Peccatum Originale
Since the Gunter Grass dustup has not found its way into the dotCom space, I thought I’d link to a piece in today’s New York Times. The author concludes his reflections with these words:
involvement in the Nazi system, even among the youngest Germans of
the time, was more widespread than we have previously wanted to
perceive, and many aspects of the era’s crimes even now lie buried in
silence. They are crimes that few books chronicle so well as “The Tin
Drum,” “Cat and Mouse” and “Dog Years.”
Later, Mr. Grass
changed, and his novels changed, too, becoming didactic and colorless.
These weaker books, along with the image of the model democratic
author, will be effaced by the passage of time. His earlier novels,
however, which tell of the deep corruptibility of human beings, of the
coexistence of mendacity and greatness and of the infinitely complex
nature of guilt, will be with us for as long as people read books.
That last sentence strikes me as a pretty fair sketch of “original sin.”
Last Week’s Tablet had a piece on the situation in Poland, where, since the nineties, the former public image of a heroically resistant clergy is under revision, and many clergy who apparently served as covert government informers now have reason to fear being exposed at a late date, like Gunter Grass.
When Benedict XV visited Poland this was one of the matters he addressed:
“During his late-May pilgrimage to Poland, Pope Benedict came to the defence of accused clergy, insisting the confessio peccati – a public admission of guilt – should be accompanied by a confessio laudis which acknowledged the Church’s past achievements. ”We believe the Church is holy, but that there are sinners among her members,’ he told clergy in Warsaw’s St John’s Cathedral on 25 May. ‘Humble sincerity is needed not to deny the sins of the past, and at the same time not to indulge in facile accusations in the absence of real evidence or without regard for the different preconceptions of the time.’
It does seem from the account in the Tablet that there is need for the humility and caution recommended by the Pope, as the evidence has apparently in some cases been contaminated or fabricated, but it is not exactly clear what Benedict might have meant about “ the different perceptions of the time.” Wouldn’t being a government informant against other priests or laity have been a pretty clear mistake, even then?
The whole article is available at:
http://www.thetablet.co.uk/articles/8431/
As part of my work on complicity with evil , I’ve been looking into this topic, off and on, for a few years. A very interesting book is Crista Wolf’s Patterns of Childhood– a memory of youth and young girlhood under the Nazis. She tries to remember — to find the roots of her complicity — as a middle-aged woman taking a trip back to her hometown.
Wolf is a very controversial writer– she was later expsed as a spy for the East German government — but it’s well worth reading.
As we all have experienced, sometimes one article may have more of an impact on one’s thinking than a heavy tome.
Prompted by Cathy Kaveny’s reference to “complicity with evil,” I want to mention an article that I found extraordinary. It was written by Stanley Hauerwas with David Burrell, “Self-Deception and Autobiography: Reflections on Speer’s Inside the Third Reich.” It is collected in Hauerwas’ Truthfulness and Tragedy.
I would count the universal proneness to self-deception one of the evident fruits of our common “Adamic inheritance.”
Gunther Grass’ membership in the SS is indeed something of which he should be ashamed, but let me perform a “confessio laudis”: his works remain among the most compelling examinations of fascism.
Still, given the nature of the culture of celebrity, I fear that the effect of this episode is simply going to be a further encouragement of cynicism, not only about politics, but about the credibility of any figure who takes public stands. Consider the reaction of many Germans to the revelations: “He’s promoting a new book.”
It’s almost an argument for Brecht’s lament: “pity the land that needs heroes.”
“Mephisto,” based on a book by Thomas Mann, if I remember right, might be a riff on this same theme.
Klaus Maria von Brandauer plays an actor who thinks he’s smarter than the Nazis, and fools himself through much of the movie into thinking that making small concessions to the Reich is keeping him one step ahead of them. And the concessions are certainly helping his career, so how bad can they be?
In fact, however, each concession ends up weakening him, enmeshing him more and more firmly into complicity with evil.
What is frightening about the movie is not the Nazis–we already know they’re evil–but the actor thinking he can bargain with evil and win. We know he’s doomed because we’ve tried it or at least thought about it ourselves.
I think we should say Waffen SS and remember that there is a difference between it and the SS plain. In the latter days of the war people were drafted into the Waffen SS who were not necessarily fanatical followers of A. Hitler. I think Grass claims never to have killed anyone. What struck me is the story I read somewhere that he said in the course of the interview that he had volunteered at age 15 for the U-boat service, but been turned down. A sailor’s life for Guenther?
Once you start thinking seriously about complicity in evil of one sort or another, you begin to see how easy it is, living in a complex modern world in which we cede control of some decisions to “experts” to become complicit in many dubious ventures. Those of us in the academic world who depend on TIAA-CREF for our retirement may have been flattered by their incessant ads telling us how they will think for us in investing our money because “we have more important things to do,” but even if you opt for one of their financial vehicles with “social” filters and so don’t support the tobacco industry, or munitions makers, that doesn’t mean you aren’t thereby into pharmaceuticals and agribusiness and big energy. Reading the daily paper can make for a certain uneasiness….
I do appreciate Fr. Imbelli’s comment on the Gunter Grass story. But I hope that I’m not alone in wondering whether continuing to use the term “original sin” is not a pedagogical mistake. As I see it, too often this term suggests that we have a good historical explanation of why there is moral evil. We all know that therre’s something wrong with all of us. But whiy this is so is by no means clear. The so-called original sin is not imputable to any historical person. Every other sin is, in principle, imputable.
Furthermore, I fear that too many Catholics think of baptism more in terms of getting rid of some defect than of really receiving new, and greater, life. The baptismal rite stresses the new life, but I’m dubious about the way baptism is understood by many Catholics, even rather well educated ones.
Similarly, all too often, at least it seems to me, Catholics think of Jesus’ redemptive work more in terms of wiping out something i.e., “original sin” and its aftereffects, rather than a positively bestowing an unimaginably great gift of bringing us into the life of the Trinity. Are my worries anything more than a peculiar quirk of mine?
No, your worries aren’t quirky, Mr. Dauenhauer.
I usually think of baptism as having washed away the sins of the Old Bad Me and Confession as washing away the sins of the New Bad Me.
Thanks for the wake up.