Wages of Rebellion (36 page)

Resistance to Nazism was painfully rare, even as Germany was losing the war. The slightest whisper of dissent could mean death, as evidenced by the execution of the five Munich University students and their philosophy professor who were members of the White Rose resistance movement. The White Rose distributed thousands of anti-Nazi leaflets before they were arrested by the Gestapo and guillotined. The text of their sixth and final set of leaflets was smuggled out of Germany by the resistance leader Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, who was hanged by the Nazis in January 1945. Copies of the leaflets were dropped over Germany by Allied planes in 1943.

The White Rose has been lionized by postwar Germans—one of its members, Alexander Schmorell, was made a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church, and squares and schools in Germany are named for the resisters—but in a BBC interview, Liselotte Fürst-Ramdohr, a member of the group who was arrested but released by the Nazis, said that the resisters had little support among the public during the war. “At the time, they’d have had us all executed,” said Fürst-Ramdohr, who hid leaflets for the group and helped make the stencils they used to paint slogans on walls.
³³

History has vindicated resistance groups such as the White Rose and plotters such as von dem Bussche. But they were desperately alone while they defied the law, their oaths of allegiance, and public opinion. Von dem Bussche said that even after the war he was spat upon as he walked down city streets in Germany. Rebellion, when it begins, is not legal, safe, comfortable, or popular.

“Somebody, after all, had to make a start,” one of the White Rose members, Sophie Scholl, said on February 22, 1943, at her trial in a Nazi court. “What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare express themselves as we did.”
³⁴

Von dem Bussche, who died in 1993, took part as a twenty-year-old lieutenant in the invasions of Belgium; Luxembourg, France—where a French sniper shot off his right thumb and he was wounded in the shoulder—and Poland. He was stationed after the invasion of Poland
in the town of Dubno in the western Ukraine. His military unit was ordered to secure an abandoned air base. The young officer watched as the SS escorted some 2,000 Jews to the airfield.

“The Jews were trucked in from the surrounding countryside, stripped and forced by the black-uniformed officers toward long, deep trenches,” von dem Bussche told me. “They were shot in their heads by an SS officer with a machine pistol, and then the next row was made to lie down and shot in their heads. It is not an easy memory to live with, especially as I considered myself, as an officer of the German army, to be an accessory to these murders.”

It was then that he decided to defy Hitler. But it would not be until 1943, when it was clear that the Germans were losing the war, that he and a small group of other officers led by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg began to plot to assassinate the Nazi leader. The conspirators did not defy the Nazis on behalf of the Jews, von dem Bussche conceded, but to save the country from defeat, dismemberment, and catastrophe.

“One motive, along with just stopping the killing, was the most valid—to stop the Russians east of Poland,” he said of the plotters. “If we had managed to keep the Russians out, Europe would have been spared the division and pain of the last forty-four years.”

In 1943 von dem Bussche was a captain. He was asked to model the army’s new winter coat for Hitler at the Wolfsschanze, the Nazi leader’s headquarters in East Prussia. He and von Stauffenberg managed to obtain fuses and plastic explosives from the British (so that they could avoid the noise made by German fuses, which hissed when lit). Von dem Bussche also had two hand grenades. He planned to physically seize Hitler and ignite the grenades in a suicide mission intended to kill the Führer and perhaps other high-ranking Nazi officials in the room. The code name for the operation was “Overcoat.”

Von dem Bussche said that von Stauffenberg told him, “I am committing high treason with all my might and means,” but added that under natural law the plotters had a duty to use violence to defend the innocent from the horrific crimes of the state.

Von dem Bussche was summoned to Hitler’s headquarters in November 1943. He waited for three days about ten miles away, rarely
leaving his room. He woke up every morning and wondered, he said, if he would be alive in the evening, and “if my nerve would hold.” But the train carrying the winter uniforms was bombed by Allied warplanes, and von dem Bussche was sent back to the Russian front, where he lost a leg in the bitter fighting.

Von dem Bussche, six feet five inches tall with cobalt-blue eyes and a voice that rumbled like a freight train, refused to describe what he or the other plotters did as heroism. He detested words like “honor” and “glory” being applied to warfare. He had no time for those who romanticized combat. He had no option as a human being but to resist, he said, and acted, as Edelman did, to save his “self-esteem.”

“There was no hero stuff involved, none at all,” he said. “I thought this was an adequate means to balance out what I had seen. I felt that this was justifiable homicide and was the only means to stop mass murder inside and outside Germany.” His was the tenth thwarted attempt on Hitler’s life. There would be one more.

On July 20, 1944, von Stauffenberg carried two small bombs in a briefcase to a meeting with Hitler. He struggled before the meeting to arm the bombs with pliers, a difficult task as he had lost his right hand and had only three fingers on his left hand after being wounded in North Africa. He managed to arm only one bomb. After placing the briefcase with the bomb under the table near Hitler, he left the room. Von Stauffenberg was outside at the time of the explosion, which killed four people—including Hitler’s security double—but only slightly wounded Hitler, who was shielded by a table leg. Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels announced over the radio that Hitler had survived. Hitler spoke to the nation not long afterward. Von Stauffenberg and other conspirators were captured and executed by a firing squad.

