“Radigal Humanism” in “Radical Humanism”
The Third Reich and Historical Objectivity
SOMETIMES TRIFLES are enough to suddenly cause the “scales to fall from one’s eyes,” as the saying goes—plain bagatelles, simple little somethings, which, however, precisely because of their simplicity, illuminate the scenery of an epoch like flares.
Thus, in a prestigious Swiss weekly, a well-meaning liberal-conservative paper that doesn’t hesitate now and then to grant me space for modest commentaries, although I am considered to be on the left, I recently read a review of the French film Le vieux fusil. The film, certainly no masterpiece of its category but still a suspenseful political thriller, had as its subject the story of an unpolitical surgeon who, during the time of France’s occupation by the Nazis, also treats wounded Maquis men and shelters them in his hospital. As a result, the SS together with French collaborators gruesomely cause the doctor’s young wife and little daughter to burn to death, in an operation like that of Oradour. The deeply wounded man suddenly feels himself torn out of his middle-class value system and plunged into a jungle of resistance, aggression, injured honor, and thirst for revenge. Instincts are laid bare in him that he would never have dreamed of in normal circumstances. In a tragic frenzy of retribution, he methodically kills one after another of the SS murderers with an old hunting rifle.
To repeat, the film was no masterwork. But quite aside from the tour de force of the main actor, Philippe Noiret, it did faithfully convey a slice of reality in France in the year 1944. From the cinematic point of view, the critic certainly could have justifiably objected to this or that aspect of the film. But he decided not to. Instead, he gave free rein to his irritation, claiming that the film was “political propaganda.” The historical facts didn’t concern him much. He obviously found it outrageous that the SS was portrayed as being what it was: blue-eyed, battle-hardened, vile, pitiless—and stupid to boot. He found this stereotyped, outmoded, and worn-out, and didn’t take the trouble to investigate whether the Death’s Head units of the Third Reich had not, in fact, behaved exactly as the cliché claims—in which case, of course, it would no longer be a cliché but an objective statement, as banal and true as the assertion “Snow is white.”
I read that and suddenly understood what had already been in the making for a few years, but to which I had closed my eyes: that the time of rehabilitation had dawned. It seems that they finally wanted to approach the Third Reich, which became a myth since from the very start it was meant to become a myth, with “historical objectivity.” The prelude was probably Joachim Fest’s Hitler best-seller, a cleverly got-ten-up biography of the Emil-Ludwig or Stefan-Zweig sort, in which a Hitler was presented to us “from the human angle.” Having said this, I must immediately note that the phenomenon of rehabilitation is not a specifically German but rather an international trend; if you wish, it is a “change of tenor.” In just a moment we will discuss to what extent the pendulum swing is taking place abroad.
First, however, it is necessary to treat the question of whether “historical objectivity” should, or can, exist at all, and particularly in this case. It is certainly true that moral indignation cannot hold its ground against the silently erosive and transformative effects of time. It is hopeless, even if not entirely unjustified, to demand that National Socialism be felt as an outrage with the same emotional intensity as in the years immediately following the Second World War. No doubt, there exists something like historical entropy: the historical “heat gradient” disappears; the result is a balance with no order. But in viewing historical processes we should not foster this entropy; on the contrary, we should resist it with all our power, if only for the reason that even distribution of the historical molecules would no longer permit us to discern a coherent picture of history. More decisive for humane concerns, however, is the demand that the study of history contain a component of moral judgment, as do the historical events themselves. Reality is reasonable only so long as it is moral. And as a concern of humanity, historicity becomes unnatural as soon as it pretends to be neutral to values. Seen in this way, the myth of the Third Reich as a myth of radical evil is truer to fact than an alleged objectivity that does not oppose the evil and already by its indifference alone becomes the advocate of this very evil.
