Then there is the color element. Mr. Clinton, according to Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist, is our first black president, the first to come from the broken home, the alcoholic mother, the under-the-bridge shadows of our ranking systems. He is also the most relaxed and unaffected with black people, whose company and culture he clearly enjoys.
His closeness to blacks may, in fact, have contributed to the relative racial harmony we have been enjoying these past few years. But it may also be part of the reason for his estrangement from his peers, and it may have helped uncork the sewer of contempt upon his head, the Starr report.
The Devil in Salem was white, but two of the few black people in the village were his first suspected consorts, John Indian and Tituba. Both were slaves. Tituba was tortured into naming women she had seen with the Devil, thus starting the hunt on its way. The conflation of female sexuality and blackness in a white world is an old story, and here it had lethal results.
In Mr. Clinton’s case, there comes an overflowing of rage reminiscent of that earlier explosion. If he lied under oath he of course broke the law, but it seems impossible that the Founding Fathers would have required Congress, as a part of his punishment, to study what parts of a woman’s body the president had touched. Except for this hatred of Mr. Clinton, which sometimes seems to mount to a hellish fear of him as unclean, a supernatural contaminator, it would surely have sufficed for Mr. Starr to report that he had had an affair and falsely denied it under oath.
The Salem paroxysm left the town ravaged, accursed and almost deserted, a place where no one would buy land or farm or build for one hundred years. Salem’s citizens had acted out the mythology of their dark subconscious and had eaten their own—all in the name of God and good morals. It was a volcanic explosion of repressed steam that gave people license to speak openly in court of what formerly would have been shamefully caged in their hearts—for example, the woman who testified that her neighbor flew in through her window one balmy night and lay upon her and had his way. Suddenly this was godly testimony, and the work of heaven was to kill the neighbor.
Salem purified itself nearly to death, but in the end some good may have come of it. I am not historian enough to assert this as fact, but I have often wondered if the witch-hunt may have helped spawn, one hundred years later, the Bill of Rights, particularly the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits forcing a person to testify against himself—something that would have stopped the witch-hunt in its tracks. It may also have contributed to the wall of separation between church and state in America, for in Salem theocratic government had its last hurrah. Or so one may hope.
THE HOLOCAUST
The Nazi Trials and the German Heart
1964
There is an unanswerable question hovering over the courtroom at Frankfurt, where twenty-two Hitler SS men are on trial for murdering inmates in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. Can the kind of movement which gave life-and-death power to such men ever again rise in Germany?
It seemed to me, sitting at one side of the courtroom one day last week, that as in all murder trials the accused here were becoming more and more abstract. Once the jackbooted masters of a barbed-wire world, they are now middle-aged Germans in business suits, nearsighted some of them, laboriously taking notes, facing the high tribunal with a blue-uniformed policeman at each one’s elbow. The two exceptions are indeed extraordinary. One has an imbecile stupidity written on his face, the other shifts constantly in his chair, a free-floating violence so clear in his eyes that one would find him frightening if met on a train, let alone on trial for murder.
But the others could pass for anybody’s German uncle. In fact, the lives most of them have lived since they scooted into oblivion before the allied advance show them entirely capable of staying out of trouble. Some have turned into successful business men, professionals and ordinary workers. They have reared families and even became civic leaders in their communities. When arrested they were not picked up drunk or disorderly, but at work or at rest in the bosom of their families.
For example, the one whose violence seemed to show in his quick roving eyes was, in fact, a real sadist. He was almost constantly drunk in the camp and liked to walk into a barracks and fire his pistol at random into the sleeping prisoners. If he didn’t like the look of a passing inmate he would blow his head off.
But after the war this man got a job in a hospital as a nurse, and his patients have written to the court saying that he was an especially tender helper, an unusually warm person. “Papa Kaduk,” they called him. No one knows anymore exactly how many defenseless people Papa Kaduk murdered in his four years at Auschwitz. A massive man, overweight now, his small eyes blaze with mocking victory whenever a witness sounds uncertain of a date or a fact, and he reaches over to nudge his black-robed lawyer who then rises to protest hearsay evidence. He seems, in short, to be quite convinced that he is indeed Papa Kaduk and not at all the monster being painfully described from the witness chair.
Another is a pharmacist who helped select prisoners for the gas chambers. He has become an important man in his town; the arresting officer had had to wait for him to return from a hunting expedition in Africa, and the local gentry showed real surprise on learning of the charges against him. Especially since it had been he who suggested that whenever the town leaders met to discuss civic affairs they wear tuxedos. How, it was actually asked, could a gentleman of such sensibility have done such awful things?
