Games with Shadows

by Neal Ascherson

  And so on, with the crew of a French nuclear submarine, and the fly-past of ‘64 aircraft including Mirage IV nuclear bombers and Mirage 2000 attack planes, and 20 helicopters.’ Insatiable for more tramping and clanking, President Mitterrand then flew to Verdun and reviewed the march-past of the 4th Aeromobile Division complete with its anti-tank helicopters.

  Why does the Fifth Republic find it still necessary to celebrate the identity of France by a display of force? I have no doubt that if Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart had not been serving their last days in a New Zealand jail before transfer to a desert island, they too would have strutted past the stand, probably towing a replica of the Rainbow Warrior.

  The nasty answer is to recall that the Fifth Republic itself was born by the forceps of military violence: in the terrifying army mutiny of May 1958 when the forces in Algeria rebelled, seized Corsica and were preparing to install a semi-Fascist regime in Paris when de Gaulle stepped in. Though true, this is unfair. It is modern France itself, through the Great Revolution, that was born through war, and the Jacobin tradition which associated the Republic, ‘united and indivisible,’ with the ‘nation in arms.’

  The victory parade, as old as Rome, is understandable. I would like to have seen General Maczek march his Poles through liberated Breda, or the British going through the streets of Brussels in tanks smothered with flowers and girls (‘Your old woman would give you Vive la Belgique if she could see you,’ says one Tommy in the Giles cartoon to another). The point of Mrs Thatcher’s victory parade after the Falklands War – the bombers passing the windows of this office in one dark thunderclap after another – was undeniable, even if one felt like denying it. But what about countries which hold victory parades every single year, in peacetime?

  The Soviet Union famously does it every November, with military attaches peering under their fur hats at the huge sausages of the missiles on their trailer. The East Germans love to do it, goose-stepping along in their jackboots with an unselfconscious zeal that brings a tic of irony even to the faces of Warsaw Pact diplomats. France apart, the West Europeans are sparing with this sort of show.

  Most British public parades have the aspect of a pageant, like Trooping the Colour. They suggests a toy-soldiers’ view of soldiering, and in that are related to the growing passion of otherwise sane human beings for getting into chainmail, topboots or Peninsular War shakos to re-enact battles of the past.

  All that is pretty harmless. Afterwards, gasping and purple-faced men get their helmets off and reach for the beer, and have at least a dim idea of the hellish exhaustion of a real battle. The march-pasts of professional soldiers with modern weapons, in contrast, usually happen in the privacy of barracks or sandy training-grounds closed to outsiders. I can testify to the hellish exhaustion of those occasions, for which I once bought from a comrade a pair of boots burnished like obsidian but three sizes too small.

  I wonder, though, whether even the long-suffering British officer caste sometimes looks across the Channel in envy. As Alfred de Vigny reflected, the peacetime officer must be a stoic indeed to bear the public’s lack of interest in, even mild disdain for its defenders when they are not defending. The Royal Tournament is hardly enough, and anyway the show is always stolen by the glamour boys of the SAS or the paras. Why not just one day in the year when the tanks roll and the line regiments tramp down Whitehall in the full view of the nation?

  Many civilians would prefer something more educational. A parade in which every marcher would represent a hundred of the dead in the two world wars, for example. Better still, a huge annual armoured drive-past, but one which would display all the weaponry taken out of service that year under international disarmament agreements, and tow it proudly past the reviewing dais on its way to the scrap-heap. Mrs Thatcher could take the salute, and even shout ‘Rejoice!’ at intervals into the loudspeakers.

  These are nice but sentimental ideas. National parades are about much more than war. They are about power within a society, and can be divided into two types.

  There are parades when They show themselves to Us. On the Fourteenth of July, the full coercive might of the State, political and military, shows itself to the French people and says: Applaud us! – which they invariably do. So it is in Moscow each November. But there is another sort of parade in which We show ourselves to Them.

