Adolf Eichmann

When There is Despair, There Will Be Hate Too. And That’s Not a Bad Thing

Remembering Friedrich Reck, who lived through the Nazi era and wrote, “A man must hate this Germany with all his heart if he really loves it.”

As would-be dictators of variable girth and invariable cruelty attempt to seize the world, we have grown accustomed to drawing easy, maybe lazy, parallels with that seemingly eternal counter-point, Nazi Germany.

But what historical precedent would a dissenting German have looked for during the monstrous growth of the Third Reich? I had never thought of it, until I came across a dissenting German making the attempt.

Friedrich Reck (sometimes Reck-Malleczewen) kept a secret diary from mid-1936 until almost the end of the second world war, “an illegal watcher among the barbarians” he calls himself, observing with increasing horror and disgust the German people’s capitulation – no, devotion – to their mad Führer. During these years, Reck also produced a more public work, a history of Münster, a sixteenth-century city-state established by a radical sect called the Anabaptists. It wasn’t a specialised interest in this obscure bit of history which led Reck to it. “I am shaken” he wrote in his diary – by how closely Münster resembled the Third Reich.

“As in our case,” he continued, “a misbegotten failure… became the great prophet, and the opposition simply disintegrated”. As in Germany, Münster’s alternative for allegiance was death; as in Germany, endless distraction kept the people “from a moment’s pause to reflect”. In every detail, it seems, Münster anticipated the Third Reich: that its “propaganda chief… limped like Goebbels is a joke which history spent four hundred years preparing”.

Reck did not draw such explicit parallels in the history he published – he wrote it camouflaged in footnotes, and even so, it was eventually banned – but he minced no words in his diary. Diary of a Man in Despair speaks as clearly, as cathartically, to anyone who fears the transformation of her world under authoritarian leadership as Münster spoke to its author.

Also read: As in Life so in His Death, Hubris and Delusion Defined Adolf Hitler

Friedrich Reck. Photo: Twitter

Take for example, the ungrudging, limitless obedience that authoritarians inspire in their flock, even when – especially when – their orders are so very thoughtless, or cruel, or just plain flops. In the final months of the second world war, it was clear that Adolf Hitler had led his country into defeat; German towns were rubble, German currency was waste-paper. Even then, writes Reck, he heard a woman extoll the greatness of her Führer, for “in his goodness, he has prepared a gentle and easy death by gas for the German people in case the war ends badly.”

I discovered Reck via Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt’s account of the trial of a Nazi captured and tried by Israel. Arendt recounts his anecdote along with another, similar story of a woman speaking fondly of Hitler’s gracious death-wish for his people. Then, she takes a scalpel and cuts to the selfish, spiteful heart of such devotion: “The story, one feels, like most true stories, is incomplete. There should have been one more voice… which, sighing heavily, replied: And now all that good, expensive gas has been wasted on the Jews!”

It was in this account that Arendt coined her famous phrase, “the banality of evil”. Arendt meant no simple-minded, ‘innocent’ banality, but rather to what Reck calls a “gigantic psychosis… the product of your radio manipulation-stupefied mass-man, and the conversion of human societies into heaps of termites!”

To live among such “thoroughly coarsened people” filled the diarist with rage. He writes with grim satisfaction of how a “revolutionary executive” emerged in the final months of Hitler’s rule, sending warnings of retribution to men and women who had been most enthusiastic in their commitment to Hitler’s cause. One amongst them, a doctor, had stopped treating Jews. Now, his wife told Reck, he had received a warning from the resistance and “had trouble with his nerves, complained constantly about the purposelessness of life and the unreality of the Party pronouncements, and was even toying with ideas of suicide.”

Reck-Malleczewen’s craving for vengeance upon those who enabled Hitler’s rule may have been rare in Germany, but it was not unique. His diary describes, for example, how workers in an electric plant planned to brand Nazi foreheads with swastikas when the Third Reich fell. “A fine idea,” he writes, with the glee one reserves for angry daydreams of justice long-awaited, “which needs only the addition of a single detail to be quite perfect: how would it be if they were forced to wear brown shirts for the rest of their lives?”

Also read: ‘Promise me You’ll Shoot Yourself’: Nazi Germany’s Suicide Wave

It wasn’t these supporters alone, however, these “mass men” as he calls them, these “canaille” – literally, a pack of dogs – that Reck showered with his rage and contempt. It was also their seeming anti-thesis: big business. “The instrument of power is terror,” he wrote, “and the industrialists hold tight to it. They control every means of influencing public opinion, and have thereby stupefied the great unproductive mass—salaried people…to the point of idiocy.”

And it was business, Reck argued with aphoristic aplomb, that underpinned the other great scourge of his time: “it has long been a theory of mine that the basic substance of nationalism is of a commercial nature”. Again, he makes the point in brilliant bit of polemic that cannot but resonate with anyone watching countries torn to shreds by divisive politics, all in the name of making them great: “in 1500 there was a German nation, but no nationalism, whereas today, when our eyes are supposed to light up at every trouser button ‘Made in Germany’, we have the reverse: nationalism, and no nation”.

But his greatest anger is reserved for Hitler himself, often expressed with such biting wit, you will laugh out loud. Once, for example, shortly before he was elected and appointed Chancellor, Hitler came to eat, alone, at a restaurant where Reck was meeting a friend. “There he sat,” writes the diarist, “a raw-vegetable Genghis Khan, a teetotalling Alexander, a womanless Napoleon, an effigy of Bismarck who would certainly have had to go to bed for four weeks if he had ever tried to eat just one of Bismarck’s breakfasts…”

Often enough, Reck’s invective against Hitler carries more than a whiff of contempt for his class. “With his oily hair falling into his face as he ranted, [Hitler] had the look of a man trying to seduce the cook,” he writes. Reck, with his country manor, his literary career, his claims to aristocracy, disdained Hitler’s petit-bourgeois origins; but what he loathed was his evil. It was Hitler’s evil that drove the diarist to despair for his country, that provoked some of the most blistering passages in his book: “I hate you waking and sleeping; I hate you for undoing men’s souls, and for spoiling their lives; I hate you as the sworn enemy of the laughter of men…”

‘Love’ is often claimed as a force against the divisive, hate-filled politics of authoritarian states and their devotees. Love is powerful, yes; the call for togetherness has the soaring quality, the idealism necessary to sustain any movement. And yet, reading Reck’s white-hot denunciations of the regime that destroyed all that was good in his world, I began to wonder – why must hate be surrendered to the right?

‘Hate speech’ for example, the intellectual preserve of bigots and trolls, what is that except shallow taunts by schoolyard bullies? How can it compare with hate that punches upwards; hate that is born of despair, recognises its own ugliness, yet turns its own soul into a battering ram against the high walls of power?

Also read: Operation Bagration: A June 22 Hitler Had Not Bargained for

“You, up there: I hate you waking and sleeping. I will hate and curse you in the hour of my death. I will hate and curse you from my grave, and it will be your children and your children’s children who will have to bear my curse. I have no other weapon against you but this curse, I know that it withers the heart of him who utters it, I do not know if I will survive your downfall.

But this I know, that a man must hate this Germany with all his heart if he really loves it. I would ten times rather die than see you triumph.”

Love is essential for building – trust and communities and better futures – but when a monstrous power grows before your eyes, do you seek to envelop it with love, or to destroy it with hate? Do you write of hope and try to soar, or do you let your angry tears burn the page?

