Jewish Studies

Crimes against Humanity

Saturday Column, April 20, 1982:

I WAS not in the Mermaid Theatre on Wednesday night for the opening of the play based on George Steiner’s novel "The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H." But I have read Dr Steiner’s book and therefore had some idea why, as a friend reported it to me, the audience was stunned into silence – a long, ranting, bravura monologue by Alec McCown, brilliantly playing the play’s central character, Adolf Hitler.

The nonagenarian Hitler has been discovered, still alive, in a remote South American swamp – by a group of Israelis. As they bring him back to face an amazed world, we are given (in a statement infinitely more moving than a thousand sentimental soap operas like "Holocaust") what amounts to the conventional "case for the prosecution" against Hitler – that the attempt to exterminate Jews was a crime without parallel in history, and that it was all ultimately the fault of this lone psychopath.

Finally the crazed old man turns to his captors and makes a long speech in his own defence which is the climax of the story.

With demonic eloquence, Hitler makes four points. First, he addresses himself to the notion of a people, a "master race", set apart by history for some special destiny above that of all other nations. Where did the Nazis get such an idea from, Hitler asks, it not from the Jews themselves, the "Chosen People of God", whose most holy texts describe how they slew and murdered their way to the Promised Land?

Secondly, the Jews had visited a unique curse on humanity, according to Steiner’s Hitler. They had raised up over men the idea of an all-powerful inhuman God so remote that human beings could no longer relate to him in a human way. Through Christ they had added to this an unattainable vision of the perferction of man’s behaviour. Through Marx, they had held out a new vision of unrealisable perfection – the state of heaven on earth. All these things had placed men in slavery to inhuma ideals which inevitably inspired them to inhuman savagery.

Thirdly, Hitler questions the charge that, in his attempt to free men from this curse, by killing six million people, he had committed a crime somehow unique in its horror. How did this compare with the 20 million Africans killed by the Christian Belgians in the Congo massacres when he was a child? Or the 30 millions killed by the Marxists in Stalin’s Soviet Union? Or all the countless other crimes committed by men against each other and against nature in our time? Why should his crime be singled out for special execration?

Fourthly, Hitler suggests that, without the Holocaust and the special aura this threw round the Jews, they would never have been able to realise their most cherished, 2000-year-old dream – that of returning to their homeland. To him, more than any other single man, they owe the establishment of Israel.

It is not surprising if the theatre is stunned after this tour de force of twisted logic. For, as no one familiar with George Steiner’s writings could doubt, he has not given Hitler these arguments just as a series of self-evidently absurd propositions.

With considerable courage, he has tried to do something which is rare not just in the theatre, but anywhere. He has tried to get people to think, to re-examine some of their most fundamental, fondly held assumptions. And it will be interesting to see whether those who feel that they disagree violently with these arguments an rally make the effort to explain why, or whether they will merely try to drown them with parrot cries of abuse.

It is undoubtedly one of the most curious and alarming features of the readiness of people not to think in our time that we should have reserved such a special place for Hitler as the only undisputed embodiment of evil.

As we contemplate the seemingly never-ending fascination with Hitler and Nazi Germany in films and books and television programmes, or at the way the words "Nazi" and "Fascist" have become our supreme terms of condemnation, we may wonder at the extent to which we have elevated Hitler into being a curious kind of scapegoat for evil – a Devil we can safely hate because he has nothing to do with us.

Once men lose the sense of their own capacity for evil (in even the tiniest ways) it is an absolutely unchanging rule that they will find that evil in other people, and where cosier to project it than onto a man who has been dead for more than a generation – even though one may still condemn those alive by imagining, however absurdly, a connection between them and what he stood for.

A tiny example of how meaningless this process has become was Mr Tony Benn’s analogy the other day between journalists who attacked "their fellow trade unionists" in Aslef and the "Jews of Dachau" who helped herd their fellow Jews into gas-chambers. Such a trivialising remark could only have come from someone who has lost all perspective on what actually happened to the Jews.

It is impossible in a short article to do justice to the points made by Steiner’s Hitler. But I believe the key to most of what he says lies in asking where men derive the ultimate source of their identity, that which tells thems who they really are.

As history of our century shows (and that of many centuries before that), there is nothing so dangerous for humanity as when people see the inmost roots of their identity as lying in their membership of a group – whether it be a race, a class, a party or even a sex. For sooner or later it will lead to seeing "the others", those who are not part of that group, as merely a dehumanised target for aggression.

So long as we identify only with a part against the whole, we never see the world straight. We can only see that from the point of perspective within each of us, as individual human beings, which shows us how we each have a living connection with everyone and everything else. And having found that point or perspective we find that it also enables us to have an intimate relationship with that otherwise incomprehensible power within us which men call God – which is only terrifying and inhuman when seen collectively, from the point of view of men as a group.

Such is the truth unspoken behind the whole of Dr Steiner’s powerful piece – and it is the only truth which can resolve all conventional thinking of our time which his Hitler so diabolically and brilliantly exposes.