In regard to our problem, the Germans—as previously indicated—are less to be reproached than their former enemies within the western alliance. The Germans are about to establish themselves politically as the world power that economically they have already been for a long time. They have no need at all to initiate reparations proceedings for the benefit of the Nazis. They can generously confine themselves to making a celebrity of their Speer and, for the rest, to say that the others were really not that much better, and now they’re admitting it themselves. Since the “Gulag Archipelago” it appears more and more probable, they say, that Hitler was the wrong swine to be slaughtered, and what about the atrocities of Vietnam, and Watergate, and Lockheed! Just take a look at all that, and what do people want of us Germans? And why all the needless uproar about the Third Reich?
No doubt whatsoever, France is their best ally. In this country, the Résistance was already an annoyance for President Pompidou: “La résistance m’agace,” the man said. No doubt, the sinister Petain will soon have his grave of honor in Verdun. They are constantly at pains there, for reasons of “historical objectivity,” and because veterans, as is well known, are infamously ridiculous, to assure the mighty neighbor to the east that they are not rancorous; rather they are resolved to stir up so much dust in front of their own door that one can no longer discern the facts of the past. In so doing, this nation (which does not tire of celebrating Ernst Jünger, while it sovereignly ignores Heinrich Mann) is losing all political, moral, and esthetic standards. Despite Belgian protests, in France the collaborator-writer Félicien Marceau, who was sentenced to prison in contumaciam in Brussels, gets elected to the Académie Française. Thanks to the novel The Ogre, solemnly tedious and suffocating in the Masurian swamp of its own utterly false lyricism, the Germanist Michel Turnier became the quasi-official interpreter of the German soul in France. He, and not Robert Minder or Pierre Bertaux! At approximately the same time, the cleaning-up at home began. Ferdinand Céline, with his paranoid verbal mishmash, was rediscovered and restored to his rights, an author who certainly borders on genius but constantly crosses its borders into the realm of insanity. For reasons of tact, one no longer speaks of his book Bagatelle pour un massacre, which literally urges a general pogrom. The Blood-and-Soil poet Jean Giono, an equivocal “pacifist” and staunch proponent of the Munich Agreement, was, and is, pampered so heartily that in all seriousness a “Society of the Friends of Giono” is making efforts to have his house in Provence classified as a historical monument.
The worst things went on in the cinema. The turning point was reached in the zeal for objectivity shown by the producers of the documentary television film Le chagrin et la pitié, which revealed nothing other than the truly not original fact that the heroes are growing weary, the old feeble-minded, and that not all Frenchmen participated in the epic adventure of resistance. It gave the French the good conscience of objectivity and the Germans the assurance that, when it was all or nothing, the others were not that much better than they. A signal for departure to new shores. It didn’t take long for the talented Louis Malle to present us with his Lacombe, Lucien (a good film, definitely better than Le vieux fusil), which, to be sure, boiled down to nothing else but a clever defense of collaboration and Nazi torture. Lucien Lacombe was just a poor devil; as such he slipped into fascist criminality—from which one could conclude with dead certainty that, seen by the light of day, all Nazi murderers, including Himmler, were poor devils. Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. So they pardoned (like the dear Lord, whose metier is pardoning), and thus also threw open a back door that was wide enough to let bestiality in again.
Even more shameless, thanks to its commercially clever injection of the sadomasochistic trend into the move toward rehabilitation, was the film The Night Porter by the Italian director Liliana Cavini. Here the peak of narrative foolishness and moral reprehensibility is attained. The masochistic fling of a former deportee, who finds one of her past torturers in the figure of a night porter and discovers that the trick with the chains and the whips and the blood is actually not without a certain charm, was sold to a crowd oscillating between insensitivity and snobbism. To top it off, the aggravating person responsible for the scandalous film even had the gall, in an interview she granted to a French weekly, to support her notions by referring to Freud and Nietzsche. All the just indignation of those who had once been directly affected by the adversity was to no avail. The Sade-Bataille chic of the pseudo-intellectuals celebrated repulsive triumphs. Together, games and twaddle appropriated the enormities and prospered. Weary of it all, one would like to bow out and tell oneself that these people are stupid and full up to the gills with undigested blather. The best thing is to turn one’s head to the wall and forget it.
