From Fear (Robert Peckham, 2023) pp192-7
In October 2018 the House of History, a museum in Bonn, staged an exhibition entitled Fear: A German State of Mind? Its immediate inspiration had been the fear sparked by the influx of nearly a million refugees into Germany in 2015 and the panic triggered by reports of attacks on German women by young ‘Arab’ and North African’ men in Cologne and other cities. Aside from immigration, the exhibition dealt with collective German fears of nuclear war, the destruction of forests and the threat posed by encroaching surveillance.
While the show spanned some six decades, the curators suggested a more expansive historical context to this angst, raising the question: is any discussion of contemporary fear possible without addressing Nazi terror and the horrors of the Holocaust?! The sexual assault of German women allegedly by Moroccan and Algerian men on New Year’s Eve in 2015, for example, was presented in some media as an instance of German Wehrlosig-keit, or ‘defencelessness’, with online commentary attributing German docility to a disavowal of a Nazi past associated with ‘violence, aggression, genocide, and biological racism’.
One striking exhibit was a large photographic installation by the photographer Gerhard Vormwald that depicted a group of naked men and women with barcodes etched across their shaven heads. The work was originally produced in 1983 in protest at a proposed census in West Germany that gave rise to fears of Big Brother-style surveillance, but it also called forth a darker history – a message reinforced by the title, Wider die Totalerfassung, ‘Against Total Control’.
Worries about the ethics of data privacy in Germany stem from the grim uses of compulsory registration during the Third Reich. Information recorded on Nazi censuses ensured that Jews and other ‘undesirables’ could be easily tracked, incarcerated and ultimately exterminated. International corporations were complicit in this coercion. The Hollerith punch-card machines that were manufactured by IBM, for example, were used in the administration of the Holocaust. After the war, the Allies overlooked this collusion since the machines’ data-processing capacity was convenient in their post-war occupation of Germany.
While Nazi surveillance helped to cultivate fear among German citizens, angst soon took on a life of its own. The playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, who fled Germany in February 1933, was an insightful analyst of this fear. In his 1937 poem ‘The Fears of the Regime’ a traveller returns from a trip to Germany and is asked who’s in charge there, to which he replies with one word: Fear’. It infects the whole of society, from academics and teachers to doctors, parents and even the dying, who lower their failing voices’ because they’re scared.
Brecht’s anti-Fascist play Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, which premiered in Paris in 1938, consists of twenty-four scenes of life under the Nazis that explore different facets of this fear. Rather than focus on the top-brass purveyors of terror, Brecht shows us fear as it manifests itself in everyday situations: inside a courtroom, a hospital ward, a town square, a factory, a farmyard and in private residences – although we’re also given glimpses of life inside concentration camps. While individuals get caught up in bureaucratic processes, it’s the mundane choices they make that ultimately determine their fate.
We’re not talking here about the chilling, edge-of-your-seat scare that a horror film might produce; this is an altogether more prosaic and pettier emotional world where doubt, mistrust and betrayal lead to conflict between husbands and wives, parents and children, neighbours and colleagues. Seemingly trifling and misplaced fears get magnified until they overwhelm relationships and produce misunderstandings that accumulate into a bigger, more consequential fear. It’s precisely because terror emerges from this jostling, everyday space of mutually reinforcing angst that it’s so difficult to manage.
Fear of persecution by the German state’s security agencies was only one aspect of the story, then, though an important one. Founded by Hitler in 1925, the SS, or ‘Protection Squad’, developed into a powerful police and military institution, vested with the authority to root out the state’s enemies. Under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, it oversaw the concentration camps and coordinated the systematic murder of Jews from 1941, a genocide referred to euphemistically by the Nazis as The Final Solution of the Jewish Question’. The SD, the ‘Security Service’, and the Gestapo, the ‘Secret State Police’, were other vehicles of terror that were officially merged in a new central security office after the invasion of Poland in 1939. These agencies worked through a network of uniformed and undercover agents and informants; citizens could be arrested and detained at any moment.
In Brecht’s docudrama, however, fear isn’t confined to the persecuted; it also grips the persecutors. The same is true in his poem ‘The Fears of the Regime’, where the Nazis themselves, despite their use of brute force and access to the paraphernalia of power, are still
Driven by fear
They break into homes
and search through the bathrooms
And it is fear
That drives them to burn whole libraries.
So Fear holds sway not only over those who are ruled, but also
Over those who rule.
