The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert -- Book Review Discussion
The
Dark Room, a novel
By
Rachel Seiffert. New York: Vintage
International/Random House. 2001. pp.
278.
I used to be a darkroom photographer, and have spent many
hours processing photographs with film and paper and chemicals struggling to
get a print just exactly right in a darkroom under safe lights. So I could relate very well to the opening
vignette in this triptych novel set in Germany from the 1920s until the end of
the twentieth century.
The book is actually three independent novellas, the first
of which, called Helmut, is the story of
a boy growing up in Berlin during the Nazi era.
It is the shortest of the three and my favorite. The character, Helmut, is the most appealing
person in the book and his observations of life in Berlin and his development
as a photographer had special resonance for me.
The last novella, Micha, is the crux of the book and the motivation and
impetus for writing it, I think.
However, I find this novella the least appealing, although it offers the
most in substantive issues that will dominate the discussion presented here.
In each novella photography makes an appearance, and
Seiffert seems to have intimate knowledge of photography and processing photos
in a darkroom. The title of the book, The Dark Room, ostensibly refers to
Helmut's use of the darkroom for processing his photographs. Apart from that there is nothing else that
relates to the title and by the end of the book, one is left wondering what the
title of the book has to do with the content, because the darkroom is not
central to the story line or to the larger issues raised by the book.
Reading Helmut, I could feel that the story was written by a
woman. Although the protagonist is a man,
a handicapped man in fact, he has the sensibility and temperament of a
woman. He cries way too much for a
man. This is true of all the men
throughout this book, with the exception of Kolesnik in the last segment, Micha.
They all seem like women in men's bodies. They are always crying over one thing or
another, confused, and ambivalent, unsure of themselves, indecisive. This is particularly so in the case of
Micha. He is the most feminine and most
conflicted of all the male characters in the book, and I think the one closest
to Seiffert's own voice and perspective.
Helmut's story is told in a tone of detachment, it has a surreal quality
that makes it very interesting. Helmut
is absorbed within himself, seems almost oblivious to the political ferment
going on around him. He seems to go
about his daily business unconscious of the momentous changes happening in
German society under the Nazis. For
example, there is a description of his rising one morning and finding broken
glass on the sidewalk. There is no
explanation or analysis of where the broken glass came from, but the
implication is that it was the result of Nazi gangs smashing the windows of
shopkeepers who were either Jewish or anti-Nazi. Helmut simply sweeps it up apparently without
reflection or reaction.
He has a preoccupation from childhood with watching the comings
and goings of trains at the Berlin Bahnhof.
During the war years his observations reveal that Berlin is slowly being
depopulated, and he carefully documents this development on a daily basis. But he does not question it. He does not ask himself why this is happening. He does not seem to reflect on his acute
observations. He is observationally
engaged, but emotionally detached. He seems
to have only minimal sexual interest for an adolescent boy. Helmut finds some pictures of nude women in a
stash of magazines kept hidden away by his employer, Gladigau. "At night he conjures the images against
his bedroom ceiling as the long, slow freight trains clatter below, a soothing
rhythm of sleep." (p.12) That's all
the sex he gets in the first twenty-four years of his life.
The middle of the three segments centers around a young girl names Lore. Her age is not given, but
one surmises her approximate age must be twelve to fourteen at most. She has a younger sister Liesel, who is
probably eight to ten, two twin brothers who must be six or seven, and an
infant brother, Peter, who is a babe in arms.
The story takes place at the end of the war and their mother, who
appears to have been a Nazi operative of some sort, is being taken into
detention by the invading Americans. She
instructs Lore to take the children on a trek from southern Germany to their
grandmother's residence in Hamburg far to the north, and gives her money and
jewelry for the trip.
The mother then
disappears and the story becomes the adventurous trek of this small troop of
children making their way the length of Germany to Hamburg, largely on foot,
during the chaos and uncertainty of the aftermath of the war. A rather unlikely and unhopeful scenario, I
think, but Sieffert's sensitive writing style and attention to detail make one
want to believe it. Along the way they
pick up an additional companion, an older boy named Tomas, who at first appears
to be Jew who has been released from a concentration camp by the
Americans. Later it seems that he may
have been a soldier or a prison guard who stole the identity of a dead Jew to
escape detection by the Americans (pp. 150-52).
