"A Contract with God" (1978)
30 de novembro de 2014
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Vida
An underwater shot of a great white shark captured using a towed underwater camera off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa
28 de novembro de 2014
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O Mal
The Banality of Evil: The Demise of a Legend
There
have been few phrases that have proved as controversial
as the famous subtitle Hannah Arendt chose to sum up her account of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann. From the moment the articles that eventually comprised her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil were published in The New Yorker, the idea that the execution of the Nazis’ diabolical plans for an Endlösung to the “Jewish Question” could be considered “banal” offended many readers. In addition, Arendt took what seemed to be a gratuitous swipe at the conduct of the Jewish councils, which, operating under conditions of extreme duress, were forced to bargain with their Nazi overseers in the desperate hope of buying time, sacrificing some Jewish lives in the hope of saving others. Only with the benefit of hindsight do we realize that their efforts were largely futile. In her rush to judgment, Arendt made it seem as though it was the Jews themselves, rather than their Nazi persecutors, who were responsible for their own destruction. Thus, with a few careless rhetorical flourishes, she established an historical paradigm that managed simultaneously to downplay the executioners’ criminal liability, which she viewed as “banal” and bureaucratic, and to exaggerate the culpability of their Jewish victims.
as the famous subtitle Hannah Arendt chose to sum up her account of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann. From the moment the articles that eventually comprised her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil were published in The New Yorker, the idea that the execution of the Nazis’ diabolical plans for an Endlösung to the “Jewish Question” could be considered “banal” offended many readers. In addition, Arendt took what seemed to be a gratuitous swipe at the conduct of the Jewish councils, which, operating under conditions of extreme duress, were forced to bargain with their Nazi overseers in the desperate hope of buying time, sacrificing some Jewish lives in the hope of saving others. Only with the benefit of hindsight do we realize that their efforts were largely futile. In her rush to judgment, Arendt made it seem as though it was the Jews themselves, rather than their Nazi persecutors, who were responsible for their own destruction. Thus, with a few careless rhetorical flourishes, she established an historical paradigm that managed simultaneously to downplay the executioners’ criminal liability, which she viewed as “banal” and bureaucratic, and to exaggerate the culpability of their Jewish victims.
Adolf Eichmann, in an official SS photo, ca. 1942. (Courtesy of Yad Vashem Photo Archives.)
Arendt’s astonishing conclusion that “Eichmann had no criminal
motives,” and the account that underlay it, might have been construed as
mere journalistic overstatement, but her status as a distinguished
political theorist, together with the furious controversy her account
engendered—Gershom Scholem famously accused her of lacking ahavat yisrael (love for her fellow Jews)—helped to create an aura of brave truth-telling that has surrounded Eichmann in Jerusalem ever since. This image of Eichmann in Jerusalem
as an act of an intellectual bravado, with Arendt herself cast in the
role of an imperiled heroine—a latter-day Joan of Arc, persecuted by an
army of inferior male detractors—was canonized in the recent and widely
praised German film by Margarethe von Trotta, Hannah Arendt.
It is certainly true that throughout the controversy Arendt comported
herself as someone who was above the fray. Often she seemed to regard
the Israelis she encountered in Jerusalem with as little esteem as she
did Eichmann. She dismissed the chief prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, with
breathtaking condescension as a “typical Galician Jew, very
unsympathetic, boring, constantly making mistakes. Probably one of those
people who don’t know any languages.” While covering the trial she
wrote to her former mentor, the philosopher Karl Jaspers:
Everything is organized by a police force that gives me the creeps,
speaks only Hebrew and looks Arabic. Some downright brutal types among
them. They would obey any order. And outside the doors, the oriental
mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country. In
addition, and very visible in Jerusalem, the peies [sidelocks] and caftan Jews, who make life impossible for all reasonable people here.
Even setting aside the egregious racism and anti-Jewish animus, there
is something very alarming about this passage. Any reader familiar with
Arendt’s classic study The Origins of Totalitarianism knows that
she described such mobs as the carriers of the totalitarian bacillus.
Nor can there be any mistaking the import of her assertion that the
Sephardic or Mizrahi policemen “would obey any order.” With this claim,
Arendt insinuated that they were the “authoritarian personalities” and
“desk murderers” of the future. Again and again, one sees how readily
Arendt blurred the line between victims and executioners.
Arendt’s banality thesis helped to engender the so-called
“functionalist” interpretation of the Holocaust, in which the role of
obedient desk murderers and mindless functionaries assumed pride of
place. Leading German historians such as Hans Mommsen coined nebulous
phrases such as “cumulative radicalization” in order to describe a
killing process that, like a Betriebsunfall (an industrial
accident), seemed to have happened without anyone consciously willing
it. But as the historian Ulrich Herbert has pointed out, at the time the
functionalist account was also culturally convenient: “For a long time
there was a reluctance to name names in research on National Socialism .
. . [Consequently,] there was also massive resistance to studies about
the perpetrators and their relationship to German society.” The upshot
of this approach was that the Holocaust’s character as a crime conceived
and masterminded by German anti-Semitic ideologues that was perpetrated
against the Jews disappeared in favor of a series of conceptual
abstractions—“modernity,” “bureaucracy,” “mass society”—in which the
Jewish (or anti-Jewish) specificity of the events in question all but
disappears.
Was Eichmann, or the evil he was instrumental in perpetrating, really banal?
Remarkably, it seems that Arendt had already arrived at a definitive
judgment of Eichmann’s character some four months before the trial even
began. In another letter to Jaspers, written on December 2, 1960, she
writes that the upcoming trial would offer her the opportunity “to study
this walking disaster [i.e., Eichmann] face to face in all his bizarre vacuousness.” But, as Bettina Stangneth shows in her well-researched and path-breaking study Eichmann Before Jerusalem,
Eichmann was, in fact, a consummate actor. “Eichmann,” she writes,
“reinvented himself at every stage of his life, for each new audience
and every new alarm.” He becomes “subordinate, superior officer,
perpetrator, fugitive, exile, and defendant.”
The meek and unassuming Argentine rabbit breeder who took the witness
stand in Jerusalem and described himself as “a small cog in Adolf
Hitler’s extermination machine” bore no resemblance to the man who, as
Specialist for Jewish Affairs of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA),
reported directly to Heinrich Himmler and had avidly sown terror and
destruction throughout the lands of Central Europe. Nor did he resemble
the man who, under the alias of Ricardo Klement, had been the toast of
Argentina’s highly visible neo-Nazi community, the man who unabashedly
signed photographs for fellow fugitives: “Adolf Eichmann, SS Obersturmbannführer
(retired).” As Stangneth aptly observes, “Eichmann-in-Jerusalem was
little more than a mask.” Eichmann gave the performance of his life, and
Hannah Arendt was entirely taken in.
In Jerusalem, Eichmann fought to save his life, and, if possible, to
clear his name for posterity. But another one of his central motivations
was to throw a monkey wrench into the gears of the Israeli judicial
apparatus, whose staff he regarded as his Jewish “persecutors.” During
his proud years in the SS, combating the pernicious influence of World
Jewry had been Eichmann’s raison d’être. With his artful performance on
the witness stand in Jerusalem, Eichmann, ever the warrior, was, in
effect, making his final stand. True to the SS creed of loyalty above
all (“Mein Ehre heisst Treue”), he went down fighting.
