![introduction 7
Western Front in 1918. With most of my cousins I was drafted into the U.S.
Army of World War Two.
Niebuhr, on the other hand, along with the German-language congregation
in Detroit of which he was pastor in 1917, had to go to great pains to make
clear his loyalty to the United States in that year. His congregation began to
conduct its worship in English, and it took up a collection of ten dollars to
purchase an American flag.
In an uncanny way, my “great journey” outside the United States would
bring to consciousness a question that seems never quite settled in the minds
of many of us in this immigrant nation: What does it mean to be an American?
I was about to have that question surface in many a conversation over the next
five months in visits to some dozen countries. I was on my way to India to
attend the Third World Conference of Christian Youth, sponsored by five world
organizations including the World Council of Churches. Successor to a con-
ference in Amsterdam in 1939 and another in Oslo in 1947, it was the first
such ecumenical youth conference in Asia, a continent that Niebuhr never
visited. In one sense, however, he was on his way to India with me as I sat on
the deck of the Queen Elizabeth reading The Irony of American History.
The book is a sustained critique of the virtues and vices of American po-
litical culture. As a fledgling theologian, I found it a bracing intellectual and
spiritual tonic. Here was an eloquent demonstration that one could be both
appreciative and critical of a country that had recently fought the most destruc-
tive war in human history and emerged as an undoubted world power. The
book is full of deft Niebuhr aphorisms that summarize his take on what it
means to be an American:
Next to the Russian pretensions we are . . . the most innocent nation
on earth. We find it almost as difficult as the communists to believe
that anyone could think ill of us.
We are . . . more virtuous than our detractors, whether foes or allies,
admit, because we know ourselves to be less innocent than our theo-
ries assume.
[H]ow much more plausible and dangerous the corruption of the
good can be in human history than explicit evil.
“American power in the service of American idealism [said one Eu-
ropean statesman] could create a situation in which we [Europeans]
would be too impotent to correct you when you are wrong and you
would be too idealistic to correct yourself.”
There is a hidden kinship between the vices of the most vicious and
the virtues of even the most upright.6](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/836366-250530065747-059cf3d4/85/Honest-Patriots-Loving-A-Country-Enough-To-Remember-Its-Misdeeds-Donald-W-Shriver-Jr-24-320.jpg)
![10 honest patriots
erners about southerners are an old story in American cultural history. In fact,
the American South in 1950 could still lay claim, with a certain pride, to being
the most distinctive cultural province of the United States, an area whose peo-
ple sensed themselves shaped by a history different from that of much of the
rest of the nation. When they become world travelers, southerners take with
them an identity shaped around a certain dualism: I am an American, but I
am an American with a certain difference.
In 1952, what might have been that difference?
The Hurt and Healing of Human Provinces
In 1953, C. Vann Woodward, an eminent southern historian, had an answer to
the question which, in one place, was explicitly shaped by his reading of The
Irony of American History. The final chapter in his book of essays The Burden
of Southern History was titled “The Irony of Southern History.” Parts of this
essay could have been written by Niebuhr. For example, writing at the begin-
ning of the Cold War, the rise of McCarthyism, and unprecedented flexing of
American economic muscle on a world scale, Woodward cocked a critical eye
at capitalism:
We [Americans] have showed a tendency to allow our whole cause,
our traditional values, and our way of life to be identified with one
economic institution. Some of us have also tended to identify the se-
curity of the country with the security of that institution. We have
swiftly turned from a mood of criticism [in the 1930s] to one of glo-
rifying the institution as the secret of our superiority. We have
showed a strong disposition to suppress criticism and repel outside
ideas. We have been tempted to define loyalty as conformity of
thought, and to run grave risk of moral and intellectual stultifica-
tion.11
This is faithful replication of the Niebuhrian critique of American trium-
phalism. But Woodward adds another dimension of irony in recording the fact
that not only did many southerners of Jefferson’s generation express a painful
awareness of the contradiction between their revolutionary ideals and the slav-
ery that supported their way of life, but that this awareness flourished more in
the Upper South in the 1820s than anywhere in the North. In that decade there
were more antislavery societies in the Upper South than in the North. About
these few years,
[it] is not too much to say that this was a society unafraid of facing
its own evils. The movement reached a brilliant climax in the free
and full debates over emancipation in the Virginia legislature during
the session of 1831–32. . . . [But then] it withered away to almost](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/836366-250530065747-059cf3d4/85/Honest-Patriots-Loving-A-Country-Enough-To-Remember-Its-Misdeeds-Donald-W-Shriver-Jr-27-320.jpg)
![12 honest patriots
be faced with economic, social, and political problems that refused
to yield to all the ingenuity, patience, and intelligence that a people
could bring to bear upon them. . . . It has learned to live for long de-
cades in quite un-American poverty, and it has learned the equally
un-American lesson of submission. For the South had undergone
an experience that it could share with no other part of America—
though it is shared by nearly all the peoples of Europe and Asia—
the experience of military defeat, occupation, and reconstruction.
