Silencing victims, witnesses and perpetrators

Many who survived genocide known as the Shoah, were devastated when they tried to tell other people about their experiences after the war. Primo Levi was overwhelmed by the responses of his listeners. After his lectures in Munich, many people came up to him, patted him rudely on the shoulder and told him he should be lucky to be alive. In the words of a psychoanalyst who was imprisoned in Buchenwald: "People, in fact, did not want me to talk about my experiences and whenever I started, they showed resistance without distinction, interrupting me and asking me to tell them how I got out." There were no ears willing to listen to the silencing. As Elie Wiesel wrote: "If we had begun to speak, we would have found it impossible to stop. If we had shed a single tear, we would have sunk the human heart. We, so invincible in the face of death and the enemy, now felt helpless […] we were mad with disbelief. People refused to listen, to understand, to share. There was a division between us and them, between those who suffered and those who read about it or refused to they read […] we thought people would remember our experiences and ours testimonies and manage to control their violent impulses to kill or hate.”

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Although it is a question of completely different scales, similar experiences are reported by raped or physically abused women when they talk about the behavior of the police towards them. Speaking requires a receptive ear or it will be silenced again. Immunity to a traumatic experience is possibly worse than the trauma itself. Listening to silence is needed in a much broader context than the therapy room.

Calls for help are often overheard because they are somewhat coded. Sometimes witnesses subsequently recall a few ambiguous statements that foreshadowed what happened next - an all-pervading experience of listening to silence. Many recognize someone's announced suicide in hidden messages. Psychotherapists who help victims of domestic violence report that these women often cannot appoint violence or, worse, not even recognizing it. Also, violence is often romanticized: "If he beats you, it means he loves you" is a widespread saying. In some countries, domestic violence has ceased to be treated as a criminal offense.

WHISPERING

Silencing often centers on erasing words, tearing out tongues, and controlling free speech. Indeed, many people who have tried to speak out have had their professional progress hindered, their academic careers halted, while some have been taken to concentration camps. These were measures implemented by the sources of political power, making speech impossible or forcing it to whisper.

Whispering is different from "arching the spine". It represents an attempt to tell the truth, so that a person does not let himself down, which allows him to walk upright and proud. Many traumatized people who have found no one to talk to have begun to quietly whisper prayers and use the ancient cultural practice of muttering prayers, whispering to God and to oneself. Although no man is willingly available as a listener, complete silencing has not been achieved, for you can resort to religion.

However, there are experiences of spouses in the USSR who only with the political thaw in the nineties dared to admit to each other that they came from bourgeois families and that their parents, grandparents were sentenced to long-term sentences in Siberia, while the spouses managed to hide their real lives from each other as much as possible. Even a whisper was high risk.

SALUTATION OF WITNESSES

Another type of silencing is closely related to conformity: don't make any noise, smile, chat only about irrelevant topics and behave as usual. The efforts of all those who wanted to have what in the German jargon of the 1950s was called parsley: a certificate that the person was not in a leading position, that he was a "little follower" and that, therefore, he was not "guilty of anything" ("persil" was the name of a detergent that promised the whitest laundry possible, and the expression parsley green was a parody of the insane desire to "whitewash" the perpetrators).

The silencing during the Nazi period began with the "Hitler salute," a diabolical invention whose rampant influence permeated every pore of everyday life. By forcing people to perform it, trivijalnost of greetings was placed under the control of mutual supervision. And besides, it's even personally greeting, with its variations, became risky. When greeting personally, we address the Other. Eye contact, body posture, and distance reflect a whole range of expressions related to how two people define and experience their relationship. This observation does not preclude more formal greetings. But the forced salutation neither refers to the other person, nor does it recognize him, since both interlocutors "unify" by saluting the dictator who is not present. In addition, each could document loyalty to the leader and at the same time control the loyalty of the other. Mutual control of loyalty and life under surveillance became a trap from which it was not easy to escape.

This practice did not arise unexpectedly. It was a political program of psychic expropriation. "There are no free spaces where the individual belongs to himself, the time of personal happiness is over, we will feel the happiness of the community." You do not belong to yourself. With these words, the president of the Women's League of National Socialists, Gertrude Scholz-Klink, formulated the goal of destroying the emotional foundations of personal relationships. During the war, Propaganda Minister Goebbels exclaimed: "He will never be freed again" from the influence of National Socialism.

