No no: they definitely were
human beings: uniforms, boots.
How to explain? They were created
in the image.
(Dan Pagis, "Testimony")
During my last visit to Berlin I brought up the name of Hans Fallada and his novel Alone in Berlin. The responses I received surprised me. My interlocutors did not know what I am talking about. "Hans who?" What's the name of the book?" I felt like a tourist who is looking for a monument in a foreign city, a monument of which the locals never heard. It did not help me much when I introduced the real name of the author, Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen, or when I cited the German title of his novel Jeder stirbt für sich allein. The responses I received were still frustrating, consisting of either shoulder shrugging, head shaking or bewildered looks.
How could this be? After all, the novel has recently become the talk of the day in Israel, especially within foreign literature enthusiasts. Actually, before I myself read the novel, I felt an odd feeling of guilt when having to confess to those who spoke excitedly about it that I did not read it - yet. After receiving too many reprimanding looks, I rushed to the book store and purchased the book. I learnt that it was originally published in East Germany in 1947 and only recently retrieved from oblivion and published in English both in the USA and England. Only after gaining warm reception abroad, a Hebrew translation of it was published in Israel.
I began to read the novel and became immediately fascinated. It is truly breathtaking. I felt as if the author leads us - his readers - on an in-depth journey through the "allies" of the political and social reality transpiring in Berlin during the second world-war. We become intimately acquainted with the varied characters brilliantly drafted by the author, along with their follies, pettiness, cruelty, anxieties, fears and occasionally - only occasionally - their human greatness. The novel, so I felt, conveys a compelling depiction of what it means to live under a reign of terror. It intimates to the readers what it means to be gripped by a deep fear of being constantly under surveillance. We sense what it means being not able to trust the closest friend, brother or sister, fearing that they might turn out to be willingly or unwillingly collaborators with a system of power that managed to extend its stealthy tentacles into the most intimate of human interaction.
Yet, while the novel allows us to grasp how a system of terror can destroy the fabric of social connectedness, transforming individuals into a submissive herd, it also shows us that even under horrifying social circumstances humans may still choose to morally excel, paying, consequently, the ultimate price: their life. This is the tragic destiny that beset Otto and Anna Quangel, the main protagonists of the novel, who dared to resist, in their naïve and ineffectual way, the Nazi regime. Moreover, while the novel allows us to understand how such a regime leads to the emasculation of basic human qualities such as basic decency, solidarity and mutual trust, it also shows us that even under reigns of terror heroic resistance is still possible and love relation can be sustained, assuming even admirable manifestations.
And yet after completing the reading of the novel I was bit perturbed. Nagging thoughts and bothersome questions came up. Where is Nazi Germany? Where are the Nazis? Now, of course, Nazi Germany and the Nazis were always there, emerging chillingly from every page of the novel. But yet this is not the Nazi Germany one encounters, for instance, in Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996). The German people are portrayed in Goldhagen's book as an indistinguishable mass, an avid and zealous partner to Nazi monstrous schemes. And the Nazis I encountered in Alone in Berlin are not the ones I "encountered" in my school days! The Nazis I "knew" were all evil incarnates; paragons of viciousness; arch villains.
This portrayal has its roots in the way Israeli official and non-official educational agencies have inculcated generations of Israelis the heritage of the Holocaust. They have endowed the victims as well as the victimizers - the Holocaust and Nazi Germany - with transcendental status. Thus, while Nazi Germany has been perceived as 'metaphysical evil incarnate', Jewish Holocaust looked upon as manifesting absolute victimhood, to be compared with no other human calamity. Hence both phenomena seemed to resist any attempt to render them humanly intelligible; both phenomena were perceived as events that can not be deciphered and analyzed by universal principles governing human behavior. The playwright of the Roman Republic, Terentius Afer, stated: Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto ("I am a man and therefore I consider nothing that is human alien to me). Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, as this portrayal dictates, deny this dictum. They are perceived as phenomena not to be reducible to any thing we can conceivably understand about humanity; they completely transcend human experience; they signify "radical alienness".