Tomas befriends the young group and proves himself vital to their success
in completing the journey.
The story is a succession of perils and hardship which the
children negotiate with a combination of resourcefulness and luck. It gets a little repetitive after a while,
but there is enough richness and variety to keep it from dragging. Seiffert is a good story teller with a vivid
imagination for detail that keeps her narrative alive and moving.
There is almost no mention of sex or sexual interest in this
whole book, which is remarkable in a book featuring adolescents. The only glimpse we have of any sexual
experience in Lore is a negative one.
Lore is awakened by noises in
the dark. English male voices,
whispering. German female, coaxing. Shifting rubble, no more talking, only breathing.
Lore knows Tomas is awake, too. She is uncomfortable under the blankets,
shifts back against the cold grit of the bricks behind her. She doesn't want to hear what they are doing
under the ruined walls. She counts the
beams on the floor above her to block it out, but her mind keeps forming
pictures. Liesel turns over next to
her. Lore fights the urge to cover her
sister's ears.
There is whispering, and after
that, walking.
Lore wakes again later to more
noise: stifled breath and sobs. She
battles her straining ears, wills herself to sleep again. The sounds are closer, muffled by blankets,
not rubble walls. Lore allows herself to
listen to the dark around her.
Tomas
cries with his jacket over his face, arms wrapped over the top to keep the
sound inside. He pulls in gasps of air,
body a heaving shadow against the opposite wall. Lore doesn't want to see it or hear it. She would cry, only his tears have taken
over. She lies, awake and furious, until
daylight seeps through the cracks in the brickwork over her face. (p. 133-34)
What a prude she is! This
doesn't sound like the sensibility of a very young, presumably inexperienced,
girl. I would expect more curiosity and
receptiveness in a girl of that age. To
me this seems like the very unattractive attitude of an older woman, who has
been conditioned to shut out and devalue sexual experience and react to it in a
negative way. It is rather un-German, I
think. That's the juiciest part of this
book. A very negative, sanitized presentation
of young people coming of age.
On the cover of the book an anonymous critic from the
Philadelphia Inquirer is quoted who calls the book a novel about the German
soul in the twentieth century. I fear
many people will be misled by this. This
novel doesn't come anywhere close to being about the German soul. It purports to be an exploration of the
German soul, it tries to present itself in this way, but this is a novel about
an English woman trying to come to terms with her own conflicted feelings about
Germans and Germany.
The characters do not seem like Germans. They have German names and they are set in
Germany, but to me they don't feel like German people. The male characters do not feel like men, as
I mentioned earlier. In two of the three
stories the protagonists are male and in the Lore episode there is a male
character, Tomas, who plays a significant role.
The only male character who seems authentically male and authentically
German is Kolesnik, in the final segment, Micha,
and he is cast as Polish rather than German.
This is a woman writing about a subject and a domain that is
quintessentially male, namely, warfare.
There is nothing wrong with a woman offering her perspective on warfare
through the medium of a novel. It can be
a valuable and illuminating perspective.
But this novel is disingenuous in that it purports to represent male
soul searching and conflict over the nature of war and wartime atrocities, when
it is in fact a gently aggressive, judgmental, moralistic attack on the
brutality and excess of warfare from a very female perspective of naive shock
and outrage. Seiffert's position amounts
to "How could you do such a thing, Grandpa?" She finds it hard to grasp how men who can
shoot young children in cold blood can still love their families and be good
citizens.
Micha, more
than any other character and more than the other two novellas, represents what
Seiffert really wants to get at in this book.
Micha is a German man, probably in his 20s, who, as a hobby, takes up
tracing his own family history. The
story is set in 1997, so he is looking back over a century of upheaval,
warfare, and social disarray that his forebears had lived through. This leads to an investigation of his
deceased grandfather who was in the Waffen SS stationed in Belarus.
The Waffen SS in Belarus and Poland committed some of the
most bestial atrocities of the war.
After the war the German government labeled it a criminal
organization. Their behavior was extreme
even by SS standards. In Poland they
were so wantonly rampaging that Heinrich Himmler had to send a battalion of SS
police to make sure they did not attack their own commanders and other German
units in the vicinity.