Reck did not confine his dissent to his diary alone. He continued to use the old greeting ‘Grüss Gott!’ – God be praised – while others called out ‘Heil Hitler!’ He walked out of a movie hall showing a propagandist film; his exit evoked “nasty remarks” from the audience. In a café, he joined a table at which the conversation was about fitting punishments for Nazis: “For the Herr Propaganda Minister, an appearance, naked, in the monkey cage at the Hellabrunn Zoo…”

Such minor acts of resistance were fatal. We learn of Hitler’s rise and fall through the horrors of the Holocaust, but Reck’s journal makes clear how any German – no matter how blue-eyed – lived in danger of denunciation, prison, execution. Joking about the Führer was outlawed; you might be guillotined for “undermining the morale of the German army”. Reck witnessed the trial of an elderly doctor sentenced to eight years in jail for possessing foreign currency (“he missed the guillotine by a hair”).

Our diarist was denounced, eventually, too. Possibly, his mistake was to write a letter to his publisher complaining about the falling value of German currency; his royalties were worthless. He was imprisoned, first locally, then at Dachau. In February 1945, just months before the war ended, Reck’s wife was told that her husband had died.

Writers rarely get the royalties they hope for, but sometimes they get the immortality they crave. Reck speaks, still – to his children, and their children’s children – of what it is to stand against a tide, of what courage may be derived from hating with all your heart.

“Only so,” as he wrote, “will we earn the right to search in the darkness for the way of love.”

Parvati Sharma is author of Jahangir: An Intimate Portrait of a Great Mughal (Juggernaut, 2018).

Argentina’s Holocaust Museum Unveils Nazi Relics

The relics included busts of Adolf Hitler and a Nazi Ouija board, used to try to contact the dead. Argentina is home to Latin America’s largest Jewish population – but was also home to many Nazis after World War II.

Argentina’s Museum of the Holocaust has displayed a trove of Nazi relics that it plans to add to its collection.

The relics were originally confiscated by Argentine authorities in 2017 during a raid on a private collector for illegal possession of art and archaeological artefacts.

After proving the authenticity of the objects, with the help of experts from Germany, authorities decided to give the museum custody over them.

The institution opened in 2001 and is the only Holocaust museum in Latin America. Currently under renovation, it is set to reopen in December when the Nazi collection will be displayed.

‘Hate, death and destruction’

The collection includes busts of Adolf Hitler, a statue of a Germanic eagle standing on a base bearing a swastika, an hourglass that belonged to a member of Hitler’s feared SS and games to indoctrinate children into Nazism.

The items encouraged “hate, death and destruction,” said Marcelo Mindlin, the museum’s president. “The great surprise of these objects was that they could not have belonged to anyone but someone in the Nazi hierarchy.”

Also read: Why We Should Read a Nazi Memoir

The large collection also includes cranial measurement instruments, an original photo of an aircraft taken by Hitler’s official photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, a set of magnifying glasses and a Ouija board.

Mindlin said the relics, some of which can be seen in the Spanish-language clip from the Security Ministry below, have been added to the museum “in the service of transmitting democratic values, education and the fight for memory so tragedies like the Holocaust are not repeated.”

‘Thousands of Nazis’ fled to Argentina

Argentina is home to Latin America’s largest Jewish population, but it’s also the place where many high-ranking Nazis ended up at the end of World War II.

This included officials such as Adolf Eichmann, who was one of the main proponents and executors of the campaign to exterminate Europe’s Jews.

He lived in Argentina under a pseudonym until he was captured by Israeli agents near Buenos Aires in 1960.

“There were thousands and thousands of Nazis here,” said Eva Fon de Rosenthal, a 94-year-old Hungarian Holocaust survivor who attended the event.

“This reflects the power of the Nazis and the strong feeling towards Nazism that they had in order to invest and spend on these objects,” she said of the relics.

Argentine Security Minister Patricia Bullrich, also in attendance, indicated that the museum might one day dedicate its space to confront Argentina’s troubled relationship with Nazism.

This article was first published in DW.

Why We Should Read a Nazi Memoir

Adolf Eichmann’s memoirs offer a chance to re-examine the discourses and propaganda that haunt nation-states today.

It is no longer bad form to recommend a Mein Kampf or an anti-Semitic tract as ‘good reading’. In this line of thought and practice, allow me to forward as ‘tracts for our times’, Adolf Eichmann’s memoirs. Eichmann, whose trial by the Israeli court was covered by Hannah Arendt and led her to the contentious descriptor of the ‘banality of evil’, was the head of the Gestapo Division IV-B4, Nazi Germany’s Secret Service.

Eichmann, it is commonly known, was the infernal mind that implemented the ‘Final Solution’: the extermination of European Jews, undertaken with the (in)famous German efficiency that also produced Siemens and Daimler-Benz. He was hanged in 1961. Two things enable us to have access via the mind and heart – it may be assumed Nazis did have hearts, even if Dr Josef Mengele had very specific ideas of studying them, among Jews – of arguably the most prominent Nazi after Himmler, Goering and the Fuhrer himself.

First, we now have a transcription of the extensive tape recordings made by Dutch collaborator, Willem Sassen, when Eichmann was hiding in Argentina after escaping from US custody at the end of the war. The volume from this transcript is unequivocally titled, The Eichmann Tapes: My Role in the Final Solution, translated by Alexander Jacob and published by Black House in 2015 as the first English translation. The second volume is False Gods: The Jerusalem Memoirs, which Eichmann wrote in prison, and also published from the same stable.

So why read Eichmann? Do we risk glorifying perpetrators when we do so? The debate on this second question is for a different forum and can go on. The first question’s answers will only be implicit by analogy and comparisons made by the competent and alert reader.

Eichmann in his Foreword writes:

“Colleagues” who have collected and expelled millions of ethnic Germans from Poland, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Soviet Russian “colleagues” who have led Soviet citizens by the millions into camps and death…Israeli “colleagues” who have consigned entire Arab tribes, settled for 1400 years in Palestine to death and expulsion…exactly I collected and deported, on orders, and during the war, over a million Jews. I do not want any pardon: I want justice, the same justice for all concerned, for whatever side they may have performed their service.

Eichmann suggests that he is no monster, he is akin to several such tyrants who at different points in history have undertaken similar extermination pogroms. With this, Eichmann erodes the uniqueness of the Final Solution, simply by saying, ‘look our neighbours have committed similar excesses’. The ease with which he despectacularises his regime’s horrors by saying they are the same as everyone else’s is a smooth rhetorical operation – but two wrongs do not make a right. So, if as a nation we commit excesses against a community and then rationalise through comparison saying a near or distant theocratic nation is as barbaric as us is to deflect attention away from our excesses.

This insidiousness of the logic of state oppression is what Eichmann clearly shows.

Enrolling in the SS

Eichmann tells us how he enrolled in the Schutzstaffel [SS]. He notes how the membership of this paramilitary organisation that would eventually be central to the Third Reich gave him a sense of belonging, identity and purpose. The ‘heroic struggle of the individual soldier’, he writes, fascinated him. He understands the ‘unity of the nation’ for the first time. But that is in fact secondary. When he takes up membership he is coached in its ideology. He references Hitler Youth meetings and campaigns, which provided the groundswell of support for the future plans. We recognise the power of propaganda and hate speech where the emotions of nationalism are always already imbued with a strong sense of being wronged (Eichmann mentions the humiliations of the First World War and the Versailles treaty), of the readiness to scapegoat a community/race and of a military resolution to social problems. Later he gives us a sample of the Nazi party line:

The Jewish population had in percentage terms relative to the rest of the population a disproportionately high share in the management of the economy, in the free professions, in the press, in the radio, in the theatre, etc/. So the enmity between host people and guests, between the Jewish part and the non-Jewish part of the population grew to such an extent that this would have doubtless led at some point to an explosion. That is why the leadership was concerned to reduce the tension in an orderly, normal and legal way.

