It wasn't to go "fight the Third Reich," but to meet their kids. The U.S. always had enough home-grown American Nazis and Aryan-wannabes and KKK, I didn't need to go to Doitch-Land for this. In 1980 I hand-typed some hundred letters to Jewish and to Christian individuals or Worthies or organizational entities, sharing the gist of my little epiphany and intention to one day make it over to Germany. While having no idea how I'd do this, the U.S. Military in its renowned wisdom, saw fit in August of '88 to send me as an Arabic-trained intel analyst to Berlin. And that was to be the horse I rode in on, just over 14 months before the Great Wall Fall.
As a Jewish teenager growing up in the U.S. I'd contemplated the Shoa often, frequently pondering all the usual run of questions and suppositions, ad infinitum. And then once, having entered my twenties, an entirely new question occured to me in a moment of extrapolation, challenging me with another perspective to examine: what would I do with myself, were I a post-war German of the same age and sensibilities, struggling with the haunting revelation of all that my own nation, the entire generation of my parents and grandparents – indeed totally including many of these, personally and directly or indirectly – had perpetrated upon their own entire Jewish citizenry and Europe's entire Jewish population (as well as those others likewise targeted) – upon defenseless men, women and children? I had never heard this addressed in all those years in the States, and have still never to this day, so I guess I get to own it.
What would I do with myself, carrying not the guilt or accountability personally but the legacy and the onus of my thoroughly compromised family, my Waffen-SS grandfather, or SA uncle, my Wehrmacht father on campaign in the East …? Suppose, I reflected as this theoretical German counterpart, I became well-informed of it all, not merely satisfied with what attention was given the subject in school, and realized that the men and the women by whom I'd been raised, with whom I'd identified more or less as role models, had all been either willing perpetrators, willing accomplices, or simply spinelessly banal, unquestioning receivers of whatever pleasures or privileges and assurances of security they'd derived from being good little Aryan-approved Reichsbürger? And even if they had remained dangerously human and exercised any form of non-compliance, if not actually being in the homeland Resistance – and there were indeed those – still they remained under the onus of having been traitors in the eyes of their countrymen or collectively taken for ex-Nazis by outsiders, a terrible slap in the face either way.
So supposing as this next-generation German I'd really gotten it, and the horror was more than my conscience could bear – and I'd gotten absolutely nowhere asking, then confronting, family members of that generation – just stonewalling, cold silence, fierce denials, angry warnings to just drop it...? Suppose as this person I had worked it out on an emotional level almost as deep as the trauma of revelation itself, that I am myself not to be held accountable for any of what had happened, having been born after The War, - and after the war on the Jews – yet am carrying in my own immediate family history the full weight of repressed and denied accountability, such that I would gladly trade families with someone, anyone, somewhere else?
In other words, here was a non-Jewish German version of myself, thoroughly human, struggling very poignantly with the most recent ancestral karma of perhaps the heaviest degree one could imagine: it is just that question of search for conscience, of really encounterng and coming to terms with that – for both post-war generation members, and I, this Jewish American was uncomfortably aware of this. There was no room for smugness or condescension or contempt, if this shared encounter was to become realized.
This American Jew contemplated this hypothetical German counterpart: and imagined there could be quite a number of them. Maybe one in a thousand, maybe less. Such a one might contemplate suicide, this American Jew is thinking I certainly would; or such a one might come to hate "everything German" and hate being a German. Such a one might finally give up in exasperation even trying to come to terms with all this or escape the overwhelming cold trauma, finding no comfort in mentioning it to friends who are not also looking at it for themselves, or in searching out "things Jewish" to try to – to what, salvage or balance or compensate for something?
I, this American Jew, could see myself in this counterpart, could identify his/her need for some kind of leveling contact, his/her desire for the way out. I sensed that this counterpart was ready for spiritual amnesty. This means: amnesty from the onus of crimes of one's familial and native predecessors, amnesty from the psychic hold of their criminal record on one's own growth, amnesty from the very spirit of that generation and its legacy of shame. Ready means that one has gained the maturity to discern and avoid the pitfalls of either gross denial, self-pitying projection, or of hanging one's head as the guilty one, the self-hating German who is actually no more conscious or prepared reflectively to go within and bravely pull up roots in search of truth than are the other two cases. And I considered that this hypothetical German counterpart – however many s/he numbered – was ripe for contact.
And it turned out - I was right.
It would approach discovering for themselves what compassionate reconcilliation and redemption could really mean, as sought out strictly in the interest of achieving and expressing true sanity and healing. After some years I also became "ripe for contact" and wound up moving to Berlin, staying here and eventually settling down, living an ordinary life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OMK1m8W65s&hl=es-419&gl=CO
(I'd waited 26 years in Berlin to give that moment, and before then, since 1980.)
Addendum:
Once, in nursing school here, while removing a tabloid from a hospital room to toss out, I came across an interview of a guy it turned out also had been interviewed for BBC previously, a former Auschwitz SS officer who loudly and unmistakeably stated toGermany and to the world: "Stop denying, it all happened, it was all true, I was there!" He described his position and duties (restricted to taking valuables and managing them) and with all candor described himself without self-pity, as a cog in the machine but with equal accountability! He authentically wished to meet any Jew of whom he could ask pardon and extend a hand.
I was so impressed, saying well that's a first - and sent off a letter to him via the tabloid, which concurred, and left it at that. I told him I'd never thought I'd be faced with forgiving a Nazi because to be forgiven you have to show remorse and as they are incapable of that down to the very marrow it would never come up -and that he was now the "Nazi I'd been waiting for 16 years to encounter" - I said as a non-victim and non-survivor myself and one who'd lost no family there anyway, I could not and had no right to "forgive" or even "pardon" him, but that I could on all moral principle, offer him my full understanding and acceptance, yes as a Jew, and as a former member of the Occupying U.S. forces here, I could offer him my hand in friendship and reconciliation, even redemption for us both. I left it at that and didn't even photocopy myletter which I normally would have done. I received in the mail a most exquisitely beautiful reply from him, for his own sake and that of his family.
It was typed out on a PC, four pages, and in the margin and at the end, some two or three places in there, he scribbled further in excited hand, his overwhelmed thanks and gratitude and heartfelt words. I had shown his letter to one of my brothers, to my parents, to survivors I've known, and to German friends here - all were as astounded as was I initially to read his letter, and all were bowled over by the action on my part which occasioned it.
No comments:
Post a Comment