Seeing Through the Night and Fog
by: Newbie
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This introduction is incredibly hard for me to write. This a review or better yet a response to the French film Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog). Anything that I might comment about the atrocities of the Holocaust in an attention-getting manner would only seem to trivialize the suffering that was endured. So here it is: millions of Jews were deliberately tortured and killed. How am I, an American living 60 years later, supposed to react or feel? Can I do anything?
Leaving behind the “supposed to’s,” my initial reaction is shock. There is a disconnect between what I understand as my worldview and what I actually encounter in the reality of the Holocaust. I come to the viewing of Night and Fog with the assumptions of a God that created the world and called it good. But the only good found in the film is the quality of the film itself. That there is good art, for me, points to the possibility of a good world created by God. But the death camps support none of these conclusions. The “chosen” people of God who once offered burnt sacrifices to him became a burnt sacrifice to the pinnacle of modern man’s ascent. How can this world be good? Where was God?
The next feeling I experience is guilt. A feeling of guilt seems to preclude a personal involvement, though. Since I was not involved in the Holocaust, I am left with a choice; either dismiss my guilty feeling or expand my notion of ‘self’. Emotions are natural expressions of the ‘self.’ There is not an abstract happiness, sadness, or guilt that imposes itself on to me. My experience of happiness will be different than another’s. For example, the happiness I felt at the birth of my son is a different happiness that would be felt by a couple that was told a year ago they would never be able to have children. Both are real experiences of happiness, but different. They are different precisely because of the differences of the people involved. Put another way, the individual experience of happiness was an expression of who the individual was. So if I dismiss the feeling of guilt, then I am dismissing a part of my ‘self.’ This leads me to the necessity of expanding the notion of ‘self’ to account for my guilt. When I review my life, my personality when I was 20 is different than what I am presently. The differences are even greater between me as a teenager and me as nine year old. Yet I conceive only one ‘self’ at all these different stages in my life. Could I have experienced these same changes to become the ‘self’ that I am now if I had lived in solitude? Granted the physical changes would be the same, but my beliefs, attitudes, knowledge, memories and scars would be different; they have all been shaped in social contexts. My ‘self’ is defined communally. How far does this community extend? Obviously it is more than those that I eat, grow, and live with. Our little communities themselves are shaped by stories that have been past down. These stories define our friendships, our families, and our ‘self.’ The story of the Holocaust, the story of Wounded Knee, the Russian gulags, 9/11, and Iraq are my story. They are a part of how I conceive of my ‘self.’
So I am faced with a paradox within my ‘self.’ How can one make sense of a prodigal god? The righteous Job protested the loss of wealth, health, and children. Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, protested the suffering of children and wished to return his ticket to god. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, awaiting his execution at the hands of the Nazis, wrote, “only the suffering God can help.” Twentieth century theologians (K. Barth, D. Bonhoeffer, A. Heschel, J. Moltmann, et. el) have developed the idea that because “God is love,” God is vulnerable to the suffering that love often begets, and the further conclusion that God himself suffered in the Nazi prison camps. Jürgen Moltmann said it this way: if there is to be a “theology after Aushwitz” then there must be a “theology in Aushwitz.”
Again, Bonhoeffer writes:
God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us . . . not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering (Letters and Papers from Prison, 196.)
According to this thought process, the weakness of God is the starting point for any reconciliation or redemption of the Holocaust. Is this a bit absurd? Yes. The absurdity of any religious idea is the attempt to explain our experience of the world by gesturing to an experience that is beyond our world. But I think it is just as absurd to explain our experiences with no gesturing whatsoever. So Kierkegaard asks me if I have the courage to leap into the absurd. I don’t have an answer.
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