Eichmann claims that ‘I saw, and see, the necessity and the indispensability of the battle, but only in the political field’. He shows us that the demonisation of a community, the Jews, is the first step. The use of descriptors like ‘guest’ to classify the European Jews signals how the subsequent politics will play out: those identified as guests or invaders will have to be exiled, thrown out, or, if nothing works, exterminated. To identify people as guests after centuries of living in that country serves the Nazis well, for it creates a neat us/them, insider/outsider frame from which to launch their horrors.

Also Read: In the Idea of an ‘All India NRC’, Echoes of Reich Citizenship Law

Eichmann teaches us this process of internal alienation of a nation’s citizens.

Soon after this, Eichmann would elaborate the first plans for the ‘treatment of enemies’ (his phrase). This was the ‘emigration policy for the Jews’. He writes:

It [Adolf Bohm’s book, Der Judenstat] inspired me to find a solution of the problem through which a homeland could be given to the Jews, and at the same time the German nation could become “free of Jews”.

To create a ‘Jewish State in Poland’, he says, ‘signified a political solution’. It would be ‘a final solution of the Jewish question, a political, and a bloodless solution’, writes Eichmann.

Also Read: Primo Levi: The Chemist Who Held A Mirror to the Holocaust

Calls to ‘cleanse’ the ‘homeland’ of specific communities, to exile them, or force them to demonstrate citizenship-emotions – all of these Eichmann endorses in the guise of a ‘political solution’. These, let us recall, were real attempts, involving the displacement of people.

The rhetoric of purity – deeply flawed, since life itself begins with mixing, contamination, impurity – that aligns cleansing with extermination is what Eichmann points to.

Polish Jews being arrested. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/ Bundesarchiv, Bild CC-BY-SA 3.0

Shifting the onus

Eichmann then shifts the onus to other countries:

Had other countries at that time been more willing to accept the Jews, then hardly a single Jew would have still been left in a concentration camp.

As a form of scapegoating, this is, even for a Nazi, something stunning. When the Nazi state derecognised its citizens, they were to be exiled. The fault, he says, was with other nations who did not welcome the Jews! So the onus is on other countries to accommodate a nation’s suddenly excommunicated and alienated peoples. The Nazi state itself was purging its citizenry but that, according to Eichmann, was perfectly justified – after all a nation must be ‘pure’ – but the refusal of other nations to be more accommodating is what generated the necessity of the Final Solution and the camps.

This shifting of responsibility by states who abdicate their ‘responsibility to protect’ their own citizens is Eichmann’s unwitting revelation of the work of the nation-state.

The ‘Jewish state in Poland’, as Eichmann terms it, did materialise: it was called Auschwitz. At some point, a displaced persons camp or a refugee camp begins to take on the shape of a ghetto. The camp no longer, then, serves as a space of refuge or shelter, nor is it any manner a ‘state’. When states today call for ‘camps’ to be created to ‘accommodate’ specific communities not enrolled in national registries, they are not being offered refuge: these are spaces of concentration – I use the term with its full semantic scope from the Nazi era – where these communities are subject to total control, militarised and surveilled.

Also Read: ‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here’: The Hell-Gates of Dachau

Then Eichmann shows us the Theresienstadt ghetto, which was both ghetto and concentration camp, designed as a midway point to the extermination camps but also to ensure the death of as many Jews as possible (Hans Günther Adler’s Theresienstadt, 1941–1945: The Face of a Coerced Community, now available in an English translation, 2017, gives us the intimate details).

This creation of spaces where the unwanted can be mapped, surveilled and destroyed with impunity – because in that space, a ‘concentrationary universe’ (David Rousset’s term) no laws apply – is Eichmann’s documentation of Nazi Germany’s spatial politics.

Auschwitz concentration camp. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/ xiquinhosilva CC BY 2.0

Legality of the Final Solution

Eichmann then seeks to foreground the mechanisms of extermination. Through his narrative he emphasises the legality of the Final Solution. There were circulars and diktats, rulings and orders that were systematically issued to smoothen the process. Eichmann lists ‘Establishment of Hostility to the Nation and State’, ‘Confiscation of Assets’ and ‘Withdrawal of German Citizenship’, among other regulations, appeared in the Reich Gazette every fortnight, he writes. This official pronouncement and enacted legislation is not mere jurisprudential history for us. Eichmann tells us:

The Jew was proclaimed an enemy of the state by the legitimate national government. The government must have had its reasons to remove this enemy as a matter of urgency. After this order had been issued, it had also to be carried out. It was not our task to question what reasons the government had for regarding this enemy as a danger to the people and the state. As the police we only had to act in accordance with the law.

This, by far, is the Nazi state’s most effective weapon. By issuing orders, the ‘legitimate national government’ empowered the SS to take action against the Jews. The SS would not question the foundations of the order: it was enough there was an order. That is, the implementation of any unjust legislation was legal and legitimate. It enabled Eichmann and several Nazis to claim at the Nuremberg trials they were simply carrying out what the law asked them to do.

What is frightening is not the execution of the law, but the enactment – or abrogation – of laws that legitimized genocide and forms of victimisation. The law too, as Eichmann’s text demonstrates, comes out of an ideology: hence, all laws enacted by the fundamentalist Nazi state, with the Party having absolute majority and no opposition, served to further the Final Solution against the Jews. Nothing Eichmann or his cohorts did was of course then illegal. That the state can craft laws that can then be used to victimise specific communities with impunity is what ought to frighten us – given the examples from Nazi Germany alone in the 20th century.

Eichmann’s emphasis on the legality of the Nazi persecution of the Jews was not a solitary instance nor a frivolous rhetorical ploy. At the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), lawyers and activists argued that ‘strictly speaking the actions of the Nazis were legal’. Hence, working backwards, the Nuremberg trials sought to base the trials on ‘the laws of human conscience which were higher than national laws’.

‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here’: The Hell-Gates of Dachau

In a very real sense, the apocalypse that was the Holocaust was rung in on March 22, 1933, as Dachau received its first prisoners.

The journey from Munich’s Hauptbahnhof was a short one, but, by the time we were getting down from the train, the weather had changed dramatically. The sky had closed in on a sunny winter’s day. A steep wind had risen. As we were taking our seats on bus no. 724 that ferries visitors from the Dachau train station to the camp, it had begun to drizzle. It felt colder already. ‘The right weather for Dachau, I guess!’, said a co-passenger, drily. There were some grunts of agreement.

Even as the bus dropped us off at the camp gate, the drizzle turned into sleet, driving us all inside the visitors’ rest area. There was nothing for us to do but wait out the freezing rain. We occupied the time by watching a documentary film – KZ-Dachau – that traces the camp’s grisly history for the visitor.

Dachau was the first of the Nazi ‘concentration’ camps. Commissioned on March 22, 1933, within two months of Hitler’s appointment as the Reich Chancellor, it was also the last among the big camps to be liberated. The Red Army freed Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, while infantry battalions of the US Third Army liberated Buchenwald on April 11. Sitting deep inside one of the Third Reich’s most fiercely-guarded regions, Dachau, however, was stormed only on April 29, 1945, just a day before Hitler killed himself. (One wonders if news of the dismantling of Dachau, the last bastion of pure Aryanism, had reached the Fuehrer in his final hours.)

