In 1946, a 12-year-old Jewish girl named Krystyna arrived in New York City from Poland. Her survival had been improbable. In the Warsaw Ghetto her mother had dressed her up in high heels and a kerchief so that they would be taken for forced labour together. Krystyna had known that deportation meant death. She imagined her friends as having fallen into a black hole.
Seventy years later, Krystyna remembered the day that she and her mother escaped from the ghetto, and her stepfather’s aunt on the Aryan side who turned them away. She remembered the cruelty at the orphanage where she stayed for a time, and the bombing of an apartment building as she hid in its basement during the Warsaw Uprising.
In New York in 1946, responding to a classmate’s question, Krystyna spoke about the war. A girl interrupted, and accused Krystyna of lying: nothing so horrific could have actually happened in real life. Krystyna did not defend herself. It made her feel better to know that her new classmates did not believe her – after all, if what she had lived in Polish was untranslatable into this new language, if something so terrible could not be imagined in America, perhaps she had finally come to a safe place.
In early autumn 2016, Krystyna, now 82 years old, wrote to me: her breast cancer had returned; she had decided to refuse treatment. She preferred death to seeing Donald Trump become president.
***
Krystyna died on 8 October 2016. A month later, in New Haven, Connecticut, I walked with my six-year-old son and four-year-old daughter to a neighbourhood high school to vote in the presidential elections. We stood in chaotic, snaking lines for two hours. Students circulated through the crowd, taking orders for coffee and muffins. These teenagers running the bake sale were incomparably better organised than the adults running the polling station. A Ukrainian political scientist friend joined us, as a kind of anthropological field trip. The disorder, and above all the long wait, stunned him.
“I never thought I’d say this,” he told me, “but we do a better job in Kyiv.”
Some 15 hours later, I was shaken from my paralysis by a 1.30am Facebook post from a Slavicist friend: “Everyone, stop drinking. You have to get up in a few hours and explain to your children what has just happened.”
Later that morning, Slava Vakarchuk, the Ukrainian rock star, telephoned me from Kyiv, offering moral support. He understood how I must feel, he said: this was how he had felt in 2010, when he realised that Ukrainians had actually voted for Viktor Yanukovych, that they had done this to themselves.
No one I knew was happy. Some were more hysterical than others, though. Many began to say: “This is very bad, but we’ll get through it. Our democratic institutions are the strongest in the world; we have checks and balances.” Now “checks and balances” became a mantra: Inhale. Checks and balances. Exhale. Checks and balances. . .
Then there were the neurotic catastrophists, including many Slavicists like myself. I knew that there was no such thing as inborn liberalism, as if Americans were a priori inheritors of some divinely bestowed immunity against an infectious disease. We were like the people on the Titanic insisting, “But our ship can’t sink!”
What I knew as a historian of eastern Europe was not what would happen. What I knew was what could happen. What I knew was that there was no such thing as a ship that could not sink.
***
In Greenwich Village I met Slavenka Drakulić, a Croatian novelist friend who had written about the bloody end of Yugoslavia. She tried to reassure me: “Don’t worry: it took Miloševič a few years to convince us that we wanted to kill one another. For now you can relax, we’ll have a glass of wine. You still have some time to get your kids out of the country.” In her Yugoslav experience, the ground for mass atrocity could not be made ready instantaneously. People did not yet know that they wanted to kill one another. If you were a fascist dictator, you had to first prepare them.
In the meantime, our house in New Haven became a Soviet kitchen: vodka, tears and the eternal Russian questions: “Chto delat? Kto vinovat?” “What is to be done? Who is to blame?” Books came into being in our kitchen. My husband, Tim Snyder, wrote On Tyranny, a resistance manual: Be wary of paramilitaries. Take responsibility. Believe in truth. Our philosopher friend Jason Stanley wrote How Fascism Works, a guide to discerning signs: The naturalisation of hierarchies. Cults of victimhood. Insecurities about masculinity. Social Darwinism. The rhetoric of Us vs Them.
Some among our colleagues protested the alarmism suggested by “the f-word”: because the press remained uncensored; because political prisoners were not being taken; because we had checks and balances. How many boxes did we need to check in order to justify using the word “fascism”? Six out of 12? Eight? Ten? Every single one?
