Atrociticies and collective memory

It is always them. The victors are the ones who write history, and they tend to blame the losers for the horrors of war. However, there is hardly a better example of the hypocritical fashion in which we have built our moral self-image than the historical obliviousness surrounding the Allies behaviour in the final year of the Second World War. Whereas crimes committed by the German, the Japanese, and the rest of the Axis members during the War have been extensively documented, it is striking how scarcely the deliberate murder of civilians (particularly Germans) in huge proportions by the British and American forces in 1944 appears in Western history books -even in German ones-, as if this exercise on collective awareness and memory was not necessary, as if we in the West were naturally immune to brutality, as if it was the remotest possibility it could happen again, with us as perpetrators. After all, it is well known no one else is to blame but them, whoever they are…

Here is an account of the Allied bombardments of Dresden and other German cities during the last years of the War: (1)

“In May 1942, Cologne became the first target of the Tausenbombernacht, as the victims called them. But Berlin was the favoured objective, it was ‘the evil capital’ and the lair of ‘the Huns’ […] on the night of 18 November, 1943, the city was bombarded by an airbone fleet of almost 450 bombers. The operation was repeated a few weeks later, but now with 750 planes. Entire neighbourhoods were in flames. 2,000 people were killed. […] On 26 February, 1944, old Alexanderplatz went up in a sea of flames and exploding ‘blockbusters’. By that point more than 1.5 million citizens of Berlin had been ausgebombt. In the end, seventy per cent of the city would be reduced to rubble. […] In Hamburg, on 28 July, 1943, the first firtestorm was created. People ran down the street like living torches; almost 40,000 suffocated in the burning cyclone or were roasted alive in bomb shelters that quickly became as hot as ovens. […] During the German bombardments of England. 60,000 civilians were killed, 90,000 were badly wounded and another 150,000 were injured. The Allied raids of Germany claimed five times that number, around 300,000 victims, including 75,000 children. Almost 800,000 people were badly wounded. Seven million Germans were left homeless, and a fifth of all the country´s houses were destroyed.  The effect of the bombings on the German war industry, however, was far less severe. […] This disproportion between industrial damage and civilian casualties was no accident. It was a concious policy. […] For every ton of bombs that landed on London, Coventry and a few other places, the British and the Americans dropped more than 300 tons back on Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne, Nuremberg and other German cities. […] The bombardment of civilians became a special science. […] A pronounced preference arose for residential neighbourhoods, as being more susceptible to ‘demoralisation’. Specialists calculated which bomb could best be used to destroy which building, how a firestorm could be created by first using a blockbuster to blow out all doors and windows, how a house could quickly be set alight by adjusting a bomb to explode only after it had first crashed through three floors. To kill firemen and other helpers, time bombs were dropped that went off only 36, 72 or 144 hours after deployment. […] On the night of 13 February, 1945, Dresden was full of refugees from the East. The city had no war industry to speak of, but that was not the point. Precisely according to plan, a firestorm raced through the streets within half an hour of the first bombs falling. To maximise the number of victims, the British and American strategists had devised a triple-whammy. They knew that, in a burning city, bomb shelters provided protection only for about three hours. After that the ground and the walls became so hot that everyone had to go back outside. It was at precisely that moment that the second attack came. The citizens of Dresden had to choose between the sea of fire outside and the oven-like bomb shelters within. Then, while everyone was busy saving themselves and others, a third attack followed. […] Today, local historians […] estimate the number of people killed in the bombardment of Dresden at 25-30,000. In the old market square in the centre of town, a funeral pyre was built that burned for five whole weeks. The cremation was supervised by SS Sturmbahnführer Karl Streibel, who had gained his experience burning bodies at the Treblinka death camp.”

Can we say we in the West have left behind and for good this kind of brutality? What on earth makes us think we are vaccinated against its resurgence, specially when we have decided to remain intentionally and shamefully ignorant about our recent past?

(1) Geert Mak, 2008, In Europe. Travels Through the Twentieth Century, New York, Vintage, pp. 560-561, 563-567.

Read on:

W. G. Sebald, 2003, On the Natural History of Destruction, New York, Random House [originally published in German in 1999 as Luftkrieg und Literatur, Munich, Hanser Verlarg].

Victor Klemperer, 1997, Das Tagebuch 1933-1945, Berlin, Aufbau-Taschenbuch Verlarg.

