In the midst of an unprecedented flood of propaganda against anti-Semitism, there has been little serious effort to examine its impact on its chosen object—the well-intentioned Gentile. George Weltner here tries to explain—using himself as case material—why he believes it is not enough to expose error and to evoke shame. Guilt, he suggests, is not a useful emotion, if we are seriously thinking of personal regeneration; it is understanding that is needed, and a pointing up of specific paths toward more civilized attitudes. Mr. Weltner’s observations may help to make clear the source of that peculiar lifelessness that characterizes novels and movies aimed at counteracting anti-Semitism.
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It is almost two years now since Goering committed suicide in Nuremberg. It would have served no purpose then if I had immediately confessed my peculiar reaction to his “escape.” I would almost certainly have been misunderstood. In the interval, however, there has been a growing recognition that anti-Semitic feelings may exist quite apart from conscious and deliberately held anti-Semitic attitudes, and that these feelings are often stubbornly rooted in men who would consciously prefer to live without them. This recognition has led to questions about the effectiveness of certain efforts to cope with prejudice, both here and abroad, and to a demand for more study and more facts. So there may be a little more willingness now to listen to an unpleasant testimony—on the assumption that all the facts have not yet come in, nor all the morals been pointed.
I was glad when Goering escaped the hangmen. Once, during the last week of the trial, I dreamt that I was about to be hanged myself. Long after I woke up, I still felt a bitter resentment against the judges—Lawrence, Biddle, and all the rest. I felt that they were my judges, too.
When the executions were announced, I switched compulsively from the Times to the News. I had to look at the pictures, the bodies, the dead faces, ropes still around their necks. I studied them with the fascination and dull incredulity of a drunken man looking at himself in the mirror. Here the blood on the chin, here the bloated nose, here the slack, open mouth. This is what happens to bad men. There you are. Look!
Goering, at least, wasn’t hanged. He fooled them. I owe him a debt of gratitude for that. He gave me a little hope that I, too, might escape the full force of the world’s wrath for being—not as bad as Goering, to be sure—but very bad, nevertheless.
When the good people of the world accused the Nazis of breaking the laws of humanity, I accused them, too, and I was glad enough to add moral indignation to fear as a motive for fighting. But when the angry killings of warfare were over and the quiet killings of punishment began, I grew uneasy. It’s one thing to feel that you are good enough to stop men from harming you and from harming your country. It’s quite another to feel that you are good enough to sit in final judgment upon them and to mete cut sentences of death by hanging. There is no doubt that Goering was a very bad man. But the question is, how good am I? How good can I be?
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All during the feverish growth of Nazism in Germany, and even after I was involved in the war against it, I was secretly quite indifferent to the persecution of the Jews in Europe. I was aware, without being too much disturbed by it, of a sharp contrast between my inner apathy and the mounting indignation of the press. Of course, as a self-defined liberal I didn’t approve of the murder of Jews, nor, as far as I knew, of anti-Semitism in any form. Yet I could not muster the spontaneous indignation that I felt was required of me. The feeling of which I was most conscious was a satisfaction in my own civilized restraint in contrast to the ugly indulgence of the Nazis. What I felt was a kind of moral snobbery. Although I sensed only vaguely, if at all, that the Nazis were fulfilling some of my own crueler fantasies, I discovered that I was keenly appreciative of the fact that their extreme badness made my own moderate virtue seem very bright indeed. Their brutality was almost a pleasure because it made me seem quite nice.
It was especially gratifying, during this period, to associate with Jews. Ever since my university days many of my best friends (not just some of them) had been Jews. Whether these earlier friendships contained patronizing and other spurious elements I cannot say. I do know that the threat of Nazism and its racial ideology provided me with a new sensation. I could now feel like a potentially very dangerous animal who by great and virtuous effort of will refrained from devouring a weaker species. I could condemn the Germans to my Jewish friends and, at the same time, secretly enjoy the same power to destroy which I, unlike the Germans, kept so well under control.
If I had not, to a certain extent, identified myself with the Nazis, I would not have felt a special pleasure in acting differently. Crimes alien to one’s nature leave one cold and, perhaps, a little disgusted. Virtue and restraint have a personal meaning only in the face of temptation. There is no doubt that in some obscure, sub-intellectual way I was tempted; and there is no doubt that, in an equally obscure way, I was grateful to the Nazis for expressing my latent sadism and for carrying the full burden of guilt while I, complacently conscious of having been transformed by their theories and actions into a potentially terrible “Nordic,” could enjoy the paradox of being gentle and kind.
When the Nazi power collapsed, so also did my false sense of virtue. It was suddenly no longer a remarkable achievement to be a tame “Nordic.” They were all tame now—or in captivity. My virtue could no longer be compared, favorably, to their wickedness; once again it had to be measured against accusing, absolute standards. The Nuremberg trial symbolized these standards, gave them a new and frightening authority. Goering symbolized my guilt.
