Poking through our forthcoming translation of Maurice Olender's Race and Erudition (translated by Jane Marie Todd and published originally in French under the somewhat longer title La Chasse aux evidences: sur quelques formes de racisme entre mythe et histoire, 1978-2005, and recently released in an updated version from Seuil under the title Race sans histoire), I came across a fascinating interview Olender conducted with H. R. Jauss, the influential German literary scholar who pioneered reception theory and went on to form an integral part of the Constance School during the 1960s and beyond. Before embarking upon a career in academia, Jauss, who died soon after the interview was published in Le Monde in 1996, served in the Waffen-SS on the eastern front, commanding a company of 100 men and winning the Gold Cross for his actions during the Estonian retreat. Tried by an Allied tribunal at Nuremberg, Jauss was judged "not [to have] participated in criminal actions," was released, and eventually took up a position at the University of Heidelberg.
The interview touches on Jauss's orientation to this personal history and to history defined more broadly as an object upon which we consider and reflect, as well as the process by which Nazi barbarism "erupts into culture," and, significantly, the reasons behind the "silence of a generation" of German academics with regard not only to their participation in the German war effort, but to the wider failure of universities to oppose Nazi ideology as it wormed its way through the culture at large. Students entering the university system in, say, 1960, complained, as Karlheinz Stierle did, about the decision of their professors to maintain "a complete silence about their role in a world of disaster":
What was this disaster within the twelve-year catastrophe of the Third Reich? It was that the university, a place of enlightenment, of humanities — of culture and science, in short — had not opposed the barbarism that was becoming stronger every day. That disaster was no longer open for discussion. As if the chasm had closed up in devouring the monster, there was nothing to remind us of what might have been only a bad dream.
The theme of catastrophe looms large in the minds of the scholars who populate the final chapters of Olender's book; when Jauss is asked to describe a world view that has marked his thinking, he cites Walter Benjamin's dictum "Das es so weiter geht, das ist die Katastrophe" ("That it goes on, that is the catastrophe"), meaning that a catastrophe like the one that occurred in Germany under the Nazi regime is not like a natural disaster, some cataclysmic event that befalls us out of the sky. Nor is it inevitable. It takes action, or the lack of it, and catastrophe on that large a scale is the result of decisions made or not made by multitudes of people. Guilt and responsibility, and the failure of a generation to address its own contribution to the catastrophe, lie at the crux of this interview. It got me thinking about the value of translation as well. The relative dearth of translated material in the American publishing scene has been a topic of some discussion lately, and I suppose this is an example of non English-language material that can really inform our perspective, whatever your opinion of this particular text (and it will likely provoke a range of opinions). Interview follows.
From Race and Erudition, forthcoming from Harvard University Press:
"The Radical Strangeness of Nazi Barbarism Has Paralyzed a Generation of Intellectuals": Dialogue with H. R. Jauss (1996)
Maurice Olender. What prompted you in October 1939 to volunteer for the Waffen-SS?
Hans Robert Jauss. Before I turn to the history of a young German who was seventeen years old when the war started, I would like to remind people that there are at least three ways of understanding history: the history that unfolds in the present, in which one finds oneself engaged as an actor; the history into which one finds oneself passively propelled, as a witness so to speak; and finally, the history that has taken place and become an object of reflection. When one attempts to examine one’s own past, those three levels may overlap, but recomposition through memory prevails. What persuaded me to enter the Waffen-SS was not really an adherence to Nazi ideology. As the son of a teacher, member of the petty bourgeoisie, I was a young man who wanted to conform with the atmosphere of the time. That said, I had read Spengler’s Decline of the West, written by an author banned by the Nazis, and it had made me skeptical of the Hitlerian empire. But along with other future historians — I’m thinking of my friends Reinhart Koselleck and Arno Borst — what we had in common was the desire not to stand apart from current events. One had to be present in the field, where history was being made, by participating in the war. In our view, to do otherwise would have been to flee, to confine ourselves within an aesthetic attitude, while our comrades of the same age were risking their lives.
