The power of this book for me lay in its vertiginous layering and intertwining of historical analysis and familial memory, the personal and the political as one. A recurring theme is how suffering is passed down through families, and about the role of silence in the transmission of that suffering. Griffin explores how much of this pain results from men’s experience of war and violence, and suggests that if silence is used to try and cover this up it will always re-emerge as trauma or violence in subsequent generations: ‘My father suffered from the silence of his father, and I suffered from his silence in turn.’ She asks an interviewee about their father’s experience of World War Two – he’d fought in the Battle of the Bulge. What was it for him, this great and terrible battle? She cannot say. He never spoke of it at home.
You can perhaps imagine my experience reading this book, questions I’d long wondered about rising to the surface. What I didn’t expect, however, was a growing anger towards my father, realising the multiple, subtle impacts that his silence had had on me, on all of us in the family. So much for wanting to ‘protect’ us from the truth … But my feelings also oscillated wildly, often to pity and sadness. There were times reading when I felt Griffin could have been writing directly about Mark. The following words I reacted to viscerally, because they described precisely the way that he felt contaminated by what he’d experienced:
I remember David … telling me what he had witnessed in Korea. His voice was so low it could hardly be heard in the recording I made, he spoke in the way I have heard women speak of rape or abuse, as if in the very telling something monstrously ugly is brought into being. The terror and brutality seemed to brand him, making him in his own mind irredeemably inseparable from the ugliness. Yet what he saw defied description. It was told more in the difficulty of telling than in the telling itself. He could name the mutilations, intestines falling out of the body, along with shit, blood, pus, but no one who had not been there could have any idea. It was only over time I began to grasp what he was saying to me. It was not just the physical fear he was feeling, it was the weight of something sordid.
Later, reading Primo Levi, I began to understand more about the relationship between such traumatic witnessing of brutality and the shame that takes over afterwards – even if the person in question was not directly involved with causing the horror. Levi sees this shame in the eyes of the Russian soldiers who liberate the remaining prisoners at Monowitz on 27 January 1945:
It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections,2 and every time we had to … submit to some outrage: the shame … that the just man experiences at another man’s crime: the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak.
Reading A Chorus of Stones, I boomeranged between raw anger and waves of sympathy for Mark. I felt confused. Part of me trying to connect with the young man who had experienced the horror of Korea. No, not yet a man, more a sheltered boy of nineteen, only a year out of school. But another part of me, a growing part, wondered whether his silence about atrocities he’d witnessed in Korea had, in some way, contributed to my need to probe into horror and genocide. Or would that have happened anyway? I remember the power of seeing Shoah for the first time, only a year or so after Mark had died, and being overwhelmed by the sense of uncovering the past in those nine and a half hours of film. Lanzmann’s dogged persistence to find what had been buried. And then, so much of our work in Platform, focussing on making visible aspects of our culture that are hidden, structures of power. None of this negative – quite the contrary – but working in such a way, especially spending decades researching genocides and perpetrators, carries a cost. Remember Lanzmann’s words about having spent years ‘trying to look into the black sun which is the Holocaust’.3
But as we get older, we also become more understanding of our parents’ limitations. The balance to be struck between telling your children about the realities of the world and terrifying them – this is probably the hardest decision of all. The desire for them to grow up, open-eyed, able to understand the capability of human beings to do terrible things, yet also the primal need to protect them for as long as possible. And maybe a lot of Mark’s silence was more to do with this. It is one thing to have traumatic memories yourself – of having to kill to stay alive, of seeing your friends and fellow soldiers maimed and dying, of not being able to save them. It is another to put these realities into somebody else’s head, and then to see that other person’s view of yourself shaken for ever.
The gentle, loving father – now with a machine gun in his hand.
4
The Silences of Societies in the Face of Atrocity: Germany, France, America, Britain
I’m still puzzling this through – this question of silence. The silence of the individual and the silence of a society. And the different qualities of silences. The silence here by the sea mesmerises. It stills me, whatever state I’ve brought down from the city. From the moment of waking it calms me. Every grass bending in the breeze outside the window, the line of slate-grey sea on the horizon, even the soft whirring of the fridge only accentuates the stillness. The silence pulsates here, and, as it absorbs me into its world, I feel myself changing, allowing myself to be carried along by its rhythm, as if trying to communicate, to reassure. All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. There is something about not hearing a human voice for hours, or even days, which stills me, and enables other hearing to happen. So this silence feels almost wholly benevolent. There is another silence that is rare and blissful and this is the state of being with someone you love and not needing to say a word. Walking through a valley, reading by a fire, looking up from a café table.
But silence can also be extremely violent. When entire societies are silent in the face of atrocities they have committed this creates a kind of moral corrosion. Sebald describes this process vividly, reflecting on his childhood in the peaceful Bavarian village of Wertach im Allgäu, just after the war:
I had grown up with the feeling that something was being kept from me: at home, at school, and by the German writers whose books I read hoping to glean information about the monstrous events in the background of my own life.1
Sebald found the apparent calm of the village and his family deeply disturbing. It was as if the child, born at the end of the war in 1944 and having no conscious memory of it, nevertheless intuited the cataclysmic violence in every gesture of his parents and in the selective memory of the Bavarian villagers. And an anger grew from there, only finding expression many years later in his writing. He understood, because he’d grown up amongst it, the lethal potential of silence in the face of trauma. The artist Anselm Kiefer, born only ten months after Sebald in March 1945, had a strikingly similar experience of an organised societal silence in the years after the war in Germany: ‘We had no information about the Third Reich when I was in school. And about Auschwitz – we were not informed about this, not in the family, not in school – nearly nothing.’2
This German silence is personified in Sebald’s work by the figure of the teacher Paul Bereyter, and his subsequent suicide, in The Emigrants. It is there in the broken figure of Jacques Austerlitz, who realises too late in his life ‘how little practice I had in using my memory, and conversely, how hard I must always have tried to recollect as little as possible, avoiding everything which related in any way to my unknown past’ – words that express what a generation of young Germans felt about their parents after the war, that their forgetting was an intentional act. Only when Austerlitz is an old man do scraps of memory begin to ‘drift through the outlying regions of [his] mind’ and he can see again the star-shaped fortress and ‘a lightless landscape through which a very small railway train was hurrying, twelve earth-coloured miniature carriages and a coal-black locomotive under a plume of smoke wafting horizontally backwards, with the far end of the plume constantly blown this way and that, like the tip of a large ostrich feather’.