I wanted to be punished, but I wanted to be understood, too. I wanted to sit in the prisoners’ box and be scolded and called names. But, finally, after the scolding and the name-calling, I wanted to be told that I was, after all, a man much like other men, that my “crimes” of thought and feeling were part of a common human heritage, and that even my sadism could be traced to frustrations and longings which men all over the world would recognize. I hoped that at some point in the proceedings the judges would nod their heads sadly and say, “Yes, I know.”
I waited patiently, but I waited in vain for them to tell me how I had become so bad, why the surface of my good will was so often cracked and ruptured by unconscious malice, what it was that I wanted so badly—and could not get simply by being good. A wise judge should be able to tell you these things. He should be able to guide you tenderly and relentlessly to the springs of crime, your crime, and make you cry out in the pain and the relief of self-knowledge. But these judges only told me that I was guilty. I knew that already. For me this was just a beginning. For them it was the end.
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The major trial at Nuremberg is long past, and I am no longer hanged in my dreams. But lesser hangmen here in America—moralists, journalists, and novelists—aware, no doubt, that I was only hanged in effigy, are holding countless trials of their own. These are the trials by book at which I, as a confessed sinner, am invited to recognize myself in adult villains who have had no past, no boyhood, no problems—in cruel acts that have had no roots in cruel experience—and in warped ideas that have had no painful birth in the minds and hearts of men. In Gentleman’s Agreement I am all the elegant and shadowy purveyers of the “Thing,” deprived of all feeling except constant selfcongratulation over not being Jewish. My crime is a petty, habit-forming conspiracy of exclusion, something I should remember not to do any more because it hurts some people who are also people. A string around my finger might help—if I weren’t so vain and Protestant and stupid. In Kingsblood Royal I appear on the scene already bled and minced into an abstraction, endowed only with the ability to chant through a long and eerie vocabulary of synonyms for Negro. My death sentence seems anticlimactic. In Crossfire I am the strange, uncaused soldier who beats the Jew to death, and who moves in an irreversible progression from crime to crime until he is shot in the back by a detective.
The soldier, at least, was alive, and I wanted eagerly to know what went on before, how he became an anti-Semite and a murderer—who his family was, whether he was loved or unloved, whether he ever wept at night and wished he were dead. I wanted to know, in the deepest sense, the story of his life. An effort so to understand him would have been an act of supreme kindness to me. It would have descended upon me like a blessing, and I would have felt more at home in a world where such understanding, or such efforts at understanding, could exist. Feeling more at home, I would have been less easily moved to fear and malice, and the purpose of this “trial” would have been, in some degree, achieved. But evidently he was not considered worth the trouble. It was natural for me to conclude that I wasn’t considered worth the trouble either.
In none of these “trials” am I treated as a person whose past can be understood or whose future is touched by hope. There are no degrees of guilt. A vagrant feeling, say the moralists, is the same as an expressed opinion; an expressed opinion is the same as an act; an act is a crime; and the crime is murder! This is the logic of their prosecution. I have only to admit to one small fault and I am immediately caught in this progression and turned out at the other end a murderer. I learn nothing; I understand nothing. I am merely sentenced to death.
Perhaps they intend to shame and frighten me into a state of innocence. Perhaps they’d like to start in me such a trembling, such an agony of self-reproach that I will perform a miracle of fission, split away from my bad self and join the growing ranks of those who point indignantly at others. But it’s too late now for me to escape into innocence in any such simple way—even under the pressure of fear. I have already acknowledged too much; I am already too strongly and too consciously implicated in my own badness. Although there are many elements in myself which I am ready and eager to change, I cannot wholly reject or obliterate any of them. To this extent I have become protective even of my sins. I will neither cast them out nor be driven away from them by threats. It would be easier for me, at this point, to seek relief in the other direction, by being defiantly bad. It would be easier for me to reject my virtues, break out in a fine rash of biases—and just relax and say to hell with it.
But I’m not looking for an easy way—either to be bad or to be good. I simply want to acknowledge myself fairly and without exaggeration, and then try to change from the center outwards, through all of my parts—slowly, without being driven.
Perhaps I did myself an injustice in assuming that I was a potential Goering, that my mild prejudices made me a potential murderer. It was a natural assumption to make then, during the trial at Nuremberg, when I was filled with the horror of what the Nazis had done. And it was natural that the assumption should be confirmed by the later “trials” by book with their fearsome device of equating all prejudice with murder. But now I am ready to draw a distinction of degree between us—between myself and Goering. I’ve got to, in self-defense. In the hope of redemption, I pleaded guilty and placed myself at the mercy of every court I could find. But the courts have shown no mercy, no inclination to understand and forgive and teach. So I’ll have to try to be a kinder and wiser judge myself.