Similarly, in the opening scene of Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, set on 30 January 1933, the day that Hitler by of the Third Reich, set on 30 January 1933, the day that Hitler became chancellor, two dazed SS officers are anything but celebratory. They’re jumpy and suspicious as they patrol the city, as if their ascension has set them up for a fall. When they wander into an unfamiliar neighbourhood, the soldiers’ fear intensifies until one of them begins to fire indiscriminately for no apparent reason, hitting an innocent bystander. The suggestion is that power breeds paranoia and for all their arrogant swagger, the Nazis are deeply insecure.
It’s this veiled but explosive fear, nestled within the outward appearance of strength, that Winston Churchill identified when he observed of the Nazis,
On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home – all the more powerful because forbidden – terrify them.
In Brecht’s play, unfounded fears become self-fulfilling prophecies. In a scene entitled ‘A Case of Betrayal’ a man denounces his neighbour simply because he hears foreign broadcasts coming from the man’s apartment. In ‘The Spy’ a boy’s parents are mistakenly convinced that he’s betrayed them when he goes out to buy some chocolate; it’s fear rather than treachery that destroys the family. In ‘Release’ a prisoner is discharged from a concentration camp but returns home to find that his friends and neighbours no longer trust him, suspecting that he may be working as an informer. Fear corrodes community, exploiting uncertainty and sowing discord. Its intractable power lies in the way that it acquires a life of its own, insinuating itself into everyday social interactions and conjuring imaginary threats. As the Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky once remarked, “Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation.”” It was through the anticipation of terror that totalitarian fear gained its force.
Where did these German fears come from? Hitler and his henchmen traded on public disillusion in the aftermath of the First World War; craving security at a time of political and economic uncertainty, people turned to extremist parties. According to the legal theorist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt – a Nazi sympathiser – Germany in the 192os was experiencing a ‘parliamentary crisis’ that resulted from ‘the inescapable contradiction of liberal individualism and democratic homogeneity’. Individualism was in the end incompatible with equality, which in any case was a deception – it was clear that party politics was based on horse-trading and backroom handshakes. Politics hinged on the fundamental distinction between ‘us and them’, despite liberal cosmopolitan claims to the contrary. What was needed, according to Schmitt, was a strong leader to cut through the quagmire of red tape, pacify ‘internal antagonisms’ and give voice to the people’s fears.’
A febrile fear, verging on paranoia, is apparent in the post-war work of German artists such as Dix, Grosz and Max Beckmann. In Beckmann’s 1919 print series Hell we’re presented with scenes of chaos and wanton violence. In Dix’s Prague Street two amputees are shown begging on one of Dresden’s main shopping streets. A gloved hand drops a paltry 5-pfennig stamp into one of the beggars’ outstretched hands as pedestrians shuffle past, unmoved by these wretched scroungers. A beggar with no legs, precariously perched on a makeshift trolley, clings to a pamphlet with the headline ‘JEWS OUT!’
These art works show a society starkly divided between the haves and the have-nots, a society so brutalised that human relations have all but broken down. The ex-soldiers, relics of the horrors of the trenches and now cast aside like rubbish, are emblems of a society that has lost its moral bearings. Fear seems to provide the only way out.
The angst of social breakdown is one explanation for Hitler’s rise to power. Fear was entwined with a sense of victimhood that was born from Germany’s defeat in the First World War and the punitive terms imposed at the Treaty of Versailles – relinquishing territory, paying hefty reparations and demilitarising – followed immediately by political and economic turmoil. Like Dix’s veterans, Germany had been dismembered – politically, economically and territorially.
The Nazis used this story of national humiliation to justify their tub-thumping revanchist policies and to stoke popular fears about Germany’s pending annihilation. As the historian Peter Fritzsche writes, the rise of the Third Reich was ‘premised on both supreme confidence and terrifying vulnerability; both states of mind co-existed and continuously radicalized Nazi policies. 1 Their violence was, in a sense, pre-emptive; like Brodsky’s anticipatory fear, it summoned its objects as a precondition for their obliteration.
Claims of a Jewish world conspiracy were used to fuel paranoia and panic. This form of terror wasn’t just used to silence political adversaries; it also functioned as a way of bringing the masses to heel. The scapegoating of public enemies coexisted with an ‘ecological panic’ set off by fear of a global food shortage, which the Nazis exploited to justify German expansion. The concentration camps existed as components of a larger political system in which fear and discriminatory panic played key roles. And this all worked within the fears that drove, and were produced by, war. Although the people might not want war, they could ‘always be brought to the bidding of the leaders, the Nazi Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring told the American psychologist Gustave Gilbert at his Nuremberg trial in 1946. ‘All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.’
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