Gert Krell
Neurobiologist Eric Kandel
With one passage in Eric Kandel’s book, In Search of Memory, I feel particularly uncomfortable. The desire to destroy people outside the group to which one belongs, may be an innate response and may thus be capable of being aroused in almost any cohesive group, he says (p. 30). But he quickly adds that such “quasi-genetic predisposition” would probably not operate in a vacuum. “One important reason for the actions of the Viennese in 1938 was sheer opportunism. The successes of the Jewish community generated envy and a desire for revenge among non-Jews, especially those in the university. Nazi party membership among university professors greatly exceeded that in the population at large (my emphasis).”
I asked myself how I would have reacted to the successes of the Jewish community, had I been a Viennese professor in the 1930s and not one in Frankfurt/Main in the 1990s. My questions became even stronger, when I read Kandel’s next chapter and really did feel envious, of his successes, his excellence, his (seemingly) happy family life, his (seemingly) uncomplicated relationship to the other sex, and his strong academic connections. I grew up in a broken family, with a loving but violent mother. I had no Mizzi to introduce me to the joys of eroticism; I was rather shy and had strong inhibitions towards girls. I was good at school, but not self-evidently excellent. I was a good and well-liked teacher, but I had few academic connections and was more of a “home-town professor”.
With my good senses I know that the relevance of such comparisons is highly doubtful, they may even be considered arrogant. I never experienced such a terrible year as Erich Kandel did in 1938, and compared to your mother’s fate, which you so caringly describe in Is It Night Or Day?, I grew up in heaven. I was a brave boy in the better sense of the term, but how brave was your mother as a girl – thrown out of her homeland, without her parents and soon to be orphaned, living with and depending on an aunt who did not love her. Nevertheless, if I can have such feelings today, how might I have felt had I received my education in an anti-Semitic academic climate!
You know how angry and sad, sometimes desperate, I often feel about the German Nazi past and the lack of atonement in the years after it. Part of the anger derives from the fact that responsibility was not accepted by many or even most of those who had committed the mass crimes or had supported the regime which ordered them, asked for them or allowed them to happen. A responsibility which many in my generation felt we had to bear and which we rejected at the same time. We wanted to be innocent and tried to put as much distance between ourselves and the Nazis and what we regarded as personal and structural continuities.
Another part of the anger, however, derives from the fact that we are not innocent by definition, nobody is. In the almost obsessive desire not to be anywhere near the perpetrators, some of my compatriots among the leftist students became perpetrators themselves. They fantasized themselves into a fascist state which was seen as planning a new Auschwitz, this time on them. Gudrun Ennslin, one of the leading figures in the RAF, once literally said so. Another leading figure, Horst Mahler, a lawyer by training, later became one of the leading Neo-Nazis. He is currently in jail because he publicly denied the Holocaust.
So it is important that the successors to a generation of murderers and racists or at least supporters and fellow-travelers of murderers and racists sort out complicated relationships between guilt, innocence, and responsibility. We are not guilty, but we are not innocent by definition. We cannot define ourselves by being the complete opposite to the perpetrators in every respect. It is highly unlikely that we ever become like them, but we are responsible for what we do and who we are.
I wonder, what kind of complications you see in the generation which succeeded the victims, how you define yourself, and what risks you see in your generation’s strife for identity.
