384
JOHN FRASER
heads for days afterwards. Certain of Brownlow's comments on the
making of his own film seem very much to the point here: "The
Nazi era was as forbidden a subject at that time [the mid-fifties] as
pornography to the Victorians. Neither of us had yet developed an
understanding of National Socialism; we shared the general horror
at their crimes, but were fascinated by the unexplained elements of
the Nazi phenomena. I have never been able to analyze this. Both
of us are inordinately squeamish. We cringe at the sight of a hospital
uniform. Nazism should have repelled us with its constant reminders of
brutality. But mysteries continued to cloud the era. And mystery is a
powerful attraction."
Now, my speaking of empathy in such a context will inevitably
have brought flooding into the reader's mind not only the bureau–
crats but also the appalling psychopaths and perverts who "found"
themselves through Nazism - Julius Streicher, for instance, or the
concentration camp guard described in Eugen Kogon's
Theory
and
Practice of Hell
who at night "would sometimes summon a victim
from one of the cells and leisurely do away with him
in
[his]
room.
He would then place the body underneath
his
bed and fall asleep
peacefully,
his
work well done."
It
is, however, not empathy with
figures like
these
that I suggest. On the contrary, such examples re–
mind one especially powerfully of how certain kinds of violences, like
certain kinds of suffering, are in fact wearying and unenlightening
in their claims on us for strong responses. Passive suffering, as Yeats
remarked, isn't a subject for tragedy, and clumsy expositions of it
tend to become wearisome and can lead eventually, even, to the sick–
joke kind of reaction. One is drawn initially into a sort of shocked
empathy, but the states of consciousness involved (as re-created by
oneself from the given pointers in an effort to understand how one
would feel .and act oneself under such conditions) are almost
in–
evitably less well articulated and less clear than one's own conscious–
ness normally is; and so, denied any clarification and advance
in
understanding, one ends by withdrawing from involvement. Well,
much the same seems true of cert.ain kinds of aggression, or, perhaps
more accurately, of certain states of consciousness out of which ag–
gressions issue - states of confusion, disarray, an overall lowering
of psychological coherence and effectiveness. Let me return briefly
to horror movies for illustration.
