From 1939 to 1945 he was a member of the Waffen SS, declared a criminal organisation at Nuremberg. But what did Jauss have to say for himself in this matter? Just before his death in 1997, he gave an interview to Le Monde - far from an open and unambiguous acknowledgement of responsibility, it seems to be an attempt to blur the lines, and obfuscate or perhaps skip around the issue. This reached almost comical heights, as the following quoted paragraph demonstrates. All footnotes and emphases are mine:
Before I turn to the history of a young German who was seventeen years old when the war started [1], I would like to remind people that there are at least three ways of understanding history [2]: 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 [3], 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. [4] What persuaded me to enter the Waffen-SS was not really an adherence to Nazi ideology. [5] 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. [6] 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. [7] 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. [8] One had to be present in the field, where history was being made, [9] 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. [10]
[1] Still old enough to know better.
[2] As opposed to what really happened.
[3] Nothing just happens in uniform.
[4] How convenient.
[5] What?
[6] Why didn't you join the Wehrmacht instead?
[7] So skeptical, in fact, that you joined the Waffen SS.
[8] Why not?
[9] And people were being killed.
[10] There's a hell of a difference between a volunteer and a conscript.
Not putting too fine a point about it, the Waffen SS was notable for a whole swathe of war crimes against regular and irregular combatants, in addition to unarmed men, women and children. The blood of millions is on their hands. Not to mention it was home to outfits like the SS-Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger, as lead into battle by a paedophile and which included mass rape, mutilation, immolation and throwing and then bayoneting live babies on its list of extra-curricular activities.
Of course, Jauss himself was imprisoned and then subsequently released without charge. But it's telling that only those conscripted into the Waffen SS after 1943 (often literally at the point of a bayonet) recieve standard veterans' pensions and benefits from the German government. Before then, you were more likely than not a volunteer, like Jauss. He was perhaps keen to distance himself both mentally and ethically from this fact:
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.
But he was that young man. They were not strangers because they were the same person. Another thing Jauss said in that interview was "my experience at the time was compartmentalized and my horizons limited", a state of affairs that arguably persisted to his death. It also applied to me, blinded but not absolved by the narrow focus of the doctoral process. Perhaps that is why Jauss found his home in academia so easily - scholarship, after all, is a selective act of remembering.
No comments:
Post a Comment