552
PARTISAN REVIEW
One may dislike the American President, or the British Prime
Minister, or the West German Chancellor intensely, but they are
operating within constitutional constraints which make it silly to de–
mand or to practice absolute opposition.
It
should be added that the
widespread tendency to use the words
communism
and especially
fascism
for all kinds of disagreeable political figures and groups is in
effect no better than the deliberate minimization of the crimes of the
past.
It
gives the notions a harmless, everyday meaning which de–
tracts from the enormity of the totalitarian menace. This too is a re–
quirement of effective resistance, that we distinguish between the
beginnings of evil and the beginnings of merely undesirable and dis–
agreeable conditions.
How does one do it? How does one make sure that one has
identified the point at which only unambiguous resistance remains?
One can never be sure, because we do not know what the future
holds . But the totalitarian age has taught many a special sensitivity
to turns of events. Whether this can be passed on to those who have
not seen it happen , I do not know. We must try .
Clearly, the probability is high that even those who have a
hunch that things around them are going badly wrong will not be
able to prevent them turning from bad to worse. Life under total–
itarianism poses unheard-of moral dilemmas . For one thing, they
are inescapable . Those German authors who adopted Ernst Wiech–
ert's cowardly phrase, "inner emigration," merely document that the
regime of the Nazis was in fact not total; for many-and for Jews , to
be sure - there were corners left in which one could remain
unobserved if one did not try to say anything. Total mobilization
does away with such luxury. It involves the merger of private lives
and public life into one inclusive process . As a result , everyone be–
comes either a killer or a victim. There are passages in Solzhenitsyn's
Guiag Archipelago
which evoke this dreaded state of affairs, and of
course George Orwell's vivid imagination of 1984 has described it as
one without issue.
Individuals then find themselves in borderline situations in
which normal moral prescriptions fail. My father was tried before
the
Volksgerichtshof
on October 20,
1944,
and sentenced to seven
years' prison. His friend and mentor Julius Leber was sentenced to
death in the same trial. But in January
1945 ,
Leber was still alive,
and it is said that a senior SS officer tried to involve him in a "rein–
surance pact": he , the SS man, would protect Leber until the immi–
nent end of the war, if Leber promised to do the same for him after-
