Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (5 page)

"The king died, and then the queen died" is a story summed up as an episodic sequence, a famous one given by E. M. Forster to make a point about the underlying unity of narrative structure.
²
The two deaths have nothing to do with each other, and if the story consists only of the coincidence of their chronology, it illuminates nothing. But what if the story is "The king died, and then the queen died of grief"? There is an action here, and that action, grief, is what we care about. Our question has moved from "What happened?" to "Why?" And our concern has moved from an alien figure, the queen, to ourselves, because we too know what it is to grieve. This movement is at the heart of the distinction, made by Aristotle, between pity and fear. When we experience the action of the tragedy as involving the character whose story we see unfolding, we feel pity for that character. But when we recognize the tragic action as involving us, we feel fear. Detachment evaporates, and we forget that the story is not ours.

It is only such a frame of reference that enables us respectfully, and without presumption, to embark on a journey of moral reckoning through a history that culminates in the Shoah. And it seems an odd but compelling concidence that Aristotle's word for such a climax is "catastrophe,"
³
the word that also translates "Shoah," suggesting not only calamity but connection. If one end of the narrative arc is tied to the mass murder of Jews, the other end cries out to be uncovered, and the underlying action, a source of tragic unity through historical complexity, demands to be identified. What happened forces us to ask why. And a genuine concern for unspeakable Jewish loss forces us to acknowledge the moral loss—a loss that always pales by comparison—that belongs to those of us whose hatred of Jews carved the arc of this story.

Ethical coherence depends, in other words, on a grasp of the causal relationship between events. But that does not imply their flowing one from the other in a train of inevitability, as if driven by fate or an impersonal force like Arendt's "eternal antisemitism." Instead, we are asking how freely made human choices led to consequences, which led to new choices and graver consequences. But always we are conscious of that human freedom, which means we are conscious at every turn that events could have gone another way. Yet it is also always true that we know how the story ends, and where. That is why the cross at Auschwitz is the epiphany. As a sighting device through which to view the past, it illuminates the real, showing us what is at stake in this story from the beginning, through the middle, to the end. What makes the cross at Auschwitz "a stumbling block to Jews"—in Saint Pauls phrase, "folly to Gentiles"
⁴
—is that the story did not have to end that way at all.

Obviously, readers come to this history from varying places and take its weight in different ways. Catholics may recognize their Church's record, both its glories and its ignominies, as the narrative thread to which the advances and reversals of Jewish-Christian interaction adhere. The overwhelmingly negative aspect of that interaction may prompt in Catholic readers a spirit of repentance. Protestant Christians may have old anti-Catholic prejudices confirmed by the story told here. But since the dreaded climax of this narrative occurs in a densely Protestant culture, with essential elements of Protestant collaboration with the Nazi project, rooted perhaps in a legacy of Martin Luther, the revelations of deep-seated Jew hatred that wind through time can hardly be read as exonerating any Christian. We are concerned here with Western civilization itself.

Auschwitz is the climax of the story that begins at Golgotha. Just as the climax of
Oedipus Rex—
the king sees that he is the killer—reveals that the hubris that drove the play's action was itself the flaw that shaped the king's character, so we can already say that Auschwitz, when seen in the links of causality, reveals that the hatred of Jews has been no incidental anomaly but a central action of Christian history, reaching to the core of Christian character. Jew hatred's perversion of the Gospel message launched a history, in other words, that achieved its climax in the Holocaust, an epiphany presented so starkly it can no longer be denied. We shall see how defenders of the Church take pains to distinguish between "anti-Judaism" and "antisemitism"; between Christian Jew-hatred as a "necessary but insufficient" cause of the Holocaust; between the "sins of the children" and the sinlessness of the Church as such.
⁵
These distinctions become meaningless before the core truth of this history: Because the hatred of Jews had been made holy, it became lethal. The most sacred "thinking and acting" of the Church as such must at last be called into question.

