46
PARTISAN REVIEW
ones we can most readily identify with. They are the ones imagination
can most readily accommodate. A bystander is like you and me , the or–
dinary human article - what normal man or woman or adolescent runs
to commit public atrocities? The luck of the draw (the odds of finding
oneself in the majority) saves the bystander from direct victimhood: the
Nuremberg "racial" laws, let us say, are what exempt the bystander from
deportation. The bystander is, by definition, not a Jew or a Gypsy. The
bystander stays home, safe enough if compliant enough. The bystander
cannot be charged with taking part in any evil act; the bystander only
watches as the evil proceeds. One by one, and suddenly all at once, the
Jewish families disappear from their apartments in building after building,
in city after city. The neighbors watch them go. One by one, and sud–
denly all at once, the Jewish children disappear from school. Their class–
mates resume doing their sums.
The neighbors are decent people - decent enough for ordinary pur–
poses. They cannot be blamed for not being heroes. A hero - like a
murderer - is an exception and (to be coarsely direct) an abnormality, a
kind of social freak. No one ought to be expected to become a hero.
Not that the bystanders are, taken collectively, altogether blameless. In
the Germany of the thirties it was they - because there were so many of
them - who created the norm. The conduct of the bystanders - again
because there were so many of them - defined what was common and
what was uncommon, what was exceptional and what was unexcep–
tional, what was heroic and what was quotidian . If the bystanders in all
their numbers had not been so docile, if they had not been so concilia–
tory, or, contrariwise, if they had not been so "inspired" (by slogans and
rabble-rousers and uniforms and promises of national glory), if they had
not acquiesced both through the ballot box and alongside the parades -
if, in short, they had not been
so
mQlly -
the subject of heroism would
never have had to arise.
When a whole population takes on the status of bystander, the vic–
tims are without allies; the criminals, unchecked, are strengthened; and
only then do we need to speak of heroes. When a field is filled from end
to end with sheep, a stag stands out. When a continent is filled from end
to end with the compliant, we learn what heroism is. And alas for the
society that requires heroes.
Most of us, looking back, and identifying as we mainly do with the
bystanders - because it is the most numerous category, into which simple
demographic likelihood thrusts us; or because surely it is the easiest cate–
gory, the most recognizably human, if not the most humane - will
admit to some perplexity, a perplexity brought on by hindsight. Taken
collectively, as I dared to do a moment ago, the bystanders are culpable.
But taking human beings "collectively" is precisely what we are obliged
