Gouvernment General
GOUVERNMENT GENERAL
However I first saw this story it has , much to my surprise, turned into a personal recognition. There are the terrible atrocities, These the world knows well. and at the start here was my own long and very involving work on-site with people who survived government-inflicted atrocities but who still live with them every day. But for whatever reason I live with it and, in some way, in that world. It is there waiting for me in my quiet time and private world. As the world of ego dissolves with the advance of years - and I am an old man with an old man’s enduring images - I see how Himmler’s world is a parody of the still solid and enduring gouvernment general we have built here.
This is a story about contexts. Human contexts and verbal contexts. And how they flow in and out of each other as the single reality they are. And it is about these two French words – gouvernment general – that seemingly could just as easily be English – only one letter difference. So there is a double question: what is their importance and why are they French? Recently I was re-reading Milosz's 'Native Realm.' I first read it upwards of forty years ago, on the recommendation of a dear friend who taught with him at Cal. I saw Milosz at the time as distant, severe, and totally humorless. His subsequent status as a Nobel Prize winner did not soften my impression. Fortunately, with time, I had the pleasure of coming to know him and Carol as friends - in Berkeley, and then in Krakow which was an hour away from Vilnius when I was working and living there.
In running through Native Realm a few days ago I came across the short chapter entitled G.G. Given that his ideas - and especially those commanding, throw-away asides he just tosses sideways into his texts - continue to call me up short I was startled to realize that he had an entire chapter on the Gouvernment General which has absorbed so much of my time. I assume that when I first read Native Realm the entire subject like just about everything in the Soviet world was so foreign with so few personal or intellectual hooks to grasp onto that I passed it by. But then, right after the collapse of the Soviet system when I began to live and work in that world I also began to live in the Gouvernent General.
Czeslaw begins the chapter actually describing why I passed it by. "For a study of human madness, the history of the Vistula basin during the time it bore the curious name of "Gouvernment General" makes excellent material. Yet the enormity of the crimes committed here paralyzes the imagination...." And then he goes on to describe them. They were so big that it took me, a well-protected American, several years living in that world to be forced to grasp how huge and terrible they were. But I am getting ahead of myself. So I go back to the words themselves.
They were chosen by the Soviets and Germans at the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact to transform much of Poland into a state of SS controlled farms, As part of setting it up they were to kill all Jews, Gypsies, and 30,000,000 Slavs. The plan had a French title because it was a typical diplomatic agreement by two modern states about their trusteeship over primitive lands. And civilized states used French for their international treaties.
Sounds horrendous. True, and it was. But in the context of 19th and 20th century colonial history it was not that uncommon. So this is a 21st century story about contexts and words – especially their local origins and lives. Words, to use a California image, are the adobe bricks we use to create the structures we call language. And languages, as I have written at length, are human creations, products of human encounters - not forces of nature. So in this story I trace my own search to pin down the choice of these two words that gave a civilized shape to one of the most lethal encounters in our time.
Sometime in the middle 90s I decided to write a description of the use of language and state rhetoric as tools of repression used by the Soviets and Nazis just before WW II. Because of my interest in the use of land and locale to anchor the repression I went to Wewelsburg, in Westphalia. The little town is dominated by a castle that not only moved into center stage for the Nazis but was outfitted to be the center stage for the most repressive of Nazi groups. Having described the place and its history in some detail a few years back I will excerpt a bit loosely from that printed description of Wewelsburg.
In the northern reaches of the Westphalian hills, near the medieval city of Paderborn, lies the little village of Wewelsburg. Set atop a low ridge in the middle of thick forests it is not easily seen. The surrounding woods so thickly cover the hills that the traveler moves from the forest directly into the winding streets with no sense that at its center is a monument of note. Adjacent to the village church and park is a substantial, late gothic castle. Perhaps I should call it part castle part chateau since the French word connotes an aristocratic residence, whereas the English castle sounds more like a soldier’s fortress. And each is here, both the ancient fortifications and the later, quite elegant residence of a wealthy aristocrat.