  Those We-to-Them parades are, I admit, pretty rare. Protest demonstrations don’t count, as They are more likely to be tucked up behind lines of police than on the stand. In fact, I can only think of one or two. There were some occasions like that in Allende’s Chile. And, best of all, there was the First of May in Prague in 1968, when the people went out in the street with their families and posters they had made themselves because they wanted to say to Alexander Dubcek: ‘We are with you – Be with us!’

  That was a good day. The Czech We inspected a rather bashful Them, still incredulous at finding themselves genuinely popular, and gave approval. That day outshines all the other May Day parades I have seen, in which the thousands marshalled by the Party from factories and offices, with banners about Peace thrust into their hands and balloons tethered to indifferent fingers, shuffle past their rulers and greet them with a fishy stare.

  I wouldn’t say that those occasions are utterly joyless. They celebrate Labour by giving people a chance to stop work, breathe some fresh air, and unload a great deal of gossip and chatter until they are shushed as they approach the podium where the Vanguard of the Proletariat stands with tight grins. There are even unplanned moments, as when Lech Wałęsa slipped into one May Day parade and gave the astonished General Jaruzelski a two-finger salute – the Solidarity greeting, that is.

  With rare exceptions, though, the parade is a one-way transmission, a form of party political broadcast. The Rhineland carnivals, with their cartoonish floats of politicians, try to reverse the flow. But in Britain all official pageantry is about rulers displaying power and plumage to the ruled. Whit Walks and Miners’ Galas, two exceptions, take place at a long, safe distance from Westminster. A cat can look at a king, but kings still feel degraded by an invitation to look at cats.

  [1986

  F3080

  The first time I visited Auschwitz, they said: ‘Go for a little walk. Pull up the turf, and see what you find.’ I found a whiteish soil, white with the ash of calcined human bone. The poplars planted at SS orders to mask the gas chambers were small and scrawny.

  The last time I went there, the earth had become brown again, like the soil of any field. And the poplars – tyrants love poplars, which offer rapid, orderly, spectacular results – had become huge, graceful trees, waving their tips innocently in the morning breeze.

  Time has begun to purify even the worst place in the world. I thought of those trees and that earth – images of how our view of history changes insensibly but, in the end, almost out of recognition – when I watched a preview of a film to be shown on Granada television late tonight.

  ‘A Painful Reminder’ – strangely innocuous tide – is about what the Allies found when they liberated the concentration camps. It contains the most sustained and terrible images of death and degradation ever shown on a screen. But, more importantly, it is about the first efforts by normal people to cope morally with suffering and brutality on a scale entirely outside their assumptions about the nature of ‘civilised’ human beings.

  It is a film within a film. The core of it is a 50-minute documentary, made in 1945 on official initiative. It was directed by Sidney Bernstein, and Alfred Hitchcock was brought over from Hollywood to assist him. Richard Crossman and Colin Wills, of the News Chronicle, wrote the script. It was to be shown to the German population with the object, as defined by Bernstein, of proving beyond any possible challenge that these crimes did take place and that the German people, not only the Nazi Party or the SS, bore the responsibility for them. Around the original film (the last reel has been lost but reconstituted), the producer Steve Morrison has assembled interviews with camp survivors
and with the men who entered Belsen and shot the documentary.

  But the film was never shown. As soon as the Allied forces began to occupy Germany, conflict began between the political aims of the occupation – the purging and re-education of German society, and the punishment of Nazi criminals – and the military authorities. All order had collapsed: the economy and currency had died, and the population, exhausted and in many places starving, was being swelled by million after million of desperate refugees from the East.

  For local military governors, often relying on ex-Nazis to reconstruct a semblance of administration, the priority was to rally Germans out of their apathy to save themselves. Purges, punishments and efforts to instil the notion of collective guilt into the population seemed, to the soldier’s mind, designed only to increase the chaos and demoralisation.