It has long been known that the CIA had been privy to Eichmann’s
whereabouts after the war. Hence it was with the CIA’s tacit approval
that, in 1950, Eichmann, in order to avoid capture, successfully made
use of the notorious “rat line” to South America. Only a few years ago,
it came to light that the German Intelligence Services had also been
well aware of Eichmann’s various activities prior to his flight to South
America. German officials also refused to lift a finger, but, for
slightly different reasons. Eichmann, it seemed, knew too much about
prominent ex-Nazis who had recently been elevated to the status of
“notables”—politicians, opinion leaders, and scholars—in the newly
conceived Federal Republic. His apprehension, they believed, would have
injured the emerging German democracy. As Stangneth remarks laconically,
although the trappings of constitutional democracy had been freshly
implanted on German soil, the problem was that “there were no new people
to administer them.”
One of the main reasons that Arendt’s banality of evil concept struck a nerve
was that it played on widespread fears about the dehumanizing effects
of “mass society.” When she wrote about Eichmann, the Nazi threat was
past, but, in the war’s aftermath, an arguably greater menace had
arisen, the threat of nuclear annihilation. This threat had been vividly
driven home by the Cuban missile crisis, which took place the year
before Arendt’s articles on the Eichmann trial were serialized in The New Yorker. It was tempting and superficially plausible to interpret both events as expressions of the same general phenomenon.
But to state a truism: Mass society can be dehumanizing without its denizens being mass murderers. In his magisterial study Nazi Germany and the Jews
Saul Friedländer describes the mentality of “redemptive anti-Semitism”
that pervaded Nazi rule from its inception. What is needed to turn
bureaucratic specialists into executioners is an ideological world view
that underwrites racial supremacy and terror. This is the indispensable
component that Nazism furnished and that, during the 1930s, reoriented
Germany as a society hell-bent on military aggression, imperial
expansion, and racial purification. One of the outstanding merits of
Stangneth’s comprehensive account is that she shows that Eichmann was
anything but a faceless cog in the machine. He fully subscribed to the
ideological goals of the regime, including mass murder.
From the very beginning, Eichmann was a firm believer in the
existence of a Jewish world conspiracy and thus fully partook of the
murderous ethos so well described by Friedländer. In Eichmann’s view,
the elimination of World Jewry, far from being a matter-of-fact,
bureaucratic assignment, was a sacred duty. During one of Eichmann’s
visits to Auschwitz, commandant Rudolf Höss confided that, upon seeing
Jewish children herded into the gas chambers, his knees quivered,
whereupon Eichmann rejoined that it was precisely the Jewish children
who must be first sent into the gas chambers in order to ensure the
wholesale elimination of the Jews as a race.
In a hastily contrived farewell speech to his subordinates at the end
of the war, Eichmann declared that he would die happy, knowing that he
was responsible for the deaths of millions of European Jews:
I will laugh when I leap into the grave because I have the feeling that I have killed 5,000,000 Jews. That gives me great satisfaction and gratification.
Twelve years later, in the course of the alcohol-infused colloquies
with a group of fugitive Nazis in Buenos Aires whose transcripts are one
of Stangneth’s key sources, he said: “To be frank with you, had we
killed all of them, the thirteen million, I would be happy and say: ‘all
right, we have destroyed an enemy.’”
To describe such a person as merely a man of “revolting stupidity” (von empörender Dummheit),
as though his lack of intelligence somehow made his status as a
genocidal murderer comprehensible, as Hannah Arendt did in the course of
a 1964 interview, is perilously myopic. It was as though, by alluding
to Eichmann’s purported intellectual failings, Arendt could make all
other substantive questions and issues disappear. Perversely, the Jewish
Specialist for the Reich Security Main Office ended up having the last
laugh, hoodwinking Arendt into believing that he was little more than a
bit player on a larger political stage. Yet, in the Jewish émigré press
during the late 1930s (which Stangneth believes that Arendt had read),
Eichmann had already been known as the “Tsar of the Jews” and was
notorious for his brutality. But Arendt had her own intellectual agenda,
and perhaps out of her misplaced loyalty to her former mentor and
lover, Martin Heidegger, insisted on applying the Freiburg philosopher’s
concept of “thoughtlessness” (Gedankenlosigkeit) to Eichmann. In doing so, she drastically underestimated the fanatical conviction that infused his actions.
By underestimating Eichmann’s intellect, Arendt also misjudged the
magnitude of his criminality. Yet, as Stangneth demonstrates
convincingly, in cities across the continent, Eichmann proved himself to
be a persistent and effective negotiator, and when he failed to acquire
what he demanded by way of negotiations, he was adept at using threats.
Thus with a relatively small staff at his disposal, Eichmann
systematically forced Jews out of their residences and into makeshift
ghettos. As the Final Solution began, he arranged for their
long-distance transport to the far reaches of provincial Poland, where
the extermination camps lay in wait. As Raul Hilberg, on whose findings
Arendt relied extensively, observed:
[Arendt] did not discern the pathways
that Eichmann had found in the thicket of the German administrative
machine for his unprecedented actions. She did not grasp the dimensions
of his deed. There was no “banality” in this “evil.”
To amplify what she meant by the banality of evil, Arendt invoked the
concept of “administrative murder,” which, in keeping with the robotic
portrait she had painted of Eichmann, was another way of establishing
the primacy of the functionary or desk murderer. But there had been
nothing in the least “administrative” or “banal” about the barbaric mass
shootings of the Einsatzgruppen—whose signature was the infamous Genickschuss
(shot in the nape of the neck)—as led by the SS’s notorious “Death’s
Head” brigades in the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. These deaths
occurred prior to the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, in which the
logistics of the Final Solution were outlined.
Eichmann’s organizational talents became especially vital and
indispensable in the case of the deportation and extermination of
565,000 Hungarian Jews during the waning years of the war. The Hungarian
situation was especially tricky. Even though the 1943 Warsaw ghetto
uprising had been successfully and brutally suppressed by the SS, it had
exposed a weakness in the Nazi machinery of extermination. In addition,
the RSHA had failed in its attempts to deport Denmark’s meager total of
less than 8,000 Jews. Following D-Day, it had become clear that, from a
German standpoint, the war was unwinnable. Thereafter, numerous
individual Nazi potentates sought to scale back the Jewish deportations
in the hope of receiving favorable treatment from the
soon-to-be-victorious Allies. But as Stangneth shows, Eichmann would
have none of it. In fall 1944, he went so far as to defy Himmler’s order
to halt the Hungarian deportations. Moreover, he played an especially
insidious role in overseeing the “death marches” of the remaining
Hungarian Jews (some 400,000 had already been transported to Auschwitz),
under conditions that were indescribably brutal.
As Germany’s military situation began to deteriorate, Eichmann showed
himself especially adept at ensuring that the gears of the killing
machine remained well oiled. To characterize Eichmann as a “desk
murderer” in order to downplay his convictions as a devoted SS officer
who reported directly to Reinhard Heydrich and Gestapo chief Heinrich
Müller is seriously misleading. After all, the duties of office demanded
that Eichmann regularly visit various killing sites.
In 1998, an immense transcript of Eichmann’s conversations with Dutch
collaborator and Waffen SS officer Willem Sassen from the late 1950s in
Argentina was mysteriously deposited in the German Federal Archive in
Koblenz. In those conversations, Eichmann told Sassen “When I reached
the conclusion that it was necessary to do to the Jews what we did, I
worked with the fanaticism a man can expect from himself.” He seems to
have had in mind Heinrich Himmler’s statement of the requirements of
total ideological commitment within the SS at the very height of the
extermination process:
These measures in the Reich cannot be
carried out by a police force made up solely of bureaucrats. … A corps
that had merely sworn an oath of allegiance would not have the necessary
strength. These measures could be borne and executed only by an extreme
organization of fanatic and deeply convinced National Socialists. The
SS regards itself as such and declares itself as such, and therefore has
taken the task upon itself.
