Legends of Our Time (17 page)

The Germans no longer feel any shame, and they deny outsiders the right to intervene. They no longer feel they are standing at the bar of history.

I for one had no desire to argue with them. I could not imagine a dialogue was possible. Anything between us would not be words: language was already too much of a link.

But finally, if I was compelled to cut short my visit and take the plane back to Paris after forty-eight hours, it was precisely because I fell into the trap: I answered questions, I shook hands. I even smiled back. And then I could bear no more of this civilized behavior: having lost my taste for hating others, I began to hate myself.

The very first contact was indeed just as I had imagined. I shuddered as I set foot on German soil and caught sight of the police uniforms. When the customs officer questioned me in German I chose to answer in English, in brief, hostile phrases. “Nothing to declare?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“I said: nothing.”

“
Danke sehr, mein Herr
.” I shrugged and walked away from him without another word. German politesse was one thing I was not interested in. The customs man stared after me—he was no longer used to this sort of hostility.

(In New York, I had run into a different kind of official. When I went to arrange for my trip, the head of the visa section of the German consulate behaved with particular arrogance. It was clear he suspected every Jew who asked for a visa of scheming to emigrate to Germany. His interrogation was humiliating. When I objected, he furiously reproached me for being oversensitive: he did not understand how a Jew could be oversensitive to a German who is only trying to hurt his feelings.)

I strolled through the streets of Stuttgart, waiting for the train to Baden-Baden. Now and then my eyes rested on a face: “This one too?” I stared insistently at a middle-aged man; I wanted to perceive the invisible: what had he done during the war? Had our paths ever crossed in the world of concentration camps? I was in enemy territory, surrounded by suspect faces: on guard, as if threatened by unknown but familiar danger.

I had been walking in silence, alone, for an hour. A young woman came up and asked me the way to the station. I told her I did not know, that I was a stranger. She smiled. I almost smiled back, when my lips suddenly froze: I became aware that I had been speaking German.

Later I allowed myself to relax. The definition of man as a social animal—a polite animal—is true. I had mistakenly supposed that all definitions would have to be revised for Germany.

In Baden-Baden I took part in the taping of a radio program. Listening afterward I found what I heard incredible: there was no hate in my voice, not even bitterness, perhaps just a shade of the anger I was, unconsciously, trying to conceal. Instead of shrieking out a
curse, I had merely murmured. It is difficult to live among men because it is difficult to keep still, Nietzsche said. But I should have kept still.

Next day I spoke in Munich. The Bechtle Verlag, my German publisher, had arranged an evening of readings. I read from the original French text of my first book,
Night
, a memoir of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and the young novelist Peter Jokostra read the German translation. The audience listened in silence, then sat motionless for a while. I reassured myself: after all, there is a certain logic in my being here and relating to these Germans a few chapters of “our” history—our common history. But I could not shake off the uneasiness that weighed upon me. The Israeli humorist Ephraim Kishon has remarked: Logic, too, went up in smoke at Auschwitz.

I talked about literature and philosophy far into the night with a group of writers, young men between twenty and thirty. The subject of the camps came up seldom, always indirectly, elliptically. One man said to me: “It doesn’t interest me; only abstract ideas are worth bothering about.” Another remarked, apologetically: “Such themes are too sad. I like literature with more gaiety, more
joie de vivre
.” A third said: “I heard you read tonight, but I must confess that concentration-camp literature leaves me cold, I just don’t understand it.”