Micha became obsessed to find out for sure if his grandfather
had participated in any of that, or if he was the teddy bear that he always
knew him to be. After the war, the
Russians had kept his grandfather in prison for nine years. He did not rejoin his family in Germany until
1954. That ought to serve as a clue.
Micha digs up where his grandfather had been
stationed in Belarus and some of the atrocities that had gone on there. He makes several journeys to Belarus to
investigate and after a lengthy negotiation, interviews a Polish man named
Kolesnik, who was there and saw what happened and was himself a
participant. Kolesnik essentially stands
in for the deceased grandfather, and is the screen against which Seiffert
projects the issues that are preoccupying her in the writing of this book.
After page 220, I became disgusted with it, and by page 250,
I was raining down the full brunt of my wrath upon it. It was when Micha was photographing Kolesnik
and his wife (p. 254-55) that Seiffert tipped her hand and I saw her for what
she is. Elena (Kolesnik's wife) wants to
take a photograph of Kolesnik and Micha together, but Micha refuses to be
photographed with Kolesnik. Why did he
refuse to be photographed with this man with whom he had established a
relationship of trust and who had been sharing intimate confidences of an
utmost personal nature over several months?
Why would he not want to participate in a permanent commemoration of the
relationship? The photograph would
represent a personal bond and an acknowledgment of this personal quest that
Micha had embarked upon. The refusal
indicates a rejection of Kolesnik by Micha as well as a hypocrisy in that he
wishes to deny, both to himself and others, the personal connection he had
forged with Kolesnik in order to induce him to talk. This refusal shows that he is not reaching
out to Kolesnik from the heart to create a personal bond of trust and mutual
understanding, rather he is seducing Kolesnik in order to use him to satisfy
his own personal need: when he is finished with him he will discard him. It is dishonest and disgusting. I think it is a crucial moment in the novel
in that it is not just a further development of the character of Micha, but
rather a revelation of Seiffert's attitude and purpose in writing the
story.
Seiffert is still fighting the war and still fighting within
herself how to regard Germany and German people, particularly of the World War
II generation. She herself is not a
wounded victim. Her family did not suffer
under the Nazis. This grudge comes from
an attitude of moral outrage over the atrocities committed in the war. She is making it personal by setting it in
the context of a family, a German family -- at least a German family as she
imagines them. But I think it is a false
picture, or at best very atypical.
What is offensive about this book is not so much its point
of view, although I take strong exception to it, but that it purports to be
something that it isn't. As such it will
misguide and misinform English speaking readers about German people and German
culture. If even critics like the
reviewers for New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer are befooled, then
what of the general reader?
This book is a fraud, but I will tell you the truth. I was in Berlin last fall and observed a
vibrant, thriving, multicultural city growing rapidly and moving forward into
the future with high energy and enthusiasm.
But it is also a city very conscious of its past, much more than any
American city I have ever seen. The
contrast between past and present in Berlin is evident in nearly every
block. The weight of the past is visible
in the architecture, old and new, the streets, the public art visible all over
the city, and in the minds and conversations of the residents. But it is nothing like the anguish and
ambivalence that you see in Seiffert.
Today there is a community of approximately 12,000 Jews
living in Berlin. There are active
synagogues, a large, very interesting Jewish Museum, opened in 2001, and a
sizeable Memorial to the Murdered Jews of
Europe, opened May 2005, just one block south of the Brandenburg Gate. I was told by a tour guide that it was built
on the site of Josef Goebbels residence during the Nazi era, but I was not able
to verify this. This memorial is very
controversial in many respects, but the fact that such a substantial memorial,
extending over nearly five acres, exists in such a prominent place in the city
is evidence of official repudiation of the Nazi policies and attitudes toward
Jews and everyone. That is a firm
conviction literally set in stone. The
architect who designed it was an American Jew named Peter Eisenman. In the following excerpt from an interview
with Der Spiegel (May 9, 2005) he
comments on the memorial and its psychological meaning and purpose.
Spiegel Online: Who is the monument for? Is it for the Jews?
Eisenman: It's for the German people. I don't think it was ever intended to be for
the Jews. It's a wonderful expression of
the German people to place something in the middle of their city that reminds
them -- could remind them -- of the past.
Spiegel Online: An expression of guilt, you mean? Some have criticized the monument by saying
it looks like a gigantic cemetery.
Eisenman: No.
