When the Past Wrecks the Present
“There is a deep sickness there” Eugyppius
A pandemic is a lot like war, throwing society into deep disarray and sometimes, a decline that cannot be stopped. The hysterical reaction to the Covid virus reminded me powerfully of my childhood. I was born during WW2 in Germany, or Deutschland, and would rather ignore the topic of the Nazis, the Jews, and the Holocaust. However, I have reluctantly returned to this theme because of two things that happened this week: I watched the German movie The Zone of Interest and signed up to read the full post of Eugyppius’ latest Substack that deals with The Germans and The Jews. And then I read about Professor Paul Finlayson who got fired for telling the truth about people who stand with Hamas. More on that later.
The movie should be of interest to North Americans because it so perfectly captures what German family life was like. The fact that this particular family is that of Rudolf Hoess, the man who managed the increasingly efficient slaughter at Auschwitz, visible across the fence right next door, is not only based on facts but also an insight that we tend to forget: the intimate details of life, how we relate to each other, to our families and our friends and colleagues, is not a little thing; it is everything.
In the movie, family life is rigidly organized, and this militaristic mindset is mirrored next door, where it is organized for a grim purpose. Here as there, everyone works a lot: Arbeit macht Frei. Work is Freedom. The same obsession with order and keeping things clean reigns here as there. Aside from barking orders, it’s an eerily quiet world. Not a lot of conversation. There is an air of manic oppression that seems to hover above both places. The kids are certainly not coddled, if they cut themselves they get treatment that hurts and not much sympathy. The mother in particular is someone I instantly recognized: a narrow, single minded Hausfrau obsessed with control and cleanliness, with running the life of her family in a no nonsense and often painful manner. She abuses her servants, tries on lipstick and a luxurious fur clearly not her own, and is seen chatting inanely with other wives about housewifely topics. She is resolutely disinterested in the grisly events going on next door. She only cares about her own life, period, and she runs it as she sees fit.
As I see it, she is an uncomfortable stand in for a lot of normal Germans, who did the same. Who looked away. Who ignored what was happening to the Jews, their neighbours, and distrusted the rumours that they were being murdered somewhere. Some were afraid to speak up; others, like my own family, ignored the Nazis; they regarded them as idiots unworthy of attention. Politics was reserved for politicians. According to my mother, that was the norm for upper middle class families like ours. My uncle, who was a teenager during the Nazi madness, confirmed it. “We didn’t take them seriously”, he told me. The results were devastating and continue to resonate today.
When I first came to Canada in 1953, I grabbed every opportunity to forget my German heritage, ditch that black weight of guilt hanging over the country of my birth and embrace the young, unblemished spirit of Canada. For me, it truly was an escape from a feeling so leaden and all pervasive that I would have done anything to escape from it. Every time I returned to the Fatherland, I felt it anew, weighing on my mind. I rejected it; I had nothing to do with that. That was not what Germany considered right and proper, of course. The Germans took on the collective guilt of having allowed the Nazis and above all, Hitler, to lead the nation into war and also, incinerate millions of Jews as well as other ‘undesirables’, meaning people who were different or dared to question the Nazi regime. My own mother nearly ended there because she protested having to labour twelve hours a day in a munitions factory while she had a toddler, me, at home.
You won’t enjoy The Zone, but you will learn a lot. And that is actually why such movies are still being made. Some 80 years after the Nazi regime ended; we’re still grappling with what happened and why. Why did this democratic nation of highly educated and hardworking people fall into the fascist abyss? And are we destined to repeat this ghastly business if we don’t even understand what happened?