The castle is triangular in plan, really more like an arrow head. At the point of the arrow rises a massive round tower, clearly older than the rest of the castle. It is obvious that it was once a free-standing fortress, predating the rest of the castle by a century at least. It is quite high enough that its crenelated crest rises above the surrounding trees. Viewed from neighboring hilltops it resembles the great keep at Windsor Castle.
At each of the other two points of the arrowhead matching round towers rise up. They are narrower, much lighter looking and more ornamented than the round tower. Each has a domed, black slate roof that flares out at the bottom and is topped with a flagpole. From a distance they look like two old Prussian officers in spiked helmets.
Connecting the three towers and completing the castle’s triangular shape are three, late gothic wings with high pitched roofs and gables. Surprisingly they are all in wonderful repair. The cobbled courtyard could serve as a stage set for the last act of a well-funded production of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg. We can assume that this castle was home to a nobleman who wished to live very well and who had the money to match his wish. And in fact this gated and moated castle was once the residence of the Prince Bishop of Paderborn.
But prince bishops, for reasons I will lament later, went the way of the Spanish Armada many years ago. In recent years someone with real money spent it on a complete restoration encompassing every stone in the walls and moats, every element in the gateway, every piece of slate in the roofing, and every pane and frame in the finely leaded glass windows. That someone was Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer SS. SS is an abbreviation for Schutzstaffel, or armed protectors, the Nazis all-powerful and toughest military guards. What had been a substantial but ignored and abandoned relic was purchased by Himmler in the early 1930s. It was destined to play a major role in an attempt to cast a mantle of Western civility and historic continuity on perhaps the most depraved and calculated attack on humanity in the 20th century.
Wewelsburg had been chosen to serve as the mystic and ritual center for the officer corps of the SS. Himmler saw the officer corps as a brotherhood of medieval knights. From this center, also dubbed the Center of the World, Himmler’s visions would be turned into distressing realities. And those visions were big. He was apparently much taken with a 19th century Russian visionary known widely as Madame Blavatsky. Helen Petrovna Blavatsky’s fuzzy boundaries allowed her to jump happily from art to philosophy to truth and beauty and of course to the newly attractive Wisdom of the East. For Himmler her ideas were made to order. No one had remembered Wewelsburg as the Center of the World, or of anything else for that matter. But what historians had overlooked visions from within Himmler's magically inspired Nazi Wisdom could more than supply.
At the heart of Himmler’s big plan was the post-war conversion of a major part of Eastern Europe into a realm divided into knightly estates for the SS elite. As one historian describes it ‘What Camelot had been to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Monsalvat to Perceval and the Knights of the Holy Grail’ so Wewelsburg was to be to the Aryan Aristocracy of the SS. As I wrote earlier all these rituals of Himmler’s new SS religion were glued together from pre-historic, Pan-Germanic spare parts and much borrowing from the wonderful worlds of Madame Blavatsky. In retrospect they seem more like trailers for a 1930s, low budget, gothic movie.
After all the Jews and Gypsies were killed, and thirty million Russians had disappeared, the remaining Poles would serve as the slave laborers for the SS estates. The Germans and Soviets drew the boundaries as they were divvying up Poland at the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact. The war slowed down the actual conversion. But at least the land could be enclosed into a new state and it would be ruled from Krakow. That was another great vision. Himmler knew that the original Aryan Knights arose from Krakow. So Krakow, alone among Polish cities, had to be preserved from bombardments and destruction.
The new state was referred to from the very start as the Gouvernment General. Given the role of French as the accepted language of international treaties the French name could give a note of legitimacy to the new territory as well as a touch of classiness to Himmler’s establishment. And as the surviving photos of holiday dinners for the new SS Knights and their Ladies at Wewelsburg hope to testify this new regime was to be nothing if not classy – or at least as classy as the under-corseted and over-curled Gnadige Frauen and their tubby Siegfrieds could manage.