As to the Nazis emerging form this portrayal - the mythological arch villains - they are not to be abundantly found in the novel, aside from the high Gestapo officer, Obergruppenführer Perl, who answers the stereotypical depiction of Nazi officers, as chillingly represented, for instance, by Colonel Hans Landa, in Quentin Tarantino's movie Inglourious Basterds (2009). But even this ogre, Obergruppenführer Perl, seemed also to be somewhat victim of the regime, since he himself was driven, in part, by the dread that he might have to bear the wrath of his superiors should he fail his mission – to find the distributors of the Anti-Nazi postcards. And indeed, one cannot deny that one of the main by-products of this intriguing masterpiece is the demystification of the perpetrators of evil. And thus although the evil remains of inconceivable enormity the perpetrators turn out to be mundane human beings.
In a way, Fallada's novel anticipated Hannah Arendt's 'report on the banality of evil,' where she offered a persuasive account demystifying Adolf Eichmann. Thus The Minister of Death, who masterminded the deportation of a countless number of Jews to concentration camps, appears through her probing eyes - to the chagrin and dismay of generations of Israelis - merely as a "man of flesh and blood", a man of no special distinction - not the "monster" as his persecutors tried painstakingly to portray him.
Relating, however, to the novel's "success" to demystify Nazi Germany, the Israeli historian, Tom Segev, protests that its publication in Israel is tainted with a problematic political agenda. It should be perceived, he says, as part of concentrated efforts exerted by Germany designed "to alter its historical image". This is ironic, he continues, since the original publication of novel in 1947 in East Germany intended to create "a fiction" that most East Germans opposed the Nazi regime, as opposed to West Germans. It is ironic, à la Segev, that the Foreign Ministry of unified Germany endorses an account of history that originally served propagandistic purposes. This endorsement becomes evident, Segev claims, considering the fact that the Foreign Ministry of Germany assumed – through its proxy, The Goethe Institute - part of the publishing expenses of the book in Israel. Considering these facts, the publication of the book in Israel, he concludes, should be treated with some suspicions, to say the least.
These allegations, insinuating a conspiracy of sort, are overly exaggerated. Suffice it is to concede, as Segev himself would, that the depiction of the past is inescapably overshadowed by the Zeitgeist of the present. Thus even assuming that the publication of the novel is motivated by the wish of Germany to forge for itself a relatively palatable past, Segev fails to notice the other side of the coin; that is, that there are attentive ears within Israel society which want to adopt this revised portrayal of the past. After all, The Goethe Institute probably has assumed the publishing expenses of other books in Israel. Only a few of them becomes best sellers! Segev fails to discuss the reasons accounting for this intriguing fact.
Thus I want to argue that the depiction of Nazi Germany more as a victim and less as a willing partner to Nazi regime sits well not only with the intention of Germany "to alter its historical image"; it also sits well with important cultural and political trends holding sway in the Israeli society during the last few decades. Though expressing a salutary spirit of reconciliation, these trends are also wrapped with inner inconsistencies and untoward consequences.
To begin with, many readers of the novel glean form it a foreboding of bad tidings to come. Israeli society is becoming alarmingly intolerant towards dissenting political views that challenge the national consensus. Thus every act of protest, for instance, against the continuous occupation of the West Bank or every demand to allow room for non-official national narratives are immediately branded as acts intending to undermine the "Democratic and Jewish character" of the State. Furthermore, "creative" initiatives pop up daily suggesting new sanctions to be imposed on individuals and organizations suspected of displaying "lack of national loyalty" or of engaging in "subversive" and "non-patriotic" activities. Many Israelis who read the novel Alone in Berlin, and who belong to critical circles, say that it evokes in them an eerie feeling that Israeli society is trading precariously on a slippery slope that might lead it eventually to the non-democratic abyss. Denying, of course, any comparison between Israeli society and Nazi Germany, they still believe that the novel may still serve as a resounding caveat against tangible treats facing democratic regimes in general, including Israeli democracy. They argue that the siege mentality engulfing Israeli society, cynically augmented by Israeli politicians, supplies a fertile ground for the emergence of such threats.