Dachau, then, was one of the most enduring institutions of Nazism, rising and falling with the Third Reich itself, as grotesque and brutal as the regime that conceived it. Auschwitz, Treblinka and Buchenwald had, in the end, gorier report cards, but Dachau, the ‘model camp’, took its pride of place in the pantheon of Nazi death camps.

Every other major camp copied Dachau’s layout and building plans. Each had a similar command centre (with its living quarters, administrative blocks and army barracks); the prisoner enclosures were erected with the same fussy attention to deadly detail (electrically-charged barbed wire fencing, a three-metre-wide ‘neutral zone’ inside the fence which was under 24X7 surveillance from the watchtowers so that an accidental straggler could be put down instantly); a ditch around the fence; and, finally, the camp’s logo – Arbeit Macht Frei (‘Work makes you free’) – emblazoned on the main prisoner gate, that greeted the hapless inmates of most other camps also with the same macabre relish.

Also Read: In Holocaust Study, a New Attempt to Measure the Pace of Nazi Genocide

Dachau’s crown jewel, the extensive SS training school located on the camp premises, boasted of illustrious alumni like Adolf Eichmann and Rudolf Höss, whose personal viciousness had few equals, even inside the Nazi ranks. Eichmann headed the ‘Race and Resettlement Office’ while Höss, as commandant of Auschwitz, was the master of ceremonies at one of the greatest death orgies in history: no fewer than 1.1 million people were exterminated under his watchful eye.

Hitler’s great hopes of sweeping the early-March, 1933 national elections were dashed, even though the Reichstag Fire Decree of 28 February, which suspended virtually all civil liberties and made it possible to throw the entire Communist Party (KPD) leadership behind bars, had put strong winds into his sails.

The repression and terror had to be stepped up, and a prison system built on an altogether new model was needed to address the needs of the evolving situation. The Nazi Party (NSDAP) had won the Bavaria state elections and, right away in early March, Heinrich Himmler, Munich’s Chief of Police, started working on the project so that, as an NSDAP press statement chillingly, said at the time:

“(a)ll Communists and – where necessary – ….. Social Democratic functionaries who endanger state security (could) be concentrated here, as in the long run it is not possible to keep individual prisoners in the state prisons without overburdening these prisons ….”

An abandoned munitions factory complex in the little town of Dachau, a little distance from Munich, took Himmler’s fancy, and there, on 22 March 1933, the first ‘concentration camp for political prisoners’, with the capacity to hold 5,000 persons, was born. The first detainees were predominantly Communist Party of Germany (KPD) leaders.

In subsequent years, though, Dachau’s scope was enlarged to take in the many different kinds of enemies of the Nazi state, the ‘human bastards’ or ‘three typical sub-human specimens’ as these unfortunates are variously described in a December 1936 Nazi poster displayed at the Dachau memorial museum today: ‘Communist– Work-Shy – Professional Criminal –Jewish national (volks) criminal’.

An exhibit from the museum’s gallery. Credit: Anjan Basu

It is unlikely that the detainees harboured any illusions about what awaited them here, but just in case some of them were still innocent, their ‘orientation programme’, where the camp commandant addressed them on arrival, settled those issues for good. Thus Josef Jarolin, Commandant in 1941/42, lovingly reminded newly-arrived prisoners, “You are without rights, dishonourable and defenceless. You’re a pile of shit and that’s how you are going to be treated.”

Also Read: Jerusalem’s Holocaust Memorial Is a Grim Reminder of What Hatred and Bigotry Can Achieve

Appropriately, the arrival of the first batch of detainees at Dachau coincided with the ratification, by the parliament, of its own death warrant – the Enabling Act of 23 March 1933. The Act vested in Hitler the authority to legislate on any issue in any manner he liked without the parliament’s approval. Like Dachau, the Enabling Act was also to be dissolved only after Hitler’s death.

Himmler and his entourage inspecting one of the first detainees in Dachau. Credit: Wikipedia Commons

How many prisoners did Dachau take in, overall? Records are inaccurate at best, but the Museum’s archives document details of over 200,200, mostly men, but also some women and juveniles who arrived in the camp’s final months. The number of the dead, again, is a crude estimate ranging between 35,000 and 50,000.

The demographics of the detainees were as varied as the causes of the deaths. German and Austrian political prisoners, war prisoners from Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, the Balkan states, France and Russia, over 2,700 (predominantly Catholic) clergymen who opposed Nazism, and, of course, Jews made up the prison population. Most Jewish prisoners – who wore yellow badges – were brought in after the November 1938 outrage known as Kristallnacht (‘Night of Broken Glass’).

True to the Nazi racial orthodoxy, a strict hierarchy was sought to be preserved even within the prison population (by, among other things, scrupulous adherence to a system of coloured badges): thus, Polish priests faced far harsher treatment than their German brethren; they were also picked for the atrocious ‘medical experiments’ more often than any other population group.

These ‘experiments’ covered the human body’s response to hypothermia (followed by scalding), rapid decompression (in simulated high-altitude conditions) and to malaria and other serious infections. Hundreds of prisoners succumbed to these abominations. Indeed, these experiments were so appalling that, even the doctors in charge of this ghastly enterprise, destroyed all records for fear that they might fall into Allied hands. That, of course, did not stop the likes of Dr Schilling and Dr Hintermeyer from being tried at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity. Both were sentenced to death.

But death at Dachau did not require the, somewhat costly, intervention of these ‘experiments’. Perhaps a forced labour camp anywhere would feed its prisoners as little as possible while trying to extract from them as much as their weary limbs could deliver, and not bother about their health and hygiene. But camps like Dachau were built around the theme of death and nothing less.

Also Read: Reading the History of Nazi Germany as a Cautionary Tale for Today

Appalling over-crowding along with deliberate, egregious neglect of sanitation made sure that epidemics (of typhus or dysentery, for example) would ravage the camp now and then. (According to one estimate, typhus alone carried off 15,000 prisoners during 1944-45.) Over 4,000 Russian prisoners-of-war were summarily executed in 1942-43 just outside Dachau.

Credit: Anjan Basu

Some SS guards were also known to play at deadly games of death themselves: a prisoner’s cap would be hurled into the ‘no man’s land’, and when the luckless man would run to retrieve it, he would be machinegunned. As the US Army approached closer, in one of Dachau’s sub-camps at Lindberg, 4,000 prisoners were burnt to death under orders from the camp commander who had decided to shut shop and move on. The prisoner huts, their doors and windows nailed shut, were doused with gasoline and set on fire. And just 5 days before Dachau was liberated, the commandant forced out nearly 7,000 surviving inmates on a death march, with a heavy guard patrol, southwards in the direction of Eurasburg/Tegernsee. Starvation, exhaustion and exposure to unseasonably cold weather killed more than a thousand prisoners on the way.

As the camp’s liberators arrived, they were confronted with the shattering scene of a freight train, standing inside the camp’s railway siding, piled high with dead and dying men. It turned out that, as Buchenwald was about to be liberated, its SS guards stuffed more than 5,000 prisoners inside the wagons of a cargo train which then set off for Dachau, Nazism’s last refuge. The prisoners encountered unspeakable barbarity on the way: at Nammering, about 800 dead were ordered to be removed from the train to be mass-buried in a wild ravine, and then the carriers of those corpses were shot dead themselves, their dead bodies hurled in their comrades’ graves.