Let's follow the trail of some attempts to "appropriate" ourselves again. There were courageous lawyers, such as state prosecutor Fritz Bauer, who in the early 1960s initiated trials against several concentration camp guards, SS men and other guards at Auschwitz. These trials remained in the cultural memory as the "Auschwitz trials". One remarkable success was Wehrmacht exhibition (exhibition of photographs of German soldiers who fought in the Soviet Union) from the 1990s, organized by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and initiated by Jan Philip Remtsma. Many photographs of German soldiers in their military activities are exhibited as documents and many grandchildren have seen their grandfathers, and how they carry out activities such as hanging people. This exhibition resonated powerfully in the German media. Sons and daughters of Nazi criminals, such as Reinhard Heydrich, severed ties with their families and wrote impressive accounts of their experiences of living with such parents.

And yet, we can wonder if these efforts, initiated by the cultural elite and governments, reached the everyday lives of ordinary German families, who had their own different and often disturbing histories from that terrible historical period. Walking through the center of Berlin, one cannot fail to notice the large and striking monuments to the victims of National Socialist atrocities: murdered Jews, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals and psychiatric patients. Although this effort by the German and Berlin authorities is admirable, one question remains: was the last of those monuments opened in 2014, 69 years after the end of World War II, because it was easier to open discussions in small circles and write for those small circles than to build something that will be a constant reminder, every day and night, to millions of passers-by?

It is well known that in the first period after the war, silencing was carried out by assigning a label nestless to those who "broke the silence" about the Shoa and the genocides. This word indicates that someone criticizes the group to which he belongs - family, city, class, community (literally: he pollutes his own nest). It was used as an accusation even in the German parliament. It has not silenced the voices of well-known philosophers, such as Adorno and Jaspers, but what has been its impact on millions of families across the country?

Two academic books have recently approached the latter question, with the help of psychoanalysis, from across the ocean, more than seventy years after the war. The first book was written by Roger Free. The title of his 2017 book, Not in my family.. German memory and responsibility after the Holocaust, could not be more suggestive. As a Canadian of German descent, born in 1965, Free suddenly found himself forced to resolve difficult questions. Do we readily recognize the responsibility and guilt of our nation, our tribe, and even our neighbors, but stop at our own doors and refuse to recognize them in our most intimate groups? Frei precisely demonstrated that this was the case, not in a large sample study, but when he chanced upon a photograph of his beloved grandfather—a man he remembered as gentle and admired for his generosity and infectious humor—in paramilitary uniform, unambiguously associated with the Nazis. Doubts and guilt transformed into research and writing, and the reader is presented with extremely honest and profound insights: "On a bookshelf I saw dusty copies of what I recognized much later as publications of the Nazi Party. They lie on a shelf full of classic works of German literature. Even after all this time, writing these words is very uncomfortable. It is a history that I do not want to admit, let alone share with others. I wrote, deleted and again, redacted, wrote a sentence about the Nazi editions several times before I left it in place. The words on the page are now an unambiguous reference point that connects my personal history with the history of Nazi Germany - intertwined, inseparable."

The second book was written by Angelica Baumer, who was born in Germany just after the end of the war, lived in Canada while her father worked at the German embassy, ​​and moved to the US as a student. Titled Born after everything. Facing the German past, this book contains a complex narrative built on personal memories, family photographs, correspondence and diaries, and using academic sources on this historical period and citing Paul Celan, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, three prominent names in the treatment of twelve years of National Socialism in Germany. Bummer is also honest and unflinching in the face of her father's mobilization during Operation Barbarossa, and the membership of both her grandmothers in the Nazi women's organization. And she gives us many insights that are real pearls, like this one: "It was easy for me to blame my parents for their silence. My own, the post-war generation of Germans, chose a position of blame. But I rarely asked them questions in ways that would allow them to listen. I was too angry or scared to accept what might be their truth. Condemnation was easy. Empathy was harder. Understanding was almost unattainable. While my mother was alive, I was not willing to listen to what she could tell me. My desire to accuse her silenced us both, and by the time I was ready to listen, it was too late."

