Westerns supported stereotypes that distorted the truth for a generation of viewers.
The danger of creating stereotypes can be even greater than the danger of not paying tribute to what’s typical. After all, the world is more diverse than uniform. Individuals, even if they belong to the same race, the same nation, and the same religion are more diverse than uniform. Goodness is more diverse than uniform. Evil is more diverse than uniform. In his recent novel The Kindly Ones , which was both praised and criticised as provoking and scandalising, the French-American-Jewish author Jonathan Littell presents an SS officer’s career and inner life because, as he explains in an interview that I read, he wanted to find out what evil is from the inside. But there are as many insides of evil as there are evil people and there isn’t that much to find out about them. Once an SS officer or soldier has crossed the line from being a fighter to being a murderer every additional murder is just an additional number. And they crossed the line for all kinds of reasons: they got a kick out of crossing it or they thought they had to cross it, they wanted to act like their fellow soldiers, they were used to obeying orders, they didn’t want or didn’t dare to question them, they were convinced that it was the right thing to kill Jews, they were drunk, murdering was less dangerous than fighting, they just didn’t care what they did, and so on. And the psychological predispositions that enabled them to enjoy crossing the line or to want to obey orders or not to care were as manifold as the reasons for doing so. To create the typical evil-doer is as simplistic and misleading as creating any other stereotype.
As an author I was often criticised for depicting Hanna, the woman protagonist of my novel The Reader , a former concentration camp guard who committed monstrous crimes, with a human face. I understand the desire for a world where those who commit monstrous crimes are always monsters. We all have the deeply-rooted expectation that a person’s acts and character, outer and inner appearance, behaviour in one context and behaviour in another context should conform. Whatever sociological role theory teaches us – deep down we still have the old notion of personal identity as consistency of character, appearance and behaviour. Our language reveals this when we talk about someone looking beautiful but being awful, looking warm but being cold, looking cultured but being amoral. We don’t easily talk about people looking beautiful and being awful, looking warm and being cold, looking cultured and being amoral.
But the world is full of this tension. Not seeing its multifaceted nature is simplistic and misleading. Maybe I insist on this point so strongly because my generation experienced again and again that someone whom we loved and respected turned out to have done something horrible during the Third Reich. I remember my English and gym teacher, a wonderful teacher to whom I owe my early love for the English language and also an early insight into the relativity of justice. When, at the end of the school year 1958 or 1959, my final grade in English was lower than the grades that I had gotten over the year, I asked him for an explanation. ‘Schlink,’ he said, ‘as long as you don’t try harder in sports, you won’t get a better grade in English either.’ I found this unfair, and of course it wasn’t fair. But it showed an old pedagogue’s insight into his student’s psyche. I was an arrogant little intellectual and hadn’t seen a reason why I should try harder in sports. Now I saw one and actually managed to swirl around the high pole that you have to jump up to. During training we students saw the tattoo on his arm that all SS officers and soldiers had that indicated the person’s blood group. But it was the fifties, and we still believed that the Waffen SS was just an elite troop and that only the Concentration Camp SS was bad.
The danger of creating stereotypes can be even greater than the danger of not paying tribute to what’s typical. After all, the world is more diverse than uniform. Individuals, even if they belong to the same race, the same nation, and the same religion are more diverse than uniform. Goodness is more diverse than uniform. Evil is more diverse than uniform. In his recent novel The Kindly Ones , which was both praised and criticised as provoking and scandalising, the French-American-Jewish author Jonathan Littell presents an SS officer’s career and inner life because, as he explains in an interview that I read, he wanted to find out what evil is from the inside. But there are as many insides of evil as there are evil people and there isn’t that much to find out about them. Once an SS officer or soldier has crossed the line from being a fighter to being a murderer every additional murder is just an additional number. And they crossed the line for all kinds of reasons: they got a kick out of crossing it or they thought they had to cross it, they wanted to act like their fellow soldiers, they were used to obeying orders, they didn’t want or didn’t dare to question them, they were convinced that it was the right thing to kill Jews, they were drunk, murdering was less dangerous than fighting, they just didn’t care what they did, and so on. And the psychological predispositions that enabled them to enjoy crossing the line or to want to obey orders or not to care were as manifold as the reasons for doing so. To create the typical evil-doer is as simplistic and misleading as creating any other stereotype.
As an author I was often criticised for depicting Hanna, the woman protagonist of my novel The Reader , a former concentration camp guard who committed monstrous crimes, with a human face. I understand the desire for a world where those who commit monstrous crimes are always monsters. We all have the deeply-rooted expectation that a person’s acts and character, outer and inner appearance, behaviour in one context and behaviour in another context should conform. Whatever sociological role theory teaches us – deep down we still have the old notion of personal identity as consistency of character, appearance and behaviour. Our language reveals this when we talk about someone looking beautiful but being awful, looking warm but being cold, looking cultured but being amoral. We don’t easily talk about people looking beautiful and being awful, looking warm and being cold, looking cultured and being amoral.
But the world is full of this tension. Not seeing its multifaceted nature is simplistic and misleading. Maybe I insist on this point so strongly because my generation experienced again and again that someone whom we loved and respected turned out to have done something horrible during the Third Reich. I remember my English and gym teacher, a wonderful teacher to whom I owe my early love for the English language and also an early insight into the relativity of justice. When, at the end of the school year 1958 or 1959, my final grade in English was lower than the grades that I had gotten over the year, I asked him for an explanation. ‘Schlink,’ he said, ‘as long as you don’t try harder in sports, you won’t get a better grade in English either.’ I found this unfair, and of course it wasn’t fair. But it showed an old pedagogue’s insight into his student’s psyche. I was an arrogant little intellectual and hadn’t seen a reason why I should try harder in sports. Now I saw one and actually managed to swirl around the high pole that you have to jump up to. During training we students saw the tattoo on his arm that all SS officers and soldiers had that indicated the person’s blood group. But it was the fifties, and we still believed that the Waffen SS was just an elite troop and that only the Concentration Camp SS was bad.
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