On an even more fundamental level, how can the relationship between concepts of ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’ be explored? What is the meaning of Walter Benjamin’s famous provocation that ‘there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’?fn1 Rather than tackling such a vast question with abstract philosophical propositions, I have attempted to root this exploration in a physical place – a walk between two sites – one associated closely with ‘civilisation’ and the Enlightenment, the other a place of fascism and mass murder – a walk between Goethe’s house in Weimar and the gates of Buchenwald concentration camp. During the course of this walk, we eavesdrop on writers and thinkers who have been strongly in my mind over the last years, people who have spent much of their lives struggling with this interrelationship – George Steiner, Jorge Semprún, Primo Levi and Sven Lindqvist, among others – and through listening to these voices, and creating a kind of dialogue between them, perhaps we can then travel further and see new kinds of connections. Most importantly, understanding continuities from the past to our world today, and the behaviour of those who exercise power, from an office in Washington or a boardroom in Berlin.
This leads me on to perhaps our greatest challenge – one of the threads that runs throughout this work is the attempt to travel into the minds of the perpetrators. And, to do this, we have to begin by trying to relinquish the label of ‘perpetrator’ and see the human beings beneath that term. To understand that men and women, of flesh and blood, create the circumstances that enable genocide and terror to happen. States do not torture, men and women do. Corporations do not kill, men and women do. And so it’s critical that we try to get to know these people – not as ‘them’, not as a group, but as individuals. And it is only by doing this that we can then begin to see if there are any common patterns, any psychology or behaviour that connects people who have killed within organisations across different centuries. In the next chapters, we will meet people who have tortured, we will get inside the heads of those who have run extermination camps, those who have caused devastation to developing countries, but also the people who have enabled these things to happen – the planners, the bureaucrats, the businessmen and -women of today. Some of the people we’ll meet are from interviews I carried out in a small university office, some are from past interviews – but having reflected on these conversations, and wider research over many years, I then try to determine if there are common aspects of psychology and behaviour which link people who kill from their desks, all who kill for their organisations.
Among these, and a key figure in my enquiry, the quiet man at the heart of Nazi Germany – the very civilised and educated Albert Speer, the epitome of the desk killer. Very much a figure of our times, startlingly modern, a corporate man to his fingertips, who almost never saw his victims and believed that the gods of technocracy would solve all our problems. A man who, as the saying goes, would never harm a fly. A man who considered himself entirely apolitical, yet through his organisational expertise, from his desk in Berlin, he was responsible for more destruction than anyone apart from Hitler or Himmler. After the war, helped by a remarkable priest in Spandau prison, Georges Casalis, he tried to understand his own responsibility. For some years he attempted to become a different man. Regardless of whether or not he ultimately succeeded, what I am most fascinated by is his attempt to change. Is it possible to be both appalled by the crimes that somebody has committed, yet also moved at their attempts to understand what they have done?
There is another strand that runs through this book, perhaps a more surprising one – love. The love of the women in the Atacama Desert, the love of my father, the love of Jan Karski, the love of Georges Casalis, and, finally, we return to Simone Weil, a woman who had an impossible love for the world, a love which killed her in the end; she understood both the transformatory power of love, and also the annihilation that comes when it is no longer there. We love, we lose love, we try to love again. Perhaps, in the kind of world that I am exploring here, love is the greatest form of resistance to power.
PART ONE
* * *
Survival and Speaking
1
A Hand in the Desert
There are figures silhouetted against a desert, perhaps half a dozen. Spread out in the vastness of that place. Dusk is approaching. Moving slowly, they are not walking with the intentionality that walking usually involves. They’re moving as if in a kind of meditation or trance. Stopping at times, kneeling in the sand. Touching the desert, occasionally picking up a handful of dust. The Atacama Desert, a name first heard as a child; the driest place on earth.
I’m watching them today, but they are here on many days, and some of them will be here, walking like this, until they die. One day perhaps you may watch them too. They are women – relatives of some of the thousands of people murdered by the Pinochet regime in Chile between 1973 and 1990 and then dumped in unmarked graves in the desert or the mountains or the sea. And they are looking for the traces of these husbands, these brothers and sisters, these sons and daughters. Fragments of bone in the desert. Watching this, at first you are incredulous. And then, astonishingly, you see a woman’s palm outstretched, and a finger gently pointing to five small pieces of phosphate of calcium found here, and, as the voice describes these fragments, the calcium becomes bone, the bone becomes a human being. Another woman describes being given the foot of her brother, with some of the sock still attached. The only part of him left. That night she cannot sleep, she comes downstairs, and describes, in a voice that seems distant to her, as if telling of another person’s experience, how she strokes his foot again and again and again.
They are in a film by Patricio Guzmán, Nostalgia for the Light, that I saw for the first time today. It’s the kind of film that makes you weep – for what it shows, but also for what it is. A meditation on the interrelationship between memory, suffering and justice. Because the film doesn’t fit any established category, the distributors initially did not know what to do with it – they didn’t understand how such a philosophical film could be sold to an audience. And, not for the first time, I find myself thinking about what is surfaced in our world. What is put before our eyes? We now have cultural, technological and scientific capabilities that would have sent Leonardo and Blake and Einstein spinning into raptures of ecstasy – and yet, what is created from these unprecedented possibilities? A demented digital chatter of consumerist narcissism. Human beings who spend far more time staring at screens than at the faces of their loved ones. Societies obsessed by the daily stupidities of celebrities, with millions employed in media to fawn and ogle over every last restaurant or shopping trip. Billions are spent every day on creating and distributing such images of mind-numbing banality. An industry of asininity. And – at the same time – we are told that there is not enough money to keep libraries open, not enough resources to support independent cinemas, or even to distribute nationally a miraculous film like Nostalgia for the Light.
But, looking further at this question of how and why certain ideas find audiences in our societies and others don’t, I wonder about the limitations of our supposedly liberal, ‘inclusive’ cultural institutions – broadsheet newspapers, art galleries, theatres, the BBC. What ideas surface here? Who exactly is included? Beyond the bubble of the ‘commentariat’ in their urban echo chambers, whose voices are heard? That crucial political question always comes to mind – ‘Who’s not in the room?’ And why? A literal answer to this (perhaps the kind of answer a child might give) is that some of these voices belong to people who are not in our continent, and so they would have to shout extremely loudly to make themselves heard. But surely in the globalised world of instant communication, which we’re always being asked to celebrate, this shouldn’t still be the case? And what of the unheard voices of those much closer to home? Sometimes it seems to me our media is more committed to demonising the poor and the vulnerable rather than giving their thoughts and feelings expression. And so a circle of being unheard, and the unarticulated rage that comes with that, spins round again, with its predictable cycle of incomprehension and violence.