[I wrote this essay at the end of the year 2000. With the current events in Palestine, the Masha Gessen affair, and the role of the United States in creating and maintaining the Zionist project, I decided to revisit it. With the rise of our own fascist movements, how we respond to our own Hitlers is a matter of some currency. Gessen, of course, was vilified for comparing the Israeli state to the Nazis. I made some modifications in the original, but the essay is substantially the same as when I wrote it. I refrained from making direct comparisons with the Republican and the Democrat fascists: but they should be fairly obvious. At the time I wrote it, I emailed it to my sister, Greta, to get her reaction. She took great exception to the concept of the “holocaust industry,” but I am convinced that with the 23 years experience in between then and now and in light of Masha Gessen’s New Yorker article, if she were alive today, she would agree with these conclusions.]
I have been reading three books about Germany, but I cannot stop thinking about missiles and mortars in Palestine. As the year 2000 ends, I finally finished Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum. I had promised myself a year ago to reread Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, and I have finally gotten to it. And then by chance I this winter I came upon the story of Mildred Fish, one-time student at the University of Wisconsin, who winds up in the German resistance, Resisting Hitler.
600 Israeli soldiers are detained for refusing compulsory armed service. Their reason is the increasing severity of the Israel Defense Force atrocities against the Palestinians, who are engaged in what we are calling an intifada. One woman in the IDF, whose job it is to search the Palestinian women, complains about the indignities with which she is forced to treat Palestinian prisoners. At times, she says, she feels like a Nazi. A Jewish academic, appalled at the behavior of the IDF, compares them to Hitler’s Nazis. As this is broadcast to a progressive internet discussion group, objections fly across the screen: how is it possible to compare these two situations that are totally different. Germany’s Nazis were the real Nazis. YOU can’t have MY holocaust.
Surely this simplifies a very complex subject. But when presumably rational people react so strongly to the feeling of one human being for another; when a rabbi insults the woman who is merely expressing her disgust for the position she finds herself in, one questions what personal stake does this rabbi and other ordinary human beings have in maintaining that destruction of the Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe was unique in history?
Let’s not even consider this as a continuation of the thesis that the Jews must justify their existence as chosen people through examples like the holocaust. For, in the manner of thought I am posing, there are no examples LIKE the European holocaust. To suggest that the decimation (taken literally) of the indigenous peoples of the Americas was a holocaust; that the millions who died in the middle passage from Africa to the Western hemisphere was a holocaust; that the calculated and calculating systematic working to death of millions of slaves (whose average working life when “sold down the river” was 7 years) was a holocaust evokes cries of protest. Eastern Europe was unique, you see.
Well, I suppose it was. And so was the Triangular Trade in human chattel. And it seems to me only reasonable to grant this uniqueness to seize upon their commonality as well. If one cannot understand the consciousness of Israeli Jews without understanding the Nazi era, one cannot understand the consciousness of North Americans without understanding the legacy of slavery, one certainly can’t understand the consciousness of Palestinians without understanding the occupation and all that means.
But no. When victim becomes oppressor, the situation becomes complicated. The oppressor must maintain some aspect of being victim. The Israeli government portrays itself as the object of terrorism. In the U.S. the government defends itself against “reverse racism.”
Of course to grant that the feeling of oppression conforms even in some general way to fascism undermines the ideals and dreams of many who still believe that the Israeli state could achieve the egalitarian goals it once professed. Israeli leaders in particular cannot grant the possibility, that the government in power is acting very like the state(s) from which Jews fled in the thirties and forties. “My power,” these leaders might say if they were candid, “depends upon my convincing the people of my country that they have more in common with me than with the common people whose land we have taken and who work, eat and even bathe at our pleasure.” The Nazi era is something that Israeli leaders have packaged as a commodity. These leaders trade the “holocaust card” on the market. It is the bargaining chip that they have in world politics because it keeps the majority of citizens of Israel in their hip pocket and in the Israel Defense Force.
Although I started this article with “I cannot stop thinking about missiles and mortars in Palestine,” I really can’t stop thinking about what the Nazi era and what contemporary Palestine has to teach us about ourselves.
II
The biography of Mildred Fish-Harnack begins with its outcome. Hitler overturned the sentence of his own court and ordered her guillotined. That is, on Hitler’s direct orders she was the only American woman to have been executed. Born and raised in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Fish returned to Wisconsin to college. While a student at University of Wisconsin, she met Arvid Harnack, who was studying for his doctorate (one of two he took). It was the 1920’s, they got married, and they settled in Germany. Harnack was a member of a leading academic family, a family which mingled among a social circle including Nobel prize winners, men of the clergy, lawyers and statesmen. They expressed their patriotism in their love for German culture. For them, Germany was synonymous with Goethe and Beethoven. For them, the rise of Hitler was anathema, signaled the death of that culture. In the meticulously researched pages of Resisting Hitler, you will not find any indication that the Harnacks considered joining the Nazis.
