Grass parched to flattened straw in these weeks of summer sun. A desiccating heat, almost Mediterranean. Almost all the flowers gone now, the poppies are tired and faded, only yellow crowds of indestructible ragwort and the mauve of thistle heads in the fields. The dog days of summer will soon be here. Clouds of moths envelop the cottage at night. Despite the stifling heat I have to shut the windows to prevent them coming inside as I write. Reading and rereading over these last weeks. The Sereny book on Speer, Jean Améry, and Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction. I find myself taking issue with Sebald on one matter – his tone of total bafflement at the German post-war silence. Is it really so surprising that a country finds it difficult to move on from its moment of greatest trauma?
There is always a tension at the heart of any writing about silence. In this way, towards the end of his lecture, Sebald describes the women refugees from the Hamburg firestorm arriving at Stralsund railway station ‘unable to speak of what had happened, struck dumb or sobbing and weeping with despair. And several of these women … actually did have dead children in their luggage, children who had suffocated in the smoke or died in some other way during the air raid.’ He finally understands that ‘it is impossible to gauge the depths of trauma suffered by those who came away from the epicentres of catastrophe. The right to silence claimed by the majority of these people is as inviolable as that of the survivors of Hiroshima, of whom Kenzaburo Oe says … that even twenty years after the bomb fell many of them still could not speak of what happened that day.’
Sebald also fails to articulate the profound differences in the nature of varying types of silence, and the resulting effects on the second generation – the silence of the perpetrator, the silence of the survivor and the silence of the bystander. The first is perhaps the most comprehensible. It is the children of perpetrators who, most often, are the ones who feel the strongest need to break the silence of their parents – for example, the remarkable interviews with relatives of leading Nazi figures contained in Hitler’s Children by Gerald Posner. Niklas Frank attempting to live his life as a kind of ongoing atonement for his father’s genocidal reign as governor of occupied Poland during the war is extraordinarily impressive, as is Martin Bormann’s son. And the 2015 documentary My Nazi Legacy shows us this process in all its painful detail.3 Niklas Frank returns to sites of atrocities that his father had ordered, along with another (far less resolved) son of a perpetrator – Horst von Wächter, son of Otto von Wächter, governor of Galicia in Ukraine during the war. But Wächter, despite overwhelming evidence, remains reluctant to condemn his father’s actions in the uncompromising terms Frank does.
There have been several very affecting books published in recent years which focus on this question of the child, or sometimes grandchild, finding out what lies behind the silence of their families, usually written in biographical terms. Martin Pollack’s work, explores the life of his father, The Dead Man in the Bunker: Discovering my Father – Dr Gerhard Bast, formerly head of the Gestapo in Linz and a significant war criminal. In the third part of Rachel seiffert’s novel The Dark Room we meet Micha, a teacher in Frankfurt, who becomes more and more obsessed about what his beloved ‘Opa’ (grandpa) did in the war. He encounters a virtual wall of silence from his own family, but he does find out that Opa’s letters home from the Eastern Front were all burnt after the war (‘what did he write that he wanted to burn?’) and eventually Micha travels to Belarus to find out for himself.
The survivors’ silence seems, at first, the most surprising. Yet, in addition to the post-traumatic aspect and the well-known phenomenon of survivor guilt, there is often an inability to disconnect the traumatic experience itself from the survivor’s own conception of themselves – as we’ve seen in the testimony of the Korean War veteran in A Chorus of Stones, ‘the terror and brutality seemed to brand him, making him in his own mind irredeemably inseparable from the ugliness.’ The children of survivors often find the impact of their parents’ silence unbearable, sometimes becoming abusive. Brutal experiences, though rarely spoken of, are often passed on to the next generation. Anne Karpf has written movingly of this in The War After. The silence of the witness, the bystander, is the most complex, and the most politically explosive – it is the silence that affects us most today, and so I will return to this question in subsequent chapters.
I’m still wondering about the connection between individual silences in the face of violence and trauma and the wider silences of entire societies. Or how to understand the breaking of such silences on both an individual and a collective level. I’m not sure whether it’s really possible for the people of a country to fully understand the suffering that they, collectively (in the form of their army or air force or oil corporations), have imposed on another people. Or to feel a genuine sense of shared responsibility. It is one thing to accept Ibsen’s proposition that ‘every man shares the responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs’; it is another for people to actually feel this shared responsibility and guilt.4 Although of course, on an individual level, these understandings are what we expect of people when they are convicted of a crime. Occasionally such realisations are expected of an entire nation – for example, after the war, the German people, as well as the German state, were widely expected to recognise the devastation caused to the world by Nazism – and also to accept their collective responsibility for having allowed Hitlerism to continue for twelve years.
Yet I wonder how many of us in Britain and America feel responsible for the devastation caused by the illegal Iraq War of 2003 and its aftermath, for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. My memories of that time are of thousands of people, millions of us, carrying banners and wearing badges saying ‘Not In My Name’. But, unfortunately, it was – it was in all of our names. Whether you went on the anti-war marches or not, it was our taxes which paid for the fighter jets and the bombs, just as surely as German taxpayers in the war paid for the SS and the extermination camps.
I know instinctively that empathy holds the key to unlocking this box. And I believe that this exceptional human quality can be developed in ways we cannot yet understand; in fact, I would say that if we do not evolve our abilities to feel empathy then we will not survive as a species. I also think it’s possible for empathy to be transmitted vast distances, not only geographically, but also historically. I’ve never regarded the past as separable from the present; and I’m only interested in the past inasmuch as it can change our behaviour today. My hope is that a revolution in historical understanding and empathy has already begun. If the American people could, even for a moment, feel a connection to the desolation felt by the first peoples of their country as weapons and disease annihilated them, would they still be able to support regimes that govern through massive and systemic abuse of human rights? If we in Britain could, even fleetingly, experience the stench and feel the terror of the millions of human beings who endured the Middle Passage on slaving ships, would we ever be able to look at transnational trade or the crimes of the City of London in the same way again?
These are hopes. But, on my less hopeful days, I sometimes feel that we haven’t even begun to frame the questions yet. When there is such controversy over the prime minister of our country expressing ‘pain’ about the deaths of a million people in Ireland, when any discussion over reparations for slavery is still greeted by most politicians with total bemusement, when oil companies who operate in our names and bring their profits back to our country are allowed to continue to devastate the environment and peoples of poorer parts of the world – then perhaps we’ve hardly begun this journey. When I look at the process that Germany has undergone since the war – the Nuremberg Trials, denazification proceedings (however flawed), and, more recently, the central positioning of the Holocaust in all German education – I do feel a sense of shame for our country. We as a culture haven’t reached our Nuremberg yet – our time of judgement – let alone our Spandau, our process of reflection and desire for atonement. We may have decolonised most of the empire, but we haven’t begun to decolonise our minds. I still see a continuum of empire – in our minds, our language, our behaviour, our trade, our corporations. Supposedly ‘successful’ violence, repeated century after century, from Hawkyns trafficking slaves in 1562 to Britain’s participation in the illegal war in Iraq at the beginning of this century.