How Arendt could believe that someone like Eichmann could thrive in
an organization whose raison d’être was mass murder, shorn of the
ideological zeal described by Himmler, is difficult to fathom. Yet, time
and again, in defiance of all evidence to the contrary, she maintained
that Eichmann could best be described as a mere “functionary.” “I don’t
believe that ideology played much of a role,” Arendt repeatedly
insisted, “to me that appears to be decisive.”
In this respect, Arendt’s findings dovetailed with ageneral trend in
accounts of the Holocaust that downplayed the role of individual
perpetrators in favor of the impersonal “structures” of modern society.
But white-collar workers and “organization men” do not as a matter of
course commit mass murder unless they are in the grip of an
all-encompassing, exterminatory world view, such as the Nazi credo that
SS officers were obligated to internalize. As Walter Laqueur noted
during the late 1990s: Arendt’s “concept of the ‘banality of evil’ . . .
made it possible to put the blame for the mass murder at the door of
all kind of middle level bureaucrats. The evildoer disappears, or
becomes so banal as to be hardly worthy of our attention, and is
replaced by . . . underlings with a bookkeeper mentality.”
In seeking to downplay the German specificity of the Final Solution
by universalizing it, Arendt also strove to safeguard the honor of the
highly educated German cultural milieu from which she herself hailed. A
similar impetus underlay Arendt’s contention, in her contribution to the
Festschrift for Heidegger’s 80th birthday, that Nazism was merely a
“gutter-born phenomenon” and had nothing to do with the spiritual
(geistige) questions of culture. In light of what we now know about the
extent of educated German support for the regime (not to speak of what
we know about Heidegger, on which see my earlier essay “National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks”
in this magazine) Arendt’s notion that Nazism has nothing to do with
the “language of the humanities and the history of ideas” appears naïve.
In retrospect, Arendt’s application of Heidegger’s concept of
“thoughtlessness” to Eichmann and his ilk seems to have been intended to
absolve the German intellectual traditions. Even Arendt’s otherwise
stalwart champion, Mary McCarthy, pointed out the crucial differences
between the English word “thoughtlessness,” which suggests a boorish
absent-mindedness, and the German Gedankenlosigkeit, which literally indicates an inability to think.
At the height of his danse macabre before the judicial
tribunal in Jerusalem, Eichmann went so far as to characterize himself
as a “Zionist,” on the basis of his negotiations during the
1930s with Jewish officials over the emigration of Viennese and Czech
Jews. For her part, Arendt seemed to buy Eichmann’s self-serving
self-description wholesale. Yet, as Stangneth shows, these forced
emigrations organized by Eichmann were unfailingly sadistic and brutal.
In retrospect, they were, in fact, a trial run for the Europe-wide
Jewish deportations that culminated in the Final Solution. Thus under
Eichmann’s supervision and under the cover of “emigration,” Jews were
divested of their homes, their life savings, their possessions, their
livelihood, and their citizenship in exchange for the uncertainties and
ignominies of forced exile.
That Eichmann smugly viewed his indispensable role in the Final
Solution as a crowning achievement was an opinion he expressed on
numerous occasions. British historian David Cesarani aptly describes the
RSHA Nazi’s Specialist for Jewish Affairs as acting “in the spirit of a
fanatical anti-Semite who is locked in a world of fantasy,” a
description that historian Christopher Browning recently seconded,
noting that, “Eichmann embraced a worldview that was delusional and
‘phantasmagoric’ in its belief in a world Jewish conspiracy that was the
implacable and life-threatening enemy of Germany.” When the regime imploded in May 1945, he became a warrior-without-a-cause.
As Stangneth shows, during his Argentine exile, Eichmann and his Nazi
comrades harbored delusions of the Reich’s return. At the time, one of
Eichmann’s pet literary projects was the drafting of an “open letter” to
Konrad Adenauer that was intended to justify the National Socialist
state and its aims. In Eichmann’s view, the Federal Republic should have
stopped issuing apologies since it had nothing to be ashamed of. After
all, during the war, Germany had been involved in a life-or-death
struggle in which it had been necessary to employ all of the means at
its disposal. As Eichmann was fond of saying: “Krieg ist Krieg”—war is war.
In Buenos Aires, the Sassen clique published a neo-Nazi journal, one
of whose main aims was to burnish the reputation of the Third Reich in
the face of “calumnious accusations” on the part of World Jewry.
Foremost among those purported “calumnies” was the so-called “Auschwitz
lie”: the “myth” that the Third Reich had been responsible for the
deaths of six million Jews. It was for this reason that, in 1956, the
former Dutch SS officer Willem Sassen conducted a series of interviews
with Eichmann. After all, there could be no more convincing witness than
Eichmann, who, from his perch at RSHA headquarters in Berlin, had
dutifully and conscientiously organized the entire affair.
Yet along the way, Sassen and company encountered a stumbling block.
On the one hand, Eichmann being Eichmann, he was more than willing to
relive in minute detail his halcyon days in Division IV B of the Reich
Security Main Office. The problem was that the destruction of European
Jewry had been Eichmann’s proudest achievement.
By the end of the taping sessions, the mismatch between Sassen’s
revisionist goals and Eichmann’s compulsive braggadocio reached absurd
proportions. The misunderstanding culminated in a raucous 1957 meeting
at which Eichmann felt compelled to provide a final statement to all
assembled of his mature ideological world view. Here are three salient
passages from Eichmann’s final declaration to Sassen and company:
I must throw all caution to the wind and
tell you that, before my Volk goes to ruin and bites the dust, the whole
world should go to ruin and bite the dust—my Volk, only thereafter!
I say to you honestly as we conclude our
sessions, I was the “conscientious bureaucrat,” I was that indeed. But I
would hereby like to expand on the idea of the “conscientious
bureaucrat,” perhaps to my discredit. Within the soul of this
conscientious bureaucrat lay a fanatical warrior for the freedom of the
race from which I stem . . . I was manifestly a conscientious
bureaucrat, but one who was driven by inspiration: what my Volk requires
and my Volk demands is for me a holy commandment and a holy law. Jawohl!
But now let me tell you, since we are almost at the end of this entire outburst [Platzen]
. . . : I regret nothing! I will never crawl my way to the cross! . . .
That is something I cannot do . . . because my inner self bridles at
the thought that we did something wrong. No, I say to you quite
honestly, had we killed 10.3 million Jews out of the 10.3 million we had
in our sights, I would be quite satisfied, and would say that we
annihilated an enemy . . . We would have fulfilled our mission, for our
race and our Volk and for the freedom of nations, had we exterminated
the cleverest spirit among the spirited peoples alive today. For that is
what I told [Julius] Streicher, and what I have always preached: we are
fighting against an opponent who, as a result of thousands of years of
practice and experience, is cleverer than we are . . .
These are the words not of a “desk murderer” but of a convinced Nazi.
They represent a toxic admixture of crude social Darwinism, malicious
half-truths, and ideological distortions. The highest reality is that of
the volk. Weak peoples perish. The strong survive. All pretensions of
international law to the contrary, it is the survival of the fittest
that determines the “law of peoples.” Since, as with all of life, the
goal of nations is self-preservation, it is permissible to utilize all
the means at one’s disposal to attain this end. Any volk that ignores
this imperative is doomed to extinction. Universal morality—Biblical
injunctions (“Thou shalt not kill,” “Love thy neighbor as thyself”),
Kant’s categorical imperative, democratic pretensions to universal
equality—must be emphatically rejected insofar as such effete
considerations expose a people to anti-völkisch precepts and
constraints that threaten to sap its lifeblood, its will to survive. To
cite Nietzsche, whose influence Eichmann at various points acknowledged,
moral considerations that transcend a volk’s drive to self-preservation
are symptomatic of a “slave morality.” If nature has decreed that life
is in essence a fight to the death for racial supremacy, what sense does
it make to buck this trend?
