Forgiving Hitler

@RandalRauser

Your 95-year-old grandmother lost her family in the concentration camps of Auschwitz. One day she tells you that after converting to Christianity in 1950, she became convinced that Jesus wanted her to forgive Hitler and so she did. What is your reaction?

i) I'd probably make no attempt to correct her. Even when people are wrong, there are times when it's best to let it slide. 

ii) As I and others have argued, there's no duty to forgive the impenitent.

iii) What's the point of forgiving the damned? It doesn't absolve them. The damned will never benefit from human forgiveness. It makes absolutely no difference to them.

iv) At best, it has a psychologically therapeutic effect on the person who forgives them. Sometimes that helps them to let go of the past and move forward.

v) That said, why should we forgive those whom God refuses to forgive? If God hasn't forgiven Hitler, why should I? 

vi) But even assuming that she has the prerogative to forgive Hitler for when he did to her, she has no prerogative to forgive him for what he did to others. She can't presume to act on their behalf without their consent. 

Life for life

One of the most moving stories in Rosenbaum’s deeply moving Holocaust and the Halakhah tells of how one can be a great moral hero even when acting out of mistaken conscience. A man in a concentration camp comes to his rabbi with a problem. His son has been scheduled to be executed. But it is possible to bribe the kapo to get him off the death list. However, the kapo have a quota to fill, and if they let off his son, they will kill another child. Is it permissible to bribe the kapo knowing that this will result in the death of another child? The rabbi answers that, of course, it is permissible. The man goes away, but he is not convinced. He does not bribe the kapo. Instead, he concludes that God has called him to the great sacrifice of not shifting his son’s death onto another. The father finds a joy in the sacrifice amidst his mourning.

The rabbi was certainly right. The father’s conscience presumably was mistaken (unless God specifically spoke to him and required the sacrifice). Yet the father is a moral hero in acting from this mistaken conscience.

http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2019/09/fulfilling-requests.html

i) I disagree with Pruss. All things being equal, it's certainly permissible or even obligatory for the father to bribe the kapo to save the life of his innocent young son. And that principle could be extended to protecting innocent lives generally. 

ii) If there are two drowning children, one of whom is yours, it's permissible or even obligatory to save your own. You have a greater duty to your own dependents, despite the tragedy to the other child.

But this hypothetical has greater moral complexity. It isn't just a question of whether the prima facie vice of bribery can be overridden. That's a separate issue. Considered in isolation, sometimes that's justifiable or incumbent. Bribery is not intrinsically wrong. 

But by bribing the kapo, the father would knowingly facilitate child murder. He is collaborating with the child-killers. He becomes a part of that moral and causal nexus. 

So the rabbi was most certainly wrong while the father was most certainly right. Although it would be psychologically understandable if the father did that, and there are mitigating factors, the deed remains objectively heinous. 

iii) Mind you, this assumes we inhabit a moral universe where there's at least one right course of action open to us. That requires a strong doctrine of providence. If, on the other hand, reality confronts us with genuine moral dilemmas, then we're on our own. 

The Davitamon bottle

(Left to right: Betsie ten Boom, Nollie ten Boom, Corrie ten Boom c. 1905.)

Here is an excerpt from Corrie ten Boom's The Hiding Place. The book is in part about her time in a concentration camp during World War II. Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch Reformed Christian who helped hide Jews during the war, but was eventually caught and imprisoned by the Nazis, along with most the rest of her family including her older sister Betsie ten Boom.

---

Another strange thing was happening. The Davitamon bottle was continuing to produce drops. It scarcely seemed possible, so small a bottle, so many doses a day. Now, in addition to Betsie, a dozen others on our pier were taking it.

My instinct was always to hoard it-Betsie was growing so very weak! But others were ill as well. It was hard to say no to eyes that burned with fever, hands that shook with chill. I tried to save it for the very weakest-but even these soon numbered fifteen, twenty, twenty-five. . . .

And still, every time I tilted the little bottle, a drop appeared at the top of the glass stopper. It just couldn’t be! I held it up to the light, trying to see how much was left, but the dark brown glass was too thick to see through.