Yet, the doctor testifying hour after hour this day leaves no doubt about the facts. He was himself an inmate, but since he did get more food than the others he is here to tell the tale. And as he describes babies ripped from their mothers’ arms, bed linen changed twice a year, the almost total absence of medicine, Red Cross trucks being used to transport prisoners to their deaths, tortures and beatings, and names one of the defendants after the other as the actual perpetrators, the German housewives who comprise most of the jury burst into tears or sit with open horror in their faces. And they are of an age which indicates they lived in Nazi Germany while this was happening: they were shopping, putting their children to bed, going on picnics on sunny days, worrying about a daughter’s wedding dress or a son’s well-being in the army while mothers like themselves and children no different from their own were forced to undress, to walk into a barren hall, and breathe the gas which some of the defendants now sitting here carefully administered.
Yet, lawyers on the tiny prosecution staff believe that ninety percent of the German people are opposed to this and other trials like it. They base their judgment on the mail they receive and on their own difficulties in getting local cooperation for some of the arrests they have made, and finally, on the absence of any clear voice or movement from among the Germans demanding that the country’s honor be cleared by bringing such murderers to justice.
On the contrary, it is widely felt, according to these lawyers, that trials like this only give Germany a bad name; that it all happened so long ago why pluck men out of their lives at this late date, and so on. Time and again these lawyers have had to escort arrested men across Germany to the Frankfurt jail because they could not find a police officer to help. And the government has given them twenty-five marks a day for expenses on these trips; the most common lodging for a night costs eleven marks. This handful of Germans nevertheless intends to go on searching for every last man down to the truck drivers who drove prisoners to the gas chambers, until justice is done.
But is there really any long-range point in all this? They do not know. Some of them have been on these cases since 1959 when the first arrests were made in this particular group of cases. They have read through millions of words of testimony, stared at photographs of the camps taken by an SS man with a penchant for photography, showing the defendants actually at work separating the doomed from those temporarily spared for labor in the camp. By this they have lost any sensitivity about what others might think and
are doggedly pursuing the goal.
And what is the goal? These lawyers are in their middle thirties, veterans of the Wehrmacht themselves, German through and through. They know their people and they know that even if every last SS man were convicted for his particular crime, it would not in itself prevent a new recrudescence of brutal nationalism which could once again confront the world with a German problem. It is something else they are after.
Imbedded in every word of testimony, and in the very existence of this trial, is a dilemma which is first of all a German dilemma, given the history of concentration camps, but is actually an unresolved problem for all mankind. For the final defense of these accused is that they acted under government orders.
When so many Germans oppose this trial, it is not simply an insensitivity to suffering, or even an immunity to the question of justice. Germans too weep for their dead and help the sick and care very much about their children. As for a respect for law, they have that even to an inordinate degree. What scares some Germans, however, and makes the German to this day an enigma to many foreigners, is his capacity for moral and psychological collapse in the face of a higher command.
Several times during the course of this trial, newsmen covering it were ordered to leave, for one reason or another, and the dozen or so police who sit below the judges’ tribunal are in charge of carrying out such orders. Not long ago three policemen were asked what they would do if ordered to shoot a newsman who disobeyed the court’s command. One replied that he could not do that; the other two said they would carry out orders.
The point which the prosecution is trying to open up first to Germany, and then to the world, is individual conscience and responsibility in the face of inhuman orders. A judge (who has no connection with this trial) told me that his fears for Germany stemmed from precisely this profound tendency to abjure freedom of choice, to fall into line on orders from above. Another man of the law, a high official in this court, feels that the day is far off, but that his duty is to work for its coming when the Germans would question authority. He sees the root of the difficulty in the especially authoritarian role of the father in the German family, which is the microcosm reflected in the authoritarian state. The underlying point of these trials is that there can be no mitigating excuse for the conscious and planned murder of six million men, women and children, orders or no orders. Some six thousand SS men did duty in Auschwitz during its four years of operation, and not one is known to have refused to do what he was told. And it is no mean irony that the Jew, whose skepticism once leavened the authoritarian character of German culture, is not around any more to help humanize the pompous general with a little healthy doubt as to his real importance.
All of which sounds hopeless and dangerous, and perhaps that is all that should be said. But there are a few unknowns which some Germans would point to with some small and uncertain hopefulness. The young, they say, are less hermetically sealed in the old German ways than any younger generation of the past. Movies, television, books and plays from abroad flood Germany. Germans travel more than they used to, and tourists from abroad come in greater numbers than ever, and there are over one million foreign workers employed in the country now.
So that a German youth is perhaps more internationally minded than his parents and not as contemptuous of strangers and ways of life that are not German. Finally there is the more impressive fact that Germany for the first time in modern history is not flanked by a line of backward peasant countries whose defenselessness was all too tempting in the past. The equalization of industrial and hence military strength through the whole of Europe makes expansion by force a good deal less possible than before.
It is in this context, a context of much distrust and some hopefulness, that the prosecution presses for a German verdict of guilty upon members of the German armed forces. Thus far none of the accused has suggested he may have done something wrong; there is no sign of remorse, and they appear to maintain a certain unity among themselves even now. Some have been in jail two, three and four years awaiting trial and have undoubtedly read what the world press has had to say about their deeds, but no sign shows of any change of attitude toward the past.