In the fall of 2001 I believe it was Vilnius University invited Czeslaw Milosz, Gunter Grass, and Szymborska to a fest honoring the three Nobel Prize winners. Fifty years earlier as a freshman at Yale one of my German texts was Drei Nobelpreistrager – Hauptmann, Mann, and Hesse. I remember being much taken with Bahnwarter Thiel. So the fest was like a half-century leap back into plus ca change. I knew Czeslaw and Carole Milosz from Berkeley and I was looking forward to seeing them. When I first went to Vilnius Carole told me to get in touch with Andrew Miksys, an American photographer then working in Vilnius as a Guggenheim Fellow, insisting that I meet him. “You two will really hit it off.” She was right. A wonderful portrait he made of Czeslaw hangs in my house today.
But on this occasion Carole and Czeslaw didn’t make it to Vilnius. He had to make an unplanned flight to Sweden to be with an editor and good friend who was taken suddenly ill. By happenstance my own friend and film partner, Ken Gumbert, came in from Warsaw on the same plane as Szymborska. We had come to Eastern Europe together a year earlier, he to work on a documentary in Prague on the Soviet’s 1948 putsch overthrowing the Czech’s post-war, democratic government, and I to go on to Vilnius. A bout of pneumonia in our unheated house sent me back to California for a while to warm up but I was back when the summer sun returned.
For someone trying to catch up with the twelve hour time lag between San Francisco and the Baltics that bright summer sun comes up painfully early. In this city of sound sleepers and tea drinkers I was up and out around six looking naively and unsuccessfully for an open café. As I re-passed the front of the old KGB headquarters straight across the former Lenin Square from our house I walked up to the beveled glass of the front door and peeked inside. Just an empty foyer. But as I was steeping back to keep going I pulled almost instinctively on the door handle. Surprisingly it was open. I went in, crossed to a wooden door which I opened and found a down stairway. So I fumbled for a light, switched it on, and at the bottom found myself in a center corridor with heavy doors on either side. I knew from my friends that the KGB – the Komitet Goz – brought people into the headquarters for questioning. But that, I found out later, took place in the offices, upstairs. The cellar was clearly different.
In silence and all alone I spent the next two hours going cell by cell. They were not the same. The KGB had different persuasive methods and they were built into the design of the cells. One, off by itself, had a dirt floor. Naïve American, it took a local to explain that this was where they shot people with a bullet in the back of the head. What I did manage to figure out by myself later on by looking at pictures of KGB prisons in other countries was that they were all designed from one central office – from the brown, sound-proofing on the doors to the lime-green paint on the corridor walls.
This experience was nothing short of chilling. It was also upending to think that someone as smart as I considered myself to be knew next to nothing about ordinary life under the Soviets. But I am a writer and this eye-opener merited a story. But where to start other than asking my friends for names. It was not that easy. The recent influx of American carpetbaggers seen as hungry to milk whatever profit they could from thepost-Soviet Baltics anxious to into the country did not help me get any answers. It wasn’t until I happened almost inadvertently to retell the story of my morning hunt for coffee that the doors opened.
With time I was given permission to look at the photos in the files upstairs. And there were boxes of them. There were snapshots of the KGB staff on winter outings in the snow. There was a really nice, new, two-story dacha outside Vilnius in the background. Their big black limousines – the ones they used in the cities to pick people up and cart them away – looked so incongruous as backdrops for the KGBfamily outings, And there parties at the same dacha for the young ‘stribai,’ the Lithuanians who did the really dirty work for the KGB. Formal photos of visiting KGB bigwigs from Moscow partying in a local hotel. There was even one ofGeorgi Malenkov, Stalin’s successor, at a bash celebrating the re-establishment of KGB control in Lithuania after the Nazi defeat.
But the photos of Soviet ascendance were the rare ones. The permission to look at the photos was really an entry into a startlingly grim world. For these photos recorded the activities of the KGB and its predecessors especially during their years after the defeat of Hitler to re-establish their control of the Baltics. Boxes of photographs of shot, torn, broken, often frozen and grotesquely distorted bodies. They were pictured lined up on the ground or leaned against a fence, like dead deer during deer-hunting season. And the photos in the boxes were often mixed together with an upsetting lack of distinction. Some of bodies, some of arrested resisters, some just of one face looking into the camera.