"There was a woman in the Bible," Betsie said, "whose oil jar was never empty." She turned to it in the Book of Kings, the story of the poor widow of Zarephath who gave Elijah a room in her home: "The jar of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail, according to the word of Jehovah which he spoke by Elijah."

Well-but-wonderful things happened all through the Bible. It was one thing to believe that such things were possible thousands of years ago, another to have it happen now, to us, this very day. And yet it happened, this day, and the next, and the next, until an awed little group of spectators stood around watching the drops fall onto the daily rations of bread.

Many nights I lay awake in the shower of straw dust from the mattress above, trying to fathom the marvel of supply lavished upon us. "Maybe," I whispered to Betsie, "only a molecule or two really gets through that little pinhole-and then in the air it expands!"

I heard her soft laughter in the dark. "Don’t try too hard to explain it, Corrie. Just accept it as a surprise from a Father who loves you."

And then one day Mien pushed her way to us in the evening food line. "Look what I’ve got for you!"

Mien was a pretty young Dutch woman we had met in Vught. She was assigned to the hospital and often managed to bring to Barracks 28 some stolen treasure from the staff room-a sheet of newspaper to stuff in a broken window, a slice of bread left untouched on a nurse’s plate. Now we peered into the small cloth sack she carried.

"Vitamins!" I cried, and then cast an apprehensive glance at a camp policeman nearby. "Yeast compound!" I whispered.

"Yes!" she hissed back. "There were several huge jars. I emptied each just the same amount."

We gulped the thin turnip water, marveling at our sudden riches. Back at the bunk I took the bottle from the straw. "We’ll finish the drops first," I decided.

But that night, no matter how long I held it upside down, or how hard I shook it, not another drop appeared.

Sheltering Jews

https://www.chambon.org/sauvage_chambon_ten_questions_en.htm

Losing hope in the world

Yet I must confess that I felt, and still feel, great admiration for both my religiously and politically committed comrades. They may have been "intellectual" in the sense we have adopted here, or they may not have been, that was not important. One way or the other, in the decisive moments their political or religious belief was an inestimable help to them, while we sceptical and humanistic intellectuals took recourse, in vain, to our literary, philosophical, and artistic household gods. 

…whether they were highly educated national economists and theologians or less versed workers and peasants, their belief or their ideology gave them that firm foothold in the world from which they spiritually unhinged the SS state. Under conditions that defy the imagination they conducted Mass, and as Orthodox Jews they fasted on the Day of Atonement although they actually lived the entire year in a condition of raging hunger…They survived better or died with more dignity than their irreligious or unpolitical intellectual comrades; who often were infinitely better educated and more practiced in exact thinking. I still see before me the young Polish priest who had no living language in common with me and who therefore spoke to me in Latin of his faith. "Voluntas hominis it ad malum," he said and glanced sorrowfully at a Kapo who was just passing by and who was feared for his brutality. "But God's goodness is immeasurable and thus it will triumph." Our religiously or politically committed comrades were not at all, or only a little, astonished that in the camp the unimaginable became reality. Whoever turned away from God, said the pious Christians and Jews, had to reach the point where he perpetrated or suffered the atrocities of Auschwitz…Here nothing unheard-of occurred, but only what the…God-believing men, had always expected or at least considered possible…Their kingdom, in any event, was not the Here and Now, but the Tomorrow and Someplace, the very distant Tomorrow of the Christian, glowing in chiliastic light…The grip of the horror reality was weaker where from the start reality had been placed in the framework of an unalterable idea. 