In fact, one defendant carries out his familial duties from prison, and his authority and racial ideas are still so powerful (he dropped the gas cartridges into the gas chambers full of people) that his daughter broke off with her betrothed because he, the defendant, believes that no good German girl can possibly marry an Italian.
This trial will go on for about a year, during which time some three hundred psychologically and physically scarred survivors will face the high tribunal in Frankfurt, living evidence of how one of the most educated, technically developed, and artistic nations in the world gave itself over to the absolute will of beings it is difficult to call human. And while that testimony fills the silent courtroom, and the world press prints its highlights, German industry will pour out its excellent automobiles, machine tools, electronic equipment, German theaters will excellently produce operas and plays, German publishers will put out beautifully designed books—all the visible signs and tokens of civilization will multiply and make even more abstract, more bewildering the answer to the riddle which the impassive faces of the accused must surely present to any one who looks at them. How was it possible in a civilized country?
It is the same question to which Cain gave his endlessly echoed answer, and I have often thought that this is why it is the first drama in the Bible, for it provides the threat, the energy for all that comes after. If man can murder his fellows, not in passion but calmly, even as an “honorable” duty leading to a “higher” end—can any civilization be called safe from the ravages of what lies waiting in the heart of man? The German government which Hitler destroyed had some of the most intelligent and advanced legislation in the world. The present republic also is buttressed by excellent laws.
What is in the German heart, though? Does the rule of law reach into that heart or the rule of conformity and absolute obedience? Surely, if the German police had picked up a twenty-two-man gang that had tortured and killed merely for money, or even for kicks, an outcry would go up from the Germans, a demand that justice be done. Why is there this uneasy silence at best, and this resentment at worst, excepting that in the Frankfurt cases these accused worked for a state under its orders? Perhaps the problem becomes clearer now, and not only for the Germans.
The disquieting, nagging truth which I think dilutes the otherwise clear line this trial is taking is that the human mind does in fact accept one kind of murder. It is the murder done under the guise of social necessity. War is one example of this, and all peoples reject the idea of calling soldiers murderers. In fact, the entire nation so deeply shares in this kind of killing that it must reject any condemnation of the individuals who actually do the killing, lest they have to condemn themselves.
The problem for the Germans is that they are being called upon to identify themselves with the victims when their every instinct would lead them to identify with the uniformed, disciplined, killers. In short, they are being called on to be free, to rebel in their spirit against the age-old respect for authority which has plagued their history.
This, I think, is why it is perfectly logical for the German housewife on the jury to weep as any human being would at the horrors she hears, even as she and her millions of counterparts have, for at least a decade now, heard just such evidence a hundred times with no sign of public protest against Nazism. It is why the officers who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944 have never been celebrated in Germany either: for they did the unthinkable, they took a moral decision against their obedience to authority.
So that the German looking at these twenty-two men may well be revolted by their crimes and yet feel paralyzed at the thought of truly taking sides against them. For part of his soul is caught in the same airtight room with theirs—the part that finds honor and goodness and decency in obedience.
But who, in what country, has not heard men say, “If I did not do this someone else would, so I might as well go along?”
So the question in the Frankfurt courtroom spreads out beyond the defendants and spirals around the world and into the heart of every man. It is his own complicity with murder, even the murders he did not perform himself with his own hands. The murders, however, from which he profited if only by having survived.
It is this profound complicity which the Frankfurt prosecution is trying to open up by sticking to its seemingly simple contention that all murder is murder. With the atomic bomb in so many different hands now it might be well to take a good look at the ordinariness of most of the defendants in Frankfurt. The thought is hateful, to be sure, and no one would willingly think it, but we do, after all, live in the century when more people have been killed by other people than at any other period. Perhaps the deepest respect we can pay the millions of innocent dead is to examine what we believe about murder, and our responsibility as survivors for the future.
POLITICS ABROAD
Dinner with the Ambassador
1985
In March, Harold Pinter and I went to Turkey for a week on behalf of the International PEN Club. We made the visit not primarily to conduct an investigation of human rights—an impossibility in so short a stay—but to demonstrate to the country’s writers and artists and to its political prisoners that the outside world cares about what is happening to them. It was to be an act of moral solidarity by the members of International PEN, and we hoped it might also have an effect on the country’s military government.
We had wanted to talk to people of all political views, including Prime Minister Turgut Ozal and the martial law commander of Istanbul, Gen. Necit Torumtay. The prime minister was in Saudi Arabia, however, and the commander declined to see us, saying that the government is now controlled by Parliament—nonsense, since the military runs the country. We did meet with publishers and editors of conservative newspapers, who more or less support the regime. All of them, however, said that under censorship the truth about touchy issues could not be printed. We also attended the trial of a lawyer who had defended the Turkish Peace Association, a banned group which used to lobby for nuclear disarmament and détente, and we spoke with people who have been jailed and tortured without being accused of any act. We went to a dinner in my honor at the American ambassador’s residence. Apart from the government-imposed news blackout on our press conference at the end of the trip, that dinner turned out to be the climax of the week.
Collected Essays Page 53