Also Read: The Beer Hall Putsch of November 9, 1923 – Germany’s Own 9/11

It was Himmler’s idea that ‘no prisoners (were to be allowed) to fall into the hands of the enemy alive’. The witches’ cabal of the NSDAP was not ready to wind up its rituals of death without a flourish. It was nothing short of a miracle that about 30,000 survivors were left to greet their liberators on that bleak, snowy late April afternoon in Dachau, among them the prominent French socialist leaders, Leon Blum and Edouard Daladier, and the well-known Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoeller whose great anti-Nazi poem ‘First they came for the communists …’ seared itself into the memory of an entire generation.

Survivors of KZ Dachau demonstrate the operation of the crematorium by pushing a corpse into one of the ovens. Credit: Wikipedia Commons

Where once stood the thirty-two prisoner barracks, only their foundations show today on a desolate stretch of open ground lined by leafless poplars. The barracks were in such a terrible, rickety shape that they had to be torn down. But the menacing crematorium which, with its numerous ovens, was never dismantled bears testimony to the humongous number of dead bodies incinerated at Dachau. The gas chamber also stands today, although it is generally believed to not have been pressed into active use, though it should have come in handy to ‘train’ master exterminators. Dachau prisoners, whom the Nazis thought needed to be ‘disposed of’ summarily, either faced the executioner’s bullet or were transported to Hartheim Castle near Linz for the ultimate Nazi ‘treatment’.

This is where the prisoners’ barracks once stood. Credit: Anjan Basu

The Dachau memorial came up as late as 1965, mainly because the neighbouring communities were consistently in denial about the camp’s hideous history. No doubt this attitude reflected in some measure on the somewhat aseptic, nearly spiffy, look of the memorial – a far cry from Auschwitz and Buchenwald – ‘like (of) some delightful holiday camp’, as Lewis Black wrote once.

Also Read: Stalingrad at 75: A Battle That Marked the Defeat of More than Just the Nazis

The museum’s collection of period photographs, government notifications, and articles from the remnants of the camp is extensive, and some videos capture the grim reality of that fearful period in odious detail. Bunk beds and wash-rooms for prisoners, recreated on the original prototypes, have been displayed in a barracks replica also. Since the detainees came from many different religious affiliations, the memorial grounds are today home to several temples/chapels: The Mortal Agony of the Christ Chapel, A Jewish Memorial, The Protestant Church of Reconciliation and The Russian Orthodox Chapel, for example.

But, for most visitors, the truly moving monuments are the Nandor Glid sculpture in dark bronze erected in 1968 and the memorial to ‘The Unknown Prisoner’ created by Fritz Koelle. Glid features, short strands of barbed wire upon which mangled skeletons hang wretchedly, the period 1933-1945 displayed beneath the sculpture, while Koelle’s prisoner stands on a pedestal that bears a legend reading ‘To honour the dead / to warn the living’.

Credit: Anjan Basu

The rain had stopped before the tour was done but a leaden sky and light haze combined to oppress our spirits as we walked back to the bus station. On the way we passed by a giant rectangle of black granite we had not seen on our way in. Upon it, in plain white lettering, stood out the following words in French, English, German and Russian:

“May the example of those who were exterminated here between 1933-1945 because they resisted Nazism help to unite the living for the defence of peace and freedom and in respect for their fellow men.”

Anjan Basu freelances as a literary critic, translator and commentator. He can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com

‘Tripoli Cancelled’: In Between Time, Temporality and the Temporary

Greek film Tripoli Cancelled, inspired by the experiences of the director’s father trapped without a passport at Athens Ellinikon airport in 1977, explores the blurred lines between freedom and confinement in times of desperate migration.

Greek film Tripoli Cancelled, inspired by the experiences of the director’s father trapped without a passport at Athens Ellinikon airport in 1977, explores the blurred lines between freedom and confinement in times of desperate migration.

A scene from Naeem Mohaiemen’s Tripoli Cancelled.

In Naeem Mohaiemen’s film Tripoli Cancelled (2017), the unnamed protagonist lights a cigarette whilst being seated on a broken escalator. Intonated by a sharp sadness, he breaks into singing ‘Never on Sunday’ (the Chordettes classic). The song from a film of the same name, makes a curious reference to the free spirited character of Ilya, a prostitute by profession who lived in the port of Piraeus in Greece. The film also revolves around Homer, an American tourist from Middletown, Connecticut, who is a classical scholar enamoured by all things Greek. Homer believes that Ilya’s corrupt way of life illustrates the degradation of Greek classical culture. He takes it upon himself to try and manoeuvre her onto the path of morality.

The disposition of Greece as the set, setting and reference for Mohaiemen’s film is operating on many levels, often letting references slip by you. That the work was to open in Athens for a German show was already forming a critical cartography along the movement of the many in search of opportunity, safety and asylum. I went back to think about the beginning, where I was introduced to a man in the pursuit of grooming himself, shaving and brushing his teeth – middle-aged, eventually dressed in a tan suit at his home maybe, perhaps getting ready to go somewhere. The work has absolute disregard for time as a meter, often using it malleably as though his unnamed protagonist and his derelict set were living in an alternate dimension.

And then, in a silent snap, the space expands into a big hall, turning the man into a tiny occupant to the centre-left of the frame – an airport that well lives its twilight. The decentralised frame of the artist’s lens also indulges in the visual othering of his protagonist, or is it distancing from the emotional forbearance of a story so personal to Mohaiemen? That the work stems from a personal story of his father being stranded at the airport in Athens becomes an entry to the many intended and consequent readings of the work, making it a premise (both physical and psychological) to contemplate the urgencies of our time – a lacunae to house the many thousands who seek. This dilemma forms the heart of Tripoli Cancelled, a giving into or letting go for the artist in the re-living of the uncertainty in his father’s ordeal and the fictions the mind makes of fear for the unknown.

The unsettling vaccum is set into motion by the man walking through the vastness, made even more apparent and distant by the lack of other human presence and barely any props to fill the space. Mohaiemen barely lets the camera concentrate on this decay, allowing you to wander your eyes and notice parts of a collapsing ceiling, the weeds breaking through concrete and a constant tint of dust on everything (but his leading man) through his frames. For moments he invests a sense of sovereignty in his protagonist as he navigates and indulges in this kingdom and its ruins. He then in the very next instant, renders him powerless.

A scene from Tripoli Cancelled.

We must return to the crisp tan suit again in its symbolism of the readiness to go home and be presentable to meet people. It is perhaps the only object of care and precious measure to this stranded man. In the neat folding and careful hanging of the suit, he preserves his hope to be home. In a visibly awkward attempt of opening a tin of food and saving his trousers from stains; the coat already hung on the rusted frame of helicopter like it were a coat rack, Mohaiemen continues to keep this readiness intact. The man in transit is also a man in waiting and the wait is qualified in Mohaiemen’s erratic time, making it all the more palpable, anxious and fatigued.

Time is also switched across history, in referencing Hannah Arendt witnessing of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, an organiser of the holocaust. In writing about Eichmann and in Arendt’s coinage of the now overused phrase “banality of evil,” she continues to make sense of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis as a crime against humanity. She argued that the displacement and annihilation of certain populations was an attack on humankind, and not only those that it directly affects. This provocation comes back time and again in the film, for example in the protagonist’s mention of the Line of Control, the de-facto border between India and Pakistan since the 1972 Simla Agreement on the contested region of Kashmir or in Agamben’s reading of Primo Levi’s notes on surviving Auschwitz. Building on from Agamben, Mohaiemen’s protagonist contemplates the act of surrendering. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, he notes, to become Der Muselman was to surrender. It was used to refer to a prisoner who had given up. In Majdanek, the word used was “Gammeln,” meaning to be rotting on the inside. Whilst in Stutthof, they were called “Kruppel,” translating as cripple.

