Emails, Biedermann and 'Should I stay or should I go?'

I got an email today. Yes, really! A whole one email! Well actually more than one but this was the only one (so far) which didn't tell me about all the amazing bargains on offer at places where I have, somewhat stupidly, bought things on-line before. Don't you just love spam? Especially when it's of the "You recently bought 'Advanced Toad-Sexing' from Amazon.com. You may be interested in the following titles: 'Toad-Sexing: beyond the text books', 'War with the Newts'*, 'Salamanders: a marxist-lesbian-feminist perspective'." Google and its bloody search algorithms have got a lot to answer for, if you ask me.

Well contained in this email was: "Carl Orff...I've always liked his work despite the fact that he was a Nazi...." Yes, see, I do get the occasional cultural reference, not just endless scatological 'jokes' and links to the latest 'viral' on YouTube.

Well it got me thinking. No surprise there, then. About all the people, intelligent, cultured human beings who stayed behind in Nazi run Germany in the 1930's. The people who should have known better than to allow their country to be run by a bunch of pseudo-scientific, myth obsessed, anti-clerical, expansionist thugs with a predeliction for 'Jew-baiting' (We won't go into the involuntary euthanasia of the mentally ill, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Racial Purity laws, the scapegoating of Marinus Van der Lubbe, Kristallnacht, the Star of David etc etc etc). But then again, hindsight is always 20/20, isn't it?

Shortly after the war, people in Germany, and elsewhere, started to question the whole preceding 25 years; as well they might given that they acquiesced in the annihilation of 6,000,000 Jews, 20,000,000 Soviets (oh alright, Stalin and his Commissars no doubt 'did' for a proportion of those), a quarter of a million Romanies and in the case of the British and Americans (lest we forget), the fire-bombing of civilian targets with little or no strategic or tactical value.

One of the upshots of this was the birth of a kind of 'navel-gazing' radio play. It all started with a play called 'Biedermann and die Brandstifter' (Biedermann and the arsonists - 'Biedermann' is the name given, in German, to a typically middle-class male {usually}, 'bourgeois' to borrow from yet another European language) by Max Frisch. The basic plot is that Biedermann allows two arsonists to rent his attic, all the while completely oblivious to the fact that they are 'fire-bombing' the city where he lives. Even after it is pointed out to him, amongst other things, that there is no necessity for them to be storing gallons and gallons of petrol in the attic.

Whatever Frisch may protest, and the same goes for 'Andorra', which stems from the persecution of the Jews, this is quite clearly, on one level, an indictment of German society's blindness to the horror of what was actually going on, both before and during the war in Germany. It can obviously be seen as more generic than that - it is also 'swiping' at the Swiss themselves for sitting on the fence, but nonethless......

It is also, however, on another level, blisteringly funny!

Frisch did however make one mistake. He was Swiss! And therefore resolutely neutral during the whole episode. (It did not help either that the Swiss were happy to salt away in 'numbered accounts' all the looted art treasure, money, knick-knacks hoarded by Nazis who had the wherewithall to do so.) Who was some arty-farty Swiss playwright who didn't even speak proper German to be telling the Germans how they should have behaved? (To be fair to Frisch, he did write the play in 'High' German - but possibly out of necessity. I defy anyone to understand Swiss German who's not Swiss. Even the Bavarians, closest geographically, just the other side of the Alps, have problems!)

So, piqued by this upstart, the Germans started their own little movment and it was a (very) brief extract from one of these, 'Der Besuch des Fremden' - 'a stranger's visit' - by Walter Jens that I chose to illustrate my reply, such as it was. Jens' little radio play was about a University Professor (Hartmann) who decamps from Nazi Germany and who returns after the war with no money, no job and having lost his family; his children died fighting on the American side. He meets a former colleague (Lauenfels) who stayed put in the University and retains most of his 'prestige', money, position etc post-war as pre-war.. However he too has lost his sons to war.

Hartmann asks why his former colleague did what he did when all around could see what was coming.

Lauenfels: ”I had to stay.... for the children’s sake.”

Hartmann: “You’re wrong, Lauenfels. It’s all the same, whichever side your children die on. The only thing that counts is, they had to die; that alone is important. And they didn’t have to die, if only everyone had broken their oath (to Hitler - ed).”

(Author's translation. Hell the text doesn't appear to be in print in German, let alone English!)

(Everyone in a university had to swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler, otherwise you were kicked out.)

So what would you do? Hartmann's argument, taking the moral highground, is clearly that if Hitler wasn't supported; if everyone reneged on the oath, then Hitler would have fallen and there would have been no war and their children would not have had to die, pointlessly, as it turned out. But, how can Lauenfels be sure that everyone will act the same, and deny the oath? After all, Hartmann merely runs away. What would happen if everyone ran away? Those that disagreed with Hitler. Wouldn't that have still left those that did agree with Hitler, a very sizeable number? (In the last election held in 1933, the Nazi party polled around 43% of the vote)

So what would have been different?

The war would still have happened. 6,000,000 Jews would still have been gassed. Dresden, Hamburg, Munich, Berlin would have been destroyed. Millions of civilians would still have died. What would have been the point? To 'revolt'? To suffer and still have nothing to show for it!

It's a very difficult question to answer, unless you are the type that thinks ideas, whether political, religious are worth dying for, alone. And there's the rub. To fight in a war, with your comrades, friends, with your fellow man, that is not being alone. You fight, if needs must, in defence of your way of life, whatever that may be, with your fellows and there is possibly comfort to be had there, I think.

But alone? Potentially, the only one? For an idea? A principle? To be a martyr for a cause? Potentially for nothing?

Something tells me that few of us are made this way. It is perhaps why we revere martyrs so much. Why we vaunt heroism so much. Because we know that we are not like them.

Do we have the right to criticise Orff, Strauss, Furtwaengler because they stayed? And laud Brecht, Einstein, Mann because they 'ran away'. I can't help thinking that if we condemn the former, we have no choice but to condemn the latter!

I don't normally do this but the post is dedicated to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Sophie Scholl who chose to stay and to fight in whatever way was open to them. And to the October '44 Sonderkommando in Auschwitz who chose a bullet rather than the gas.

* War with the Newts - a real book, by Karel Capek, and a damn fine book it is too!