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I keep hearing people say that the "Camp Auschwitz" guy should be forced to volunteer at the Holocaust Museum to teach him some empathy, and people, empathy doesn't work like that.
CW: Holocaust
CW: Holocaust
First off, if merely WITNESSING suffering automatically taught empathy, every Nazi camp guard would have quit.
Even EXPERIENCING marginalization, persecution, and/or suffering doesn't automatically teach empathy. If it did, white women and white gay men wouldn't be racist, let alone complicit in patriarchy. No man of color would be misogynist. No disabled person would be homophobic.
You have to *choose to learn* empathy from suffering, whether you're witnessing it or experiencing it. It doesn't happen automatically.
I was recently reading some German writers who talk about antisemitism in the field of biblical studies, and in Tania Oldenhage's book "Parables for our Time," which every Christian clergyperson should read: https://www.amazon.com/Parables-Our-Time-Rereading-Scholarship/dp/019515052X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&qid=1610664933&refinements=p_27%3ATania+Oldenhage&s=books&sr=1-1
I came across a poem that she returns to multiple times throughout the course of the book. Before I get to that, though, I want to talk about her discussion of the inability to see.
She talks about how after the war, Allied soldiers forced German citizens to look at pictures and watch film of the camps, of the horrors there. Oldenhage talks about how many of the Germans couldn't process what they were seeing.
Essentially, in attempting to denazify the population, the Allies demanded that German citizens witness what had been done in their name, and perform remorse.
But here's the thing:
Even those of us who've *studied* the Holocaust fairly in-depth and watched a lot of footage and read a lot of memoirs and first-hand accounts and who desperately WANT to understand have trouble grasping the horror of it.
Even those of us who've *studied* the Holocaust fairly in-depth and watched a lot of footage and read a lot of memoirs and first-hand accounts and who desperately WANT to understand have trouble grasping the horror of it.
And, y'know, I'm Jewish. I'm motivated to understand. I *want* to get it. And it's something I continue to undertake voluntarily.
I'm not being forced to do it by people who just won a war against me.
I'm not being forced to do it by people who just won a war against me.
So, predictably, these attempts had varying effects on individuals. Oldenhage describes on of them as an inability to see what was in the pictures. Looking at an image and seeing *the image* and not the reality the image represents.
And I feel like that's a good way to describe the role the Holocaust plays in Western consciousness more broadly. It's become symbolic for so much, and by labeling it the ultimate, incomparable evil, we've made it a *signifier* for evil while losing what it actually WAS.
And I think you can read this poem (Kaschnitz's Zoon Politikon; I'm not going to type it out to spare people from accidentally encountering the graphic imagery in it) two different ways.
So, regardless of how you want to interpret this, it's a poem about an orderly German home haunted by the horror of the Holocaust, which bursts into it on Sundays.
The way I've seen most Americans read it is to assume it's about remorse and acknowledgement and guilt that Germans feel despite attempts to ignore it, forget it, move on.
But I think it can just as easily be read as resigned or even resentful. All of that imagery of being haunted is *passive.*
The parquet floor is *carved*. The clothing is *put on* the narrator(s).
The parquet floor is *carved*. The clothing is *put on* the narrator(s).
"clothed with what we deserve" can be taken as acceptance of guilt, or it can be about guilt being *put on them* by someone else
The thing that makes it most ambiguous for me, though, is that when the Jewish victims of the camps are referenced in this poem, they are described in horrific (not sympathetic) ways.
Perhaps that's in keeping with the theme of haunting, but it's notable that it's not their killers, or the entire machinery of killing them, that's described as horrific. It's the victims themselves.
They've gone from being described as inhuman and disgusting by the people who killed them to inhuman and disgusting by the people who are haunted by them.
So while the narrator in this poem is certainly *haunted* the Holocaust, it's not clear whether they are haunted by remorse and sadness or by resentment that they're forced to remember this.
In any case, they don't demonstrate any empathy for the victims. They don't seem them as ghostly people, as people who should still be alive, whose death was a loss. They see them as ghoulish corpses and rotten smells.
The point being: you can expose people to horror. You might, at least with some people, be able to make them feel horrified.
You can't force them to feel *empathy* or *compassion.*
You can't force them to feel *empathy* or *compassion.*
I do think people can often reach other people one-on-one, but that's not going to come about by forcing someone to do volunteer work with the people they've harmed, and you shouldn't potentially inflict further harm on those people by putting it on them to teach the unwilling.