That lack of distinction was not haphazard. The Soviet system was built on three pillars: collectivization, state terror, and demonization. The Nazis demonized by race, the Soviets by social class. Resisters of any sort were all members of that anti-Soviet class. So partizanai were all the same. But photos of their dead and distorted bodies, could be useful within that other pillar of Soviet life – state terror. The partizanai came together to fight Stalin’s plan to “Russify” the three Baltic republics. His plan was to turn them into a human wall against the West by getting rid of the Balts and importing Russians to take their land. So these photographs of dead partizanai were exhibited publicly in their native towns. The pictures were displayed in the town centers and the townspeople were summoned to see them. In part this was to show the futility of opposition. But on these occasions KGB agents watched for reactions indicating grieving families. Then they were arrested and transported for having harbored enemies of the people.
I admit in all honesty that these months after months of viewing these terrible images, and in a few cases getting to know some of their surviving relatives, has changed me in ways I do not understand but live with even now. It is hard to find long times for care free hours in a mindset suffused with images of human suffering. Oddly, the strongest images I still have are of the many old and seemingly poor women who came to Mass every day – arriving early, always alone, and obviously in their own worlds. They came in in complete silence, never looking up or to the right or to the left. Obviously they were there, but they were not with us. I am sure that this is not uncommon but after those many months with them, hour after hour interviewing women like them, and the months in the KGB photo files, their silence and solitude no longer seemed remarkable.
As we know the Soviet system was corrupt and corrupting. How dehumanizing that was became especially clear to me when I was told a story about these photographs. Before their hurried flight after the Soviet collapse the top KGB agents destroyed the pictures that were personally incriminating. But some of the more enterprising local KGB workers did their own picking, making off with some showy ones that are now making their ways to the Saturday flea markets. There is actually a market now for “Soviet chic.” The Lithuanian historians have to bid against rich European tourists in the Saturday flea markets for the pictures of their own national history.
When I first went to Vilnius in 1999 it was obviously a recently freed and still much-wrecked city showing all the signs of a terrible occupation. I go there today, to the beautifully restored Polish baroque marvel it now is, and instinctively I see it through the eyes that saw too much during my first years there. My partner’s arrival from Prague which I mentioned above was in response to these experiences which I described to him quite regularly. He thought that there might be another documentary that needed to be made. I had thought only to write about it, perhaps a photo essay. As a writer I really overlooked the role of all these insistent pictures as the public face of the system. But as a filmmaker he knew it, and knew that the story was too big and too visual for a written narrative. So he flew up from Prague, convinced me to keep going, and we decided to make the film. Both films were eventually made and released.
We began filming interviews five years later, in the summer of 2006. With much help from what by then was the staff of the new KGB archive and museum and their colleagues in Vilnius as well as a few friends in Vilnius we were able to line up an impressive group of people. Nearly all had been prisoners at one time. Some were captured partisans, or partizanai; some exiles to Siberia and the Arctic coast; some forced laborers from Magadan and the Altai region; some anti-totalitarian political activists. It was a relief in the midst of all these stories of man-made pain to be able to interview some former prisoners now reunited with their families and back living on the farms from which they had been arrested.
Filming on the farm gave us what proved for me to be the real eye-opener – the stories from the women. Learning what it was like to be a young wife and mother, and a mother-to-be, shunted by the local Communist officials into legal nowhere. They were harassed, bullied, mocked, and left struggling for survival - alone, labeled an enemy of the people, denied use of what had been their own farm wagon and horse now the property of the town which supposedly all townsfolk could use.
Establishing the structures of the new soviets, or collectives, turned the accustomed farm life- which was hard but decen - into a deprived, depersonalized, and controlled existence, subject to the whims of the local low-lifes who held the collective's power in their hands. With all the Soviet propaganda about the moral superiority of their systems it was a surprise to learn just how grubby the local officials really were. Now, with their men gone – in prison or in slave labor – the women had no one to protect them from the locals.
One farm couple, after his twenty-five years in prison, were again in their log house in a lovely rural area two hours southeast of Vilnaus. Before his arrest and her series of arrests, releases, police interviews, and public humiliations he had been one of the leaders of the underground resistance. And the partizanai, as they were called in Lithuanian, were literally under ground. He showed us the small, hidden bunker behind what had been his father’s farm house. The small and hidden underground bunker had actually served as the headquarters for the national resistance leader for a short period. The bunker was dug down into the wooded bank of a small creek. He pointed across the steep bank to the opposite bank only about thirty feet away. He made a point of letting us know that it was not in Lithuania. It was the Gouvernment General. He obviously knew the importance of the border. And he too used the French name to describe it.