Nothing in this history was conducive to the theory that the South
was the darling of divine providence.14
There is one flaw in this Woodward description, however, one omission
that is both historical and moral. When it came to experience of “poverty” and
involuntary “submission” no segment of the South could rival that fourth of
its population who were slaves. In his cultural generalizations, Niebuhr never
much distinguished regionally different experiences of “America.” Even Wood-
ward, when he spoke here of southern defeat, concentrated on the war and its
cost to southern economics, political power, and pride. But there were always
two “Souths” with two different perspectives on southern and American his-
tory. This was the point of a remarkable 1964 book by a southern writer named
James McBride Dabbs. In the title of his book he posed the question, Who
Speaks for the South? Dabbs, unimpeachably a southerner, heir to a plantation
deep in low country South Carolina, rendered an answer that his neighbors
undoubtedly found radical and disturbing: African American southerners— they
speak most authentically for the South. They are the ones who, most of all,
learned the un-American lessons of poverty, submission, defeat, and centuries-
long humiliation at the hands of the powerful who used them to sustain their
power, their wealth, and their belief in their white superiority. Having thus
endured the worst crime in American history, the slaves and their descendants
have had the most right to speak credibly about living in and struggling against
the injustices of a society that believed only selectively in “liberty and justice
for all.” But more: In their combination of endurance of suffering at the hands
of American white-dominated institutions with determination to become full
members of American society, the descendants of American slavery and seg-
regation have offered to their very oppressors a unique lesson in what it means
to be human: to endure defeat, “the great equalizer,” without capitulating to it.
In this, African Americans’ only major domestic rival are Native Americans,
who were being forcefully exported from the South as slaves were being im-
ported. Dabbs’s acquaintance with descendants of the latter led him to write:
In the experience of defeat, Negroes are our equals, perhaps our su-
periors; certainly they have been able to make better use of defeat
than we [whites] have. If the whites of the South could realize and
accept their defeat as a mark of their humanity, an indication of](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/836366-250530065747-059cf3d4/85/Honest-Patriots-Loving-A-Country-Enough-To-Remember-Its-Misdeeds-Donald-W-Shriver-Jr-29-320.jpg)
Honest Patriots Loving A Country Enough To Remember Its Misdeeds Donald W Shriver Jr
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- 8. Honest Patriots Loving a Country Enough to Remember Its Misdeeds donald w. shriver, jr. 1 2005
- 9. 1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright 2005 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shriver, Donald W. Honest patriots : loving a country enough to remember its misdeeds / Donald W. Shriver, Jr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN–13 978–0–19–515153–4 ISBN 0–19–515153–4 1. Repentance—Christianity. 2. Restorativejustice—Religious aspects—Christianity. 3. Social ethics—United States. 4. United States—Moral conditions—20th century. 5. Reparation—United States. 6. Restitution—United States. 7. Reconciliation. 8. Victims of crime—United States. 9. United States—Politics and government— Moral States—History—20th century. I. Title. BT800.S54 2005 320'.01'1—dc22 2004021769 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
- 10. Dedicated to Honest Patriots Everywhere
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- 12. Acknowledgments Honest Patriots is a sequel to my 1995 book, An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics. There, I maintained that the longtime associa- tion of forgiveness with personal ethics and religion is overdue for an interpretation in a political, collective context. There, too, with historical illustrations, I argued that repentance is indispensable to a genuine forgiveness-transaction between human beings. The present volume explores the concept of social-political re- pentance in the recent histories of three countries: Germany, South Africa, and the United States. Helps from colleagues in all three countries are too numerous to mention in toto, but some deserve special gratitude. Chapter 1, on Germany, has its origin in the luxury of four months given me by the new American Academy in Berlin, founded by the generosity of the late Stephen M. Kellen, his wife, Anna- Maria Kellen, and the family of Hans and Ludmilla Arnhold. Acad- emy president Everett Dennis, director Gary Smith, and staff mem- ber Marie Unger helped me at many stages of these months in Berlin. They secured for me introductions to officials, scholars, and religious leaders whose interpretations of current German work to acknowledge the painful history of Nazism were unfailingly instruc- tive. Among others were Dr. Annegret Ehmann of the Wannsee Conference Center, Dr. Eugene DuBow of the American Jewish Committee in Berlin, Dr. Hans Dieter Holzmann of the Academy of Social Sciences, Bishop Wolfgang Huber of the Evangelical Church in Germany, Dr. Geiko and Helga Müller-Fahrenholz, University President Gesine Schwan, Dr. Ralf Wüstenberg, Dr. Heinrich Bedford-