This is not permissible, however. Not yet. Time has not yet completed its work of effacing the differences; that is to say, the social “heat gradient” caused by the Nazi crimes has not yet been equalized by historical entropy. Protest is absolutely necessary if a historical picture is not to be falsified, a picture in whose features we recognize the radical evil that cannot be compared with any earlier occurrences and, I am convinced, will not be matched in heinousness by anything that may yet come. It didn’t matter much that the intelligent Susan Sontag protested against the modish, international idolization of Leni Riefenstahl and her inflated kitsch (that harmonized so well with the plaster pylons of Herr Speer and to which the ultra-avant-garde Cahiers de Cinéma is kowtowing). From the USA I received the news that Veit Harlan’s anti-Czech propaganda film Die goldene Stadt (i.e., Prague) is being shown there with great success in movie houses intended especially for German-language programs. And when, gentlemen, will Jud Süss finally return to favor? The film is not really that irrelevant at a time when a new antisemitism ventures forth in the guise of “leftist” anti-Zionism. The disputants, who become enraptured at the deeds of North and Black African despots, are closing the circle in the direction of the philistine beer-table regulars for whose adversaries they mistake themselves, whereas in truth they are their complement.
The perverse copulation of the Right and Left that reveals itself to us in the rehabilitation wave goes deeper and is more uncanny than rightist and leftist debaters suspect. Susan Sontag’s clear recognition that the fuss about Leni Riefenstahl is at least partly traceable to agitation by the feminist “Left” hits upon a truth but not the entire truth. The latter is so complicated that in the space at my disposal I must make do with indications. Therefore, just this much: Behind the utterly false fascist esthetics that finds “beauty” not only in a film of a Reich’s party rally but, if need be, in scenes of political torture, there hides bad old irrationalism in very modern get-up. It assumes the most varied and, I won’t deny it, at times most attractive forms. It can appear as Spengler transformed into Michel Foucault. As the Wilhelm-Reich cult, it can spurn Freud’s civilized “sublimation” and profess a sexual excess at whose logically predictable end there is not “sexual pleasure” but violence and murder. It can drape itself structuralistically as a Rousseau renascence and thus abandon humanism. (I suggest as a therapy Lévy-Bruhl’s book Primitive Mentality .) Irrationalism, which is one of the breeding grounds for the rampant spread of the rehabilitation weed, appears in one place in the form of the “anti-Oedipus” of Deleuze and Guattari, who are working on an anarchistic anthropology; it appears elsewhere clothed in the communist-Catholic priest’s robe of a Roger Geraudy, who prostrates himself before primitive social communities and simultaneously knocks at the door of the Catholic hierarchy, all the while insisting on his Marxism; still elsewhere it turns up in the obtrusive promotion of regional folkloristic group games that need only to be called “identity-finding,” rather than custom and usage, in order to make them respectable.
That all this did not descend on us like a bolt from the blue is clear. Raison deteriorated to capitalistic-technocratic ratio, and compromised itself so much through the practices it served that every mental effort shrinks back before it like a horse rearing up in fright. No “Critical Theory” helped. There was no longer salvation in neo-Marxism. On the contrary, now the “Dialectics of Enlightenment” became an obvious danger. Historical objectivity, it was decreed, demands that the seed of fascism be seen already in the Enlightenment, that the latter be regarded as “having failed” (not: as “having been overpowered”!) and that the former be analyzed with an “objectivity” that is beyond all ethics as a state of consciousness of the Weltgeist.