SILENCE OF PERPETRATORS

photo: pexels/jaksonmartins

As Macbeth testifies, the first danger to silence comes from the perpetrator himself. Philomela's rapist is tormented by his conscience, and Macbeth loses his mind and can only continue killing because he follows the logic of "silencing the witness". Of course, none of them act without tormenting their own conscience, but the truth is quite the opposite. From these artistic representations and historical experiences, organizations that function according to the principle of the mafia conclude that the perpetrator himself must commit to silence. It's better not to kill him, since he might still be needed, and instead oblige him to complicity. Only when he himself kills someone must he be aware that the others know of his loyalty. And his loyalty can be trusted. As a witness, he would cast doubt not only on others, but always on himself. The most important task then becomes to silence yourself.

INVASIONS

In October 2021, during the covid-19 pandemic, the first news leaked that Russia had assembled massive military troops on the border with Ukraine. A lot of diplomatic, political and military activities followed, as well as the activities of the secret services, about which most citizens were informed very superficially. What was released to the media as news was the Russian side's persistent denial that attacks on Ukraine were intended. In January, and even more so in February 2022, Russian speakers used the term "Western hysteria".

The war began on February 24, 2022. One message stood out. Two weeks before the attack, Putin, in a political statement, called Ukraine "his beauty" who would have to "bow down", which meant "submit" or "submit" - a clear allusion to male sexual fantasies - in order to take his wife. on the back. We easily recognized the fraudulent beautification (rape disguised as love), the "hunt", the metaphor and the promise of a lofty act (cleansing Ukraine of "Nazis"). This quote about "beauty" disappeared from television, newspaper and radio news, it was silenced.

And yet, there were many predecessors in whom territorial conquests were presented as conquests of women: as rapes. A German soldier from the First World War is depicted as King Kong with a bat, carrying the conquered Belgium in his hands, represented in the form of a raped woman. In 1917, American propaganda depicted the German beast on a Harry Ryle Hopps poster with the aim of motivating mobilization, so that the US could enter the war.

The difference is that Putin attributes the rape to his side in the struggle. It is a call to one's own people, a call to rape, which could be reflected in the model of Aaron's call in Shakespeare's Titus AndronicusAaron calls his people:

Princes, A festive hunt is being prepared., and there it will be
come all the beautiful Roman ladies, know.
The forest is wide., spacious and full
lonely places, created by nature
for rape and all crimes.

This is Aaron's. call to gang rape. Here we have the individual elements that make up the discernible gestalt of the invitation: a "hunt" is promised, to which is added a false embellishment, "festive". In the end, the truth comes out: "rape and crimes". Beautiful Roman ladies were announced for hunting, and spacious and wide places were promised. Here again we have that false beautification: lovely ladies are implicitly turned into whores. Next element: Aaron describes the places as "solitary" - implicitly promising that there will be no witnesses. Shakespeare allows Aaron to present all the elements of the "occasion": no witnesses, lovely ladies, wide space and a metaphorical contradiction - a solemn hunt. Thus it becomes possible to publicly describe rape as a sublime act. At the same moment and move, what can be heard is silenced.

Putin uses the metaphor of love in order to transform his intentions into benevolent and peaceful ones. But the second part, the "beauty" must "submit", announces i it hides the violence initiated, since this self-attribution is historically new and betrays a guilt-ridden conscience.

Putin describes his war party in metaphors directed earlier against enemy. This may have contributed to the effort to largely silence his metaphorical appeal to rape in the public sphere. Putin's call was heard, but he did not conclude that it was a call to his people. This is not the case only with Russia. There are also too many countries and governments to point fingers at. We want to contribute to making people receptive to hearing about the incredible, unbearable number of acts of violence that are taking place all over the world at any given moment. They can be heard and seen, they are not "unconscious". Those who suffer are silenced. Conversely, those who are silenced suffer because they lack someone's ear to listen.

Translated from English by Marina Vicanović

The text was adapted for publication in the weekly "Vreme"

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