In reading a chapter from Richard Adams’ Watership Down and speaking of warmth, a pot of coffee heats over invisible flame with the protagonist sitting against the cold backdrop of twilight blue. Between narration of letters to his wife and readings from Adams’ book, Mohaiemen offers an incidental reading of those in-between certainty and speculation, surrendering and hope.

Watership Down, illustrated in the story of brothers Hazel and Fiver and their desperate quest of home is a striking allegory of our current moment. The term desperate is perhaps not enough to demonstrate the seething relationship between longing and the greed to be in the midst of those we love. Like the rabbits, Mohaiemen’s protagonist must conquer his deepest fears time and again in order to endure. Enunciated in the emotive and recurring activity of writing letters, this vulnerability belongs as much to Mohaiemen as it does to his actor – as they continue to make sense and come to terms with time and emotion.

Another scene from Tripoli Cancelled.

Naeem’s 747 awaits its passengers. His unnamed protagonist cosplays a pilot going through the usual drill of inflight announcements and pre-flight prep to a handful dummies. This plane never takes off and here lies the truth about exiles, of state sanctions and the elusivity of hope; for acts of adapting and normalising to occur. Greece at the centre of the refugee crisis with migrants from both east and south, and as country with its own demons, a perennial economic crisis aggravated by imposed austerity, continues to be a site like Mohaiemen’s Airport – an in-between space of uncertainty and waiting.

This brings me back to time. In this 95 minute saga, time becomes space – a site for reflection – for thoughts to permeate the haunting silences of when Mohaiemen’s actor is talking in wet-walled stares. Sometime, the actor brings forth a telephone receiver with a broken cord. With deft certainty, he spells out the country and state code as 88-02, a direct connection to home (and a fragment of the artists’ landline number from the 1980s until sometime around 2000). The call is tried but is sadly missed. He continues to tell the operator that he has it all correct. The call is tried again and is sadly missed again, the apparatus that never come together and fails the protagonist as they fail so many others.

Here I’d like to give into temptation and name actor Vassilis Koukalani, Mohaiemen’s protagonist, who essays the many who are in-between home and asylum – with a upsetting sequence where he breaks down into measures of frustration, fear and fatigue. In between his baritone voice led episodes stand haunting silences, allowing us to stray, gather ourselves and move on.

In a scene of heartbreaking humour, he plays a pilot flying a chopper lifted by the sound of his spitting mouth-mimicked motor. The chopper is stuck in turbulence and Koukalani takes control of the craft – one of those few moments where he exudes certainty and the will to pass the rough.

The film ends where I begin this piece.

Mario D‘Souza is a writer and curator based between Delhi, Baroda and Goa.

Tripoli Cancelled was filmed in Ellinikon Airport, designed by Finnish architect Eero Saarinen between 1960 and 1969. It was closed in 2001 and was later used for housing refugees. It has since been sold off for real-estate development as a part of the European Debt negotiations.

Israel: Death Penalty Advocates Win Preliminary Vote in Parliament

Currently, a death penalty can only be imposed if a panel of three military judges passes sentence unanimously.

FILE PHOTO: Israeli lawmakers attend a vote on a bill at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in Jerusalem February 6, 2017. Credit: Reuters/Ammar Awad/File Photo

Israeli lawmakers attend a vote on a bill at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in Jerusalem February 6, 2017. Credit: Reuters/Ammar Awad/File Photo

Jerusalem: Israel’s parliament gave preliminary approval on Wednesday for legislation that would make it easier for a court to pass a death sentence on assailants convicted of murder in attacks classified as terrorism.

Israeli military courts – which handle cases involving Palestinians in the occupied West Bank – already have the power to issue the death sentence, although this has never been implemented. The only case of an execution in Israel was carried out against convicted Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1962.

The amendment to the penal code would still require three more readings if it is to become law. Currently, a death penalty can only be imposed if a panel of three military judges passes sentence unanimously. If the amendment is adopted, a majority verdict would suffice.

Wednesday’s motion was brought by defence minister Avigdor Lieberman, an ultra-nationalist in the conservative coalition government who advocates tough action against Palestinian militants. Fifty two of parliament‘s 120 members voted in favour, and 49 were opposed.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voted for the motion but said that such legislation required deeper discussion and that the matter would now be considered at ministerial level before further debate in the Knesset.

In remarks to lawmakers on Wednesday, he said: “I think that in extreme cases, when somebody slaughters and laughs (as he kills), he should not spend the rest of his time in jail and should be executed.”

Asked by an Israeli Arab lawmaker whether he would also apply this reasoning to Jewish militants convicted of killing Palestinians, Netanyahu said: “In principle, yes.”

The successful vote was the latest in a number of motions brought by right-wing coalition members who feel able to pressure Netanyahu’s brittle government into enacting hard-line legislation, sometimes reluctantly.

Learn to Be With Yourself Before You Can Learn to Be With Others

Edgar Allan Poe famously thought it was ‘such a great misfortune’, to lose the capacity to be alone with oneself, to get caught up in the crowd, to surrender one’s singularity to mind-numbing conformity.

In 1840, Edgar Allan Poe described the ‘mad energy’ of an ageing man who roved the streets of London from dusk till dawn. His excruciating despair could be temporarily relieved only by immersing himself in a tumultuous throng of city-dwellers. “He refuses to be alone,” Poe wrote. He ‘is the type and the genius of deep crime … He is the man of the crowd.’

Like many poets and philosophers through the ages, Poe stressed the significance of solitude. It was ‘such a great misfortune’, he thought, to lose the capacity to be alone with oneself, to get caught up in the crowd, to surrender one’s singularity to mind-numbing conformity. Two decades later, the idea of solitude captured Ralph Waldo Emerson’s imagination in a slightly different way: quoting Pythagoras, he wrote: ‘In the morning, – solitude; … that nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company.” Emerson encouraged the wisest teachers to press upon their pupils the importance of ‘periods and habits of solitude’, habits that made ‘serious and abstracted thought’ possible.

In the 20th century, the idea of solitude formed the centre of Hannah Arendt’s thought. A German-Jewish émigré who fled Nazism and found refuge in the United States, Arendt spent much of her life studying the relationship between the individual and the polis. For her, freedom was tethered to both the private sphere – the vita contemplativa – and the public, political sphere – the vita activa. She understood that freedom entailed more than the human capacity to act spontaneously and creatively in public. It also entailed the capacity to think and to judge in private, where solitude empowers the individual to contemplate her actions and develop her conscience, to escape the cacophony of the crowd – to finally hear herself think.

In 1961, The New Yorker commissioned Arendt to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi SS officer who helped to orchestrate the Holocaust. How could anyone, she wanted to know, perpetrate such evil? Surely only a wicked sociopath could participate in the Shoah. But Arendt was surprised by Eichmann’s lack of imagination, his consummate conventionality. She argued that while Eichmann’s actions were evil, Eichmann himself – the person – “was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions.” She attributed his immorality – his capacity, even his eagerness, to commit crimes – to his ‘thoughtlessness’. It was his inability to stop and think that permitted Eichmann to participate in mass murder.