In Eichmann’s view, one of the reasons why the Jews, those consummate
cosmopolitans, are so dangerous is that, as a people without roots,
they subsist and persevere entirely at the expense of other peoples. For
this reason, they are the sworn racial enemy of the Germans as well as of all peoples. Hence, the National Socialist Vernichtungskrieg (war of annihilation) against the Jews was, on racial grounds, entirely justified.
Insofar as they are impervious to reason and reality, such
mythological world views are self-perpetuating. The clan of believers
has a vested interest in maintaining the illusion that the world view is
entirely coherent and functional, since there is really no fallback
position. Nazi ideology was an all-enveloping proposition. It only
collapsed when, at the war’s end, the major German cities lay in ruins
and Germany had become, following Hitler’s suicide, a führerlose Gesellschaft:
a society without a leader. It is therefore difficult to understand
how, shortly after the trial, Arendt, speaking of Eichmann’s actions and
conduct, could assert, “I don’t think that ideology played any role.” A
decade earlier, the chapters on “Ideology” and “Race” had been among
Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism’s genuine strong points.
If ever there was a “trial of the 20th century,” the Eichmann trial was it.
In Europe and North America, the meaning of the trial, and thus to a
great extent the Holocaust itself, was filtered through the lens of
Arendt’s popular account and the contentious debate that it spawned. Her
provocative subtitle, the “banality of evil,” helped establish the
so-called “functionalist” interpretation of the Holocaust, in which the
role of obedient desk murderers and mindless functionaries assumed pride
of place, producing a Holocaust strangely divested of anti-Semitism.
The reductio ad absurdum of this approach may have finally come during the controversy over Daniel Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. In
the course of this debate, in the 1990s, Hans Mommsen, by then the
recognized dean of German Third Reich scholars, said, “I don’t think the
perpetrators were really clear in their own minds about what they were
doing when they were engaged in killing Jews.” Mommsen’s avowal was
widely viewed as an index of how far out of touch professional
historians were with the German public’s need for clarity and for an
honest accounting of a previous generation’s horrific transgressions. In
retrospect, Arendt’s stress on the perpetrators’ lack of animosity
toward the Jews harmonized with the post-war German political agenda of
parrying questions of historical responsibility. Although Arendt did not
necessarily share this agenda, her correspondence reveals how sensitive
she was to the tendency to equate “Germans” with “Nazis.”
Although Arendt’s interpretive approach, as well as the functionalist
paradigm in general, identified a set of important socio-historical
concerns, it also downplayed the uniqueness of the Shoah by inserting it
within an overarching narrative that highlighted the dangers of
“modernity,” “mass society,” “atomization,” and so on. The Holocaust
came to symbolize the risks of the transition from traditional society
to the modern administrative state. But in the end this German Sociology
101 “from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft” approach failed
to explain the historical uniqueness of the radical evil that was Nazi
Germany. Here, one of the unexplained paradoxes and ironies was that in The Origins of Totalitarianism the
figure of radical evil occupied pride of place in Arendt’s interpretive
scheme. In fact, she concluded the book’s Preface by declaring: “if it
is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears
(absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly
comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never
have known the truly radical nature of Evil.”
As Bettina Stangneth reminds us repeatedly in Eichmann Before Jerusalem,
when Hannah Arendt traveled to Jerusalem to cover the Eichmann trial,
part of the baggage she carried was a fixed set of socio-historical
predispositions and prejudgments. Nowhere was this problem more evident
than in her attempt to understand Eichmann’s conduct in terms of the
misguided figure of the “banality of evil.” What should have been clear
then and should certainly be clear now is that if the Holocaust was
banal, then it was not evil. And if it was evil—as it indubitably
was—then it was not banal.
25 de novembro de 2014
Vida
%2Bsearching%2Bfor%2Bfood%2Bon%2Balgae%2Bin%2Bthe%2BNorth%2BEast%2BAtlantic%2BOcean%2B(Gulen%2C%2BNorway).jpg)
A nudibranch (Limacia clavigera) searching for food on algae in the North East Atlantic Ocean (Gulen, Norway)
The Ḥaliẓah Shoe
(Probably Germany, late 19th century)
The
ceremony of the taking off of a brother-in-law's shoe by the widow of a
brother who has died childless, through which ceremony he is released
from the obligation of marrying her,
and she becomes free to marry whomever she desires (Deut. xxv. 5-10).
and she becomes free to marry whomever she desires (Deut. xxv. 5-10).
24 de novembro de 2014
Morte
Patio civil, cementero San Rafael, Malaga, 2009
70 years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Luc Delahaye
photographed the forensic exhumation of a mass grave containing the
bodies of executed Republican prisoners
23 de novembro de 2014
22 de novembro de 2014
Sigd
.jpg)
Mujeres israelíes de la comunidad judía de Etiopía rezan durante la fiesta del Sigd, en Jerusalén
21 de novembro de 2014
20 de novembro de 2014
19 de novembro de 2014
18 de novembro de 2014
Har Nof Synagogue Terror Attack
Five Israelis were killed in a frenzied assault by two Palestinians who targeted worshippers at a Jerusalem synagogue.
"Letters to Afar"
"Letters to Afar", Installation by Péter Forgács and The Klezmatics,
a new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York.
The video art installation is based on films taken by Jewish immigrants
who traveled from New York back to Poland during the 1920s and 1930s.
With few exceptions, this is the only motion picture documentary record
of Jewish life in prewar Poland.
17 de novembro de 2014
The Science of Suffering
Kids are inheriting their parents' trauma. Can science stop it?
By Judith Shulevitz, "New Republic"
Lowell,
Massachusetts, a former mill town of the red-brick-and-waterfall
variety 25 miles north of Boston, has proportionally more Cambodians and
Cambodian-Americans than nearly any other city in the country: as many
as 30,000, out of a population of slightly more than 100,000. These are
largely refugees and the families of refugees from the Khmer Rouge, the
Maoist extremists who, from 1975 to 1979, destroyed Cambodia’s economy;
shot, tortured, or starved to death nearly two million of its people;
and forced millions more into a slave network of unimaginably harsh
labor camps. Lowell’s Cambodian neighborhood is lined with dilapidated
rowhouses and stores that sell liquor behind bullet-proof glass,
although the town’s leaders are trying to rebrand it as a tourist
destination: “Little Cambodia.”
At
Arbour Counseling Services, a clinic on a run-down corner of central
Lowell, 95 percent of the Cambodians who come in for help are diagnosed
with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. (In Cambodia itself, an
estimated 14.2 percent of people who were at least three years old
during the Pol Pot period have the disorder.) Their suffering is
palpable. When I visited Arbour, I met a distraught woman in her forties
whom I’ll call Sandy. She was seven when she was forced into the jungle
and 14 when she came to the United States, during which time she lived
in a children’s camp, nearly starved to death, watched as her father was
executed, and was struck in the ear by a soldier’s gun. She
interspersed her high-pitched, almost rehearsed-sounding recitation of
horrors past with complaints about the present. She couldn’t
concentrate, sleep at night, or stop ruminating on the past. She “thinks
too much,” a phrase that is common when Cambodians talk about PTSD.