Sometime before we began filming I flew from Vilnius to Krakow to visit Carole and Czeslaw. She picked me up at the airport, and on the way back to their apartment right off the Rynek she made a detour. She wanted to point out a hilltop fortress that had been the headquarters of the Gouvernment General, again describing it using the French name.
I review these histories and I admit that I do so still looking for the answer to the question that has me writing. Where does the common practice of covering such bizarre and lethal cruelty with orderly, even elegant names from? Equally important, why is it used so commonly used in some countries but not in others. Where it is used it is common and of such long-standing.
Where it has not been used is of equally long standing. Here I am interested in the use because of the connection to Gouvernment General. Where it is uncommon and actually disallowed I will describe in the next section.
To cite the common I think of the Dutch East India Company, the British Raj and its antecedents, France OutreMer and the French colonies just to mention a few. In each of these places slavery endured long past the dates of its official, legal elimination, and was more widespread than was common reported until quite recently. Just how widespread and how enduring is the subject of current studies study in Britain, France and Holland.
That the real extent of slavery and all its terrors was not described is more than a dodge, much more than an attempt at a cover-up. For what it is worth, I think it comes from the structures inherent in the choice to record the histories in writing. As I have written elsewhere, and at some length, language is not a force of nature like sound or color. We do not discover it, we create it. It is an artifact. And it is a purposeful artifact. The invention of the description ‘Government General’ to cover the planned slaughter of millions of people is an example. But we need not go beyond our own histories of slavery to see how our own governmental language presents slavery as an acceptable reality within Western culture.
At the start of World War I something like 70% of the world’s people were held effectively in slavery or slave-like conditions by imperial capitals ofEurope, Istanbul, and the United States. Last night I visited a cousin who worked for an NGO in Burundi and lost close friends during that civil war. Whatever the early histories of Rwanda and Burundi, their chaotic seizure and transformation into German East Africa in 1885 by the German Empire newly minted in 1871 was about German unity, not Africa. The same can be said of the European donation of Burundi to Belgian control after the German defeat in 1918. But more cruel even than the European introduction of cash-crop slavery and their almost instinctive European imposition of race and eugenics as human realities into their governing ground rules was their coerced use of several hundred thousand Africans as porters during the war in Africa. They died by the thousands and thousands – of disease, malnutrition, and exhaustion. As we might expect the half million or so Africans who died because of the European battles with one another in Africa almost never enter into World War I statistics.
Each of these colonial powers – France, Germany, England, Belgium, Portugal – who understood order and equality in their own lands – developed well-thought-out, social, political and religious rationales for their rule in Africa. These all allowed the disorder and horrors they created, justified, and left behind as they pulled out. They did so seemingly with no contradiction. And they did so because the languages they created to understand and explain their colonial rule to themselves did not provideany linguistic space for contradictions or for any people who might embody contradictions. Rationales do not exist in the abstract. They exist within the created contexts where self-justifying rationales are given the almost sacred status that places them beyond question. We know we are better at running their lives than they are. We don’t have to prove it. It is true and we all know it. And whatever happened we all know that they’re better off for our having been there.
It may be tough to challenge self-serving rationales when they are wrapped in the flag and associated with all the values we place publicly beyond discussion. But it is impossible when the rationales are functions of the national rhetoric. Napoleon established a united France. And following his defeat the other imperial nations did the same. And when the core rhetoric in each of the imperial nations was in support of a politically and religiously and culturally and administratively united nation then any dissent from that one form of nation makes no sense. Even more, that dissent doesn’t even have a language in which to promote itself. Hitler and Lenin were the later triumphant exponents of that totally united nation. Their Gouvernment General was a minor and reasonable footnote to the way new things had to be. Aristotle wrote that our public discourse, which he called rhetoric, exists not to prove but to persuade. It does so by drawing on starting points that by common consent are beyond discussion. At least beyond discussion until their existence and function is challenged – and then God help the challenger.