I was not in the least bit curious about a religious grace that for me did not exist, or about an ideology whose errors and false conclusions I felt I had seen through. I did not want to be one with my believing comrades, but I would have wished to be like them: unshakable, calm, strong. What I felt to comprehend at that time still appears to me as a certainty: whoever is, in the broadest sense, a believing person, whether his belief be metaphysical or bound to  concrete reality, transcends himself. He is not the captive of his individuality; rather he is part of a spiritual continuity that is interrupted nowhere, not even in Auschwitz. He is both more estranged from reality and closer to it than his unbelieving comrade. Further from reality because in is Finalistic attitude he ignores the given contents of material phenomena and fixes his sight on a nearer or more distant future; but he is also closer to reality because for just this reason he does not allow himself to be overwhelmed by the conditions around him and thus he can strongly influence them. For the unbelieving person reality, under adverse circumstances, is a force to which he submits…For the believer reality is clay that he molds. Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits (Indiana U, 1980), 13-14.

There is hope, but not for us

There are stock arguments for the traditional authorship and dating of NT books like the Gospels, James, and Revelation. I think these are good arguments. But I'd like to explore a neglected line of evidence.

Moderate to liberal scholars typically date the Synoptic Gospels (esp. Matthew and Luke) to after the Jewish War (c. 67-73). I think that's easier to say if you're not a Jew who lived through the Jewish War. 

Admittedly, there's a sense in which that disqualifies me as well. But this is less about being Jewish or having a particular experience, then cultivating an awareness of the relevant sensibilities. 

Let's take a comparison. George Steiner and Edmund Wilson are both great literary critics. Steiner regards Kafka as a major writer, whereas Wilson regards him as overrated and ephemeral. Why the difference?

Simply put: Steiner is Jewish and Wilson is Gentile. Steiner is reading a Jewish author through Jewish eyes. He sees Kafka as a prescient allegory of the Shoah.

That's magnified by the fact that Steiner is, himself, haunted by the Shoah. His father had the wisdom to get his immediate family out of Dodge, but he couldn't save his extended family. He wrote them pleading letters. They ignored the threat and perished in the death camps. Steiner has the psychology of a Holocaust survivor (whether or not he meets the technical definition, which is disputed). 

By contrast, Wilson just doesn't get Kafka. He can't. Kafka doesn't speak to him at that level. It's too alien to his own experience. He has a waspish, patrician background. Hobnobbed with F. Scott Fitzgerald. He has no ear for Kafka. I don't necessarily say that as a criticism. It's not as if I can directly relate to Kafka's experience either. 

Let's draw another distinction. When people look back on their youth and childhood, there's often a sense of loss–assuming they had a happy childhood. But that can take either one two very different forms:

i) They may wax nostalgic about the past. Take writers like Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huck Finn & Tom Sawyer) and Ray Bradbury (Dandelion Wine). Although that's tinged with a sense of regret, because it's irrecoverable, the loss was natural and gradual.

ii) But then you have writers whose happy youth or childhood was torn from their arms. Prematurely ripped away. Take Giorgio Bassani. His novels are set in pre-war Ferrera. And they reflect that place and period. They reflect his actual experience, making allowance for artistic license. 

Yet they are told with a view to the Shoah. Although the historical setting is prospective, the narrative viewpoint is retrospective, as a chain of events leads inexorably to the abyss. 

This is Holocaust literature. And it has Biblical precedent in exilic literature (e.g. Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Lamentations). In Jeremiah you have escalating despair as he foresees his people doomed by their own obduracy. What makes it so maddening is the self-fulling nature of their fate. They bring it upon themselves by their defiance. Ezekiel oscillates between elation and bitter rage.  And Lamentations gives voice to the unspeakable. 

Now, the Jewish War was an event similar in significance to the Holocaust and the Babylonian Exile. Even for Jews outside Palestine, Jerusalem was the epicenter of Judaism. It's hard to overstate the psychological impact that would have on survivors. There's medical evidence that children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors suffer from transgenerational trauma. And you'd have the same dynamic for analogous events. 

And that's a basic problem with the post-70 date for Matthew. If it was written after that cataclysm, why does it not read like Lamentations, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel? Although ostensively set in the time of Jesus, we'd expect the calamity of the Jewish War to cast a long backward shadow, just as we find in exilic literature and Holocaust literature. That's assuming it was, in fact, written after 70 AD. 

But Matthew doesn't begin to have the emotional register of someone who wrote from that harrowing vantagepoint. Yes, there are storm clouds on the horizon in the Olivet Discourse. But that lacks the direct transparency and intensity of searing personal experience. It's abstract. Future. Not the past as future.