For me it wasn't about guilt.
When looking at Germans, I have never felt a sense that they are
guilty. I have encountered anti-Semitism
in the United States as well. Clearly
the anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1930s went overboard and it is clearly a
terribly moment in history. But how long
does one feel guilty? Can we get over
that?
I have always thought that this
monument was about trying to get over this question of guilt. Whenever I come here, I arrive feeling like
an American. But by the time I leave, I
feel like a Jew. And why is that? Because Germans go out of their way -- because
I am a Jew -- to make me feel good. And
that makes me feel worse. I can't deal
with it. Stop making me feel good. If you are anti-Semitic, fine. If you don't like me personally, fine. But deal with me as an individual, not as a
Jew. I would hope that this memorial, in
its absence of guilt-making, is part of the process of getting over that
guilt. You cannot live with guilt. If Germany did, then the whole country would
have to go to an analyst. I don't know
how else to say it.
The memorial and the behavior of the Germans toward the
architect illustrate a decisive repudiation of Nazi-ism within the mainstream
German culture. There is no
squeamishness about facing up to the past as represented in The Dark Room. This memorial in the center of Berlin is vast.
It doesn't show any indecisiveness or unwillingness to face up to the
issue. At the same time a controversy
blew up during the construction of the memorial because of a coating on the
stone slabs meant to inhibit the scrawling of graffiti on them.
It happened that the company that manufactured this coating to preserve
the Jewish Memorial from defacement was also the same company that manufactured
the gas that was used to poison Jews in the concentration camps.
The product was to have been provided by Degussa, a big German chemical
company.
Now it turns out that Degussa once owned Degesch,
the firm that produced the Zyklon B used to gas Jews in concentration camps. At first,
nobody noticed—or nobody wanted to notice. But then the press discovered the
link, reportedly after being tipped off by a Swiss company that had hoped to
win the contract until Degussa decided to donate half the material needed.
After the story broke, the memorial's board of trustees, after an
apparently heated discussion, concluded that using the firm's product, called
Protectosil, would be “unacceptable given the specific nature of the Memorial
project”. It advised the construction company to stop using the coating until
another product could be found.
Degussa has not, in fact, been one of the companies that shies away from
its past. It is an active member in the foundation created by German companies
to compensate victims of forced labour. And it has commissioned researchers to
look into its history, without having any say over what they publish.
This behavior is by no means exceptional these days. Since the
mid-1990s, says Manfred Pohl, a historian and head of corporate cultural
affairs at Deutsche Bank, most large German companies have reappraised their
history. It is now time, he argues, to forgive them (not the same as
forgetting). By excluding Degussa from the Holocaust memorial, an opportunity
has been missed to do just that. One could also claim that it is unfair to
penalise today's shareholders or employees of Degussa for the actions of the
company in the past. (The Economist, October 30, 2003)
It is exactly the same issue in play in Seiffert's
novel. But the Germans do not show the
anxiety and confusion and paralysis before the issue that Micha shows. He does not represent typical German
attitudes or behavior. Germans are quite
good about facing up to the issue. They might come to differing conclusions,
but they are almost always decisive and surefooted in whatever their
direction. Germans want to get on with
it. That doesn't mean they want to
forget. They are not deniers. But the kind of anxious preoccupation shown in
Sieffert's lead character is very un-German in my eyes.
When I was in graduate school, I took several seminars that
fell under the umbrella description of "Ethics." We studied books by authors such as John
Rawls and Robert Nozick. I was shocked
at how naive and simple-minded they were, and the crudeness of the methods
whereon these intellectual edifices were constructed. My professors took it all very seriously, but
I had undisguised contempt for what I was being taught. The professors and the authors of these books
believe that there are timeless principles of ethical conduct that are
independent of time and circumstance and culture, and that they can be
discerned and refined by a process of concocting (usually) hypothetical
situations and then testing various alternatives and outcomes against our
"intuitions." In the case of
Robert Nozick it was individual rights, in the case of John Rawls, it was
principles of distributive justice. My
professors had great faith in this faculty of moral intuition which they
thought was inherent in people and could lead in principle to universal
agreement. Absolute standards of Right
and Wrong could be discerned and applied to people and events independent of
cultural or historical frames of reference.
