| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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expressions of feeling, would laugh or giggle uneasily when
dreadful issues were raised, and (as German assistants noted) would leave out
verbs and even adverbs in avoiding specific statements — that is, avoiding
responsibility for his words, often resorting to clumsy forms of speech.
Over the course of the interviews I had the sense he had taken on the
postwar self of a pleasant, conservative-democratic German of advancing years,
while inwardly retaining a strong sense of his personal history as part of the
Nazi generation. A connecting link between these two views of himself were the
writings of certain contemporary biologists. He often had books by Desmond
Morris and Konrad Lorenz on his desk and would sometimes initiate a discussion
with me about the biological sources of aggression and imperialism. In that way
he could be both a contemporary man and retain a biological worldview that had
for him a degree of continuity with the Nazi period. Lorenz, prominent both as
a Nazi and as a postwar German-Austrian biological scientist, could
particularly serve as that kind of link. Ironically, Dr. B. seemed to require
some affirmation of his Nazi-related self (after all, that was he as a young
man) for him to muster the strength and candor to probe it and Auschwitz as
intensively as he has. |
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| Overall Life Patterns |
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Finally, Ernst B.’s overall life patterns may help us
to understand his special combination of Nazi affiliation and life-saving
decency, and particularly his avoidance of selections — even though, in
the collective historical structure I am discussing, themes from an early life
can do no more than reveal certain individual tendencies within that structure.
The most persistent theme in Dr. B.’s life, beginning in earliest
childhood, has been his quest for human connection, for contact. I suspect that
the German family structure does much to create that hunger, and that it was
expressed and fed in the Nazis’ extraordinary focus on unity, on
collective merging (the slogan: “One people, one party, one
leader!”). But for Dr. B. it has meant a highly personal search for
acceptance, recognition, belongingness, and intimacy — requiring some or
all of these in order to feel alive. Inseparable from that quest has been an
ideal associated with his father (or his admired uncle) which he called
“integrity” and had to do with holding on to one’s life project,
to one’s sense of self, whatever the pressure to yield or dissemble. Much
of his life has been a struggle to balance these two fundamental, and at times
seemingly incompatible, aspirations.
Dr. B.’s family shared much
of the German nation’s experience of the First World War in terms of
abject humiliation, isolation, and — above all — loss. The national
regenerative impulse was reflected in his being assigned a “survivor
mission” of carrying on the unfinished work of the gifted uncle killed in
the war. In his swing from rebellious artist to compli- […ant] |
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