The work of Sophocles is instructive in this awful history because the cumulative effect of
Oedipus Rex
is not depressing but ennobling. What mitigates the unrelenting ugliness of that tale of incest and parricide is not a counternarrative in which positive elements are emphasized, but the fully realized narrative of tragedy itself. The revelation of moral causality, that one choice leads to a consequence, which leads to a new, more fateful choice, is a revelation of moral coherence. Oedipus, in the moment of his self-blinding,
sees.
The catharsis of tragedy leaves an audience more human than before because the unity of the drama denies the meaninglessness of life conceived as a series of unconnected episodes. And the action of the drama, driven by choice, leads to a consequence that did not have to be. Likewise, even this history opens to possibilities of a new future, and even this reckoning can be offered in hope.

As a Catholic, it is a matter of urgent importance to me that my Church is attempting, however fitfully, to face this history and imagine a different kind of future. We know that the Catholic Church has solemnly repudiated the ancient charge that Jews are guilty of the violent murder of God. We know that Pope John Paul II has done more to heal the breach between Christians and Jews than any previous pope. We know that the Church, in all its educational efforts and liturgical practices, is painfully extracting vestiges of explicit antisemitism.
⁶
But the cross at Auschwitz, with its origin in Wojtyla's own good will, with its origin in the ambiguities of two Roman Catholic saints, with its assertion of a particularly Catholic cult of martyrdom before a people who resent it—the cross at Auschwitz raises, in addition to everything else, a question that can only seem like blasphemy: Thinking of the Holocaust and all that led to it, what kind of God presides over such a history? But is that history's version of a more ancient question? What kind of God shows favor to a beloved Son by requiring him to be nailed to a cross in the first place?

4. My Mother's Clock

W
HEN I WAS A BOY—
after my brother contracted polio but before I went off to Georgetown—we lived in Germany, where my father was transferred by the Air Force. It was the 1950s, and the postwar continent was up from its knees but not quite on its feet. To America's everlasting credit, as I saw it then, we conquerors had not looted the vanquished but were helping them recover. There was under way, nevertheless, a genteel form of plundering, as we relatively affluent Americans bought up the treasures of impoverished Europe on the cheap.

My mother had a passion for old things, and as an officer's wife she could indulge it. She was a good-looking redhead with a sense of style. Not even the language barrier dampened her innate love of the friendly greetings exchanged with shopkeepers. Nothing sparked her adventurous spirit like the search for quality at bargain prices. I loved to wander with her through patched-together shops and Quonset arcades in which the worldly goods of what we thought of only as a lost aristocracy were for sale. Bavarian crystal, Dresden platters, Meissen dishes, Belgian lace, Delft figurines—I first heard such names not knowing they referred to places. I remember the somber mood into which my mother would fall, moving past the makeshift shelves. Perhaps she was thinking of the tables laid with these beautiful things. Carefully selecting, piece by piece, the settings of family banquets, was she somehow trying to rescue the dreams of lost women with whom she secretly identified? Decades later, as I set the table for my parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary dinner, I opened the corner cupboard for those Bavarian crystal goblets. My mother protested. The glasses had not been used since she'd purchased them in Germany. "What are you saving them for if not your golden anniversary?" I asked. A wounded look blew into her eyes—because of me, I thought then, wrongly. I know better now.

Mom was the daughter and granddaughter of Irish immigrants who'd arrived in America destitute. In Germany, was she unconsciously trying to accumulate her own legacy, the heirlooms that history, and a British overlord, had denied her? Then the point was never actually to use what she bought, but only to have it, and then to hand it on. If she had such a stripped-bare motive, she never spoke of it. If I had asked, she'd have only teased herself as a woman born to shop—a mall maven ahead of her time. She never threw the lavish dinner parties that would have justified such possessions. Most of what she bought in Germany sat in crates in the basement, forever unopened. Yes, the antidote to dispossession was possessions, and the point of such beautiful things was to pass them on, offering her progeny tangible connections to a past, even if it was a dream past unconnected to our reality and the unknown reality of the things themselves.