Von dem Bussche, recovering from the loss of his leg in a Waffen-SS hospital outside Berlin, anxiously followed the news of the assassination attempt on the radio. He listened to Hitler’s angry tirade against the “traitors” who had attempted to kill him. He knew it would not be long before the SS appeared at his bedside. He spent the night eating page after page of his address book, which had the names of every major conspirator who was being hunted, was under arrest, or was dead. The
British explosive material from his aborted suicide bombing was in a suitcase under his bed. He asked another officer to carry the suitcase out of the hospital and toss it into a lake. He was repeatedly interrogated over the next few days, but because none of the other plotters had implicated him, even under torture, he managed to elude their fate.

He did not succeed, at least not in killing Hitler and overthrowing the Nazis. He felt that as an army officer, even with his involvement in the assassination plots, he remained part of the murderous apparatus that had unleashed indefensible suffering and death. He worried that he had not done enough. The brutality and senselessness of the war haunted him. The German public’s enthusiastic collusion with the Nazi regime tormented him. And the ghosts of the dead, including those he admired, never left him. He understood, as we must, that to do nothing in a time of radical evil is to be complicit.

“I should have taken off my uniform in the Ukraine,” he told me on the last afternoon of my visit, “and joined the line of Jews to be shot.”

T
hose with sublime madness accept the possibility of their own death as the price paid for defending life. This curious mixture of gloom and hope, of defiance and resignation, of absurdity and meaning, is born of the rebel’s awareness of the enormity of the forces that must be defeated and the remote chances for success. “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism,” Havel wrote. “It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
³⁵

Optimism, especially the naive optimism fed to us by the corporate state, engenders self-delusion and passivity and is the opposite of hope. Rebels who are self-aware, who are possessed of sublime madness, are also often plagued by a gnawing despair. When the movie producer Abby Mann, who wanted to film Martin Luther King’s life story, asked King facetiously, “How does the movie end?” King responded, “It ends with me getting killed.” As Mann recalled, “I looked at him. He was smiling, but he wasn’t joking.”
³⁶

Social and economic life will again have to be rationed and shared. The lusts of capitalism will have to be curtailed or destroyed. And there will have to be a recovery of reverence for the sacred, the bedrock of premodern society, so we can see each other and the earth not as objects to exploit but as living beings to be revered and protected. This recovery will require a very different vision for human society.

William Shakespeare lamented the loss of the medieval Catholic rituals eradicated by the Reformation. When Shakespeare was a boy, the critic Harold Goddard pointed out, he experienced the religious pageants, morality plays, church festivals, cycle plays, feast and saint’s days, displays of relics, bawdy May Day celebrations, and tales of miracles. The Puritans, the ideological vanguard of the technological order, made war on the Elizabethan and Jacobean theaters for celebrating these premodern practices.

The London authorities in 1596 prohibited the public presentation of plays within city limits. The theaters had to relocate to the south side of the River Thames. The Puritans, in power under Cromwell in 1642, closed the London theaters and in 1644 tore down Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. Within four years, all theaters in and around London had been destroyed. The Puritans understood, in a way that is perhaps lost to us today, that Shakespeare was attacking the cold ethic of modernity and capitalism.

Shakespeare portrays the tension between the dying ethic of the premodern and the modern, a theme that would be explored by William Faulkner in American fiction. Shakespeare, like Faulkner, saw the rise of the modern as dangerous. The premodern reserved a place in the cosmos for human imagination, what the poet John Milton called “things invisible to mortal sight.”
³⁷
The new, modern Machiavellian ethic of self-promotion, manipulation, bureaucracy, and deceit—personified by lago, Richard III, and Lady Macbeth—deforms human beings and society. Shakespeare lived during a moment when the modern world—whose technology allowed it to acquire weapons of such unrivaled force that it could conquer whole empires, including the Americas and later China—instilled this new secular religion through violence. He feared its demonic power.

Prospero in Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
is master of a magical island where he has absolute power. He keeps the primitive Caliban and the spirit Ariel as his slaves. Shakespeare reminds us that the power unleashed in the wilderness can prompt us to good, if we honor the sacred, but to monstrous evil if we do not. There are few constraints in the wilderness, a theme that would later be explored by the novelist Joseph Conrad. The imagination triumphs in
The Tempest
because those who are bound to their senses and lusts are subjugated and Ariel is freed from enslavement. But in the Spanish, French, and British colonies in the Americas, as Shakespeare had seen, the lust for power and wealth, embodied by the evil dukes of the world, led to an orgy of looting, subjugation, and genocide.

“Imagination,” as Shakespeare scholar Harold Goddard writes,

In the presence of the natural world, all of the great visionaries have heard it speak to them. It spoke to Shakespeare, as it spoke to Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. This communion blurs the lines between the self and the world. It is what Percy Shelley meant when he wrote that poetry “lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world and makes familiar things as if they were not familiar.”
³⁹
Too often this wisdom comes too late, as it does when Othello stands contrite and broken over the dead Desdemona, or when Lear lifts up his murdered daughter, Cordelia. This wisdom makes grace and transformation possible.

In the kind of visions that were experienced by Black Elk and revered by Native Americans, the kind that inspire artists and rebels, the visionary encounters the strange, unexplainable, mysterious forces that
define life. And visionary language speaks, as poets and rebels do, only in abstractions and allegory. It is the language of sublime madness. “ ‘The Lord at Delphi,’ says Heraclitus, ‘neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign,’ ” writes Goddard.