After 1933 the Harnacks began to develop discussion groups and study circles and social circles out of which they built a small anti-fascist network. Arvid was highly schooled in economic theory and visited the Soviet Union to study their planned economic formations. Mildred, who was taking her doctorate in American Studies, was doing work on the transcendentalists in literature and philosophy. Her lectures on Whitman, Hawthorne, Emerson were highly regarded. She was engaged in translating work from English to German, when the censors allowed such books to be published. The two were close to the American Ambassador to Germany, but especially to his daughter, Martha Dodd. Resisting Hitler is filled with interviews and insights from some of the people who knew them well in this period. And from some of these interviews emerges the picture of people turning toward Marxism and the political-economic formation that was developing in the East, in the Soviet Union.
Of course many anti-fascists turned east. That was where someone was listening. They would have been as happy to find a receptive ear with Uncle Sam as with Uncle Joe. But Sam wasn’t listening at all, and even Martha Dodd offered her services to the Soviets. In addition, the author makes a good case for Arvid and his friends being as influenced by a promise of the future– central planning and egalitarianism — as much as by revulsion for the present.
Harnack fed information to both the US and the USSR. For months, the network in Germany reported on the expected attack to the East. When the attack finally came, network members were astonished as Hitler’s forces moved rapidly to the East. It appeared that the Reich was invincible. But when the tide turned with the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad, German papers did not report the change. A radio broadcast from the network to their Soviet contact was intercepted. In a matter of a few days the 17 key members of what Hitler branded the Red Orchestra were imprisoned. Their trial, in mid December, lasted only 5 days. Harnack and the inner circle of this conspiracy were executed in a few days later. The Court sentenced Mildred to six years in prison, but Hitler was furious. He demanded a retrial. Mildred, too, was killed. Hitler was determined that they would die without knowing of the prospect of success of the Russian counteroffensive.
III
Bernhard Schlink’s writing is very elegant in its simplicity. I cannot think of The Reader without thinking of Hesse, not so much for content as for style. The Reader has no “hero” in the usual sense. It’s two main characters are quite flawed. It’s a postwar tale narrated by a lawyer (Schlink himself is a lawyer) who, as a boy, a pubescent teenager, comes to know a woman who was a camp guard during the war. Comes to know first in a physical, sexual, sensual way. This rather odd couple, a woman and boy who could easily be mother and son, carries on an intense, curious romance. But know each other they do not. One day she disappears from his town, his life, under mysterious circumstances. And it is only later in the novel, after the young man becomes a lawyer, that he meets her again and finds out about her position as a camp guard. But does he even know her then? And what does he know of what she did?
As a young man he reads to her: he finds out that she cannot read herself. She never learned. He is such a good reader. And he makes her so happy by his reading. But does he really understand what he reads as much as she understands his reading, and even later, in what she requests from him while she is in prison? In the end, we readers are compelled to question which of the two is the reader of the title. It is perhaps this ambiguity, which makes this novel so provocative; while it’s resolution in the final separation and search for truth, which makes it so frustrating.
Much of German post-war writing is filled with concentration camp angst. It’s a genre like Westerns in the US. Except that in our Westerns the Indians are either noble savages or just plain savage. We don’t seem to have much angst over our concentration camps. And probably, looking at Germany from the safe distance of middle America, I can sit here and say “enough already.” The resolution of The Reader was frustrating because it was so indecisive. I don’t know who bears the guilt. ‘
It may not be clear who are the friends of the resistance, but there is no doubt in Resisting Hitler who is the enemy. And it’s important to put this novel in the context of the fate that befell the Harnacks once they were dead.
Within the German military, a patriotic group developed a conspiracy to kill Hitler. It was a high placed, anti-fascist formation that did not succeed. After the war they were given high honors, They were treated as heroes. In contrast, the Red Orchestra became the object of vilification. They were traitors, not heroes; they sold secrets to the enemy. They were Reds. I am tempted to say smugly, “The Germans are like that you know.” Chalk it up to the authoritarian personality and genetic fascism.
But the state of Wisconsin did the same thing. A proposal to celebrate Mildred Harnack day in the public schools was killed when a University of Wisconsin alumnus, an editor of an Oklahoma newspaper, argued that it was a damned shame his daughter would observe a holiday from school in honor of a damned Communist when she couldn’t even say prayers to her God in the schools.
After Germany reunified, the authorities found that a school in the east had been named to honor Mildred. Western authorities promptly changed the name to some cipher instead. The outcry from those “totalitarian East Germans” forced the government to concede on the question of the school name: It reverted back to Mildred’s school.
