There is considerable irony in the fact that Giulio Ricciarelli’s 2014 film “Labyrinth of Lies” which pleads for the preserving of painful memories has received so little attention since its release two years ago.
The movie is based on the true story of events leading up to the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials using a young fictionalized public prosecutor Johann Radmann (Alexander Fehling) as the main character.
Early in the film, Radmann learns of the horrors of Auschwitz from the real life German journalist Thomas Gnielka (André Szymanski). With the support of his superior, the German Judge Fritz Bauer (Gert Voss), Radmann launches an investigation into former Nazis and brings Auschwitz camp personnel to trial in 1963, beginning a process in which Germans began to uncover and face the horrors of the Holocaust.
Near the end of the film, after he has resigned as public prosecutor, Radmann stands with Gnielka outside the barbed wire at Auschwitz talking about Radmann’s resignation:
Gnielka: What about the trial? How can you give it all up?
Radmann: I always wanted to fight for the good cause. But I don’t know what that is anymore. How can I try another person? If I had been there… I don’t know what I would have done.
Gnielka: You’re missing the point, Johann. Look around. What do you seen?
Radmann: Auschwitz.
Gnielka: No, you see a meadow. Trees, barracks, a fence. Auschwitz is the stories that happened here and are buried here. Without the trial these stories will be forgotten.
Radmann: There is no appropriate punishment for what happened here.
Gnielka: It’s not about punishment. It’s about the victims, about their stories.
There is no such thing as “appropriate punishment” or justice in the face of Auschwitz. There are no scales that can be balanced to put right the wrongs that have been done in so many of the horrific chapters of human history.
Trials cannot bring justice; but they can help to preserve memory. And we remember in order that we might live differently.
When Radmann returns to the public prosecutors office, his superior asks,
Why have you come back?
Radmann replies,
Because the only response to Auschwitz is to do the right thing yourself.
Every day is a challenge to answer Auschwitz. The violence, genocide, injustice, and destruction that litter the story of the human community stand as a stark challenge to every person living to ask ourselves what direction our behaviour, our attitudes, our thoughts, and our words are tending.
Every decision we make is preparing the world for greater harm or greater good. When we choose gentleness, we are building a more gentle world. When we choose prejudice of any sort, we are creating a world in which the possibility of horror is increased. There are no irrelevant choices.
No one starts out to become a war criminal. We get there by small increments, tiny choices. Careless words build upon one another to move us in a destructive direction.
Just as there can be no justice in the face of Auschwitz, there is also no way to make the vicious events of that terrible chapter of our history into some edifying morality tale. But we can allow our knowledge and the truth we see in the stories of our past, to motivate us to make different choices in the present. In this way perhaps not all hope will be lost and the human community may move in tiny increments towards greater goodness and light.
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nb: at the end of his excellent book Nazism and War, Richard Bessel concludes,
In Germany after 1945, Nazism was buried in a double sense: it was buried as a political movement and an ideology capable of mobilizing mass support, and it was buried in public memory. Through the horrors of 1944-45, Nazi Germany was transformed into armes Deutschland – ‘poor German’ – to be pitied rather than reviled. In their own eyes, Germans emerged as victims of war, not perpetrators of Nazism. It would take at least a generation before this perception could be challenged effectively. 181, 182
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June 25, 2016 at 9:41 am
Jaqueline
( I was told by my dear Aussie friend who is visiting: “Jaq, what you write is an important perspective, how is anyone going to listen if you sound mad about it?”. So I asked Christopher to take my comment from yesterday down. I thought I was going to rewrite what I wrote yesterday, and I still might….yet below is the comment that came forth today. It could be a blog post in itself, hopefully it’s worthwhile. )
I realise I need to sound more gentle, less frustrated at what is sometimes written here…but as someone who has Christopher’s blessing to write and to share my perspective, if I am the only one who looks at this story from the point of view of what happened to Germany, is it going to help?