The Eugyppius piece, one that I admire tremendously and wish I had written, goes a long way towards diving into the undertow, the implicit dread that the Nazis still spread, especially in Germany. And why they are achieving precisely the opposite of what they intend, which is to prevent a return of that mentality so perfectly rendered in The Zone. To be clear, in Germany, they have done everything possible to atone: they are paying reparations to this day, they have built monuments to the murdered Jews, and as a writer you cannot legally use symbols such as the Hakenkreuz even for satirical purposes, as another Substack writer, CJ Hopkins, discovered. He is being legally persecuted by the German state for putting this symbol on the cover of one of his anti-fascist books. The more they obsess about their Nazi past, the more they are replaying it, busy passing laws that the fascists would certainly approve of. I have written about it in a previous post and compared these illiberal laws strangling speech to our very own version here in Canada. Or the UK or the USA. In other words, this is not simply a German issue, but with predictable thoroughness, they are writing laws even more insane than ours. All in the spirit of preventing a resurgence of ‘hate speech’, ‘disinformation’ and so on. We’re protecting freedom by strangling it, Heil Hitler! It’s a fake religion, says Eugyppius:
So what is going on here. Why does all the earnest wrangling with the fascist past actually create a new, slightly different version of it? It seems clear that we are dealing with a form of hysterical fear that breeds the opposite of what it intends. The more fearmongering re Hitler and the Nazis there is, the more insane and counterproductive the response. All over the west, we are witnessing an orgy of handwringing over ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’ that can only be dealt with by government overreach and laws that would make Hitler happy. Perhaps we are too much in thrall to the fascists; we might want to take a breather and a step back. Because right now, we are witnessing the convergence of opposites identified by Dr Iain McGilchrist. We are keeping our enemies so close that we are in real danger of becoming just like them.
Meanwhile, our overlords do not trust our judgement, so they have decided to make decisions for us that we used to take as our birthright. Only in oppressive communist and fascist dictatorships were such things possible, or so we thought. Now that they are happening right here, we have a choice: just ignore it and hope it will eventually disappear. Or fight for your right to speak and write as you think. Appeasers are those who feed the alligator in the hopes that it will eat them last, Churchill supposedly said. Whoever said it knew something about the dynamics of appeasement. Which is often just looking the other way, as the cozy German family does in The Zone. As my and countless other German families did, thus enabling one of the great human catastrophes of history.
Unfortunately, that is not where it ends. Because of the war in Israel, the stakes have just been raised again and I can hear the sirens going off in my head. The age old, so-called ‘Jewish Problem’ is back. And this time, it’s not just the Germans who are looking the other way. Anyone who openly declares their solidarity with Israel and condemns Hamas, an acknowledged terrorist organization committed to cleansing the Middle East of all Jews, will get publicly shamed and likely lose their jobs in Canada. This is happening right now, right under our noses at the University of Guelph. Where a dedicated professor close to retirement called out Hamas for its brutality after watching the videos of the slaughter in the desert. Paul Finlayson has children in the age group that was attending the desert rave, and he imagined what would have happened to them. So he said on social media that anyone who stands with Hamas stands with fascists.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/university-teacher-faces-firing-for-denouncing-hamas
And within days, his life as a beloved teacher, a man who often stayed late to write another book or lend an ear to a needy student, was over. Someone in Asia who calls himself an educator lodged an official complaint, and the university immediately took his side and began proceedings against Finlayson. A firestorm of controversy and false accusations erupted. Long-time colleagues started averting their eyes when they met him. You can read the story of what happened yourself and decide if Canada is still a country where we enjoy freedom of expression and the protection of the law. Academia seems to be the place where it’s now dangerous to speak your mind. Didn’t Jordan Peterson do that, as well? Yes he did and his life as a licensed psychologist is likely over as well.
I think we are standing at the edge of the abyss again. Whether we too fall in or manage to build a bridge to the other side is an open question. I know what I must do. I have to engage again with a painful past that I have been attempting to outrun my entire life. And I wish I had another choice. I would much rather write poems and discuss the nature of faith, beauty, and love. We’re going to need them too if we want to emerge from this firestorm of hate without getting burnt. I was looking forward to a tranquil summer lying on my balcony and soaking up the sun. I can still do that except that it won’t be tranquil at all.
Yes, you are right, Monika! The Nazi-topic is still present and part of the power woke people exert over other people. On the other hand: many "normal" people are concerned about the ongoing wokeness and not in line with it. One example: A few days ago, I couldn't get a ticket for a book presentation because it was sold out within minutes. The title of that book: "Der entmündigte Leser", and the author Melanie Möller, a professor of classical philology, fights with her book for the absolute and total freedom of literature. So, it seems that many people totally go along with that book and its author - which is a "Silberstreif am Horizont", isn't it?