Norman Manea - The Fifth Impossibility - Essays on Exile and Language

Subsequently, the award-winning director initiated the project of a vast Holocaust Archive, a laudable endeavor that well befits our time. The film’s therapeutic and profitable happy ending made possible a new, philanthropic phase in our day-to-day lives, a charitable result that will, of course, in turn receive deserved applause — even in Germany. The Spielberg Archive, we are told, might even serve as a welcome substitute for the controversial Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. A good solution, many say.

Is this a good way of diverting the “moral cudgel” that has been repeatedly raised against Germany and the Germans in the trivial mass media of which Martin Walser spoke? Is this an alternative to the “monumentalizing of German shame” which Walser, perhaps rightly, so fears?

Although I understand why Walser is fed up with the media’s primitive representations of the Holocaust and German guilt, it would be difficult for me not to distance myself from his position on several counts.

If it had been a German politician giving expression to these patriotic concerns, I’d likely have been more understanding. In the case of a writer — above all one of Walser’s standing — whose calling it is to scrutinize the ambiguities, the dark side of human nature, such a view of the historical “German shame” (and guilt) seems strange to me. It would have been inconceivable for a politician to write a text like “Brother Hitler,” in which the great author and great German Thomas Mann displayed, as in Doktor Faustus or in the “Novel of a Novel,” not only the good side of Germany and the Germans, of which he was so glowing an example, but also its bad side, which he debated with exemplary lucidity during the last decades of his life. I have difficulties believing that Martin Walser reads this text any differently than I do.

Assigning an individual to the permanent role of victim or perpetrator certainly entails alienation. As we know from the case of the Jews, who have always been the world’s scapegoats, the assignment of such a role is unbearable. Even more grotesque is the situation in other countries. Unlike Germany, Japan has never engaged in a critical reassessment of its past, but has continued to hold up the terrible symbol of Hiroshima, with no mention whatever of the barbaric massacre of Chinese citizens in Nanking, where the Japanese Army engaged in horrifying acts of bestiality.

But don’t we still have to ask ourselves whether the Holocaust has rightly come to serve as a moral cudgel, regardless of what Miss Media, this frivolous, cynical, omnipresent concubine of modernity, has to say about it? And do we not have to ask ourselves where exactly the danger of “monumentalizing the shame” would lie, whether or not the guilt in question is German?

Baudelaire says that the Devil’s most clever trick is to convince man that he, the Devil, does not exist. In our case, one might say that memory may constitute a trap if the evil in man is forgotten, the “shame” (and guilt) that ought to accompany mankind’s many demonic acts. Should we just go on filling the world with monuments to “heroism,” that is, with glorifying commemorations of deeds which, seen from the “other side,” from the point of view of other nations (or even one’s own), meant defeat, death, loss of honor and home. What does a monument in honor of a German victory over France mean to a Frenchman, and vice versa? And what is the meaning, for a German, of a monument to a peasant revolution in which thousands of German lives were lost at German hands? Would not this, too, be a “monumentalizing of German shame” (and guilt)? Not to mention the countless massacres that have been carried out between and within various peoples in the name of brotherly or neighborly love.

Would not, then, these “Monuments of Shame” be at least as instructive, if not even more so? Ought not the people of all nations be reminded again and again what man is capable of doing to man? “Ignominy,” not only “Heroism.” Complementary aspects of historical fate — a complementariness that ought to be unsettling, even now. Would it mean an end to the “glorious” unity of the state, or would this state finally be compelled to reconsider its role and aspire to the highest good, namely the unconditional respect of the rights of the individual, regardless of whether or not this individual lives in one’s own or in some other society?

Young people in Germany should not have to bear the burden of a guilt for which they were not responsible. Yet why should they surround themselves with the aura of a heroism which they have equally little to do with? How does a monument to an ignominious event (i.e., the Holocaust) to which future generations have no direct relation, compare with a monument to the heroism of who knows what Kaiser, whose imposing statues can be seen in so many German cities? The young generation cannot relate to him, either. In terms of the indirect, difficult-to-define relationship to what one calls “history,” “people,” and “fate,” both monuments make sense. In terms of truth, both aspects should be invoked at once — ignominy and pride, guilt and virtue.

Martin Walser seems suspicious of those German intellectuals who never tire of accusatory rhetoric where the Holocaust is concerned, believing that they will be absolved of guilt if they labor in the service of “memory”—even if it is only for a moment in which they find themselves “closer to the victims than to the perpetrators.” This is certainly no grounds for irony. It is Walser’s right to shield his eyes from the obsessively reiterated nightmare, although he does not specify whether it is the horror itself he is unable to bear or the manipulation of the horror to serve ends that have nothing to do with the consciousness of guilt. Both are, in a sense, understandable, and it is precisely this capacity of mine to understand which saddens me. For what we should not forget is that the only ones who no longer have a choice as to whether or not to shield their eyes are the victims themselves, who vanished from this earth with no grave or memory other than the increasingly turbulent controversies of posterity.

Germany’s “shame” is also the shame of mankind. He who does not see how the Holocaust calls into question the very fabric of humanity does not, in my opinion, have any chance at all of understanding its true dimensions and meaning.

Last year the Vatican — quite rightly — announced that it had no intention of declaring itself innocent of the consequences of the age-old anti-Jewish propaganda campaign which has provided the impetus for countless fanatical crimes. The barbaric crime of the Holocaust has a certain relation, albeit not a direct one, to this past. Christian iconography functioned for centuries as more or less fanatic “mass-media” propaganda, which for two thousand years constantly emphasized the image of the crucifixion as an example and proof of the inextinguishable Jewish guilt — an untruth that, as one knows, nevertheless has had a mystifying power that was all but impossible to resist. A dangerous cultivation of the hatred of Jews, which paved the way for the atmosphere of crime and its denial. A millennium-old monumentalizing of shame?

I understand all too well that one can grow weary of the influence of the mass media, even if this cannot be compared with the threat of death under which Jews lived in constant fear for two thousand years.

Christ, with his Jewish parents, would have been marked for death at Auschwitz. Shouldn’t the Christian world dare to see him in every one of the six million Jewish victims? We may recall the Nazi song: “ Wir wollen keine Christen sein, denn Christus war ein Judenschwein ” (We don’t want to be Christians because Christ was a Jewish swine).