From Jesus to Hitler and beyond

“For centuries, Jesus has been our moral compass, and after the Second World War we wanted to be the opposite of Hitler,” writes Arnon Grünberg in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. “Hitler was our moral anti-compass: everything we did not want to be. This is the central argument of the short book by the British historian Alec Ryrie, The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It. Ryrie specialises in the history of Protestantism in England and Scotland during the 16th and 17th centuries. Ryrie’s analysis – Hitler as the Antichrist and the culture of remembrance as another form of religion – is not new. But the issues he highlights are worth reflecting upon. To distinguish the Hitler era from other periods, Ryrie sketches a past in which Christianity was regarded as the self-evident foundation of morality upon which European culture rested. If a European asked themselves how to be a good European – and this naturally applies to Americans as well – they would ask: what would Jesus have done? Then came the rupture in civilisation that we might call the Second World War, the Shoah or the Holocaust. God and his Son died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Their ashes still blow across the world. Ryrie then outlines a post-war Western world in which Christians continued to remain faithful to Christian ideals, but were ashamed of their Christianity and therefore propagated these ideals without biblical references. The invention of the Judeo-Christian civilisation, which emerged after 1945, fits into this pattern: we shall include the Jews as well. The old ecclesiastical anti-Semitism was no longer a sign of piety, but a stain, and had to be hastily transformed into philo-Semitism.

In fact, Ryrie goes so far as to suggest that the Holocaust accelerated and perhaps even completed secularisation in the West. He also believes – not entirely without reason – that the Hitler era, in other words the culture of remembrance, has produced an obsession with evil that cannot always be described as entirely healthy. Good, in the best liberal tradition, had been entrusted to the individual. Religious freedom meant that everyone was expected to seek their own salvation on their own, perhaps with the help of a few like-minded people, but without disturbing their neighbours. Evil, on the other hand, retained its metaphysical – not to say religious – dimensions intact and was by no means an individual matter: it concerned society, and the individual was obliged to express an opinion on the matter.

Ryrie believes that the obsession with social evil – which is, of course, a form of fascination – has sometimes led to strange decisions. He argues, for example, that the apartheid regime in South Africa claimed far fewer victims than Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China – and yet South Africa was, ‘for several decades’, ‘the West’s great moral cause’. Mao, who to my knowledge was not a racist but undoubtedly a mass murderer, was able to be ignored and even had sympathisers in the West for a time who believed that the Maoist path was the way forward. Whilst goodness became a private matter, the fight against evil remained a concern for everyone; this struggle turned into a secularised religion called anti-Nazism or anti-fascism. It did not promise immediate salvation, but it offered its followers a clearly defined enemy and a set of values such as human rights and equality (…) The end of the taboo is nearing completion. And the blame for this lies not only with the right, but also with the paradox inherent in anti-Nazism itself, which can only combat evil by constantly evoking it and unearthing it in the most diverse of places.

Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film-maker and columnist murdered in Amsterdam in 2004 by an Islamist extremist, had hit upon something at the start of this century when he observed that the Dutch had not been particularly good at being good during the war, and therefore tried all the harder to be so after the war. Hitler’s era could not be described more aptly. In very measured terms, Ryrie advocates a return to a form of religion to once again provide a foundation for moral sentiments.

He calls it a return to our roots, and these roots need not necessarily be Christian. I have my doubts. There is one aspect of the Hitler era that Ryrie largely overlooks: the glorification of victims as modern saints and, consequently, the glorification of the condition of victimhood itself. The iconisation of Anne Frank is a case in point. Virtually everyone who has written or reflected seriously on her work has highlighted her literary talent; for them, it was crucial that Frank be taken seriously as a writer. However, her iconisation obstructs this perspective. Anne Frank belongs to everyone and is therefore everyone: a Syrian girl, a Kurdish girl, a Palestinian girl, a Ukrainian girl, a Uyghur girl. In this way, the writer has become a book cover. Anne Frank has become an empty vessel that anyone can fill according to their own needs. Broadly speaking, the same applies to the culture of remembrance. This development – which could scarcely have turned out any other way – has produced a great deal of moral and aesthetic kitsch, in which reality served merely as a backdrop for the creation of supposedly profound experiences. The horror became a haunted house at a funfair, complete with trigger warnings. For almost everyone, the Nazi uniform took on a reassuring character. They are the bad guys, we are the good guys – regardless of what we do or say in our present-day world. In his book A Strange Happiness: The Public Religion Surrounding Auschwitz (2003), literary scholar Jan Oegema speaks of a ‘continuous sacralisation’. The victim was bestowed with a sacred aura, after which anyone who saw themselves as a victim could claim privileges. The term ‘woke’ fits the Hitler era perfectly, although someone like Ryrie would probably see it as the last gasps of that era. Injustice must be rectified or compensated for. Appeasement is slow suicide. For Ryrie, this is one of the defining features of the Hitler era. The historical example: Chamberlain, Munich 1938. It should be added that America (the West) has, since 1945, been unable to win its wars: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and, this year, Iran. George W. Bush, too, justified his invasion of Iraq by referring to Munich and Chamberlain: we have learnt from the past; no appeasement. Weapons of mass destruction must not fall into the hands of Saddam Hussein, who was, of course, compared to Hitler – so let us go to war. The ‘Hitler era’ was still in full swing in 2003. Oegema concludes his book with Albert Camus, who wonders aloud why the West is so obsessed with the crucifixion, and then answers his own question with the words ‘un étrange bonheur’, a strange happiness. Because God surrenders himself to all-too-human ‘pains, torments and fears’, every single individual in the world is drawn into a ‘great and terrifying mystery’. For a time, the Holocaust fulfilled this role of mystery.

Camus’s absurdism was popular only for a short time. The idea that any attempt to create meaning and order in the world is a fiction, and that for this reason alone it can never truly bring peace to anyone – this idea is too much for human beings. One could live with absurdism only as long as the horrors had not yet become part of the culture of memory, but were still merely memories. Will the end of the Hitler era also mark the end of victim culture? Will human beings be prepared to see themselves as potential perpetrators rather than potential victims, regardless of their identity? The perverse side-effect of victim culture has been that identity has become an issue. But there is no identity that can serve as a vaccine against becoming a perpetrator.”