- 13. viii acknowledgments Strohm, Paul and Adelheid Stoop, and Bundespräsident Richard von Weiz- säcker. To this list of distinguished Germans I must add four special friends: Renate Bethge and the late Dr. Eberhard Bethge, custodians-extraordinaire of the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and Drs. Helmut and Erika Reihlen. Beyond all calls of duty, the latter have devoted much time and energy to locating historical sources, memorial locations, and translations vital to my attempts to understand the three-generation struggle of Germans to “master the past.” My debts to South Africans are similarly numerous, especially to the staff of Cape Town’s Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, outgrowth of the work of its director, Charles Villa-Vicencio, who headed the research arm of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1996–1998. Staff members Fanie DuToit, Tyrone Savage, Nyameka Goniwe, Deborah Gordon and Carol Esau were un- failingly helpful in facilitating my two months in the spring of 2002 in South Africa. In all, since 1986, I have visited South Africa four times and have been privileged to observe the vast changes in that country’s recent tortured history. Among the leaders there who have spent precious time with me interpreting this history have been Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Dr. Alex Boraine (Deputy Chair of the TRC), Bishop Peter J. Storey, Stanley Abrahams of District Six, former President F. W. De Klerk, Dr. Kader Asmal (in 1992) and his associate Dr. June Bam in the new Ministry of Education (in 2002), Dr. John de Gruchy of the University of Cape Town, and a dozen other scholars of that university whose works are quoted in chapter 2. Stellenbosch University faculty were similarly generous in time spent with me, among them constitutional scholar Lourens du Plessis, political philosopher Johan Dagenaar, and theologians Rus- sel Botman, Dirke Smit, and Denise Ackermann. Among other friends who have shared with me their own distresses under the apartheid regime have been Ginn Fourie, Patricia Gorvalla, Joseph Seramane, Beyers Naudé, Glenda Wildschut, Michael Lapsley, and Richard Goldstone. Though I have never met Nelson Mandela, his presence pervades the new South Africa, personifying its turn from racism to democracy and, most of all, personifying the struggle of thousands of his colleagues over many decades. Were I to dedicate the South African chapter to any group of people, it would be to those millions of black, colored, and Indian people, plus a select band of whites, who endured the apartheid era in cities, towns, and farms in stubborn hope that a new South Africa could come to be without a tragic descent into war. In turning to the United States in chapters 3 and 4, I mean to suggest that Germany and South Africa have some lessons to teach us in how and why my country needs to work harder on acknowledging pasts of which we have no reason to be proud. Without long association with certain African American colleagues I would never have learned to follow closely our own current Amer- ican attempts to “master” our own negative past. Among those scholars and church leaders who have extended their knowledge and patience to me have
- 14. acknowledgments ix been Union Theological Seminary faculty James H. Cone, Delores Williams, Cornel West, the late James Washington, the late Annie Powell, and my pastor– friend–mentor James Forbes, preacher without peer. As I suggest at the begin- ning of chapter 3, it might well be dedicated to the late Lucius H. Pitts, who first awoke me, at age twenty, to the tragedy and triumph of the African Amer- ican presence from the beginning of this country’s history. Native Americans are the more ancient presence, and only with the writing of this book have I begun to study that presence carefully. I owe some of my belated focus on them to Dr. JoAllen Archambault, longtime scholar at the Smithsonian Institution and fellow with me in 1999 at the American Academy in Berlin. More recently, I have been enormously aided by the work and friend- ship of my upstate New York neighbors Shirley Dunn and Steve Comer. The former is the region’s premier student of the history of the Mohican Nation in what is now Columbia County. The latter is the one lineal survivor of the Mohicans still living in this Hudson Valley area. Richard Powell, professor of history in Columbia-Greene Community College, has provided similar assis- tance. All three are leaders in the recent founding of the Native American Institute of the Hudson River Valley. In chapters 3 and 4, for my analyses of American high school history books in the period from 1960 to 2000, I am much indebted to my New York neigh- bor, Carolyn Jackson, whose experience in the baffling world of school text writing, adoption, and teaching has been invaluable. Much travel has fed these pages. My companion in that travel—geographic, intellectual, and spiritual— has been Peggy Leu Shriver, who across fifty years has made all thirteen of my books better by far than they would have been without her. She has writ- ten five books of her own. As in our life together, in poetry and prose, she has often tapped at the door of Wordsworth’s “thoughts that lie too deep for words.” I claim the profession of Christian social ethicist, and in the writing of this book it has become clearer than ever to me that my chief scholarly companions are the historians, especially those who agree with Professor Gordon Craig that their essential work is to “restore to the past the options it once had.” For some of my partners in the field of Christian ethics, the following pages may not dwell consistently enough on the Christian roots of my interest in history, which began to flourish in my academic major at Davidson College. My chief aim in writing has been to demonstrate that it is both possible and necessary for societies to face and to repent of certain evils in their past. The evils iden- tified here are rugged. They need little extended theological or philosophical investigation before being tagged as evil indeed. The important thing is for a society to learn to acknowledge and turn away from those evils in firm, insti- tutionalized forms of the collective commitment, “Never again.” How to do that is the theme of these pages. Underneath it all is my conviction as a Chris-
- 15. x acknowledgments tian that the human capacity for repentance, like that of forgiveness, in either religious or secular forms, is our hope for a future less evil than our pasts. Whether defined as a “turning” (shuv) with the Hebrew Bible or with the Chris- tian New Testament as “a mind change” (metanoia), repentance is an act of hope. That hope has nourished these pages.