In the end, the German philistine’s magic horn poured out the same gifts as that highbred intellectuality in Paris and New York whose sole link with intelligence is purely etymological. The nonsense that after Auschwitz a poem was no longer possible quickly became the assurance that twaddle was not only possible but indispensable: at the regular beer-round and in the seminar. Historicity turned into historical indifference and thereby renounced itself. It is no accident that Lévi-Strauss is a rabid Wagnerian, like the Thomas Mann of Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. No, even worse: like those Teutomaniacs cloddishly stumbling along in the tracks of H. S. Chamberlain. In the process of rehabilitation the circle closes vexatiously not only from Right to Left, but also from the superacuminous to the plain imbecilic. Intellect and cultivation are the orphans. And let no one be surprised if a German nationalism that never before felt so good as in the days when it caused the rickety bones of civilization to tremble, boldly rears its abominable head. It has nothing to fear since the intellectual Left relinquished its arms and has been reveling in a misunderstood Rousseauism and Nietzscheanism, which it combined, in a self-delusory sleight-of-hand, with a Marx whose ethical-prophetic élan is rigorously denied for the sake of Althusser’s sanctity of the “text.” And Freud’s pessimistic humanism of sublimation was hushed up in favor of Lacan’s value-neutral “structured discourse.” What Julien Benda called in his day “la trahison des clercs” is coming to pass in the general rehabilitation of barbarism—which one hardly dares to designate as such anymore, so great is the fear that one could be dismissed as a “veteran” by a Right that no longer feels morally burdened and a Left that fervently throws itself at every current fashion.
Well, of course: veterans are comical when they hold their pitiable ceremonies, which are becoming shabbier from year to year. They are dead serious when, as the old generation, full of lived history and assimilated historicity, they raise their warning voices, in the awareness that their actions are futile. Only long after they are gone will it turn out that as the untimely ones of their day they were more in step with the times than the others who are blindly dashing into a future that they themselves are blocking without knowing it. As for me, I don’t have the slightest illusions. Rehabilitation, once begun, counter to morality and history, will take its course. In England they will discover that Oswald Mosley was not such a fool after all. In France, where already at the present hour the worst murderers, amnestied, are enjoying a peaceful old age, official opinion gone astray will weigh Pétain and Laval into a pseudohistorical equilibrium produced with the help of false weights. And Germany? Well, that is clear: since all the preliminary categorizations have been taken care of, it will no longer wish to deny Hitler his place in the Feldherrenhalle. There will be some difficulties only in the case of the Invalides: the corpus delicti cannot be located. Historical objectivity, so they say, always operates beyond good and evil, and they indiscriminately file evil away, whereby good, too, disappears from the agenda. Dialectics contributed generously to an undertaking that is self-righteously represented as “demystification,” whereas in truth it is merely fostering a new and more dangerous mystification. Bourgeois morality was justifiably rejected as ideology, but in the process, morality pure and simple—which also wore bourgeois dress—went to the dogs along with it. No one seems able to recognize that in certain historical constellations subjective outrage accords exactly with humane reality.
As Ernst Bloch put it, one need not at all have a precise idea of the humane in order to recognize beyond any doubt that Nero was a monster. In our context this statement can be reformulated to mean that the myth of evil embodied by the Third Reich has more objective character than does dialectical demystification. Thomas Mann’s biblical maledictions (“What right do you actually have still to be alive?”) possess greater value, not only morally but also politically, than a self-alienated intelligentsia’s historical constructions that, in the name of a falsely conceived objectivity, boil down to rehabilitation.
But the way things are there is little prospect that this will be comprehended. The old Brown Shirts have every imaginable chance to give the few remaining simpletons with their talk of repentance one more whack on the skull. And the New Reds will be unable to protest. For what is sauce for Qaddafi must also be sauce for the Führer. Only more so.
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“Die Zeit der Rehabilitation: Das Dritte Reich und die geschichtliche Objektivität,” in Österreichische Autoren bei Klett-Cotta (Austrian authors published by Klett-Cotta), ed. Kurt Biak and Michael Klett (Wien: ÖBV-Klett-Cotta Verlagsgesellschaft m.b.H., 1981), pp. 21–35.
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