Instead, the reader is treated to academic debates about Halakha and competing theories of the afterlife–from forty years before. And that's perfectly consistent with Matthew being precisely what it purports to be–rather than a retrojection. 

Compare that to Paul Celan, who lost both parents in the death camps. Who was repeatedly hospitalized for clinical depression. Who eventually committed suicide–unable to overcome the grief and guilt. Likewise, Primo Levi was another Jewish chronicler of the Shoah who survived the death camps, but succumbed to suicide. Ditto: Jean Améry. The memory was just unbearable. 

Conversely, the tone of Revelation calibrates very well with exilic literature and Holocaust literature. It's easy to imagine John writing that after the Jewish War. The emotional register parallels Ezekiel. 

But what about the Gospel of John? I think it might well have been written in the 60s. 

But suppose it was written in the 90s. Is that consonant with what I've been discussing? Possibly. People have different coping strategies. One way is to become more withdrawn. And, indeed, John's Gospel is detached and otherworldly. If the life you knew has been obliterated, that's one way to adapt. 

If Matthew was composed before 70 AD, and is literarily dependent on Mark, then Mark is however much earlier. 

The letter of James is written in a serene style that bears no trace of trauma to the collective psyche of 1C Jewry which you'd anticipate if it was penned sometime after the Jewish War. 

Luke is less susceptible to this style of analysis. Likely a Gentile convert to Judaism, and then to Christianity via Judaism. Although he's profoundly invested in Messianic Judaism, that's not a part of his formative experience, so even if his Gospel was written after 70 AD, I wouldn't necessarily expect it to reflect the same traumatization. There are, however, other arguments for dating its composition prior to 70 AD.

I've been using Jewish comparisons, but we could cast a wider net. Dabney was so demoralized after his side lost the Civil War that he moved to Texas. He just couldn't stand to live in Virginia any more. The life he'd known and loved was literally shot to pieces. Or consider the enduring psychological impact on dispossessed American Indians, driven from their ancestral lands.  

Finally, this may touch on the question of what happened to most of the apostles. After being listed in the Gospels, why did many melt away? You have traditions and legends, but that has an apocryphal flavor. A way of validating a national sect. 

One explanation may be that some of them perished in the siege of Jerusalem. Not because they were too devoted to the city, or nostalgic memories, but because they had relatives there, or because they had house-churches there where they ministered. Like missionaries who stayed behind in China during the Japanese invasion. Rather than abandon their flock, they suffered with them and died with them.  

In illo tempore

I first saw The Garden of the Finzi Continis when I was about 12. It made an indelible impression on my youthful mind. C. S. Lewis discussed the value of rereading good books, and Leland Ryken has discussed the inexhaustibility of good literature. As you age, you change. When you reread a good book, it has newer significance, not because the book has changed, but because you have changed. There's a dialectical relationship, where literature can influence your outlook on life while life can influence your outlook on the literature. Same is true for great movies. 

The Garden of the Finzi Continis isn't for everyone, but it struck a chord with me. Several features account for its power:

i) The film is a cinematic adaptation of the book. A great director directing a great novel. A masterpiece of a masterpiece. 

ii) Although it's fictional, it is semiautobiographical. That lends the film a particular poignancy, because the film commemorates a genuine tragedy. The characters represent Bassani's ill-fated friends and relatives, who perished in the Shoah. 

iii) Both film and novel benefit from the central, master metaphor of a garden. That's a unifying principle. And it supplies a tacit commentary on the significance of the action. 

The garden exists outside history, in illo tempore. A timeless world. A world within a world. Time's passage inside and outside the garden doesn't synchronize. It's more like stepping into a parallel universe. Has affinities with Eliade's myth of eternal return. Time is cyclical inside the garden, but linear outside the garden. 

The story begins with two times, but converges. The action moves towards the merging of two times, as the inexorable march of time outside the garden finally breaches the walled garden, whisking its occupants away to the death camps. The garden lulls its occupants into a sense of false security. 