Joining the Waffen-SS at seventeen, becoming head of a company at eighteen, being responsible for more than a hundred men: that was my daily life during the war. My experience at the time was compartmentalized and my horizons limited. I often learned only after the fact what battle I had participated in. I did not discover what had really happened until the end of the war — and with horror. The goal was to survive with my men where I happened to be, on the eastern front. No room there for ideology. Or for heroism, in fact. What sustained me was an understanding of survival.
On this subject, I recall the anecdote that was told at the time. “Under our Nazi dictatorship, there are three possibilities: if you are intelligent and in the Party, you’re not sincere; if you are sincere and intelligent, you’re not in the Party; if you are sincere and in the Party, you’re not intelligent.” That was our state of mind, which gives a good sense of the cynicism reigning at the time.
M. Olender. What happened to you when Germany was liberated from Nazism?
H. R. Jauss. What counted most for me as a prisoner of war was the international military tribunal in Nuremberg. Because it was thanks to it that we were able to inform ourselves precisely of the facts and hence to take the measure of the absolute horror committed by Nazi Germany. For us, there was also the hope that from then on the atrocities committed during wars, and against human rights, would always be judged by international tribunals . . . which, alas, has not been the case. It was hoped, as Kant believed, that a crime against humanity perpetrated anywhere on the planet would be justiciable in any other place in the world. Although crimes against humanity have existed since 1945, and as such are liable to international judgments, I still don’t think we should imagine that different massacres are historically equivalent: each keeps the specificity of its horror and in this case comparison obscures history more than it can clarify it. That said, the crimes of the Nazi regime surpassed absolutely anything imaginable in a civilized nation.
M. Olender. After being tried and released, you arrived at the University of Heidelberg.
H. R. Jauss. That was in 1948. Along with others, we had a desire for radical change, as attested by the review Die Wandlung, where we could read, notably, texts by Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt. And though Heidegger was the one being taught, we were much more excited about Sartre. We wanted to create a society in a new Eu ro pe an Germany whose culture would prevent the nationalist ideas that had led Germany to that abjection — which was also an extreme form of degradation of self and other — from ever resurfacing again.
M. Olender. There is an enormous bibliography on World War II, in Germany and elsewhere, many, many studies by historians, sociologists, and psychologists, on the crimes committed by the Nazis. But how are we to explain the fact that the major German academics who were compromised by Nazism have said nothing about their past, have been able to say nothing, or very little, to the succeeding generations of students of the last half a century?
H. R. Jauss. It’s difficult for me to talk about the silence of my teachers, of Heidegger or Gadamer. The exceptions were indeed quite rare. Apart from Jaspers and the articles in Die Wandlung, you have to turn to authors such as the great Marxist philologist Werner Krauss to hear a few isolated voices. Karl Löwith does talk about Heidegger’s silence. In his statements, Löwith indicates how far Heidegger’s seminars in the early 1930s had pushed the destruction of metaphysics, to the point of being within arm’s length of what Nazi ideology was about to become. Although our teachers were silent, our generation did draw a lesson from them, which was also our motto: “Never again Auschwitz, never again Hiroshima.”
M. Olender. Can you say more about that silence of a generation?
H. R. Jauss. The silence in this case is undoubtedly linked to a refusal to understand what is inhuman. Leo Spitzer shed light on that phenomenon for us in an article called “The Familiar and the Strange,” also published in Die Wandlung. Spitzer wondered why German academics, who played such a major role in legitimating Nazism, had so much trouble after the war talking about what had happened, as if the incomprehensible inhumanity of the crimes committed by that regime confined everyone who had participated in it — in what ever capacity, as actors or as witnesses— to total mutism. The radical strangeness of Nazi barbarism has paralyzed a generation of intellectuals, confining them to passivity, a mental inertia, literally to stupidity — if stupor indeed renders one mute.
In my last book, I tried to talk about the act of understanding associated with “free will” (Freiwilligkeit). In fact, we cannot arrive at an understanding by either compulsion or regulation, or even by logical argument: to understand something or someone involves consent. I must therefore refuse to understand what I cannot morally approve. For me, the “free will” implied by any understanding is humanism’s last resort. Indeed, if one can understand everything, one can forgive everything, which is unacceptable. One cannot understand the genocide committed by the Nazis because understanding it would be a way of approving of it. Therefore, though one must continue to record and study the facts to show where the mechanisms of the Nazi Reich led, one must refuse to understand them.