Of course there are some German writers tormented by a guilt they shared by the mere fact of having lived under the Nazi regime—Heinrich Boll and Paul Shaluck, for example. Others live with a memory inherited from their fathers: like Günter Grass. The burden of guilt weighs sometimes heavy, sometimes more lightly. In the writings of Jokostra, Martin Walser, Alfred Andersch, or Ulrich Becher, there is, if not revolt, at least a search for justice, an authentic protest. Their heroes sit uncomfortably in their skins, feeling their corruption. Yet these writers, for
the most part, do not truly represent the younger generation. The members of that group have adopted a quasi-Brechtian attitude, seeing and judging the past from a distance, not in order to comprehend it better but to prove that they have nothing in common with it. Novelists like Hans Christian Kirsch or Uwe Johnson turn their backs on the Nazi period as something alien to them. In the schools, there is rarely a mention of what the Jewish Question was under Hitler. Dachau for the young students is the name of a peaceful village: the word has no other ring. Auschwitz is … ancient history. Yet these students have to be told something, and they are told that it is true the Nazis mistreated the Jews: but the teachers do not go into indelicate detail. Even if they did, the students would not be interested—it is all dead and gone and they can pass their tests and make their way in life without such knowledge.

I had imagined an angry German youth. I had seen reports of students making pilgrimages to Bergen-Belsen and shedding bitter tears at performances of
The Diary of Anne Frank
. If any youth had the right, even the urgent duty, to fling its rage into the face of its parents, it was surely the youth of Germany. Should not a young German be permitted to accuse his father? So I had imagined. But nothing I saw or heard in Germany, and virtually nothing I read bears witness to an angry youth: there is more anger in the youth of France or England or the United States. One exception is Günter Grass. He describes, in his
The Tin Drum
, a dwarf who refuses to grow, or talk, or escape his condition: in this way he judges his contemporaries, who may criticize the present regime but think it political whimsey to bother about what went before.

To be sure, the intellectual elite tries here and there to sound the alarm. Lectures are held, and books dealing with Jewish subjects are published. Martin Buber has for some time now been glorified,
Exodus
appeared on the
best-seller lists, and translations have been prepared of the works of Sholem Aleichem and Mendele Mocher Sforim. To all this the general population continues to remain indifferent. It is not good breeding, in today’s Germany, to discuss Buchenwald. If Schwarz-Bart’s
The Last of the Just
achieved only limited sales in Germany as compared with its reception in other countries, it was because it contained an indictment of those who made Ernie Levy their victim. The works of Paul Rassinier sell better and are more praised. In his three so-called historical sketches, this author claims to “prove” that the Nazi liquidation of the European Jews was only a myth invented by the Zionists and their friends. According to him, the Nazis did not kill off six million Jews—a few hundred thousand at the most. Gas chambers?—pure fantasy. The Germans, young and old, like to hear a “Herr Professor”—Rassinier is a professor and French—tell them such things. It reassures them. If, at a certain period, the Germans were in bad odor the world over, it was not their fault: blame the Jews.

Suddenly, I no longer knew why I had come. To tell them about the camps? Convince them that such things had really existed? To describe the Nazi era which was, in Malraux’s phrase, a “time of scorn”? I did nothing of the kind.

Aside from that one reading of a few pages of
Night
, I treated Auschwitz as taboo. I found absurd the notion that a Jewish writer should come and tell the Germans about their crimes.
Reveal
, perhaps, but tell? What was there that had not already been told? Each time my interlocutors out of politeness tried to broach the subject, I changed it. But it was only later that I understood why: I was no longer capable of hating.

A few months before, at a party in New York, a young woman had come up to me and said: “Deep down, I’m afraid of you. I know you hate me.” I was stunned: “Why should I hate you?” She was of German origin, she confessed.
I blushed: “Of course I couldn’t hate you, you’re too lovely.” She was in fact known for her opposition to Hitler and had spent many months in Nazi prisons, but I did not know it at the time. I had blushed simply because I was ashamed of being accused of hate: so I had explained it to myself. The real truth was different: I had blushed because I was ashamed of having permitted my hate to get away from me. It was this shame that overwhelmed me in Germany: I was betraying the dead. Instead of judging the Germans, then, I judged myself.

After the war, one question had absorbed me: how to explain the absence of an urge to vengeance on the part of the survivors? When Buchenwald was liberated, the Russian prisoners lost no time commandeering American jeeps and driving to Weimar, where for hours on end they machine-gunned inhabitants for having led a normal—if not peaceful—life on the other side of the barbed wire. The liberated Jews did nothing like this. Why not?