As victors in WWII and in the Cold War we probably find it hard to equate our own colonial history with anything like the rationales for the Gouvernment General. Yet Churchill, recall, ordered the British commander and troops who effectively were abandoned in Singapore to fight to the death against the Japanese. They had to do that lest any surrender tarnish the name and honor of the British Empire. Tell our histories and perforce the language we use for the telling is a powerful constant that shapes the flows and the moral value of events presented. The public histories of the Nazi and Soviet regimes were self-aggrandizing because they were created as rhetorical tools for that very purpose. As Anne Applebaum notes so often the Soviets knew well that their relentless, party-line haranguing could, with time, become seen as true. And as I learned in my teaching in Vilnius it sets down very enduring roots. The phrase Government General was also sold for that purpose and was sold very effectively and well.
Lest it seem that my descriptions of the repressive actions of the colonial powers reflected attitudes and practices common everywhere I want to note again that this is not true. The struggle of the colonial powers to have a united nation – which in effect meant a oneness in its religious institutions and symbols – had a long-established antidote in the diversity of religions and polities, an alternative in South and Central Europe that existed up to the end of the 18th Century. It is no accident that modern Germany’s first attempt to have a truly open and democratic government – tolerant not only of cultural and religious differences but tolerant of diverse forms of government – was centered in the tiny little city of Weimar. And that is where we go in the second section, to see the vitality of that world. A world, I believe, that would have had no place for the likes of the Gouvernment General.
GOUVERNMENT GENERAL II
Recently I came across a description the pre-19th Century German polities, what the author – my dear friend Thomas Brady – described as the loose-jointed monarchy some of us remember as the Holy Roman Empire. From one of my German classes at Yale I remember – sort-of – that 19TH Century mocking ditty, ‘du heil’ge, deutsch, rom’sch reich, was halt sie jetzt suzammen.’ The mockery came from within the triumphant mindset of the emerging German national state now celebrating its new religious and national unity. Especially the fact that it was a state, no longer a plurality of them. And this was new. There had long been a rather large number of states with real, inner, religious, cultural and political diversities which they inherited from the past and valued very highly. Their union, such as it was – and ‘as it was’ was what they liked and valued – had no national army, no one ruler, no one idea of what rule should be, no central authority decreeing and collecting taxes, and no uniformity of religious belief and practice. To many libertarian Americans today that sounds like a rather decent arrangement. But in a Europe whose major nations – Germany, England, Russia, even France – had experienced the power – and the appeal – of Napoleon’s empire and, after destroying him had decided to outdo him, those German pluralities were seen as in the way.
That loose and mostly peaceful confederation had done well for several hundred years. It benefitted from the acceptance of religious diversity, tolerated politically different systems, and demanded little more than some hat-tipping to the current center of the Empire. It had little military power because it had no common military service – and lacked that by choice. In turn it produced so much of what we know as German classical culture. It is no accident that this ‘German Enlightenment’ which bridged the 18th and 19th centuries was centered in Weimar.
This tolerance of diversities did not come out of nowhere. As Tom Brady has described so well there was not a German Reformation, there were German Reformations. Perhaps the most important of these Reformations was the shift among the evangelicals of religious authority from the regional rulers to the local parishes. Given the role of religion in carrying the symbols and rhetoric of order that change in the location of popular church life was more important than what princes and bishops thought.
But that loose union was out of sync with the 19th century ideal of a religiously, administratively, and politically unified state that Napoleon launched and his conquerors developed. It did not take long for it to become the national model for Europe’s leading powers. What Stalin and Hitler did in their establishment of the Gouvernment General was not much different from what the victors in World War I did when they divvied up the German colonies in Asia and Africa and the collapsed Ottoman world.
But they did more than parcel them out. They placed them in polities which they created ad hoc. And they did it with no apparent interest in the wishes or welfare of the peoples they appropriated. There was more human focus on the commercially valuable African captives being transported from the West Coast of Africa to Brazil and the Caribbean than there was three centuries later on the many thousands of Africans who died as coerced porters for the English, French, Belgian and German forces chasing each other around the forests of Africa during the war, or during the meetings of the new trusteeship councils setting their fate after the German defeat.