Michael Ignatieff, 2000, Virtual War. Kosovo and Beyond, New York, Metropolitan Books.

Photo: Dresden after World War II © Emory U.

Taboo, dignity and purpose

A judge from Augsburg, in Germany, has forbidden Gunther von Hagens from showing a couple of corpses having sex in the exhibition opening this month in the city. Von Hagens, medical doctor and Professor, invented the plastination technique, which allows to preserve corpses and display them in different postures, something he has been doing for pedagogic purposes in a number of exhibitions around the world, which bear the title of Koerperwelten. The judge claims the composition with the bodies shows contempt for human dignity.

As it happens, the exhibition has been open during the whole Summer in Berlin, where it raised no controversy, and one has to wonder why this part “shows contempt for human dignity” and other bodies displayed in the same exhibition playing the saxophone or catching a rugby ball do not. Perhaps the judge was influenced by two widespread taboos which play a role here, those of sex and death. However, in this region of the world freedom of expression is a paramount social value, and prohibiting an exhibition is a serious legal decision, which here would only be justified if it actually showed “contempt for human dignity”. It seems this is not the case.

The judge appears not to have taken into account the pedagogical purpose of the Koerperwelten exhibitions, which apparently has not offended the thousands of visitors that attend them each year in different countries and continents, which surely will have different perspectives regarding the representation of death. I attended one of these exhibitions years ago in Berlin and found it fascinating and very interesting. To judge by their attitude, the hundreds of other visitors that day had similar feelings.

In matters of freedom of expression, the rule should be “everything is allowed except…”, and the list of exceptions should be a minimum one, aimed at preserving human dignity, yes, but considering the matter on a case by case basis, and always assessing from an ethical point of view the purposes of the author and the coherence of means and ends. For instance, should we allow the display of explicit images of forced sex betwen adults and children, or of a human execution, devoid of any context? I would say we should not. Should one be free to show those images in, say, a movie, a book, an exhibition, etc., maybe not explicitly, in a meaningful context and with a purpose most would deem ethically acceptable? I would say one should.

I am well aware of the many caveats raised my choice of terms -”ethically acceptable”, “assesing purposes”, “coherence”-, and that this clearly is a moral minefield. However, a liberal system of values -the one we should cherish in our liberal societies- should hold freedom as its highest moral tenet, devising criteria -as morally sound as possible- aimed at making the list of exceptions to this rule a minimum one. Otherwise, it is all paternalism and censorship.

On a final note, I must admit that even the extreme examples I gave a couple of paragraphs before are not very useful to establish the moral boundaries of what we can legitimately display in the public realm. A few years ago, I attended an art exhibition in the P.S.1 museum in New York, which showed an excerpt of an old black and white movie in one of the rooms. In the film we could see a group of white hunters aboard an helicopter, flying above a tropical forest and shooting people with their rifles - apparently, members of an indigenous tribe, who run scared in all directions. Each time they hit one of them, the hunters would celebrate it blatantly. Brutal fictional images, I thought. However, these images became breathtakingly disgusting when minutes after I read the movie was not fictional: it was part of a recovered footage of real human hunting in the Amazon forest in the 70s, hunting for pleasure, as in a normal sport. Perhaps the judge of Augsburg would have censored this exhibition if it had taken place in his city, and for the very same reasons that lead him to censor part of von Hagens´ exhibition, but in doing so, he would have served very poorly the cause of human dignity, for the message the artist wanted to convey when showing this real movie -the radical, unthinkable and utmost inhumanity we could express towards our fellow individuals- reached this visitor deeply, and more so when this message was devoid of any obvious context (just the screen and some brief lines stating it was a real movie). The film itself rendered any description redundant from a moral point of view. Was this bare displaying obscene? Yes, it was. But it made us reflect on something -respect for human life- we carelessly take for granted, and this reflection started in our guts. Nothing short of sheer revulsion could have had such a moral effect.