In Palestine, in
kibbutzim
and around Palmach camp-fires, the idea of vengeance was violently argued—and rejected. The basic principle was that Nazi crimes must be opposed by humane justice: hate must not be fought with hate. We had to show the executioners our moral superiority, prove to other peoples that Jews are incapable of deeds of hate. Hatred of the enemy—especially in his defeat—has never been a Jewish habit. “Rejoice not on seeing thine enemy struck down,” Solomon teaches.

There is a passage in the
Midrash
which describes the wrath of God against his angels who had begun singing his praises as the Jews were crossing the Red Sea. “My creatures [the Egyptians] are drowning and you are disposed to sing?” And though he lost his throne for it, Saul refused to kill Agag, the Amalekite king who is the symbol of Israel’s hereditary enemy. Typically, in the few places where hatred does figure in the Bible, it is always of family, of tribe, or of neighbor—not of foreigners. Jews
are suspicious of foreigners, they do not hate them. The Torah bids us remember Amalek, not hate him. In modern times, the ghetto Jews expended upon the
Judenrat
a more concentrated hatred than upon the Germans themselves, and during the British occupation of Palestine, the secret political organizations hated each other more than they hated the English.

The night Eichmann was executed, a friend made a remark which at the time left me perplexed: he could not help feeling a kind of pity for this functionary of death as he stepped to the scaffold. I protested violently. It was, indeed, not until I re-entered Germany that I understood about hate, a hate that was more than desirable: a justified hate. It escapes us, disappears as the events that engendered it have disappeared.

A Jewish poet in an extermination camp prayed: “O God, give me the strength to hate.” He had more than enough reasons, it was only strength he lacked. Two thousand years of persecution had failed to prepare the Jewish mentality for hate, had only immunized it against hate. Jewish history is full of examples, from Akiba to Hillel Zeitlin, of how the Jews have always been able to meet beast with man, massacre with prayer, cruelty with faith.

It must be said, moreover, that relations between Jews and Germans—aside from the business of propaganda—had always been, in the time of the apocalypse, devoid of hatred. This seems strange, yet it is what gave—and still gives—the tragedy its true dimension of horror. “I am not an anti-Semite,” Eichmann proclaimed in his trial at Jerusalem: the very Eichmann responsible for thousands of death trains. Absurd as it seems, he was probably telling the truth. He killed off Jews—and he did not necessarily hate them. The Nazis saw Jews not as human beings—stimulating hatred or justifying it—but simply as objects, minerals, numbers: one does not hate numbers. As for the
Jews, they saw the Germans as a machine crushing life and spirit, reducing them to ashes: one does not hate a machine.

In the camp—I am trying to remember—my senses were too atrophied to allow me to be capable of hate. Yet if I was able to feel hate, it was directed toward my bunk-mate because he had wangled an additional ration of soup or bread. You hate man. For us the SS guards were a force that destroyed and denied man. You do not hate the stone that crushes you, or the animal that devours you. Only man inspires hate, and only man suffers it. At the moment of his death, the victim does not cast his last glance of hate at the executioner: it is his comrades he hates, those who betrayed or abandoned or forgot him, or simply those who will remain alive. The executioner already belongs to the landscape of death. “I forgive you!” Pierre Laval shouted these last words to the soldiers of the firing squad. His hate was directed toward the judges and witnesses, toward the joy of the victors—his equals, whom chance had favored. In our heart of hearts, we hate only what resembles us. The first murder was a fratricide.

There is a time to love and a time to hate; whoever does not hate when he should does not deserve to love when he should, does not deserve to love when he is able. Perhaps, had we learned to hate more during the years of ordeal, fate itself would have taken fright. The Germans did their best to teach us, but we were poor pupils in the discipline of hate. Yet today, even having been deserted by my hate during that fleeting visit to Germany, I cry out with all my heart against silence. Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate—healthy, virile hate—for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead. I shall not return to Germany soon again.
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