After she tried to kill herself while pregnant, her mother took Sandy’s
two daughters and raised them herself. But they have not turned out
well, in Sandy’s opinion. They are hostile and difficult, she says. They
fight their grandmother and each other, so bitterly that the police
have been called. They both finished college and one is a pharmacist and
the other a clerk in an electronics store. But, she says, they speak to
her only to curse her. (The daughters declined to talk to me.)
On
the whole, the children of Cambodian survivors have not enjoyed the
upward mobility of children of immigrants from other Asian countries.
More than 40 percent of all Cambodian-Americans lack a high school
diploma. Only slightly more than 10 percent have a bachelor’s degree.
The story of Tom Sun, a soft-spoken, pop-star-dapper thirtysomething (he
doesn’t know his exact age) is emblematic, except, perhaps, in how well
he’s doing now. His mother was pregnant with him during the Khmer Rouge
years. His father died before the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and drove
the Khmer Rouge back into the jungle. When he was very young, he, his
mother, and a little brother made their way from a Thai refugee camp to
the United States and eventually settled in Lowell. The two boys and two
other brothers, born after they arrived in the United States, were left
to raise themselves. Illiterate and shattered, their mother gambled,
cried, and yelled at her sons. “My mother, she’s loud,” Sun told me.
“She’s got a very mean tone. I still hear it in my head.” His
stepfather, a mechanic, also a survivor and also illiterate, beat them
until welts striped their bodies. By the time Sun should have entered
seventh grade, he had joined the Tiny Rascals, perhaps the largest Asian
American street gang in the United States. “It was comforting,” he
says. “We weren’t into drugs or alcohol.” They were into being a
substitute family. They were also into guns. Sun was involved in a
shooting that led to a stint in prison, which led to a GED, some college
credits, and some serious reflection on his future. He left the gang in
his mid-twenties. His brothers were not so lucky. Two of them are
serving life sentences for murder.
The
children of the traumatized have always carried their parents’
suffering under their skin. “For years it lay in an iron box buried so
deep inside me that I was never sure just what it was,” is how Helen
Epstein, the American daughter of survivors of Auschwitz and
Theresienstadt, began her book Children of the Holocaust,
which launched something of a children-of-survivors movement when it
came out in 1979. “I knew I carried slippery, combustible things more
secret than sex and more dangerous than any shadow or ghost.” But how
did she come by these things? By what means do the experiences of one
generation insinuate themselves into the next?
Traditionally,
psychiatrists have cited family dynamics to explain the vicarious
traumatization of the second generation. Children may absorb parents’
psychic burdens as much by osmosis as from stories. They infer
unspeakable abuse and losses from parental anxiety or harshness of tone
or clinginess—parents whose own families have
been destroyed may be unwilling to let their children grow up and leave
them. Parents may tell children that their problems amount to nothing
compared with what they went through, which has a
certain truth to it, but is crushing nonetheless. “Transgenerational
transmission is when an older person unconsciously externalizes his
traumatized self onto a developing child’s personality,” in the words of
psychiatrist and psychohistorian Vamik Volkan. “A child then becomes a
reservoir for the unwanted, troublesome parts of an older generation.”
This, for decades, was the classic psychoanalytic formulation of the
child-of-survivors syndrome.
But researchers are increasingly painting a picture of a psychopathology so fundamental, so, well, biological, that efforts to talk it away can seem like trying to shoot guns into a continent, in Joseph Conrad’s unforgettable image from Heart of Darkness.
By far the most remarkable recent finding about this transmogrification
of the body is that some proportion of it can be reproduced in the next
generation. The children of survivors—a surprising number of them, anyway—may
be born less able to metabolize stress. They may be born more
susceptible to PTSD, a vulnerability expressed in their molecules,
neurons, cells, and genes.
After a
century of brutalization and slaughter of millions, the corporeal
dimension of trauma gives a startling twist to the maxim that history
repeats itself. Yael Danieli, the author of an influential reference
work on the multigenerational dimensions of trauma, refers to the
physical transmission of the horrors of the past as “embodied history.”
Of course, biological legacy doesn’t predetermine the personality or
health of any one child. To say that would be to grossly oversimplify
the socioeconomic and geographic and irreducibly personal
forces that shape a life. At the same time, it would be hard to
overstate the political import of these new findings. People who have
been subject to repeated, centuries-long violence, such as African
Americans and Native Americans, may by now have disadvantage baked into
their very molecules. The sociologist Robert Merton spoke of the
“Matthew Effect,” named after verse 25:29 of the Book of Matthew: “For
unto every one that hath shall be given ... but from him that hath not
shall be taken.” Billie Holiday put it even better: “Them that’s got
shall have; them that’s not shall lose.”
But
daunting as this research is to contemplate, it is also exciting. It
could help solve one of the enduring mysteries of human inheritance: Why
do some falter and others thrive? Why do some children reap the
whirlwind, while other children don’t? If the intergenerational
transmission of trauma can help scientists understand the mechanics of
risk and resilience, they may be able to offer hope not just for
individuals but also for entire communities as they struggle to cast off
the shadow of the past.
Rachel
Yehuda, a psychologist at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in the Bronx
and a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Mount Sinai Hospital,
has well-coiffed blonde hair, a slew of impressive post-doctoral
students, and an air of rock-solid confidence. She is the go-to person
on the molecular biology of intergenerational trauma, although she may
never have pursued this line of research were it not for the persistence
of the children of trauma victims themselves.
In
the late ’80s, when Yehuda was a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at
Yale, she was analyzing the results of an interview with a shell-shocked
Vietnam veteran. At one point, she told her mentor, “I just can’t
understand whether trauma does this, or whether this is just who this
person is.” He said, “Rachel, that is a testable hypothesis.” So she
tested it. Yehuda had grown up in Cleveland Heights outside Cleveland,
Ohio, in a Jewish neighborhood full of Holocaust survivors. She returned
home and used a university archive to identify survivors from among her
neighbors. In her initial experiments, Yehuda found that Holocaust
survivors with PTSD had a similar hormonal profile to the one she was
seeing in veterans. In particular, they had less cortisol, an important
steroid hormone that helps regulate the nervous and immune systems’
responses to extreme stress. Some of the participants have objected
strongly to the comparison: ‘“They had guns! We were hunted,”’ they’d
tell her. “But that doesn’t mean they both don’t experience nightmares,”
she says.
Trauma is generally
defined as an event that induces intense fear, helplessness, or horror.
PTSD occurs when the dysregulation induced by that trauma becomes a
body’s default state. Provoke a person with PTSD, and her heart pounds
faster, her startle reflex is exaggerated, she sweats, her mind races.
The amygdala, which detects threats and releases the emotions associated
with memories, whirs in overdrive. Meanwhile, hormones and
neurotransmitters don’t always flow as they should, leaving the immune
system underregulated. The result can be the kind of over-inflammation
associated with chronic disease, including arthritis, diabetes, and
cardiovascular disease. Moreover, agitated nervous systems release
adrenaline and catecholamines, both involved in the fight or flight
response, unleashing a cascade of events that reinforces the effects of
traumatic memories on the brain. This may partially explain the
intrusive memories and flashbacks that plague people with PTSD. Extreme
stress and PTSD also appear to shorten telomeres—the DNA caps at the end of a chromosome that govern the pace of aging.