Today in the Guardian newspaper was this about the Brexit vote: “We saw who applauded and who wept. Our friends in Paris, Berlin and Washington were stunned and disappointed. Cheering were the French Front National leader Marine Le Pen, far-right Dutch MP Geert Wilders, the Austrian far-rightist Norbert Hofer and, of course, Donald Trump – fittingly the first international visitor to this new land of Ukipania. And no doubt allowing himself a lupine grin, far away from the cameras, was one Vladimir Putin.”
It is my conviction that because we have not bothered with understanding the German story with compassion that we find ourselves in danger of the rise of the far right again in the world today…..and it is not Germany who is inviting this threat into our world: it is the countries that have been proud about having defeated Fascism which are crowding around it today.
We cannot understand why the Holocaust happened in isolation, as if it was just a case of German vs Jew. The Jews were the scapegoat of the world then, and for centuries before. Why are we surprised that a downtrodden country which when it rediscovered power took out the hurt and wounds of their on suffering onto the Jews?
( I mentioned the Council of Evian in which the world chose to turn their back on Jewish refugees and leave them as “Germany’s problem” to solve to someone on Facebook , and he wrote: how was the world supposed to know what would happen to the Jews? I shake my head at that- as if we don’t have a little under 2,000 years of Jewish persecution under our belt, to be able to guess what might happen to Jews who are being persecuted.)
This is why I am so insistent that we need to look at the German story from a different point of view :
Hatred and evil is within our hearts and within our society, yet those human qualities are not strong until they have a powerful charismatic cause and leader to rally around; it waits until human beings are too tired to love, too tired to feel compassion for anyone but themselves; too tired and hurt to care if anyone but themselves are being persecuted.
It waits until the “good” people feel helpless to do anything, and get ignored and beat up even when they try. It waits until people begin to mistake evil for good, and good for evil.( Evangelicals endorsing Trump comes to mind ). It waits until there is a suitable scapegoat ( this time it is the other Semite brother who is the one the world loves to hate, though give anyone-one a chance to show hatred for Jews today and they will take it ).
All these things happened to Germany then and are happening today, especially under our noses in America.. Yet are the countries in thrall with the Right today as in a desperate state as Germany was before the Nazis were voted in? Yet we still consider the Germans the ones we need to write and doco and film about, so we don’t fall into evil.
Clearly we need to understand the past in order to learn from it, but something has gone wrong it seems if the very countries that have condemned the Germans, who have not allowed the story of ordinary German people see the light of day, who have done nothing but focus on Nazis being evil, are the ones who are falling for the very danger that Germany was in not so very long ago.
What if all those films and books and docos have done is not help us remember the Holocaust as much as it kept evil in the past so we do not need to look at it today. What if all they did is give evil a chance to hide behind so it could build it’s strength in order to creep up upon us unawares and rise amongst us today?
June 25, 2016 at 2:42 pm
Christopher Page
great thoughts! you are right it could be a blog post on its own and now most of it is: https://inaspaciousplace.wordpress.com/2016/06/25/evils-of-the-past/
June 25, 2016 at 6:30 pm
Jaqueline
Thank you Christopher,
(my Aussie friend looked at me and said “See?”)
June 25, 2016 at 2:40 pm
Evils Of The Past | In A Spacious Place
[…] The original post and comment can be read here: https://inaspaciousplace.wordpress.com/2016/06/23/no-justice-in-the-face-of-auschwitz/ […]
July 6, 2016 at 9:39 am
Robert
It is entirely missing the point to talk about “left” and “right”; the mass killings of the last century were produced mostly by regimes of the left: Maoist China, Soviet Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, North Korea etc. etc. The genocide of the Armenians set the stage for the Holocaust; both racially and religiously motivated genocides.
Evil is as evil does regardless of political labels. The commonality is the evil that faithless humans are capable of when guided by the “inherent goodness of human nature”. A fact too uncomfortable for an age addicted to comfort.
Blather about Donald Trump is nothing but an insult to the memory of the dead and a trivialization of their suffering. Kindly show a little respect, even if a sense of proportion is impossible.