And yet the success of Fallada's novel in Israel, aside of course from its literary qualities, may be attributed also to a fact resisting a simple political dichotomy between left and right. It may be connected to a trivial truism concerning Zionist ideology, shared by Israel left and Israeli right alike. That is, both camps perceive Zionism as a national movement inspired by European mindset, and more important, as a movement always aspiring to be accommodated within the cultural and symbolic boundaries of Europe. However, if this self-perception has been "mired" by a contradictory desire in early stages of Zionism; that is, by the desire of Zionists to reconnect with their Middle Eastern "primordial roots," this desire has virtually evaporated nowadays. Interestingly though, even the horror of the Holocaust did not succeed to rekindle this desire nor to thwart Israel's wish to be included within European cultural boundaries.
And thus, for instance, most segments of Israeli society – right and left wing alike - gleefully endorse, for instance, Huntington's depiction of global political affairs, locking Israel narrowly and inescapably within the tentacles of the 'clash of civilization', the clash between Judeo–Christian tradition and Islam. Although this depiction of geopolitical reality is particularly promoted by Israel's right wing camp in the service of its entrenched and unyielding political position vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict, this Manichean worldview find also approving repercussions among various segments of Israeli society that espouse more accommodating political positions in this regard. They are lured by a geopolitical vision that secures the inclusion of Israel within the cultural boundaries of Europe, even under halcyon days of peaceful and prosperous Middle East.
Such a desire may be also evinced through the growing fascination of third generation Israelis with Germany at large and with the city of Berlin in particular. Berlin, as widely agreed, has emerged as one of the most thriving cultural centers in the world, figuring bustling multiculturalism and vibrant and pioneering activities in various artistic fields. Thus a combination including the ambient atmosphere of the city, the convoluted historic ties many Israelis maintain with Germany and their global mindset, all have led many of them not only to view Berlin as a preferable site on their travel itinerary, but also as a place they choose for their extended sojourns.
I believe that these political and cultural trends – though sometimes contradictory –may play an important role in rendering Fallada's novel - bent on the demystification of the dreadful past – popular among Israeli readership. Such literary feats may unintentionally serve, among other things, as soothers of the inescapable feeling of dissonance experienced by most Israelis when relating to Germany and its horrifying past vis-à-vis the Jewish people.
"The past," as the internationally acclaimed Holocaust historian, Yehuda Bauer states, "will not go away". He intends this statement as a polemic against German historiography, which tends, according to him, to present an incomplete account German history. Yet this statement is also relevant to how many Israelis wish nowadays to view this history. The past indeed will not go away, but it allows still for innovative reinterpretations and creative revisions. "The Shoah runs through our veins." This is the title of a recent study concerning young Israeli adults' perceptions of the Holocaust, yet present reconstruction of it, initiated either by official or non-official organs of the state, deviate significantly from its traditional construction.
Such revisionist account of history is consistent with attempts made by Germany "to alter its historic image". Furthermore, the demystification of Nazi Germany and the decoupling of the German People from the Nazi regime allow many Israelis to imagine Nazism as an abstract concept. Nazism becomes a signifier without a 'signified,' a signifier lacking a singular and specific referendum. Nazism is operating now as an open category able to receive within itself contingently emerging instantiations. Thus for instance, we, Israelis, still remember the vows of our late Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, made during the Lebanon war in 1982, to dislodged Arafat from his 'Bunker' in Beirut. The Israeli public is also repeatedly "taught" that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, is the new Nazi threat emerging from Tehran. There many other examples displaying this problematic and unfortunate motif.
Such examples, expressing practices of transference, exercised on the inner terrains of Israel's collective unconsciousness, may be nothing but a tragic chapter in the convoluted and circuitous journey of the Zionist movement to the Middle East and back to Europe. To be able to reconcile with Europe, and especially with Germany, Israel is not only surrendering readily to feats of demystification of the tragic past offered, for instance, by Fallada's novel, it also invests mental energies to depict her Middle East nemeses as prototypical Nazis. This seems to allow Israel to expel itself - symbolically - from the Middle East in its desperate attempt to reconnect with Europe.
There is a Hebrew proverb saying the following: "More than the calf wants to suckle his mother milk, the cow itself wants to breastfeed the calf". In the case under discussion the proverb should be stated in reverse: "More than the cow wants to breastfeed the calf, calf itself wants to suckle his mother milk."