For example, Aristotle, and virtually everyone in the
ancient world, took slavery for granted and never questioned its legitimacy as
an institutionalized social practice. My
professors thought that today, from our vantage point of modern enlightenment,
we can judge with finality that Aristotle was wrong and that those ancient societies
were unjust with the same surety that we can judge that their calculation of
the circumference of the earth was wrong as well as their conception of the
causes of disease. In other words,
"ethics" can make "progress," and our understanding of
proper moral conduct can be "improved." In fact, human beings can themselves be made
better in terms of their moral character should they apply these advances in
ethical insight to their daily lives. By
implication, some people can be judged to be morally superior to others with
absolute certitude and conviction. One
professor once asserted with fervent conviction the he was a better human being
than Adolf Hitler. I nearly laughed in
his face. This whole project of constructing
these "ethical" systems by which human beings could be evaluated and
compared seemed to me to be breathtakingly arrogant, naive, and stupid. Unworthy of serious scholarly consideration. I couldn't believe they were teaching this in
a university and that they expected me to read this stuff and take it
seriously. They judged me to be devoid
of capacity for ethical thinking and unsuitable to even be in graduate
school. We didn't like each other.
This approach and mindset behind all of these modern
formulations of universal human rights and war crimes goes back to Immanuel
Kant in the late 18th century, who believed that moral principles must be
understood a priori, that is independent of the contingencies of time,
circumstance, and experience. A categorical
imperative is one whose validity and applicability is universal, that is, in
all circumstances and it is justified as an end in itself -- as opposed to
being a means toward some greater good.
How one recognizes such imperatives and applies them to practical
situations is not easy to grasp, but Kant had great faith in reason and he also
believed that we had an innate sense of what was right that was not dependent
on experience, that conscience tempered by reason could yield access to this
inner light of moral right. This was
roughly the approach that my professors believed in and tried unsuccessfully to
inculcate in me.
I think Rachel Seiffert believes something similar to what
my ethics professors believed, although she doesn't think in these grand
philosophical superstructures, but I feel that same revulsion toward her and
what she is doing that I felt toward them.
She thinks she can judge her Waffen SS grandfather with the same
righteous certitude that my professor felt when he asserted his moral
superiority to Adolf Hitler. What is
offensive about it is that Seiffert and the professor think they are delivering
"objective" judgments that have universal validity rather than
subjective reactions. They want to claim
a correctness that goes beyond themselves and their own subjectivity, the
limitations and contingencies of their own personal point of view and position
in the world. This
"correctness" can be imposed as "truth" on anyone. It is not simply a point of view. It is what everyone should think. This
is what is objectionable.
I probably would not like her son of a bitch Nazi
grandfather either, and I'm sure I wouldn't care much for Adolf Hitler. But that is because of who I am, how I have
been brought up, my values and goals and assumptions about life that have been
shaped by long experience and the time in which I live. I do not claim that they has any validity
beyond myself. I'm willing to concede
that others with different experience in different times and circumstances may
see things differently. Seiffert and the
philosophy professors are not.
I am squarely in the Nietzschean camp, who reject Kant and
any attempt to formulate moral principles that are absolute and universal. Moral sentiments have to be understood as
arising not from abstract principles, reason, or some window of universal
conscience, but in deep, visceral, emotional reactions. When we see the piles of emaciated bodies in
the concentration camps, our reaction of shock and horror is not a reasoned
inference based on some universal principle.
It is a gut reaction of the most visceral emotion. Our sense of morality, our understanding of
Right and Wrong, begins in these primitive emotional responses. Principles are abstractions that attempt to
generalize from these primitive feelings to guide our future conduct and judge
the conduct of others in situations that might have less immediate clarity. But the fundamental basis for morality is our
human emotional dispositions. As such,
moral preconceptions are highly variable and dependent on time, circumstance,
culture, experience, and personal psychology.
They are inherently precluded from ever becoming anything like a
universal imperative or a consensus across humanity. Attempts to formulate a universal moral code
or universal moral principles is an exercise in futility. At best it is self-deception. At worst it is hypocrisy and a legitimization
of authoritarianism.
Rachel Seiffert, without being self-conscious about it, does
have this predominant religio-Kantian context operating in the background and
takes its presumptions for granted. Her
book can be seen as an illustration of how this absolutist attitude toward
moral principles plays out in the interpersonal relations of a family and the
estrangements and antagonisms that result.