In
the early ’90s, Yehuda opened a clinic to treat and study Holocaust
refugees. She often got calls from the children of survivors. “At first,
I would just politely explain that this is not a program for
offspring,” she says. But then she happened to read Maus,
Art Spiegelman’s now-classic graphic novel about a paranoid Auschwitz
survivor and his puzzled, repelled son, who observes that his father
“bleeds history.” Shortly thereafter, yet another survivor’s child
called her and said, “If you understood the issues better, I think you
would see that we need a program also.” “Come on by and educate me,”
Yehuda replied. The man was an Ivy League graduate and a successful
professional “whom you would not think was the casualty of anything,”
she says. She listened to him talk about his unhappy childhood for
several hours, and then stopped him. How could he square his impressive
accomplishments with the notion that he was damaged? “He said: ‘Well,
there are a lot of ways to be damaged. I wouldn’t want to be the person
involved in an intimate relationship with me. I wouldn’t trust myself to
be a good father.’” That is when Yehuda decided to research therapies
for the children of survivors, too.
She
knew some of them were troubled, but she didn’t know why. Was the
damage a function of the way they were being raised? Or was it
transmitted by some other means?
In
early papers Yehuda produced on Holocaust offspring, she discovered that
the children of PTSD-stricken mothers were diagnosed with PTSD three
times as often as members of control groups; children of fathers or
mothers with PTSD suffered three to four times as much depression and
anxiety, and engaged more in substance abuse. She would go on to
discover that children of mothers of survivors had less cortisol than
control subjects and that the same was true of infants whose mothers had
been pregnant and near the Twin Towers on 9/11.
In
the early ’90s, whenever Yehuda presented her findings, fellow
scientists scoffed at them. The prevailing wisdom then held that the
fearful body manufactures too much cortisol, not
too little, and moreover that effects of stress on the body are
fleeting. Yehuda was asserting that PTSD is correlated with lower, not
higher, cortisol levels and that this trait—and vulnerability to PTSD—could be passed from parent to child. “My colleagues did not believe me,” she says.
They
also accused her of espousing Lamarckian genetics. The
eighteenth-century thinker Jean-Baptiste Lamarck held that traits
acquired over the course of a lifetime could be bequeathed to offspring.
Evolutionary thinkers had been ridiculing his views for well over a
century. The Darwinian orthodoxy was that, while biology may be destiny,
the vicissitudes of individual fate don’t alter the underlying
sequences of genes. Yehuda told her critics: “Listen, I don’t know
what’s right or wrong. I’m telling you what it is.”
Since
then, further research offers support for Yehuda’s thesis. Studies of
twins have showed that a propensity for PTSD after trauma is about 30 to
35 percent heritable—which means that genetic
factors account for about a third of the variation between those who get
PTSD and others. More biologists are unpacking the epigenetic effects
of PTSD—how it may change the way genes express
themselves and how these changes may then reprogram the development of
offspring. For instance, the kind of PTSD to which a child may succumb
differs according to whether it was a mother or a father who passed on
the risk. Maternal PTSD heightens the chance that a child will incur the
kind of hormonal profile that makes it harder to calm down. Paternal
PTSD exacerbates the possibility that the child’s PTSD, if she gets it,
will be the more serious kind that involves feeling dissociated from her
memories. A mother’s PTSD can affect her children in so many ways—through the hormonal bath she provides in the womb, through her behavior toward an infant—that
it can be hard to winnow out her genetic contribution. But, Yehuda
argues, paternal transmission is more clear-cut. She believes that her
findings on fathers suggest that PTSD may leave its mark through
epigenetic changes to sperm.
About a
decade ago, Michael Meaney, a professor of psychiatry at McGill
University in Montreal, founded the field of behavioral epigenetics when
he proved, by experimenting with rat mothers and their pups, that early
experiences modify gene expression and that those modifications can be
passed from one generation to another. David Spiegel, a professor of
psychiatry at Stanford University and a former president of the American
College of Psychiatrists, told me that Meaney had revealed the
epigenetic transmission of vulnerability in rats, and Yehuda is now
showing it in humans. Yehuda is, he wrote in an e-mail, “ahead of her
time.”
What Yehuda hopes to do is
nothing less than untangle the web of relationships among biology,
culture, and history. Do social forces transform our biology? Or does
biology “permeate the social and cultural fiber”? How do you even begin
to tease these things apart?
Maciek Jasik
Garretson
Sherman, 30, his son Rich, 5 months, and his mother, Caroline M.
Bryant, 51, in Staten Island, New York. Weary of the chaos following
Liberia's long civil war, Garretson left the country in 2007. His
mother, who is visiting, still lives there.
In the early ’80s,
a Lakota professor of social work named Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart
coined the phrase “historical trauma.” What she meant was “the
cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over the lifespan and
across generations.” Another phrase she used was “soul wound.” The
wounding of the Native American soul, of course, went on for more than
500 years by way of massacres, land theft, displacement, enslavement,
then—well into the twentieth century—the
removal of Native American children from their families to what were
known as Indian residential schools. These were grim, Dickensian places
where some children died in tuberculosis epidemics and others were
shackled to beds, beaten, and raped.
Brave
Heart did her most important research near the Pine Ridge Reservation
in South Dakota, the home of Oglala Lakota and the site of some of the
most notorious events in Native American martyrology. In 1890, the most
famous of the Ghost Dances that swept the Great Plains took place in
Pine Ridge. We might call the Ghost Dances a millenarian movement; its
prophet claimed that, if the Indians danced, God would sweep away their
present woes and unite the living and the dead. The Bureau of Indian
Affairs, however, took the dances at Pine Ridge as acts of aggression
and brought in troops who killed the chief, Sitting Bull, and chased the
fleeing Lakota to the banks of Wounded Knee Creek, where they
slaughtered hundreds and threw their bodies in mass graves. (Wounded
Knee also gave its name to the protest of 1973 that brought national
attention to the American Indian Movement.) Afterward, survivors
couldn’t mourn their dead because the federal government had outlawed
Indian religious ceremonies. The whites thought they were civilizing the
savages.
Today, the Pine Ridge
Reservation is one of the poorest spots in the United States. According
to census data, annual income per capita in the largest county on the
reservation hovers around $9,000. Almost a quarter of all adults there
who are classified as being in the labor force are unemployed. (Bureau
of Indian Affairs figures are darker; they estimate that only 37 percent
of all local Native American adults are employed.) According to a
health data research center at the University of Washington, life
expectancy for men in the county ranks in the lowest 10 percent of all
American counties; for women, it’s in the bottom quartile. In a now
classic 1946 study of Lakota children from Pine Ridge, the
anthropologist Gordon Macgregor identified some predominant features of
their personalities: numbness, sadness, inhibition, anxiety,
hypervigilance, a not-unreasonable sense that the outside world was
implacably hostile. They ruminated on death and dead relatives. Decades
later, Mary Crow Dog, a Lakota woman, wrote a memoir in which she cited
nightmares of slaughters past that sound almost like forms of collective
memory: “In my dream I had been going back into another life,” she
wrote. “I saw tipis and Indians camping ... and then, suddenly, I saw
white soldiers riding into camp, killing women and children, raping,
cutting throats. It was so real ... sights I did not want to see, but
had to see against my will; the screaming of children that I did not
want to hear. ... And the only thing I could do was cry. ... For a long
time after that dream, I felt depressed, as if all life had been drained
from me.”
Brave Heart’s subjects
were mainly Lakota social-service providers and community leaders, all
of them high-functioning and employed. The vast majority had lived on
the reservation at some point in their lives, and evinced symptoms of
what she called unmourned loss. Eighty-one percent had drinking
problems. Survivor guilt was widespread. In a study of a similar
population, many spoke about early deaths in the family from heart
disease and high rates of asthma. Some of her subjects had hypertension.