Although the story is set in Bassani's hometown, if you visit Ferrara you don't find a garden of the Finzi-Continis. Not even in ruins. It's a place that only existed in Bassani's imagination. Given how much of Bassani's fiction has concrete counterparts in reality, we might ask why he invented the garden. 

But perhaps that's the point. Because the garden never existed, it represents an illusion. The illusion of Bassani's fellow Jews, who refused to acknowledge the existential threat that was bearing down on them. A fatal state of mind. 

iv) Since there was no garden of the Finzi-Continis in Ferrara, what was Bassani's source of inspiration? Bassani's garden naturally evokes associations with the primeval garden of Eden. And there seem to be studied similarities with the paradise lost motif. When Micol expels him from the garden, when the Finzi-Continis are themselves expelled, that's reminiscent of man's banishment from paradise. 

Yet the comparison invites contrast. Bassani's garden doesn't represent life before the fall. Giorgio's pursuit and passion for Micol has has affinities with another Biblical garden: the erotic garden of Canticles. It may also be indebted to the courtly, chivalric tradition of The Roman de la Rose. 

Perhaps the closest parallel is with Tasso, Bassani's fellow Ferrarese poet, in his Gerusalemme liberata. Micol is like Armida, the seductress and sorceress who takes crusaders captive in her enchanted garden. A femme fatal. 

So Bassani's garden is a false Eden. Expulsion from Bassani's garden signifies the expulsion of Italian Jews from society, and ultimately from life itself. 

v) Which brings us to the enigmatic figure of Micol. Both film critics and literary critics puzzle over Micol. Pauline Kael faulted the movie on two grounds: She found Micol's behavior inscrutable, as well as the passivity of the Finzi-Continis in the face of mortal danger. 

As a fictional character, it's possible that there is no one correct interpretation of Micol. Perhaps the characterization is inconsistent. An artistic failure–albeit compelling. However, I think we can offer a more charitable and coherent interpretation. 

Micol is the central character. The hub, in relation to which other characters are the spokes. Gorgeous, spoiled, proud, imperious, and mercurial. A tease. Her treatment of Giorgio betrays a cruel streak, as she leads him on, only to rebuff him. An unattainable woman.

There may be an element of contempt for his indecision. Sometimes she gives him an opening, but Giorgio is so spellbound that he takes too long in responding to her overtures. He lets the moment slip away. And having missed the opportunity, he rarely gets a second chance. By contrast, Malnate has none of Giorgio's hesitation. 

Micol is too worldly for Giorgio. He's a romantic to her cynic. She spurns him because he loves her, and she wants to avoid emotional entanglements. Remain independent. Be a woman, but not a wife or mother. So she has a fling with Malnate instead. That preserves her detachment. A purely physical relationship, with no strings attached. That's symbolized by the fact that he's Gentile and she's Jewish. Due to the race laws, they can't marry. Not that she'd ever marry somebody like him. Malnate is her social interior, and culturally Philistine. But he serves his purpose. The fact, moreover, that men of draft age will be conscripted ensures the impermanence of the liaison. 

The Finzi-Continis are paradoxical. Unlike many Jews, they refuse to assimilate. Yet their aloofness isn't due to religious scruples. They seem to be Pharisees without faith, like Santayana's The Last Puritan. A secularized parody of ritual cleanliness. 

Ironically, their Jewishness is more important to the Nazi gentiles than it is to these nominal Jews. In another irony, Micol and Alberto are the epitome of blond, blue-eyed, ivory Aryan perfection. So close to the Nazi ideal. 

Another reason she may make no effort to save herself is that any other life would be a comedown from what she has known. She's the goddess of her enchanted garden. But her youthful beautiful will fade. To marry and bear children would demote her. Make her intolerably ordinary. 

There's a hint of incest between Micol and Alberto. It seems to be psychological rather than physical. But it reflects the fact that no one else is good enough for her. Only a god is fit to be the consort of a goddess. Yet by having an affair with her brother's best friend, there's a sense in which she snubs Alberto as much as Giorgio. 