Just as Poe suspected that something sinister lurked deep within the man of the crowd, Arendt recognised that: “A person who does not know that silent intercourse (in which we examine what we say and what we do) will not mind contradicting himself, and this means he will never be either able or willing to account for what he says or does; nor will he mind committing any crime, since he can count on its being forgotten the next moment.” Eichmann had shunned Socratic self-reflection. He had failed to return home to himself, to a state of solitude. He had discarded the vita contemplativa, and thus he had failed to embark upon the essential question-and-answering process that would have allowed him to examine the meaning of things, to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood, good and evil.

“It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong,” Arendt wrote, “because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer.” It is not that unthinking men are monsters, that the sad sleepwalkers of the world would sooner commit murder than face themselves in solitude. What Eichmann showed Arendt was that society could function freely and democratically only if it were made up of individuals engaged in the thinking activity – an activity that required solitude. Arendt believed that “living together with others begins with living together with oneself”.

But what if, we might ask, we become lonely in our solitude? Isn’t there some danger that we will become isolated individuals, cut off from the pleasures of friendship? Philosophers have long made a careful, and important, distinction between solitude and loneliness. In The Republic (c380 BCE), Plato proffered a parable in which Socrates celebrates the solitary philosopher. In the allegory of the cave, the philosopher escapes from the darkness of an underground den – and from the company of other humans – into the sunlight of contemplative thought. Alone but not lonely, the philosopher becomes attuned to her inner self and the world. In solitude, the soundless dialogue ‘which the soul holds with herself’ finally becomes audible.

Echoing Plato, Arendt observed: ‘Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business; solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about … when I am one and without company’ but desire it and cannot find it. In solitude, Arendt never longed for companionship or craved camaraderie because she was never truly alone. Her inner self was a friend with whom she could carry on a conversation, that silent voice who posed the vital Socratic question: “What do you mean when you say …?” The self, Arendt declared, “is the only one from whom you can never get away – except by ceasing to think.”

Arendt’s warning is well worth remembering in our own time. In our hyper-connected world, a world in which we can communicate constantly and instantly over the internet, we rarely remember to carve out spaces for solitary contemplation. We check our email hundreds of times per day; we shoot off thousands of text messages per month; we obsessively thumb through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, aching to connect at all hours with close and casual acquaintances alike. We search for friends of friends, ex-lovers, people we barely know, people we have no business knowing. We crave constant companionship.

But, Arendt reminds us, if we lose our capacity for solitude, our ability to be alone with ourselves, then we lose our very ability to think. We risk getting caught up in the crowd. We risk being ‘swept away’, as she put it, “by what everybody else does and believes in” – no longer able, in the cage of thoughtless conformity, to distinguish “right from wrong, beautiful from ugly”. Solitude is not only a state of mind essential to the development of an individual’s consciousness – and conscience – but also a practice that prepares one for participation in social and political life. Before we can keep company with others, we must learn to keep company with ourselves.

Jennifer Stitt is a graduate student in the history of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Elie Wiesel, Auschwitz Survivor and Nobel Laureate, Dies at 87

What made Wiesel’s voice so urgent was his articulation of the deeply troubling questions of conscience, guilt and faith raised by the Holocaust for all of humanity.

Elie Wiesel with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, Washington, in December, 2011. Credit: Flickr

Elie Wiesel, the Auschitwz survivor and Nobel laureate famous for his work on the horrors faced by the Jews during the Holocaust, died on Saturday, July 2, at his home in New York, at the age of 87.

As the New York Times reports, after World War II, little was spoken or written about what had happened or how to come to terms with it, even by survivors. Through his works, Wiesel came to be hailed as a voice for the six million Jews who were systematically massacred by the Nazis during the war. It was with the translation of his first work into English in 1960 that Wiesel gained attention. Night, originally La Nuit, is an autobiographical account of the horrors he witnessed at the Auschwitz and Buchenwald camps as a teenager.

Wiesel was born in 1928 in the small Jewish community of Sighet, near the Ukrainian border. When the Nazis invaded, Wiesel’s family was deported to Auschwitz, where Wiesel was separated from his mother and sisters, and worked at the nearby labour camp Buna, loading stones into railway cars. At Buchenwald, he watched his father die from dysentery and starvation. After the US army liberated the camp in 1945, just after his father died, Wiesel was sent to a home in France, under the care of a Jewish organisation. He went on to study at the Sorbonne in 1948, and become a journalist with the French newspaper L’Arche.

He wrote La Nuit while reporting on the newly founded state of Israel for L’Arche. The 800-page memoir was edited down to 127 pages and published, but did not do particularly well. It was only after the televised trial of Adolf Eichmann that people began to notice it and Wiesel himself. He went on to lecture and speak widely, and to write several novels, essays and books of reportage. Night went on to sell more than 10 million copies.

As the New York Times obituary notes, Wiesel’s other books deal with Judaic studies widely; yet what makes his voice so urgent is how he articulates, in spare and haunting prose, the deeply troubling questions of conscience, guilt and faith raised by the Holocaust for all of humanity.

In his works, Wiesel identified and struggled with what he called the “dialectical conflict” – between the need to recount what he had witnessed and the futility of giving voice to events of such extremity.

“If I survived, it must be for some reason,” he said in a New York Times interview in 1981. “I must do something with my life. It is too serious to play games with anymore, because in my place, someone else could have been saved. And so I speak for that person. On the other hand, I know I cannot.”

In 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for being a “messenger to mankind” and for his “message of peace, atonement and human dignity”.

When accepting it, he said: “Whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation, take sides… Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

Wiesel outspokenly denounced the massacres in Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur and the violence against black South Africans and political prisoners in Latin America.

In 1985, while accepting a Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement at the White House, he urged then President Ronald Reagan to cancel his planned visit to a military cemetery where Hitler’s SS soldiers were buried.

In 2013, when the Obama administration was in talks with Iran about the latter’s nuclear programme, Wiesel took out a full-page advertisement in the Times calling on the US president to demand a total dismantling of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure because of what he said was the country’s ‘genocidal’ intent against Israel.

Wiesel was not without his critics. Writer Max Blumenthal, a critic of the Israeli state, repeatedly attacked Wiesel for his support of Israel, as well as his comments on the Armenian genocide and the Iraq war.

Amidst wide mourning over Wiesel’s death on Saturday, Blumenthal tweeted that he “went from a victim of war crimes to a supporter of those who commit them… He did more harm than good and should not be honored.”

The Pathology of a Ceremonial Society

The measure of the writer is the terror she inspires in the ceremonial orders of power.

An RSS supporter throws petals on the marching men. Credit: Shome Basu

A supporter throws petals on the RSS men marching below. Credit: Shome Basu

Ceremonies have a certain morbidity – as events that are not open to debate. An annual ceremony this year repeats the ceremony of the previous year, which repeated that of the year before, and so on. Any deviation would be disrespectful to the original event which the ceremony commemorates. Likewise with magical utterances or mantras, deviation would draw supernatural punishments. A purely ceremonial society, where each day is a faithful repetition of the days gone by, is called primitive – a theoretical ideal for ethnology. A primitive society has no need for history books. Gandhi himself preferred a certain form of ceremonial society which he called ‘village swaraj’. He contrasted the permanence of the villages of the subcontinent with the achievements of the ancient Greeks and the Romans—“Such ephemeral civilisations have often come and gone and will continue to do so”.

In being a ceremony in itself, a primitive society does not need quotation marks. We use quotation marks to set off an older statement from a new one. We quote in order to distance ourselves from the statements and traditions of the past – these punctuation marks are an institution which sets off the past from the future.