They harbored thoughts of suicide and identified intensely with the
dead. Brave Heart quoted a Vietnam vet, who said: “I went there prepared
to die, looking to die, so being in combat, war, and shooting guns and
being shot at was not traumatic to me. That was my purpose and my reason
for being there.”
American Indians
suffer shockingly worse health than other Americans. Native Americans
and native Alaskans die in greater proportions than other racial or
ethnic groups in the country, from homicide, suicide, accidents,
cirrhosis of the liver, pneumonia, and tuberculosis. Public health
officials point to a slew of socioeconomic factors to explain these
disparities: poverty, unemployment, lack of health insurance, cultural
barriers, discrimination, living far from decent grocery stores.
Sociologists cite the disintegration of families, the culture of
poverty, perpetual conflict with mainstream culture, and, of course,
alcoholism. The research on multigenerational trauma, however, offers a
new set of possible causes.
At the
frontier of this research lies a very delicate question: whether some
people, and some populations, are simply more susceptible to damage than
others. We think of resilience to adversity as a function of character
or culture. But as researchers unravel the biology of trauma, the more
it seems that some people are likelier to be broken by calamity while
others are likelier to endure it.
For
instance, studies comparing twins in which one twin developed PTSD
after trauma, and the other never had the bad experience and therefore
never received the diagnosis, have uncovered shared brain structures
that predispose them to traumatization. These architectural anomalies
include smaller hippocampuses—which reduce the brain’s ability to manage the neurological and hormonal components of fear—and
an abnormal cavity holding apart two leaves of a membrane in the center
of the brain, an aberration that has been linked to schizophrenia,
among other disorders. Researchers have further identified genetic
variations that seem to magnify the impact of trauma. One study on the
mutations of a certain gene found that a particular variation had more
of an “orchid” effect on African Americans than on Americans of European
descent. The African Americans were more susceptible than the European
Americans to PTSD if abused as children and less susceptible if not.
Another
theory, even more uncomfortable to consider, holds that a particular
parental dowry may drive a person to put herself in situations in which
she is more likely to be hurt. Neuropsychologists have identified
heritable traits that push people toward risk: attention deficits, a
difficulty articulating one’s memories, low executive function or
self-control. The “high-risk hypothesis,” as it is known, sounds a lot
like blaming the victim. But it isn’t all that different from saying
that people have different personalities and interact with the world in
different ways. As Yehuda puts it, “Biology may help us understand
things in a way that we’re afraid to say or that we can’t say.”
In
the past few years, Yehuda has helped design and has co-authored
studies with Cindy Ehlers, a neuroscientist at La Jolla’s Scripps
Research Institute, along with others, who advanced the high-risk
hypothesis for Native Americans. A host of studies have shown that
significantly more American Indians endure at least one traumatic
incident—assault, an accident, a rape—than
other Americans (among the subjects in this particular study, the rate
was 94 percent); that the risk of being assaulted and contracting PTSD
seem heritable to about the same degree (30 to 50 percent); and that
trauma, substance abuse, and PTSD mostly seem to happen in early
adulthood. “What is being inherited in these studies is not known,”
writes Ehlers. But the fact that all these bad things emerge at the same
point in the kids’ development argues for some degree of genetic or
epigenetic influence. Another way of saying it is that maybe these young
adults are finding themselves at the center of a particularly cruel
collision of genes and history.
On
the stormy afternoon in July when I visited Tom Sun’s apartment,
lightning had just blown out a transformer drum down his block and the
lights were out. The sky was just bright enough to illuminate a domestic
idyll: A two-year-old boy bounced happily on and off Sun’s lap. A
ten-year-old girl whisked the toddler into the kitchen as soon as her
father asked her to. The living room was sparsely but pleasantly
furnished. The air of calm was no accident. Now in his late thirties,
Sun is a counselor to teenagers in trouble, including gang members, and
has arranged his schedule so that he can come home early every day and
give his children the care he was denied. (Sun’s wife works late.) In
addition to cultivating serenity, he teaches them self-reliance. He
wants them, he tells me, to be prepared for whatever reversals of
fortune they may encounter. He has taught them to cook for themselves,
“just in case something should happen to Mommy and Daddy”; he has taken
them for 15-mile walks to a mall over the border in New Hampshire so
they know they can walk that far if they need to. It’s hard to imagine
many other Americans doing this and hard for me not to interpret Sun’s
precautions as echoes of his mother’s experience. But it is his way of
mastering the past.
Ever since
humans have been inflicting violence on other humans, they have been
devising techniques to deal with its aftereffects. The French
phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes of “the lived body”—the
body as a receptacle of past experiences, of a knowing that bypasses
knowledge. Think of a culture as a collective lived body, the scars of
its experiences accumulated over generations and fixed into rituals and
mores. A less elegant way of putting this is in the language of therapy:
culture as coping mechanism.
The
Jewish mode of trauma management is commemoration. An old joke has it
that all Jewish holidays amount to the same thing: “They tried to kill
us. They failed. Let’s eat!” When Jews retell the tales of Egyptian
slavery—hunger, humiliation, murder—they’re
performing acts of catharsis in the company of others whose forebears
also outlasted their tormentors. If refugees from the Nazis and their
offspring have thrived relative to other victims of massive historical
trauma, surely that has to do with the quantity of cultural and human
capital that washed up with the survivors on the shores of America and
Israel. But their flourishing may also be a therapeutic benefit of
ritualized communal mourning. It is no accident that the Holocaust now
has its own holy day: Yom Ha-Shoah, the Day of the Holocaust.
Cambodians
don’t privilege commemoration in the same way, although they certainly
have rituals for mourning the dead. Dwelling upon the atrocities of the
Khmer Rouge, I was told repeatedly, is not the Cambodian way. During my
time in Lowell, I visited a wat,
a Buddhist temple, and met a monk who explained, through a translator,
that he advises people who come to him for help to accept what cannot be
changed, focus on the future, and trust that all injustices will come
out right in the end.
Looking
insistently forward, rather than backward, may strike some Westerners as
a form of denial. That reliving the past and telling tales about it
offer the best cures for mental suffering must qualify as the most
entrenched belief in Western psychology, with deep roots in the
Christian imperative to confess and the Jewish injunction to remember.
Delve into the literature on collective trauma, and you will read about
the devastating and long-lasting suffering occasioned by “the conspiracy
of silence,” the failure to speak openly about the horrors of recent
history.
This ingrained faith in
memory has surely influenced the most common treatment for PTSD:
cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. The dominant CBT protocol for PTSD
is prolonged exposure—the vivid reexperiencing
or reimagining, and in some cases writing down, of distressing memories,
until they have been crafted into narrative and lost their sting. By
creating new associations and contexts for the intrusive thoughts, the
therapy is said to decouple memory and fear, along with all the
physiological reactions that fear provokes.
But
repeated reexperiencing does not work in all cases. For some people,
rather than healing, it may retraumatize. Anthropologist and
psychiatrist Devon Hinton, who works at Arbour Counseling, talks about
his patients’ “catastrophic cognitions”—extreme
attacks of anger, say, triggered by experiences that set off memories,
which then kickstart fits of anxiety, and so on. These triggers often
have deep cultural and historical associations. They may be children
behaving in a manner deemed disobedient or ungrateful; they may be, as
Lemar Huot, a young therapist at Arbour (she treats Sandy, among others)
explained to me, women refusing to act as they would have in the old
country. Being disrespected, Hinton told me, reawakens the sensation of
being coldly demeaned by the Khmer Rouge. Symptoms such as neck pains
and shortness of breath may reenact suffering endured during the years
of slavery, when Cambodians were sometimes forced to carry heavy loads
on their heads and shoulders or were tortured by near-drowning or having
bags placed over their heads. Huot recounted the tale of a beloved
grandmother who began to behave in a way that left no room for
ambiguity. “We’d come home from school,” said Huot. “We lived across the
street from a baseball field, and she’d be in it. She’d hidden a bag of
rice in her clothes and told us it was time to run. Or she’d start
seeing bugs in her food.”