The advantage of my point of view over Seiffert's or the
ethics professors' is that it allows greater openness, greater flexibility, and
greater tolerance. The ethics professors
who believe in absolute Rights and Wrongs are afraid to let anyone think
differently from themselves. They want
to feel like their rightness is not limited to themselves and therefore they
are justified in imposing their judgments of right and wrong on others and in
requiring others to follow their mandates and conform to their standards. It is the instinct of the religious
priesthood in a different guise. Instead
of being the spokesmen for God, they claim to be speaking for "all
humanity." We don't need it, and
its arrogance and blindness is a potentially dangerous, pathological force in
society.
I can like people that I don't like and the contradiction
does not bother me. Seiffert, believing
as she does in absolute rights and wrongs, always has to be aligned with the
side of right and never with the side of wrong.
She is convinced that there is a right and a wrong from which to orient
oneself. She can never allow herself to
like someone who is evil. Micha thinks
he will never get used to it that Kolesnik likes him (p. 259). I do not have these limitations.
As far as war crimes are concerned, you need to keep in mind
that it is always the winners who try the losers. The winners define what the crimes are, who
the criminals are. They appoint the
judges, conduct the trials, pass sentences, and mete out punishments. Victorious armies rarely try their own
soldiers, commanders, or political leaders for war crimes. The United States can point to a few well
publicized exceptions, but these are always low level soldiers who are
portrayed to be rogue. The opportunity
to discredit a few low level common soldiers for excess actually masks the
larger, more systematic destructiveness being wreaked upon a country and its
population that is sanctioned and promoted at much higher levels.
For example, today about 20% of the territory of Vietnam is
uninhabitable because of unexploded American munitions. On much of the landscape nothing will grow
because of the use of the defoliant Agent Orange during the war (Atlantic, June 2012). Is this a war crime? Is anybody being prosecuted for it? Not even the Vietnamese are pursuing it as
such. They don't see it in their
political interest to continue the conflict with the Americans despite the
lingering effects of the war upon their country.
Charles Anthony Smith (2012) traces the beginnings of the
concept of war crime to the trial of King Charles I of England by Oliver
Cromwell.
This prosecution came about
after the conclusion of a conflict for the nominal purpose of punishing the
defeated leader for crimes such as the murder of civilians, torture of
captives, and forced conscription. The
trial of Charles I was antecedent to modern war crimes trials. (p. 21)
Once the Nazis were defeated
and World War II came to a close, however, the Allies institutionalized the
concept of war crimes tribunals through the Nuremberg Trials. (p. 22)
The Nuremberg Trials have been judged a success and a role
model for future proceedings of this type.
A similar series of trials in Tokyo at the end of World War II have not
been so favorably judged. The Nuremberg
Trials
embraced concerns about
substantive due process and procedural process as inherent to a just
proceeding, the trials in Tokyo reverted to a show trial model with an almost
complete disregard for the concepts of justice. (p. 80)
Smith goes on to present detailed analyses of subsequent war
crimes trials in many modern contexts including Argentina, South Africa, the
former Soviet States, the former Yugoslav States, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan,
and the "War on Terror."
The fundamental question
considered here through the historical evolution and development of war crimes
tribunals in their various forms is whether human rights tribunals, ad hoc or
standing, promote and are the product of concerns about justice or are they
more likely to be a manifestation of normal political processes and efforts to
consolidate political power. (p. 270)
The cases examined here
demonstrate that the purpose of the tribunals has been the consolidation of
political power. (p. 271)
I concur with his analysis and evaluation of these processes
and their underlying philosophical preconceptions.
Smith contrasts the character of the war crimes tribunals that
are the consequence of peace through victory and the peace accord reached in
Ireland in 1998, known as the Belfast Agreement, or the Good Friday Agreement.
One of the notable aspects of
the case of Northern Ireland is the complete omission of any provision for war
crimes trials or tribunals of any sort.
The long and violent history of the conflict in Northern Ireland
includes multiple tragedies and the killing of non-combatants, indiscriminate
bombings in civilian areas, the unlawful imprisonment of opponents, and a
variety of other actions that, in other contexts, have led to prosecutions for
gross violations of human rights. (p. 278)
Smith points out that this was not simply an omission on the
part of the parties to the agreement, but a considered judgment.
