in itself and slights the larger question of how any group of people could have been so radically submissive, allowing themselves to be associated in any way with such clear ethical transgressions.
Some—many—Germans did refuse to participate in the vileness, and this makes the questions even more complicated. In fact, the “Good German,” too, has come to have a symbolic connotation almost as intricate as that of the German war criminal: the people who tried and sometimes succeeded in protecting their Jewish acquaintances or helping them to escape, the several priests who sacrificed their lives by sermonizing against the regime, the officers in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler, and, most touching, the “Edelweiss Pirates,” the tiny movement of dissident adolescents, most of whom were betrayed and hanged.
Yet still, the exclusionary nature of the term itself, “Good German,” implies that there
weren’t enough, that more Germans should have resisted, protested, done something, anything. We ask a great deal of those ordinary Germans, though, those who after all were so much like us, our neighbors, our families, ourselves. We ask of them that they should have been stronger, more heroic, to have taken greater risks. The word “risk” won’t do, though, because given the efficiency and extent of the gestapo’s surveillance, to do anything at all meant to be prepared to sacrifice one’s life. Dare we ask ourselves whether we would have the valor to attempt resistance in such a situation? In the sheltered and privileged environment I live now, I’m aware that within meters of where I live, there are poor people, some desperately so, who suffer political and social neglect and contempt, and yet I forgive myself the fact that I do essentially nothing for them, and rationalize my inaction by telling myself that these problems are too great for any one person’s efforts, that they are issues for specialists who in democracies are appointed to attend to them. But in my heart I know that I am in truth no more ethically scrupulous, courageous, or “good,” than the Germans were back then.
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No wonder Germans can feel put upon by the assumptions made about them and the demands that ensue from those assumptions. Certainly it’s distressing to have a single component of your existence, something that you don’t necessarily feel has much to do with you at all, become the resolving fact of the way your life is evaluated. This is the ineluctable predicament of symbolic identity, and there is no way to experience it without anxiety. Jews, as I’ve said, have known this for a long time, having been characterized for centuries by our cultural and “racial” difference: a people to be at best tolerated, at worst rejected, expelled, and finally wiped out.