Modernity conceived itself as a progressive distancing from primitive societies. It created institutions – copyright, the university, refereed journals – to safeguard the ideal of a surge towards the future. This vision is also reflected in the academic norm of limiting the amount of quoted material permitted in a book, and the vigilance against plagiarism. Without the use of quotes there is no recognition of the new statements. Without the new statements there can be no meaning for quotes. Modernity is the game of finding the ideal ratio between the past and the future separated by quotation marks.

We write, therefore we are

For this reason, the writer is the heroic figure of modernity. The act of writing involves a certain aggression that rushes towards the unknown and the unwritten, and creates new statements. The writer’s new statements maintain the ratio between the past and the future such that we live with a sense of history. Without the writer, we will have slipped into a society in which there are only quotes, or a society that merely recalls and repeats. The writer is also a revolutionary in language. Revolution is the modern theatre of politics where a cut with the past is made in a single event. Hence, modernity was also obsessed with scientific, literary and philosophical revolutions.

Quotes are quite complex in their deployment. We quote in many ways, such as by prefacing what we speak with “as said by”, “allegedly”, “in the interest of neutrality”, “it is believed by some that”. The academic uses quotes to mention that statement from which she secedes in the history of that discipline. She deploys quotes to gather thoughts, often separated by centuries, and the differences between these thoughts, into a corpus for the free thinking animal that we are.

No one in religious institutions would preface their ceremonial chants with “allegedly” or “it is debatable”. If, in the ceremonial colony of the Germany of 1939, a man were to say that Czechoslovakia is not a part of Germany it would have been seditious. If he shouted “Czechoslovakia is a part of Germany” while winking or drawing quotation marks in the air with his index fingers, he would have quoted academically and earned a ticket to a camp. The quote marks would make the statement secede from its ceremoniality and ritual power. The pure recitation of the past is ceremonial. This is what is currently being demanded of the great international Sanskrit scholars Wendy Doniger, Michael Witzel, and Sheldon Pollock by the clergy of the subcontinent where the rationalists M. M. Kalburgi, Govind Pansare and Narendra Dabholkar have been killed for this. Obedient recitation rather than academic citation.

Let us imagine a time without writers. All that we write and speak are quotes: restricted to the same set of permissible and unburned books, mandatory slogans, and the drill. Bereft of the aggressive use of language to lure in the future, quotation marks will become redundant. The same number of statements – whether they are in quotes or not will make no difference anymore – will repeat. There will be no new novels written, no breakthroughs in science. This will be the end of our politics, sciences, and the arts. We will no longer refer to a past and project a future. Guns, tanks, and khaki shorts are going to be the only difference we will then have with the primitive societies, from which this coming society will in all other respects be indiscernible.

The right to remain silent

When new statements are suppressed by being declared seditious, the potentiality of language secedes from us. In India, we are now beginning a fight for our right to not speak the words that are against our conscience, such as declaring our allegiance through slogans and songs for a fair skinned upper caste housewife swathed in silk and gold, who loves to straddle wildlife, and lusts for real estate all the way from Iran to Philippines.

In 2008 “the assailants chanted […]” before a nun was raped in Kandhamal. When Kanhaiya Kumar suffered custodial beating it was apparently to force him to speak the words that were not his own “We thrashed him for three hours and we also forced him to say […]”. If the thugs who boasted about this incident spoke the truth, then, the machinery of the state will have been an accomplice to compelled speech. When it was said “an amendment should be made in the law so that everyone says it” we wondered about the rituals to be followed. Are we to chant it before all meals? Are we to chant it when we are not speaking other matters? Are we to chant only it, and utter no other word? Now, they tell us that this slogan needs more lebensraum: “We want the whole world to chant […]”. The unmistakable suggestion of the lust for the ‘whole world’ is alarming. The right to remain silent is necessarily implicit in the right to speak freely. We will say what we want to. We will not say what you want us to.

If we do not fight back and write back we will have achieved the subcontinental version of the ceremonial society of the Nazi Germany. Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film Triumph of the Will captured the primitive society that Germany became: all men and women content to repeat the words of the Führer, the drill, the uniforms, the marches – a people celebrating the sacrifice of all their faculties in order to take the modern form of the ceremonial society. The repugnant drill that is carried out in the play grounds by the men in khaki shorts could soon be all of us, our everyday.

Today, our statements towards the future are suspended – allegedly – by physical threats and penal intimidation. We are beaten – allegedly – for language still clings to us. We are shot in our homes – allegedly – for putting pathetic ceremonies in quotes. We are imprisoned – allegedly – for we are not blind to injustice. We are being amputated from each other, since we will soon have no words left to exchange – allegedly. We watch language seceding from us with the tranquillity of an animal that is being eaten alive.

Our regression into the ongoing discourse about who chanted which profane slogans and which sacred slogans all must chant is the desiccation of language and the withering of lives in the subcontinent.

It is not late to enquire into the ways in which we are letting the whole of language slip into quotes and become ceremonialised. Centuries of ceremonial mnemonics practiced as knowledge in the subcontinent, and the ritualised social order were repeated in the postcolonial decades too. It is not merely a discriminatory education system that sent the poor and the lower castes to entirely inadequate schools, colleges and universities; it is also the ‘rote learning’ system which enforces conformity into all young minds: the outdated syllabi, the doctrinal history books, absence of philosophy in the schools, question papers that repeated for decades, the answer sheets in circulation since the first questions appeared, the class rooms that demanded obedience and ceremonial repetitions. That is, we systematically inhibited the possibility of free thinking people and aggressive writers.

The aggression of language

It is this pathology that makes us play our politics through quotes today when we demand our freedoms by invoking the long gone greats: we do not have to quote Tagore to say that any kind of nationalism is a mass movement for psychopaths; we do not need Gandhi to speak about the illegitimacy of having a sedition law; we won’t be helped by quoting Bhagat Singh to demand the freedom to be irreligious. There are many things spoken by the great figures of the past that are entirely disagreeable to us. And, as we can see, these authoritative quotes are worth nothing today. We need to write our own revolutionary statements.

Without the aggression of language that breaks free of every holy land, we risk being embargoed into a ceremonial colony, even geographically, in the subcontinent. The writer is someone who breaks through the ceremonial idolatry and the desiccated surfaces of a tired language in order to bring new matter, be she the practitioner of fiction, history or philosophy. The writer, free of the quotation marks, gives something new to contest. She may inaugurate a new polemics as when Hannah Arendt reported on the trial of the Nazi, Adolf Eichmann. He may obtain for us a new region in language, as when Eduardo Galeano brought politics and the tragic into football writing. He may speak of the unspeakable, as when the French philosopher Sartre wrote about the French involvement in the Holocaust. She may draw new lines of demarcation, as when Ada Byron wrote the first computer program.

A writer represents the aggression of language, someone who gives new matter for the inverted commas to swaddle, as new points of departure for the others. The writer is the step leader for lightning to strike. Rohith Vemula’s final message is our step leader, and it contains the following words: “I always wanted to be a writer”. The measure of the writer is the terror she inspires in the ceremonial orders of power. Each writer brings into language a new style of aggression. When Perumal Murugan wrote, “Writer Perumal Murugan is dead”, he practiced the style of proscription – declaring the secession of his language from fascism. He left his statement to us as an augury as dreadful as that of a land where nature withdraws into aridness. There is another style of the transmutation: when our writers condemned the state for its intolerance, the honours and awards bestowed by it became shingles, which they threw back. Today, we are in need of all our writers, the writer in all of us. We are in need of lightning strikes. So that we can write, grinding our teeth: Back off!

Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan are philosophers based in the subcontinent.