The tragedies of the past have
left a deep and profoundly regrettable legacy of suffering. We must never forget those who have died or
been injured, and their families. But we
can best honor them through a fresh start in which we firmly dedicate ourselves
to the achievement of reconciliation, tolerance, and mutual trust and to the
protection and vindication of the human rights of all. (Belfast
Accord 3, quoted in Smith, p. 279)
One important factor influencing the character of this peace
settlement was that no side in the conflict was able or likely to accomplish a
sustainable military or political victory.
In other words, a draw on the battlefield means no war crimes trials
will take place. So much for absolute,
indelible principles of Right and Wrong.
Micha is carrying out a war crimes tribunal on a personal
level within his own family. The story
reveals how disingenuous, hypocritical, and destructive it is. In the final pages the pent up rage and
vengeance begins to pour forth. Micha
seems to care about nothing else but the crimes of his grandfather. The desire for punishment even extends to the grandfather's
wife. He knows she covered it up, so she
is also guilty. He fights with his
sister, is estranged from his wife, refuses to visit his grandmother, does not
speak with his parents. Every
relationship he has is poisoned by his obsession with the facts of his
grandfather's Nazi past. (p.261) This
orgy of self-castigation is very un-German.
It appears to me to be Germans the way Seiffert would like to see them,
what she hopes they might be.
At the very end of the book there is a perfunctory,
supremely unconvincing gesture toward reconciliation as Micha brings his young
daughter to visit her grandmother for the first time, apparently some years
after the main subject matter of the story.
It doesn't work as a repudiation of the thrust of the whole narrative,
nor does it work as a logical outcome of character and events. This flippant gesture feels like an
afterthought, and a rather thoughtless one at that. I think it reflects Seiffert's utter confusion
in the face of the issues she's struggling with.
As Nietzsche pointed out, if God is dead, then there can be
no absolute, timeless basis for moral imperatives. Moral preconceptions and judgments become
context dependent subject to variables of culture, social context, and personal
psychology. It does not mean, as
Dostoevsky mistakenly thought, that all things become permissible. Who grants permission? It means that all moral judgments and all
human conduct must be understood within the social, cultural, and psychological
context in which they occur. This is not
a distressing situation as Jean Paul Sartre lamented in Existentialism is a Humanism (1946, p. 294). It means we are in charge, and we are making
the decisions. And those decisions will
be made according to the perceptions and values and norms of the times in which
we live. There is nothing wrong with
this. There never were any gods and
there were never any priests speaking with God's voice. Everything is as it has always been. A clearer understanding of the human
condition removes the arrogance and grandiosity from our claims of moral
certitude, and with that demise comes an opportunity for greater understanding
of even the most evil people and the most despicable actions. It doesn't mean that we won't kill them for
it. But we will do it on our own authority,
not the authority of God or universal Right.
I can condemn the piles of bodies at Belsen and Buchenwald
the same as Seiffert can. I can feel the
same horror and revulsion at the atrocities and brutality of the war. But I know that my rejection and condemnation
of these actions does not go beyond myself and there may be others who feel
very differently. I do not speak with
the voice of God or for all humanity. At
the same time I have the capacity to relate with warmth and congeniality to the
perpetrators of the most unspeakable crimes.
No matter how bad people are, not everything about them is bad. There is always more to them than their worst
manifestations. Windows and bridges are
always possible. I believe it is a
positive advantage in human relating that surpasses that offered by the perspective
displayed in Seiffert's book and by my ethics professors.
The
Dark Room is a book about Rachel Seiffert. It is not about Germans or Germany. Keep that in mind if you decide to read
it.
Notes
The BBC has a nice concise summary of the history of the
concept of war crimes and their application.
Der
Spiegel Online May 9, 2005
Kaplan, Robert D. (2012) The Vietnam Solution. The
Atlantic. June 2012.
Sartre, Jean Paul (1946)
Existentialism is a Humanism. In Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. Edited by Walter Kaufmann. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing/Meridian. pp. 287-311.
Smith, Charles Anthony (2012) The
Rise and Fall of War Crimes Trials: From
Charles I to Bush II. Cambridge, New
York: Cambridge University Press. 316 pp.