Law professor Samuel Moyn argued that comparison with European fascism of the 1930s deflected our domestic responsibility. “Abnormalising Trump disguises that he is quintessentially American,” Moyn wrote. The comparison to the 1930s, he argued, shrouded the ways in which American democracy had long co-existed with a dark underside of war-making and support for terror abroad, and mass incarceration and extreme inequality at home.
The historian Peter Gordon took a different position. “Some of my colleagues on the left remain sceptical about the fascism analogy,” Gordon wrote, “because they feel it serves an apologetic purpose: by fixing our attention on the crimes of the current moment, we are blinded to longer-term patterns of violence and injustice in American history.” Gordon rejected the argument as specious: “The fact that things have always been bad does not mean they cannot get worse.”
Stanley argued that “fascist tendencies” existed on a continuum. The Polish adjective faszyzujący, formed from the present active participle, captures the sense of “moving in the direction of” or “inclining towards” fascism. It is distinct from the adjective faszytowski, which translates as “fascist”. English (unlike German) does not have an equivalent word; the limitations of English grammar obstruct the subtle but nontrivial distinction. “Fascist” is often invoked as if it had a talismanic power to resolve ambiguity.
Arguments about who has the right to use “fascism” and “concentration camps” (and “genocide”, a legal term) are about recognition. At stake is Anerkennung in G. W. F. Hegel’s sense, what the master in the master–slave dialectic desired from the slave: affirmation through recognition from the Other. Today, recognition of suffering is often mediated through reference to the Holocaust. It serves as the necessary third term. Do we need this word, this comparison to the Nazi camps – Vera Grant, the art curator and historian of Germany, asked – in order to recognise the inhumanity at the American border today?
“I’ll point to a step Trump has taken – he’s using ICE to round up children, he’s surrounding himself with loyalists and generals, he’s using the apparatus of government to dig up dirt on a political rival – and the response is always ‘Sure, that’s bad, but it’s not a big enough step to justify the F-word,’” Jason Stanley told the New Yorker. “I’m starting to feel like the it’s-not-a-big-enough-step people won’t be happy until they’re in concentration camps.”
In spring 2018, ICE – Immigration and Customs Enforcement – started tearing refugee children from their parents and throwing them in cages. I wrote to Stephen Naron, director of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. I asked him whether this might be the moment to compile testimonies about children being taken away from their parents during the Holocaust?
On 17 June 2019, Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described the detention camps along the southern US border as “concentration camps”. The backlash was immediate. One week later the Holocaust Museum issued a statement: “The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary.”
It was a radical statement: forbidding thinking of one phenomenon in relation to another one amounted to forbidding thinking as such.
Stephen Naron and I returned to the idea of compiling testimonies, now with the hope of provoking a conversation that could transcend the “is Trumpism fascism?” debate. It seemed to me that the Kierkegaardian Either/Or was a trap: historical comparison should not be a yes or no question, but a “how” question. Nothing is ever exactly the same as anything else. Ceteris paribus – “all other things being equal” – the presumption so often involved in social science, struck me as a fallacy: all other things are never equal. This is one reason why it is impossible to do a control study on real life.
***
This September, my ten-year-old son’s class took a field trip to a nature reserve. My son was especially taken by the wild pigs. He came home and delivered a fervent discourse on why it was preferable to be a wild pig as opposed to a human. Friedrich Nietzsche would have agreed. His 1874 essay “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” began with cows luxuriating in their presentism. We could only envy them their happiness, whose source – Nietzsche wrote – was a lack of self-consciousness about temporality. Man, on the other hand, suffers from a constant awareness of the past, and this awareness serves “to remind him what his existence fundamentally is – an imperfect tense that can never become a perfect one.” Consciousness of the past plagues, emasculates, at times overwhelms us. Only the strong can handle a lot of history. Take Schiller and Goethe, Nietzsche told us. “In relation to such dead men,” he wrote, “how few of the living have a right to live at all!”
Intimidation by greatness has its parallel in intimidation by vileness: the sentiment that in relation to the
Holocaust, no one has a right to speak at all. “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism,” Theodor Adorno wrote after the war. Are assertions of both beauty and horror, then, equally impermissible?