When they're finally rounded up, that's a leveling experience–as they suddenly share captivity as Giorgio's father. It humanizes her. 

But there may be yet another reason for her erratic behavior. A sense of foreboding and futility. She has no future in this world. Her generation is doomed. Alberto's degenerative illness symbolizes the loss of hope. Her frustration may also account, in part, for her mean treatment of Giorgio. 

Yet, in a way she may feel that she's sparing his feelings in the long run. He can't have her because she's doomed. They are not allowed to have a life together. Circumstances conspire against them, even if the feeling was mutual. She drove him away to save him. Nearly vicarious. She takes his place. 

This may, however, reflect a difference between Bassani's understanding of Micol and de Sica's. De Sica's interpretation may soften the character. 

Ultimately, though, I think Micol is a conflicted character because she's an emblematic character. She represents the excruciating paralysis of action that Bassani witnessed firsthand, as Italian Jews allowed events to overtake them. Their passivity, their denial, sealed their fate–in a self-fulfilling destiny.

Bassani himself had an opportunity to escape, but he, along with his brother Paolo, stayed behind to participate in the resistance. He was able to rescue his sister and parents, but the remainder of his relatives and Jewish neighbors perished in the death camps. That haunted him for the rest of his life, and Micol is the projection of that fatal indecision. 

They had different survival strategies. Giorgio's father (who was modeled on Bassani's own father) tries to shield his family by playing the role of the loyal fascist and patriot. But in the end, that's not enough. 

Italian Jews were blindsided because Nazism was foreign. A witch's brew of German philosophy and mythology. Traditional Italian anti-Semitism was theological rather than racial, and it was far less threatening. But Mussolini's pact with Hitler interjected that alien ideology onto Italian soil. 

vi) Because the viewpoint of the characters is prospective, while the viewpoint of the audience is retrospective, that generates dramatic tension. The audience knows the cataclysm that awaits the characters before they do. By the time it catches up with them, it's too late to escape.  

vii) To my knowledge, Bassani was a secular Jew. The Holocaust left him shattered. Had it not been for the Holocaust, he would have been a minor writer, but that event lent tragic weight and moral focus to his writing. Yet all he could do, from within his worldly vantage-point, was to commemorate and document the cataclysm. He felt it should be meaningful, but he had no transcendent frame of reference. Even if his friends and relatives hadn't died in the Holocaust, they'd all be dead by now. Death by "natural causes."

Like an anthill struck by lightning. The ants scurry about, surveying the devastation. Collecting the dead. Repairing the damage. Starting over again. But the cosmos is sublimely indifferent to their plight. It's their little tragedy. But in due time, all things pass. People come and go. They take their place in the vast invisible cemetery of time's forgotten lives. There is no moral urgency. In the end, everyone who cared about the dead is dead. Time erases everything. 

There is no hope in this world. Like an empty nautilus shell, it curves in on itself, leading to a dead-end. Hope can only come from the outside, breaking into the cycle of despair.  

From Luther to Hitler?

http://phc.edu/UserFiles/File/_Other%20Projects/Global%20Journal/06_03_Poewe.pdf

Another Jewish Holocaust on the Horizon

This past week we learned that Libya has chosen to go the direction of radical Islam, and Obama announced the pullout of all US troops from Iraq in the near future. Iran and Syria are becoming more unabated in their goal to wipe out Israel. Turkey and Egypt are ratcheting up their radicalism by the day. And the state of Israel is more isolated today since its inception, thanks to the current administration. And last, but not least, the world supports a Palestinian state, not caring that it will be led by Islamic leaders who refuse to acknowledge the existence of Israel.

Only bone-headed ignorance pretends that enlightened Muslims would never cause a holocaust.

Lest we forget, the pictures below from the Holocaust are not for the faint-hearted.

Warning: All images in this entry are shown in full, not screened out for graphic content. There are many dead bodies. The photographs are graphic and stark. This is the reality of genocide, and of an important part of World War II and human history.

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/10/world-war-ii-the-holocaust/100170/

ht: Tim Challies