- 16. Contents Introduction, 3 1. Germany Remembers, 15 2. South Africa In the Wake of Remembered Evil, 63 3. Old Unpaid Debt To African Americans, 127 4. Unreflected Absences Native Americans, 207 5. Being Human While Being American Agenda for the American Future, 263 Notes, 287 Bibliography, 333 Index, 339 A photo gallery appears after page 206.
- 17. This page intentionally left blank
- 18. Honest Patriots
- 19. This page intentionally left blank
- 20. Introduction There are three kinds of patriots, two bad, one good. The bad are the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics. Good patriots carry on a lover’s quarrel with their country, a reflection of God’s lover’s quar- rel with all the world. —William Sloane Coffin1 At 10:00 a.m. on September 11, 2001, this author had just written the twenty-fifth manuscript page of this book. At that moment, mil- lions of American lives were interrupted by an awful event that fo- cused our collective minds on a new fact, which Samantha Power put in context when she wrote: “To earn a death sentence, it was enough in the twentieth century to be an Armenian, a Jew, or a Tutsi. On September 11, it was enough to be an American.”2 On that day, our fingers left the keyboards, the telephones, the other tools of our trades while our eyes stared at the televised image of two large New York buildings crumbling into rubble along with the bodies of almost three thousand of our fellow human beings. From that moment until the last day of 2001, writing the twenty- sixth page of a book concerned with moral assessments of the German, South African, and American past seemed almost impossi- ble. On that day, December 31, 9/11 ⫹ 111, my fingers returned to the keyboard with a new understanding of how difficult this book is to write. In the wake of September 11, 2001, a great flood of agreement seemed to sweep across the United States under the summation “everything has changed.” In that exaggeration hid a grain of truth:
- 21. 4 honest patriots all of our past is subject to reunderstanding in light of our present and the tasks imposed on us for our future. Suddenly, with an attack by foreigners on two cities of this country, we glimpsed a future more dangerous than we had ever imagined. Our minds retreated from past history into present history and grim overtures to future history. A December 31, 2001, editorial of the New York Times put the matter crisply: “The effect of September 11 was to make many of our old concerns look puny.”3 As for making money, going out to restaurants, looking forward to the World Series, and even an author’s commitment to write a thirteenth book, the remark was psychologically accurate and morally pertinent. Many persons who worked in the World Trade Center and who survived to remember the horror testified that their priorities really had changed. Concerning the death of one young fellow worker in his investment company, a colleague said, “Now we care for each other more, we care for life. Making money is still important but secondary.” With equal pertinence in that same issue of the Times, novelist Joyce Carol Oates reflected that even the most terrible of public events fade in personal and public memory: “Amnesia seeps into the crevices of our brains and am- nesia heals.” Ingrained American optimism concurs: For us, “the future is ever- young, ever forgetting the gravest truths of the past.” But forgetting those truths is fraught with danger and delusion, as survi- vors of death camps in Nazi Germany and prisons in apartheid South Africa will testify in the first half of this book. In the latter half, I center on certain “grave truths of the past” which, from the standpoints of our moral, psycho- logical, and political health, Americans need to remember more accurately and more publicly than has been the habit of our culture to date. On the face of it and for the moment, such a project encounters, in 9/11, a great upsurge of resistance from Americans high and low. On the day after, two popular evan- gelical church leaders, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, experienced that en- counter when they broadcast a version of the surmise, “Americans deserved it.” No less than a president of the United States rebuked these two theologians, and most of their supporters shook their heads in disagreement, too. America has its faults, most said in response to this moralism, but the first real moral truth has to be that the murder of three thousand civilians is wrong, that this is no way to correct the possible errors of Americans’ relation with global humanity, and that instant condemnation of an assaulted people insults the moral priority of compassion. Furthermore, as many an American pondered the question, “Why do they—terrorists and others—hate us?” we were driven to the defensiveness that cries, “There are things about this country that we are proud of! There are values that others may attack, but we are not about to deny them! We will defend them militarily, too.” Sober academic critics—such as this author has often tried to be—came in for their share of popular and political scorn in the fall of 2001. Politicians