What is at stake in singularity? For the literary theorist Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, the commitment to singularity is bound up with a moral commitment to responsibility. The anxiety is that comparison relativises, and thereby mitigates; singularity is existentially necessary for full consciousness of guilt. In Gumbrecht’s case, the guilt is a guilt-by-contiguity: born in 1948, he himself is among those described by German chancellor Helmut Kohl as having been “graced by a late birth” – Die Gnade der späten Geburt. Perhaps what motivates Moyn’s polemic is a similar anxiety: historical comparison – even, paradoxically, to fascism – threatens a singularity presumed to ground
responsibility.
Yet why must comparison lighten responsibility? Is our understanding of others not dependent precisely upon analogy, metaphor, translation?
***
Spike Lee’s 2018 film BlackKkKlansman tells the story of Ron Stallworth, a black Colorado policeman who infiltrated the Klu Klux Klan in the 1970s. In the film, Stallworth tells his colleagues that he can portray himself as white on the phone. The police chief is sceptical. “Some speak the Queen’s English, some speak jive,” says Stallworth, “I speak both.” This is met with incomprehension because he is surrounded by people who do not understand code-switching. Americans are poor at grasping the meaning of translation. Our exceptionalism is bound up with our monolingualism, which is not only a linguistic deficit but an imaginative one: our inability to imagine that life taking place in other languages can also be real.
Translation demands an ability to inhabit the voice of another. Among the books to come into being (not in my kitchen this time) since the 2016 elections is Amelia Glaser’s Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine. In response to the sufferings of Ukrainians, Palestinians, African Americans and others, Yiddish poets re-inscribed Jewish texts, “translating trauma into empathy”, and rendering other victims of oppression “metaphorically Jewish”. This history of Yiddish poetry reminds us that thinking through analogies – translating untranslatable suffering – is inextricably bound up with empathy.
In 1980, as Solidarity took form in communist Poland, its chaplain, Józef Tischner, wrote the essay “Thinking from within a Metaphor”. Tischner began with the problem: how could we know that the world was real, and not merely a projection of our consciousness? The question was so haunting, Tischner explained, because our deepest pain was “the pain of radical uncertainty”. The history of epistemology – the philosophy of knowledge – was laden with metaphors: Saint Augustine conceived cognition as giving birth, “something of its own kind . . . neither reflection nor creating out of nothing”. Plato asked us to imagine a cave, where the shackled prisoners mistook the shadows on the walls for reality. René Descartes hypothesised an evil demon, who had put false thoughts into his mind with the intent to deceive.
“Radical metaphorisation of the visible world,” Tischner wrote, “means degrading it from the position of an absolutely existing world.” Conversely, thinking in the complete absence of metaphors meant adhering to the “principle of univocality of language – as if it were a prohibition to go outdoors which binds the virus-infected”. For Tischner, this metaphor-less thinking, this claim to total affirmation of the world in its singularity, was a thinking in which “realism becomes not only a philosophy but already a disease.”
***
Any historical situation contains elements of both the singular and the universal. Can we extract the universal from the particular, and better understand the relationship between them? No moment is ever exactly the same as any other, just like no human being is exactly the same as any other. Yet there are essences we can distil, things we learn from the past. We learn that life in a given time and place can appear utterly normal – but can turn on a dime. We quickly normalise the abnormal. What is utterly unimaginable one day can become the new status quo a few months later.
“Die Grenzen verschieben sich,” commented my friend Ema, as we drank coffee by the Danube in August 2020. “The borders recede.” I was describing the America I had just left. Ema understood: she and her husband, Serbs whose second mother tongue is Hungarian, had come to Vienna from Vojvodina in former Yugoslavia. Ema had come in the 1990s, during the wars of ethnic cleansing; while a university student in Vienna she had volunteered as an interpreter for Bosnian refugees.
The borders recede. And we can carry on.
The writer Indi Samarajiva graduated from college in Montreal. He moved back to Sri Lanka just as the ceasefire in the civil war fell apart in 2008. “I used to judge those herds of gazelles when the lion eats one of them alive and everyone keeps going,” he writes, “but no, humans are just the same.” In autumn 2020, as the then American president Donald Trump campaigned for re-election, Samarajiva looked through old photographs: “There’s a burnt body in front of my office. Then I’m playing Scrabble with friends. There’s bomb smoke rising in front of the mall. Then I’m at a concert. . .”