So maybe The Reader isn’t as superficial as I think it is. And just maybe I’m displacing my anger about America onto this book. But The Reader is not “about” middle America. It IS about Germany.
IV
In the 1800’s, two North American white women were appalled at the treatment of Blacks and Indigenous Americans. They wrote two novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ramona; they used the limited quality of 19th century moral force to cast a literary searchlight into the dark places of the national psyche. A century later the literary moment has degenerated to reflect the acceptability of ethnic boundaries of creativity. Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie and Diane Glancy write very well; but they are expected (are allowed?) to write only about the debacle and survival of the Native American. A whole generation of African Americans write about the experience of black America (are they allowed to write about anything else?). And when they do, they are criticized for not writing about universal human experience. August Wilson was chastised by the New York Times drama critic Robert Brustein for only writing about Blacks! In the same column, Brustein asked Wilson to write about universal themes, like Chekhov did. Mind you, he did not chastise Chekhov for only writing about Russians. Doesn’t Philip Roth write about Jews? In this country of 275 million people, are not more than a dozen white novelists writing about OUR holocausts, our ugly Americans, our Americans grappling with the blood history of our country? I am reminded of the incredible debate (who can debate this any more?) going on about whether Jefferson had children with slave mistress Sally Heming.
The philosophical approach of the “ethnic agenda” requires that each writer must write about his or her community. Then, by definition, the writing from that category is not universal and hence not of the same quality as . . . But wait a minute. What is “my community” and how does it relate to the whole? Doesn’t a truly American literature spring from the multi-faceted American experience? Isn’t the blues the quintessential American experience, in this most class-divided of all countries?
While the ethnic agenda frames questions in terms of color, it’s not so much a black and white issue any more. Increasingly the question to writers is: who will finally take up the cause of the least of us all.
V
The ethnic political agenda is part of a cultural assault that has Balkanized American literature. When David, my (at that time) 17 year-old step-son read To Kill A Mockingbird, it made such a huge impact on him. David’s father is African-American. The author: a white southerner attempting to come to grips with the American holocaust, but from the perspective of the white southerner. I emphasize that, because the examples of this are few and far between. And yes, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it is flawed. But the impact on a 17 year old African American man was undeniable.
Who will take up the cause of the marginalized? Who will clarify that the experience of American survivors of the uniquely American holocausts merges with the universal? Denise Giardina, in her novels about the Appalachian miners, examines this relationship. Richard Price’s hard-bitten city dwellers connect to this reality. Russell Banks’ vivid portrait of the abolitionist family of John Brown in Cloudsplitter. Even John Grisham, in A Time To Kill, examines the brutality of Southern law from the viewpoint of a civil rights lawyer. But by and large, the angst over the American holocaust is left to the survivors to write about. There is an acquiescence that white Americans are not survivors also. I want to read someone who expresses the complexity of this relationship, it’s ambiguity and it’s decisiveness.
We are back to where we began. America must own up to its own holocausts. It must own up to its own fascist practices. We must recognize the reality that Germans drew up their proscriptions against Jews after reading about the American post Civil War black codes. America relies on certain ideas and institutions to guarantee that the holocausts remain the property of demagogues.
Literature can break this stranglehold. Literature arises on the foundation of experience. Forty and fifty years ago, this experience was segregated, balkanized and exemplified politically by liberation movements and civil rights movements. Those movements have gone as far as they could have: they have achieved integration of segments of those communities into the leading circles of the country. The leaders of those movements of yesteryear today are more representatives of the Democratic Party and all it represents than of the grassroots movements from which they evolved. The experience of today is a different experience. It is the experience of the fragmentation of those movements and the emergence of a class movement. Such a movement is calling forth its writers, its musicians, its artists. Only this kind of a movement can confront the past in all its ambiguity with unambiguous honesty.
V.
Many years ago I interrupted the peaceful ending of a family seder, after all the questions had been asked and answered, and after everyone had a warm feeling of democracy that the story of liberation from pharaoh always brings. I asked how we could end this celebration without at least commenting on the suppression of the Palestinians and questioning how this contradicts the notion of liberation in Israel. I was not a very popular person. Since then I have come to be encouraged by the number of people who share these opinions. I was encouraged in 2000 by the number of Israeli soldiers refusing to fight (just as their German anti-fascist forbears tried to undermine the Third Reich). I am encouraged today by the US Jewish Voice for Peace and its clear opposition to the Zionist state of Israel. And I find the broad social activity for housing, health care, abolition of the carceral state and other fundamental needs – movements to end our ongoing holocausts — very encouraging. These movements need a literary voice. It’s time for a class movement in literature, drawing on the unique and emerging 21st century experience of a newly forming class of disenfranchised: A class whose historic role is abolition of all previously existing conditions of exploitation and oppression.
Chicago Labor & Arts Festival Blog 