  Bernstein got a first whiff of changing attitudes as early as August 1945. An official in the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office warned him that ‘there are people around the C-in-C who will say “No atrocity film.” I would say that the atrocity film, if really good and well documented, would be shown willingly and successfully in nine months’ time when the difficulties of the winter have been tackled.’

  There was no ban. But time passed, and the right moment for the film never seemed to have arrived. It was shelved, and in time passed to the Imperial War Museum where, under the cryptic title ‘F3080,’ it has reposed ever since.

  It was a victim of the great change in Anglo-American policy towards Germany. The motive for not alienating the population gradually changed from the need to mobilise society against starvation to the need to establish a new West German State as part of an anti-Communist alliance. Wartime declarations that Germany would be ‘de-nazified’ and all Nazi criminals punished were left only half-fulfilled.

  Should the film have been shown? In 1945, the Germans were so blinded by disaster that the film’s accusations might well have rolled off them. The novelist Günter Grass, as a young prisoner, was marched by the Americans to see Dachau, but still did not believe what he was told until he heard it from German radio journalists reporting the Nuremberg trial a year later.

  But in the years of recovery, when Germans could reflect again, the Allies preferred to leave it to the Germans to settle their own accounts. It was over 30 years before a syrupy American soap-opera called ‘Holocaust’ brought home a version of the truth to millions of German viewers.

  The word ‘Holocaust’ raises an even more startling point about the Bernstein-Hitchcock film. This was a documentary about mass murder in the concentration camps. Yet the original script uses the word ‘Jew’ only three times – and then quite tangentially to the main theme.

  A passage about Buchenwald lists no fewer than 31 categories of dead, starting with ‘African negroes.’ The Jews are not mentioned. On Auschwitz, the script states that ‘transports of prisoners from all over Europe were sent for extermination.’ There is no hint that the main purpose of the gas chambers was to murder the Jewish population of Europe.

  Today, this omission seems utterly incredible. A pendulum has swung, and the planned murder of six million Jews towers so high over our notion of history that the five million non-Jewish victims of the camps (eight, if the Soviet prisoners systematically starved to death are included) are often overlooked. But there it is: this film, made by passionate anti-Fascists, does not mention the Holocaust.

  Why not? Bernstein was Jewish; Crossman an expert on Germany who had worked in psychological warfare and later became an ardent supporter of Zionism. The explanation seems to lie partly in propaganda tactics, partly in the very idealism of the group which made the film.

  A key principle of war propaganda was to make its targets identify with Hitler’s victims. A dreadfully revealing Ministry of Information guideline, sent out in 1941, warned propagandists that to make the Nazi evil credible, they must always deal with ‘the treatment of indisputably innocent people, not with violent political opponents and not with Jews.’ This was for the British public. Crossman, trained on such principles, must have feared that they were infinitely truer for the Germans. If the film presented victims as Jews rather than ‘innocent people’ it might not pierce the indifference built up by 12 years of official racialism.

  So the film spoke only of men, women and children ‘from every European nationality’, defined the victims by their humanity and innocence, not by their faith or race. The filmmakers had not, in fact, had time to grasp the horror within the horror. The scale of the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Problem’ had scarcely dawned on them, and it was to be many years before the word ‘Auschwitz’ (implying the gassing of millions), replaced ‘Belsen’ in Britain as the ultimate metaphor of evil.

  But they also felt that to single out ‘the Jews,’ even as victims, was somehow to play the Nazis’ game. This had been a war for humanity, for the ‘common people’ of the world, a liberation from the iron compartments imposed by Fascism. In the long years while ‘F3080’ lay forgotten on its shelf, that big-hearted vision of human unity gathered dust too, until today few can remember what it was like. And that is our loss.

  [1985

  Exiles

  I had never seen a president of a republic inaugurated. So the other day I put on a respectful tie and went along to Eaton Square in London. Here, in the presence of several hundred witnesses, Count Edward Raczynski laid down the office of President of the Polish Republic in Exile and Mr Kazimierz Sabbat took the oath as his successor.

