To the Editor:
Dr. Leo Rangell's essay on the Germans, the Hamburg Congress, and war-guilt (Newsletter, Vol. 18, No. 4, Fall, 1984) is compassionate and sincere. It is in ironic contrast that I am reminded of a satirical song that had some vogue during World War II; the lyrics pleaded, tongue in cheek: “Let's not be beastly to the Germans / Please don't hurt the Huns …” The jest does not hide the frustrated rage that was felt in those days, and that is felt by an undetermined number today against the nation that made Hitler, the War, and the Holocaust a fact of history.
The continuing resentment and suspicion are seldom felt toward individual Germans, especially if one knows them personally, but is directed toward the nation's people in the aggregate. This is a phenomenon of group psychology that has also been prominently displayed toward blacks and Jews, the individual at hand being exempted from the bias felt toward the group. Some us of have heard it as psychoanalysts: one's colleagues and the specialty itself are ridiculed and scorned, but with the addendum that, “You're different; you're not crazy” (or weird, or arrogant, or whatever).
It is still necessary to reiterate that the subject is profoundly important and enormously complex, and that it is unlikely that any resolution or solution will be found in this century. My personal concern is that when the two generations of the Holocaust (the survivors and their children) have expired, the catastrophes of Nazism, the War, and the Holocaust will have been relegated to the history books and their possibly redeeming object lesson to humanity will have been forgotten. There is evidence that this is, to a degree, already the case in Germany and that in some parts of the world it has never been learned.
In keeping the memory alive, which we must do, vengeance is not the issue. Psychoanalysts know that vengefulness consumes the avenger more surely than it does his object. Nor is it reasonable to dictate what the present German people shall feel; this is strictly their problem. In the largest perspective, we must know that the surviving victim or victimizer may or not feel guilt or shame, as in some of Dr. Rangell's instances; that there may be identification with the victim as well as with the aggressor, as in some of his instances; that xenophobic bias will always be with us, and that consequently the world must be constantly vigilant as to the resurgence of arrogant, aggressive nationalism and virulent anti-Semitism.
Above all, I want to emphasize that the superego in most people is not a stable organization. The quotation from Freud's “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” on the first page of the Newsletter, accompanying Dr. Rangell's essay, is a perennial warning from a clear-headed vision. A person feeling guilty responsibility may regress again to open hostility, seeking and finding a scapegoat. A people on whom responsibility for the Nazi atrocities lies heavily stands as an object lesson and witness for the rest of humanity. Surveillance and the threat of certain punishment are still in 1984 more effective deterrents in preventing individual or mass violence than are moral compassion, Judaeo-Christian ethics, and the individual superego and ego-ideal.
This leaves the present German people, including our colleagues, in an unenviable position. They are not alone in the history of mankind's retributions. Justice and fairness are part of a perennial quest.
If these are valid facts, what are we to make of Dr. Rangell's even-handed, compassionate, and thoughtful essay? Criticism will no doubt seem carping and even reprehensible, but I think it must be said that at times he is asserting that what was done in Germany is “only human and we're all sinners,” that only one who is without sin should cast any stone of accusation or reproach. Arthur Koestler wrote many years ago that one need not have lily-white hands to call attention to another's dirty hands. Morality follows a logic of its own and in being even-handed in evaluation there is a possibility not perhaps of forgiving the sin but of trivializing it.
There is a strong tendency these days to be relativistic about morality, as I think Dr. Rangell is, in part. In principle, this is a highly legitimate perspective to take, given our current understanding of matters of ethics. It is understandable, also, on the basis of humanistic feelings. But when, with him, we group together the Nazi atrocities, the affairs of Nixon and his band, isolationist America in the 1930's and 1940's, the fact that we have held Congresses in Rome, Vienna, and Spain, so why not Hamburg, and the puzzling vignettes (were they included to be even-handed?) concerning Germans whose fathers were “not Nazis” but “German soldiers' or ”normal“ anti-Semities, we must conclude that no overarching principle emerges, that this relativity in morality is misleading and unrealistic, and that we are confusing and hybridizing the objectivity of the social scientist with the injunctions to forgive of Judaeo-Christian ethics and the ”copped plea“ of the petty criminal.
There remain two curious phenomena: First, “forgiving” is prescribed. But how does a people forgive a whole people and their descendents? Forgiving is difficult enough for an individual. The problem, anyway, is not one of forgiving, but of learning to live without suspicion and with a return of trust. And this makes the problem ever more complex. Second, it is implied that we all must participate equally in the blood-guilt. But, as I have already suggested, this is to follow a faulty logic and a highly undesirable ideal. Everyone is potentially
an Oedipus, but if everyone is responsible for everyone else's actual- and thought-crimes, then no one can be sane.
The psychoanalyst is by inclination and training disposed to be sympathetically detached and, when confronted with social issues, to rely upon his clinical objectivity. Sometimes this is adaptive, sometimes defensive, often, it is unrealistic and his professional neutrality opens up more problems.
It would be quixotic to assume that these problems can be solved with rationality. Objective rationality is possible for international financiers and traders, and then only by discounting the human factors. The German problem will endure as a problem. At best, it is a nonvindictive object-lesson and warning to future victims and victimizers. A harsh prediction but, I think, both realistic and potentially redemptive.
Stanley L. Olinick, M.D.
Washington, D.C.