For better or worse I have had the opportunity to see this mindset at work in chaos set up by one of the two agents of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. I cannot pretend to come at any discussion of the Soviet as an insider. I began working in Vilnius and Lithuania as an almost total outsider. Gorbachev’s tanks had been gone for 6 years. But only six years. Close enough to the Soviet rule for me to have lived in the mess, the human and visual chaos, they created and left behind. Vilnius today shines as one of the loveliest baroque cities in Europe – and it is clearly Polish baroque. In 1999 it was a grimey, Soviet outpost. I was left with the impression that for Lenin and Stalin the worst tools of capitalist corruption were paint ad soap.
I did not go to Eastern Europe with no exposure to the life there. I had the good fortune – and I feel called on to add, the great blessing – to have met Czeslaw Milosz much earlier. I had known him for years in Berkeley. Once I began reading his accounts of life under the Soviets and then the Nazis I knew in some way that they had taken me to a door that I had to go through. Some of my most impressive college mentors were refugees from Nazi and Soviet tyranny. But that tyranny which I knew they lived with every day was, like all of Eastern Europe, a closed world to me – and more different it turned out than I had even the mindset to suspect.
The combination of his writings and our dinner table discussions – in which of course I was mostly a listener – fed into my own mistrust of untroubled certainties and especially of the people who promoted them. But I had no grasp of life in Eastern Europe. Then my life and daily work with ordinary people in Vilnius – with their daily schedules, routines, what they did in public and how they did it – opened my eyes to their world of mistrust, distance, silence, solitude. Here in California people are open. I encountered the opposite as a habitual mistrust, especially mistrust of strangers. The stranger was the eyes of the KGB. My work over a few years in the KGB photo files and with the victims of police terror explained a lot. It also made some people mistrust me, I suspect, because they didn’t know why – and in their world that means for whose benefit – I was there. And whose ever benefit it was, it wasn’t theirs. It was in that context that I began to understand and really respect Milosz.
In retrospect I marvel at how little I knew and how many daily encounters it took for me to even start to learn how deadening and isolating it must be to live with that power of police to arrest for reasons they never have to state. And it was a power that everyone knew filled the jails, the cemeteries, and the cattle cars to Russia – and God only knowing what happened after the trains arrived in Novosibirsk. I learned more in Lithuania about fear of the police that I hear described so often by Black Americans than I ever learned in America. My years there taught me what they were talking about – that arbitrary right to stop and arrest you without ever having to explain why.
Milosz was actually much more Catholic than I. My piety, such as it is, was more akin to the peasant mindset he describes somewhat dismissively. And my skepticism – principally toward any claims to any total certainty – was more focused on the intellectualism in which he was at home. We all cling to our roots. Whatever its root source it was not peasant piety that was used to burn people at the stake, it was the wisdom of the biblical and theologically wise. I was trying to understand the sources of state rhetoric that is used to kill. That he and Carole granted my work a serious hearing was affirming enough to allow me to pursue this study seriously. The title “Native Realm” is a reference to a line of Hegel I believe: Self-reflection is the native realm of intellect. And any understanding eventually has to enter into some self-reflection. Since I held the compulsive self-revelation in which Berkeley was still awash in something close to contempt that alternative was helpful.
I have been able to use my own family stories of much less than honorable business and political arrangements in New York, to put it over-simply, as a lens through which to look at power in the old Soviet Union. It had never occurred to me, and to most Americans I assume, that the old Soviet Union was, and always had been, for sale from top to bottom. Well, welcome to New Jersey. But where I find Milosz’sdescriptions of the political and intellectual life in ‘greater Poland’ so helpful is that they allows me to see that the peculiar ideas of Himmler and Madame Blavatsky are no more fantasist than much of what he describes in his world during the 20s and 30s. To me Milosz’s Slavic world sounded esoteric. There is nothing esoteric about the S. S.