  It was a ghostly, fantastic moment. Skeletons emerged from cupboards and put the Sunday Express into a nervous fury: ‘Pathetic, isn’t it, that more than 40 years after the end of the war there should still be the meaningless façade of a Polish Government-in-exile?’

  But it is that beefy, numbskull comment which is pathetic. Meaningless? The ceremony at Eaton Square, like the exile government itself, does not have a literal meaning, but there are other kinds of meaning. When Mr Sabbat, promoted from the office of Prime Minister of his small Cabinet, took the presidential oath by ‘Almighty God and the Holy Trinity’ to ‘apply the law of the Constitution [of 1935]’ and to ‘defend the state against evil and danger,’ none of his hearers and not even – I think – he himself supposed that he would ever sign decrees in Warsaw.

  And few men are less ‘pathetic’ than Count Raczynski, now in his nineties. His dignity and irony are inviolable. He was ambassador to the Court of St James in 1939, when Britain offered him its sword to defend Poland. He was ambassador in 1945, when Britain informed him that she was withdrawing recognition from his Government and leaving Poland in the lurch. He received the slap, as he had received the sword, with the bow of a grand diplomat.

  Governments in exile are a way of saying No. They do not deny unwelcome reality. They consciously defy it, which is different. Absurdity is their business, for they are saying that the world as it exists is absurd. They are aware, as the Spanish Republic in exile was aware, that it will probably be unknown people far off in Warsaw or Madrid who will eventually regain freedom, and that those unknown people will not invite them to resume authority.

  Gradually losing touch with the homeland is an inevitable process. The Russian writer Alexander Herzen, looking at the political exiles of nineteenth-century London, observed: ‘They are like the court clock at Versailles, which pointed to one hour, the hour at which the king died … meeting the same men, the same groups; in five or six months, in two or three years, one becomes frightened: the same arguments are still going on, the same personalities and recriminations: only the furrows drawn by poverty and privation are deeper; jackets and overcoats are shabbier; there are more grey hairs, and they are all older together and bonier and more gloomy….’

  Exile as a condition has a whole scale of descending misery. There is the expatriate or emigrant, who lives abroad by choice. There is the émigré, whose choice is determined by politics. Then comes the exile who cannot safely return, the refugee who has fled from
pursuers, the deportee who has been expelled from his own home, and finally – at the bottom of the heap -the slave labourer driven away to work the mines and factories of a foreign conqueror. At Eaton Square, I saw men and women who have known each of these fates. They looked composed. Perhaps they recall the Polish aphorism: ‘I hit bottom – and then I heard someone tapping from underneath.’

  All exiles, and especially politically active exiles, know the occupational diseases of the condition. Squabbling and faction-fighting are one. In Chile, up to General Pinochet’s coup in 1973, there was a revolutionary Catholic party called Mapu. A Chilean informs me that abroad it split into three, the third fragment comprising those who didn’t want a split. He added that two of the fragments were being led by the same man using different names. At home, a politician’s insistence upon being in the right is kept under control by events, which are unpredictable. In exile, where there are no events but only highly predictable fellow-exiles, political arrogance and dogmatism can grow as tall as giant groundsel in the Ruwenzori Mountains.

  Belligerent cultural assertion is another disease. It afflicts the expatriate, above all, who feels he must justify his choice of life abroad. California is infested with braying Englishmen with yellow moustaches, insistent on telling one the Test score.

  But a proper exile – an involuntary one – does not need to prove a loyalty. The Expellee Leagues in West Germany are led by aggressive windbags. But their rank and file at those enormous rallies, wearing the costumes and eating the sausage and potato cakes of a lost ‘Heimat,’ are not really aggressive at all. They belong to a very special exile plight: that of people whose homeland has actually ceased to exist, like a sunken Atlantis. Where German Pomerania was, there is a Polish province: their villages have different names. After 40 years, their cities have foreign histories of their own. We will not see a loss so total until survivors gather after a nuclear war.