We learn that those people who maintain an uncanny moral clarity regardless of all conditions, and those who take some sadistic pleasure in harming others, are both outliers. Most people, most of the time, allow their behaviour to be shaped by the social situation in which they find themselves.
There is always a scapegoat, the anthropological philosopher René Girard tells us. The particular persons in this role vary, but the role itself remains remarkably constant. Are there other such roles? In the Netflix miniseries Unorthodox, 19-year-old Etsy runs away from her ultra-orthodox enclave in Brooklyn. The rabbi dispatches the Chassidic thug Moishe to bring her back. In Berlin, terrorised by Moishe, Etsy turns to her estranged mother, who long ago fled their community. It is only then that Etsy learns that her mother did not abandon her by choice. How was it possible?
“There’s always a Moishe,” Etsy’s mother tells her.
During the Second World War, the Austrian-born Diana Budisavljević saved thousands of children from fascist Ustashe camps in Croatia. Perhaps we learn, too, that there is always a Diana Budisavljević? An Irena Senderlowa? A Harriet Tubman? A Chiune Sugihara?
We learn that inhumanity, like humanity, approaches in small steps. Slavenka Drakulić, the Croatian novelist, attended the trials of Yugoslav war criminals in the Hague. These could have been people she knew, her daughter’s former schoolmates. “As in Germany, in Croatia you first stopped greeting a person of the other nationality perhaps only because you were afraid that others would see you acknowledging him,” she wrote. She tried to describe how it had all happened: “it is we ordinary people and not some madmen who made it possible. We were the ones who one day stopped greeting those neighbours of a different nationality – an act that the next day made possible the opening of concentration camps.”
“An avalanche of killings never started as a huge thing,” said Krzysztof Czyżewski, theatre director and co-founder of the Borderland Foundation in Poland. “Auschwitz was something connected to daily life and small events. That’s how it starts. You never know how it will end up.”
“Build the wall!” “Lock her up!” “Send her back!” The borders recede. “Stand back and stand by.” Or as Steve Bannon said on a podcast last year, “I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I’d put the heads on pikes.” A cavalier disregard for political correctness slides into a psychopathic indifference to other people’s lives.
This January, a white-supremacist-leaning armed mob harbouring fantasies of saving the world from Satan-worshipping paedophiles stormed the Capitol building. “This is what you’ve gotten, guys!” Mitt Romney, one of the only prominent Republicans to oppose Trump, yelled at his Republican colleagues as the mob descended. The crowd shouted too: “Tell Pelosi we’re coming for that bitch!” “Hang Mike Pence!” “Get the firing squads ready.”
We learn that a failure of understanding can blur into bad faith. We learn that there are moments when there are no innocent choices, and that the consequences of actions can be boundless – and unforeseen.
***
"Everything is translation,” the Ukrainian translator and psychoanalyst Jurko Prochasko once said. And there is no seamless translation, no seamless metaphor, no seamless comparison.
Unmediated, perfect understanding of the Other is a utopian – and perhaps a totalitarian – delusion. But that perfect understanding is not possible does not mean that no understanding is possible. Freud tells us that there is no such thing as absolute clarity even about our own selves; the self is always hidden from the self. Yet the existence of art and literature is a leap of faith that some kind of understanding of the Other is possible. Otherwise the poetry of Paul Celan and Dwayne Betts and Wisława Szymborska would not exist. Nor would the novel. Their existence is an act of faith that we can read ourselves into the life of another person.
Perfect opacity might be as much a fantasy as perfect transparency. Maybe, in the end, some kind of translation is all too possible. Krystyna’s desire to find herself in a place where horror was incomprehensible was an attempt to flee from the human condition. When she understood that there was no such place, she made a final escape. The rest of us remain to grapple, and to hope.
A longer version of this text was originally published as the introduction to the Public Seminar/Eurozine forum “On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life”.
This article is from the New Humanist spring 2021 edition. Subscribe today.