In a rough warehouse in Wiesbaden, not far from the Rhine, my mother had bought a beautiful grandfather clock, a seven-foot Bavarian masterpiece. The case was made of oak. A pair of carved cornucopias encircled the face, time itself as the giver of all the earth's bounty. When Mom died a few years ago, I inherited that clock; my brothers and I drew straws for it, and I won.

A full year passed before I could reassemble its weights and chains and chimes in my own living room. The silence of the clock had been a measure of my grief, and setting it in motion again meant I had begun to re-cover from her death. The music of the clock, Westminster chimes, began to waft through our house every fifteen minutes. While it evoked my mother's absence, it did so consolingly, a kind of presence after all.

But then the clock began to mean something else as well. Recent news stories have revealed how the possessions of Europe's annihilated Jews ended up in the homes of respectable people; their savings accounts in the general funds of respected Swiss banks; their gold and jewels in the vaults of prestigious institutions from Spain to Argentina; their art on the walls of great museums—all without compensation to anyone.
¹
And what about the slave labor that built profits for Volkswagen and subsidiaries of Ford, for Krupp and Bayer? We have just begun to ask.
²
The willed naivete, the denial, the moral obtuseness—whatever one chooses to call it—with which the vast majority responded to the Holocaust for so long has evaporated, leaving the telltale salt of truth on every surface. My mother's lost aristocrats surely included Jews, of whom genteel postwar looters like us never thought, as we never doubted our German servants' unprompted assertions that they had always hated Hitler. Now I find myself staring at my mothers clock, half hypnotized by the swinging pendulum, the metronome click of which seems to ask: And you? Who are you to assume your innocence?

I was born in 1943, the year before the jurist Raphael Lemkin coined the word "genocide."
³
By then, most of the murders of Jews had been carried out. People of my generation, especially Christians, have viewed the Holocaust from the moral high ground, as a crime for which we bear no responsibility. Yet the Holocaust was not simply what happened to Jews between 1933 and 1945. It involved not only the six million, but the tens of millions of their lost progeny. It is the absence of that Jewish legion—the heirs of those paintings and clocks—that the world has come increasingly to feel as a real presence. Jews accounted for 10 percent of the total population of the Roman Empire. By that ratio, if other factors had not intervened, there would be 200 million Jews in the world today, instead of something like 13 million.
⁴

With that as a background, and aware of those "other factors," one may ask why. And with the explosion of news about Jews and the Shoah—in 1945, the year of "revelation," about 250 Holocaust-related news stories appeared in the
New York Times;
in 1997, there were nearly double that
⁵
—one must ask why. Is it safe to remember the lost legion of Jews because finally it is clear that Jews as a key presence in Europe have at last been gotten rid of? Or because, as a factor in American life, inexorably pushed by demographics, intermarriage, and secularization, Jews as a group are growing less significant?
⁶

History must name forever the perpetrators of the Final Solution, and the particular crime of the Nazis must never be universalized. Western civilization did not operate the crematoria; men did. The theory of corporate guilt is properly derided, because it is true that if all are guilty, no one is. Nevertheless, the prosecutor's method applies: Once one asks why, one must also ask who benefited.

Who benefits still? What about the unclaimed money in Switzerland, not in 1945 but now? What about Picasso's
Head of a Woman,
known to have been in the private collection of one Alphonse Kann, but now, as of this writing, in the Pompidou Center in Paris? What about the un-probated moral legacies of universities, churches, and nations? And yes, what about my mother's clock? Unlike meticulously recorded bank accounts, famous artworks, or real estate, the provenance of this lovely but ordinary timepiece can never be established. That means I will never know whether it was stolen from a Jewish family, or whether it wasn't. In that way, my mother's clock has taken on a new character as a chiming icon of the twentieth century's most difficult question. Who benefits? Who benefits, that is, from the perhaps coming disappearance of Jews from everywhere but Israel, their garrison outpost? The vanishing of Jewish culture through assimilation is not, of course, the urgent moral problem that the attempted elimination of Jewish culture through mass murder is, but it should be acknowledged that the potential demographic crisis facing the Jewish people is defined by the loss of the murdered millions, not only in the twentieth century, but in all the others.