Hinton is
part of a group that has catalogued more enigmatic sources of distress;
they have even succeeded in having them included in the DSM-V. The
manual includes nine culturally specific presentations of mental
disorders; one is Cambodian, others are Latino, Japanese, and Chinese.
The Cambodian one is the “khyal attack.” Khyal
is thought to be a sort of malevolent wind that can wreak havoc in the
body, blinding and even killing. Outbreaks occur when the flow of khyal
is trapped in the body; this may lead to cold limbs, dizziness, heart
palpitations, tinnitus, and blurry vision, among other things. The fear
that one is suffering a khyal attack is another “catastrophic cognition,” a terror born of terror that keeps cycling back on itself.
Another
source of what feels like near-fatal anxiety is sleep paralysis,
idiomatically known to Cambodians as “the ghost pushes you down.” This
is when a person wakes but is unable to move and senses the presence in
the room of a menacing figure. You might call sleep paralysis a
haunting. Visitations often begin during periods of everyday stress—money
troubles or fights with children or spouses. The guests are understood
to be the angry spirits of people of whose gruesome deaths the dreamer
may, say, have witnessed: fellow villagers whose skulls were smashed, a
child killed by being swung against a tree, a friend who starved to
death. Apparitions of the unburied and unmourned can dislodge a soul
from its body and enslave the visitant to the ghost. The only way to
allay its fiendish malignity is to make gifts and offer incense in the
name of the dead.
Hinton argues that
treatments should focus as much, if not more, on techniques for calming
oneself down than on awakening demons and that these should be rooted
in the patient’s own traditions. For his clients, he uses meditation,
mindfulness, stretching, the visualization of images that promote
self-forgiveness and loving-kindness. For instance, Buddhism prizes a
quality called upekkha (the word comes from
Pali, an ancient Indian language): equanimity. This entails distancing
oneself from emotions and disturbing thoughts; a Buddhist metaphor is to
think of them as clouds in the sky, and let them scud away, and so that
is something practitioners of culturally adapted CBT might have people
do. “We have Southeast Asian patients imagine love spreading outward in
all directions like water,” writes Hinton. “This is because in Buddhism
water and coolness are associated with values of love, kindness,
nurturing, and ‘merit-making,’” that is, doing good deeds such as giving
to the poor or to the temple.
I do
not mean to imply that a traumatized nation should forgo a strict
accounting of the crimes of the past. One source of deep anger for many
Cambodians is that the Khmer Rouge regime ended inconclusively. Only
this autumn, nearly 40 years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, did a
United Nations–backed tribunal open hearings on whether its top
officials committed genocide; before that, only a handful of officials
had been tried and sentenced on the lesser charge of crimes against
humanity. The director of the most notorious torture center, Kaing Guek
Eav, better known as “Duch,” was only given a lifetime sentence after
Cambodians protested his lighter penalty of 35 years. Cambodia’s current
prime minister, Hun Sen, was at one point a Khmer Rouge commander,
though he left the group when Pol Pot began killing his own followers.
Sen is now a capitalist rather than an agrarian communist, but his
government is authoritarian and certainly does not give the reassuring
sense that the past is safely past.
So
it is important to remember. But tone also matters. What made Yehuda
the saddest while cataloguing the stories of survivors’ children, she
told me, were the descriptions of childhood homes that felt like
graveyards and the children’s sense that laughter desecrated the memory
of the dead. Death, she says, must not quash life: “Living and laughing
and being joyous and almost disrespectful to those who suffered—it’s what they’d want you to do, without forgetting them,” she says.
When
entire countries or communities are ravaged by the effects of massive
collective trauma, often the response is to call for truth commissions
and reparations. Although these deliver necessary justice and restore
moral balance to the world, they don’t suffice to heal the damage.
Studies of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for
instance, indicate that, though it imparted a greater knowledge of
history among South Africans, it had little impact on their well-being.
The
emerging research on trauma makes it increasingly clear that in order
to interrupt the cycle of dysfunction for families, we’ll have to
address the biological aftershocks of trauma. There are hopes for quick
fixes—drugs and other rapid treatments to
prevent the traumatized from developing PTSD. Early research on mice
into a non-addictive drug called SR-8993, for instance, appears
promising: It activates opioid receptors in the amygdala, which may
prevent the consolidation of fearful memories. This suggests that
perhaps there’s a way to keep the traumatized from becoming fixed inside
their terrors.
As for those who
already have PTSD, some scientists swear by beta-blockers. They are said
to interfere with the storage of memories—to
blunt the emotional edge of horrific memories and to help the brain
extinguish fear by making its circuits a little more flexible and
associations less fixed. However, beta-blockers haven’t done any better
than placebos in recent tests. “Fear extinction is a lovely theory, and
if it were really about fear, it would be nice to extinguish it,” says
Yehuda. But “in people fear is just one of many things that happens when
you’re traumatized.” Yehuda puts more stock in hydrocortisone, which
inhibits the abnormal cortisol secretion that permanently damages the
body’s ability to quell anxiety.
None
of this tells us specifically what to do for the next generation.
Perhaps one of the most popular approaches emerges from social work and
public health: It is to help mothers with PTSD deal with their infants
so that they don’t reproduce their angst in their young children. I can
no longer count how many psychologists I talked to who are launching or
already working on programs that try to do this, sometimes starting
during pregnancy. Another idea is to run genetic tests on the recently
traumatized, so as to identify who among them is more likely to develop
PTSD (and thus, presumably, to pass it on). Trauma victims in an
emergency room in Atlanta who tested positive for genes associated with a
risk of PTSD got an hour of psychotherapy, with follow-up over the next
two weeks. They developed fewer symptoms than victims with a similar
profile who did not get the therapy.
Yehuda,
for her part, aims to locate the exact spots on genes where molecular
changes occur in response to trauma. Such knowledge could elevate
interventions to an even higher level of precision than genetic
screening. To be effective, she says, “we have to understand what are
the reversible and the non-reversible targets,” by which she means, what
can be restored to normal and what can’t be. This research, however, is
not easy, because among other dangers you risk trying to reverse
something that actually helps a body adapt—of mistaking resilience for pathology, as she puts it. Nor are these investigations cheap.
It
seems a small moment of grace when you hear a tale of how the past can
come to heal rather than bedevil. Lemar Huot is grateful that her
parents and grandmother, who were able to carry on and to shield her
from their experiences until her grandmother became sick, never
inculcated in her any fear of the dead. On the contrary, “it was almost
reassuring to have them visit,” she says. “There was this idea that your
loved ones are never far away.” But the collective wounds of the
Cambodian community have a way to go before they close up, and at some
level, of course, they never will. Huot discerns a lingering anomie
among her patients and their children. Children learn from their
parents’ ongoing torment that the past is unpalatable and the present a
flimsy gauze that can easily be torn to expose the festering underneath.
There
is biological PTSD, and familial PTSD, and cultural PTSD. Each wreaks
damage in its own way. There are medicines and psychotherapies and the
consolations of religion and literature, but the traumatized will never
stop bequeathing anguish until groups stop waging war on other groups
and leaving members of their own to rot in the kind of poverty and
absence of care that fosters savagery. All that, of course, is
improbable. The more we know about trauma, though, the more tragic that
improbability becomes.
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