Photo: Two corpses at the Koerperwelten exhibit in Berlin, 2009 © Koerperwelten.de

Freedom and civic courage

I still have many progressive acquaintances that purport to cherish freedom, but would never criticize autocratic regimes… if they happen to be “leftist”, that is. These people would do themselves a favor if they watched attentively the film The lives of others (Das Leben der Anderen, Germany, 2006, directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck). What would they say then about states that destroyed so meticulously the lives of so many people on behalf of socialism? Would they agree with the claim that building an egalitarian society required spying most citizens, looking at every aspect of private, individual lives, and locking up or eliminating all those over who fell the slightest shadow of a paranoic doubt of disloyalty to the regime, proof of what could often be the mere possesion of a Western newspaper? Perhaps they would try to convince themselves that this events happened long time ago, sidestepping the fact that the terrorist practices of the Eastern European socialist governments against their own citizens were in place until 1989, or that it was a corruption of the true ideas of socialism. But how to avoid linking the millions of lives destroyed by regimes like the former DDR with those being equally destroyed nowadays in Cuba, China or Venezuela, for instance? Those who experienced first hand the fear of the secret police, censorship, and terror at some point in their lives are much more willing to stand up for individual freedom than some of those who were born in a free society, take their liberties for granted, and for whom being progressive is just an empty aesthetic exercise which requires no critical, honest thinking. After all, Nazism and Communism arrived in Germany after decades of constitutional and semi- or fully democratic governments. Those ones that tend to think democracy can defend itself -or worst: that governments will safeguard our liberties, and that it is a task requiring no individual effort on our side- should take the best lessons from this excellent film. On the other hand, and timely related to the film, two days ago the Hungarian President Laszlo Solyom and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel commemorated the 20th Anniversay of the so called “Pan-European picnic”, an spontaneous meeting of East Germans and Hungarians in the border between Austria and Hungary that helped precipitate the fall of the Berlin wall (“Hungary Remembers Picnic That Cracked Iron Curtain”, thanks for the link, J.), and which is the perfect example of the civic courage needed to fight totalitarianism. How many of us here in the Western world would show nowadays the same resolution if our liberties were in danger?

Photo: Das Leben der Anderen, 2006 © moviezkult

Some thoughts on recent readings

Which metaphorical object could we employ to describe Paul Auster´s intricate plots in his novels? A jigsaw puzzle? A matrioshka? I personally would choose the expression ‘hub and spokes’. According to the Oxford American Dictionary, the phrase hub-and-spoke denotes ‘a system of air transportation in which local airports offer flights to a central airport where international or long-distance flights are available.’ The concept conjures up the image of a bicycle wheel, and Auster´s novels often seem to recall a group of wheels disparagedly intersecting with each other, with different main stories and characters tangled up with minor ones in a sort of complex web. Furthermore, you never know in which direction the story will be developing and which characters and events will end up being paramount to it. Something you may be absolutely certain about, however, and this is the author´s trademark, is that pure chance will play a big role at fuelling the plot. Admittedly, The Brooklyn Follies (London, Faber and Faber, 2005) may not reach the height of Paul Auster´s chef-d´oeuvre, Moon Palace, yet it is Auster in full swing, with its colorful characters, its detailed Manhattan-Brooklyn background, its convoluted turns of action and its masterly description of the overcoming power of chance and coincidence to alter our daily lives in unsuspected ways.

It may not be his best creation, and besides, it gives you the impression of being a hasty assembled potshumous book (nothing to blame on the author himself), but W. G. Sebald´s collection of incomplete literary sketches on Corsica -plus some essays- entitled Campo Santo (Barcelona, Anagrama, 2007; originally published in German with the same title by Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003), contains pieces which should be counted among his best works and are on a level with his masterpiece, Austerlitz. I am speaking of chapters such as ‘Campo Santo’, on the role of death in Corsican traditions; ‘Between history and natural history’ (on the literary description of total destruction)’, reviewing the German literary approach to the massive bombing of German cities by Western allies during World War II, something he addressed at lenght in his On the natural history of destruction; and ‘An attempt at restitution’, an inclassifiable bildungs-like short essay on his literary and personal maturation. I consider this last piece a jewel whose beauty and power to conjure up images and reflections may move anyone to tears.

I admit it. It may be heretic to some, but I am overwhelmed by the infinite sadness and the weighty role of routine in Fernando Pessoa´s account of a clerk´s immobile life -sure, there is an ultra-rich inner life in him, on the other hand- in Libro del desasosiego [Livro do desassossego / Book of disquietude] (Barcelona, Acantilado, 2003), despite the beautiful, musical translation into Spanish and the meticulous edition of Acantilado Publishers, a real pleasure for readers. As a second heresy (some will wonder why on earth should I compare these two Portuguese authors), I prefer the more classical in style works of Jose Maria Eça de Queiroz. However, there is much more of Pessoa to read before I give up.

Photo: Soho, New York City, 2007 © Loudsoul