In that context, I find it dangerous to accept historical analyses whose sophistication lies in explaining everything, in order, ultimately, to understand everything and even to find “sufficient causes” for the advent of the Nazi dictatorship. It seems very naïve to me to imagine that ethics need not play a role in the study of the past, and you really have to be a positivist to believe in the omnipotence of historical or sociological analyses.
M. Olender. To return to the silence of academics compromised by Nazism, do you believe there is a connection between an endless debt toward the victims — the “guilt- consciousness” Jaspers considered “indelible” — and impediments to thinking?
H. R. Jauss. Yes, undoubtedly, a connection to guilt but also to shame. That’s why I don’t understand why there was never any guilt or shame in Heidegger and other teachers of his generation. That refusal to examine one’s past is also at issue in Jünger. For people of my age, he was not a role model when he glorified an aesthetics of war. Even in recent interviews, Jünger takes no critical distance from his war years. I find no better way to explain to myself the recent fashion for the jurist Carl Schmitt: a militant Catholic and a Nazi high dignitary, he was also an unrepentant anti- Semite, yet his writings have found excellent publishers in France. Nonetheless, in 1935 Karl Löwith did a lucid analysis of that unscrupulous man’s theoretical thinking.
M. Olender. You were talking about a generation between shame and guilt?
H. R. Jauss. If we want to say more about guilt and shame, it is worthwhile to remember that in German, as in many other languages, Scham, shame, also means modesty. And in silence there can also be modesty. But I must point out that assuming guilt completely in no way erases the shame and silence that may result from it. One cannot compensate or make up for the irreparable.
Two attitudes may result from such a feeling of unavoidable national shame, which Jaspers discusses, even
among those who have committed no criminal act: either you no longer do anything but mope and sometimes even delight in virtuous indignation or gratuitous self- accusation because it makes no sense to set yourself up as a judge, even a judge of yourself; or you strive to transform the guilt and shame by a collective action that allows you to leave a deadly past behind you. As for myself, I have endeavored to reform the outdated structure of the German university. In creating the Poetik und Hermeneutik group in 1963, with Hans Blumenberg and a few other friends, I embarked on an intellectual project that opposed any tendency to return to the idea of nationality or race as meaningful vectors in the human sciences.
M. Olender. Is there an idea, a view of the world that has particularly marked you?
H. R. Jauss. Perhaps Walter Benjamin’s line: “Das es so weiter geht, das ist die Katastrophe” (That it goes on, that is the catastrophe). In other words, the catastrophe is not an apocalyptic event, a break. It results from what everyone participates in, if only tacitly. Inertia, the fact that everyone cooperates passively in the same motion without opposing it, that’s what leads to catastrophe: that’s when Nazi barbarism bursts forth in culture itself. Hitler’s assumption of power was not a necessity inherent in history, any more than anti- Semitism is consubstantial with Germany. I do not accept the idea of a providence or a natural destiny that would be historical.
M. Olender. What if a publisher invited you to write your “memoirs,” to speak of the shame and silence of a generation of intellectuals compromised by Nazi Germany?
H. R. Jauss. That might make sense, since I have the feeling today that I understand after the fact things that, though not entirely buried in silence, have not always appeared so clearly to me. And yet I know, we all know, that memories fade. Even as a prisoner of war, I realized that my memory could play tricks on me. One would therefore have to write one’s “memoirs” against one’s memories. There’s also something else. The letters from my youth, sent from the front— I couldn’t reread them for a long time. When I finally did reread them, I was caught off guard by a young man who had become a stranger, whom I could not recognize as myself. To tell my past in the present, then, I’d have to find a broken writing style. Of all the biographies I’ve read recently, there’s only one I find convincing. That’s Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (Childhood). That beautiful book establishes a dialogue between the self telling episodes from her past and another voice that is constantly challenging her, so that any idealization of memory is avoided. Lived experience appears there in its inexhaustible contingency, between question and answer.
Race and Erudition is Copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