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So Far, it’s merely a personal, psychological question with me, a question of getting along with myself, of not having too many nightmares, of reducing an intolerable burden of guilt. I will have to stop condemning myself for the minute, internal reactions of pride and prejudice which identify me as a member (or as having been a member) of a Protestant American community. I must recognize that I am not all of a piece, that I respond to people and situations on different and sometimes inconsistent levels. On the adult level I side with the weak against the strong, with the oppressed against the oppressor, with the way of democracy against the way of the tyrant. On this level I believe in the sides I take—I’m no hypocrite, thinking one thing and doing another. But there’s a more primitive level, a heritage of provincial responses far less amenable to criticism and change than adult beliefs. This is the level at which, in earlier years, I unresistingly absorbed the prejudices of my family group.
Expression of these prejudices, or, at least, implicit agreement with them, was a condition of membership in what was then, unquestionably, the society of the “best” people. It was, in fact, the only thinkable society; the mere thought of expulsion was as frightening as death. If certain evidences of membership were lacking, such as wealth or long native lineage, the expression of the right prejudices became relatively more important. They acquired a magical quality; they opened doors that otherwise might have remained closed; in adversity and in failure they defined me stubbornly and staunchly as a superior individual. They were useful things to have, these prejudices—indispensable, in fact, in the society of my youth, to personal security and self-respect.
In spite of long exposure to social science and liberal thought, I have some of them still. A small residue remains unresponsive to the solvent of intellectual analysis. Especially when I feel tired and defeated, I tend to reclaim, half-consciously, my membership in the society of the “best” people and draw what little solace I can from the feeling they give me that I “belong,” and that my totem superiority is invulnerable to the attacks of an alien world. At such times, not knowing why or by whom I am attacked, I retreat, emotionally, behind the defenses of the first society of which I was a member, and from behind these defenses I warily survey the outside world, hoping to identify the aggressor as someone not too powerful to strike down. I know these responses are irrational, but, unfortunately, neither self-accusation nor accusation by others can uproot them. The best I can do now, until some chemistry of growth makes a bigger man of me, is to recognize them, confess them, and keep them from touching any person unkindly by word or deed.
I say it’s only a personal, psychological problem because I know I’d never participate in an American version of a fascist movement. I know in advance what the temptation would be, and I am prepared to resist it. I know, too, what the rewards would be, and I know that I wouldn’t enjoy them. On the other hand—and this should worry the guardians of tolerance—I’m not sure that I’d fight on the other side with the kind of dedication required of me by my adult beliefs.
The people on the good side, the vocal ones, anyway, have been much more skillful in exposing and condemning than in understanding and curing. They have made me well aware that my prejudices are irrational, but they have failed utterly to communicate to me the process by which prejudice ceases to be a need.
How am I now to serve the needs which I have been serving by racial pride and ill-will? What reconciled them, emotionally, to the unrewarding doctrine that, in the eyes of God, all men are created equal? And how did they learn to accept objective, competitive tests as a measure of their worth—when they could so easily have remained superior to such tests? They never tell me how, and they leave me with the irritating impression that they have simply created for themselves a new kind of “natural” superiority, a new way of being effortlessly better than the rest of us. They don’t make me feel that we are struggling through this business together and that we are all having a hard time squaring our past—and our present—selves with our social conscience and our adult knowledge.
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It’s not enough, they say, to have definitely rejected the lure of political and racial fascism. It is not enough that in all my overt acts and in most of my impulses I am a good democrat. I must go farther. I must purge myself even of vagrant feelings of superiority and bias, and I must reject those in whom I detect such feelings. Now this may be an easy assignment for a man who doesn’t like his family or the friends of his boyhood, but it’s asking a little too much of one whose parents have been reasonably good to him and who still depends on the friendship of men he grew up with. My family and my boyhood friends are not that bad. And I am not that good. I can move away from them a little, but I can’t afford to lose them entirely.
I resent the apparent ease with which my liberal advisers have accomplished all of these separations. I am uncomfortable in their presence. I am ashamed to be honest with them. This isn’t a good way to feel towards people you know are right, is it? It’s not good when you want to get away from them and relax with some unregenerate provincial who takes it for granted that you prefer Protestants to Catholics, Gentiles to Jews, and whites to any other race.
It’s not good—and it’s certainly not the effect intended by prosecutor Jackson, by novelists Lewis and Hobson, and by a host of other righteous fighters against prejudice. But the plain truth is that, until the racial moralists present themselves to me more fully as men who are troubled with themselves as well as with others, I shall continue to need the approval of my imperfect friends more than theirs.
This, as clearly as I can tell it, is the story of my reaction to the Nuremberg Trial and to the many literary trials in which prejudice is condemned for the benefit of the American people. It is the story of a thwarted search for my own image, for the one compassionately presented case I might recognize as my own. It is also a story of self-defense—of resistance against the two cruelly unqualified choices which every such trial demands of the defendant: a plea of complete innocence on the one hand, or a plea of utter guilt on the other. I refused to accept either alternative, because neither would have told the truth. Instead, I made a third choice. I decided to present so clearly and understandably my inability to make either plea that I would cease, in fact, to be a defendant at all but would become, rather, the spokesman of many men like myself who have learned, as I have, that their cases can never be settled in courts of law—nor in books that resemble courts of law.
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