In Native Realm, which I was rereading earlier this evening, in a section on Slavic nationalism, he says that “a system does not grow out of a void.’ Even though as a finished product it could be exported its characteristics were determined by its own native soil. The choice within the leading European powers to unify religion and nationalism grew out of their native soil as well. And the native soil which produced the Hitler-Stalin pact also produced the German and Russian expansionist rhetoric of the late 19th century. Hitler and Stalin came quite honestly to the decision to divide Eastern Europe between them. The atrocities they inflicted were as much a function of an established system as a function of the land and its history. Their murderous chaos marched out of both local cultures and established trusteeship practices for lesser peoples in need of supervision by superior peoples.
Granting that this may be accurate then why is the history of the Gouvernment General so largely unknown? I do not know. But I am going to suggest one possible reason. Just above I mention the expansionist rhetoric of the late 19th century. What the Russians and Germans did in Moscow in 1939 was similar to what the Western nations had done and were still doing in their colonies. Perhaps it could have been seen as excessive but not essentially evil. In a sense the Gouvernment General was yet another colonial plan, not an extermination plan.
Where is the difference? In the national rhetoric and its moral support system. Not all political rhetoric had been national. There had been the rhetoric that kept religion and rule separate, that Weimarer Klassik mentioned above, and it was the hope to renew that tolerant rhetoric that set the German parliament in Weimar. But whatever local determination Wilson and some others may have talked about it was their victorious powers that drew the new boundary lines.
We know that ideas like nationalism and colonialism exist in the mind. But how? Are they ideas before we put them into words? And in what words, and which language? Aristotle wrote that logic is for proof, rhetoric is for persuasion. Logic it seems is a private, interior, mental process. Bring it out into public commerce and it becomes persuasion. And that persuasion then grows local roots – or at least that is what we hope for in trying to persuade. But when that world of national rhetoric has already been so well set up any new and different ways of seeing will have a hard time finding land to grow on.
There was one example of just how hard it was for opposing ideas to be given a hearing. Before World War I the labor parties in England begged their members not to be bought off by the prosperity being imported from the colonies. The preached about the exploitation and sufferings of the people in England’s colonies. And they did preach. The British socialists owed more to the Wesleys than to Marx. But the national rhetoric did not have much room for alternatives in a London it had just rebuilt into an elegant imperial capital. Some of the appeal of that national righteousness must still be strong enough – several generations after the events – for it is still being paraddistribution of e d in TV spectacles like Jewel in the Crown and Upstairs Downstairs.
The rhetoric of colonialism which I have described elsewhere is local. It is found early on in the language of the European colonial powers from which it absorbs their manipulatively dominating mindset. Ant it was, and is, dominating. It appeared already well developed in the land grants issued in the middle 1540s in the Chichimeca region north of Mexico. The variety ,of grantees - ranchers, church authorities, potential mining interests - effectively worked together well enough to bring the Chichimecas into the proper status envisaged for them by the Spanish authority. A leading historian of period wrote that the notably few Franciscans set up a structure - he refers to it as a 'spiritual structure' - that "would eventually hold the frontier together." At these linguistic and cultural distances We know too little of the realities underneath those words to know how it worked. But already the notion of unity as a great value was sufficiently part of it that it obviously worked. And it worked well enough that,much later, It overran the plural visions of the Weimar Republic. It was in the saddle in the decisions of the British Foreign Office to partition Ireland, India, and Palestine making clear that religious unity was the sine qua non to a successful nation. The reality was that ‘these people’ were incapable of living together'. So build on and reinforce what does hold people together - common religion. And it plays a strong role in the United States today in the role given to a nationalized form of biblical Protestantism which is cited by a solid minority as the glue to their nationalism.
There have been many Gouvernments Generals, agreements by the representatives of powerful nations, to impose a civilized sense on peoples seen incapable of self-government. Regime change is the latest rationale for it, but at base it is the same victor’s triumphant national rhetoric at work. And as in the past it is the trade policies and arms produced and sold and where necessary underwritten by the powerful nations that create the uncivilized situations causing them to think of changing regimes. The only fatal flaw in the Gouvernment General was that its principal supporter lost the war.
This is one of only two pictures of people loaded onto Soviet boxcars. The ‘Soviet hammer and sickle is on the left side of he car