- 22. introduction 5 and citizenry said to us, “This is no time for USA-bashing. We must come together as a people. We must defend America and what it stands for.” To this, many of my colleagues, including numerous journalists, have replied, “One value that America stands for is the value of self-criticism. Bury that in a bliz- zard of unalloyed patriotism, and you kill democracy in America.” The latter phrase resonates with the very title of a great book on the pe- culiar nature of this country. In that book, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville reported that, everywhere he went in the young United States of the 1830s, he met citizens who proudly celebrated the individual freedoms of their new country. But, observed this shrewd French aristocrat, these individ- ualistic Americans bristled when one raised some criticism of their country. Their pride in its freedom did not seem to evoke any use of that freedom to identify the flaws in their still-evolving republic. Often they said to him: Has not America escaped the corruptions of Europe? Who are Europeans to detect anything wrong with us? The American, taking part in everything that is done in his country, feels a duty to defend anything criticized there, for it is not only his country that is being attacked, but himself. . . . Nothing is more an- noying in the ordinary intercourse of life than the irritable patriot- ism of the Americans. A foreigner will gladly agree to praise much in their country, but he would like to be allowed to criticize some- thing, and that he is absolutely denied.4 Academics and theologians who have dared to criticize aspects of Ameri- can domestic and foreign relations in the post 9/11 atmosphere were often accused of being foreigners. We are told: “A nation at war needs unity and support by all its citizens. Under attack, no nation can afford to give much leeway to those who question its official and widely affirmed virtues. It is time to rally around the flag.” This book means to reply to this view in a way that combines criticism with celebration. In her op-ed of December 31, Ms. Oates also remarked that “the future doesn’t belong to those who only mourn, but to those who cele- brate.” In that remark she distinguished what I mean to connect. What is celebratable about democracy in America? One answer is: Those public moments and events when we mourn some features of our national past with new present awareness that we must never repeat such events in our future. This is a book about citizens in three countries who have revisited pasts of which their moral and historical sense makes them ashamed but who have done so, not in a spirit of moralism but with explicit intention to confront a past for the sake of ridding the present and future of its lingering effects. I will call that citizen spirit and intention honest patriotism. De Tocqueville himself distinguished between “instinctive patriotism” and “well-considered patriotism.”5 My hope is that the patriotism exhibited in this
- 23. 6 honest patriots book is well considered in light of historical accuracy, political practicality, and moral clarity. Most of all, however, the book concentrates on actions of citizens who, in recent years, have sought to demonstrate that there are forms of public action that constitute public repentance for flaws in how we have remembered the past. Shared memories are no small part of public culture. The latter will never be truly reformed, I argue, unless the past we ought to mourn is mourned in fact, in public, and in a context of concrete gestures and measures that put the past behind us in our very act of confronting it. For such a difficult project, we all need the encouragement of those who have pioneered in the effort. Among them are citizens and institutions of countries outside the United States. Two such countries are the focus of the first two chapters here: Germany and South Africa. The rest concerns the United States. In short, this is more a “how to” book than an “ought to.” How do a public and its leaders go about the task of repenting of a historical past and building barriers against its repetition? The heroes and heroines of these narratives are people who have answered this question in public deeds and demonstrations. Becoming an Honest Patriot: An Autobiographical Note The origins of these pages are deep in my life story, at least as deep as that fall day in 1952 when I embarked on my first trip outside the United States. For two days prior to climbing aboard the S.S. Queen Elizabeth—not long before a troopship in World War Two—I roomed overnight with a friend in the dor- mitory of Union Theological Seminary in New York. We were both second- year theology students. Knowing my interest in issues of social justice, he took the occasion to arrange for me a brief interview with Professor Reinhold Nie- buhr. Token of that meeting was a parting gift to me presented by my friend at pierside as the ship was about to sail: Niebuhr’s 1952 book, The Irony of American History. On the flyleaf Niebuhr had written: “To Donald Schriver with good wishes for the great journey.” The slight misspelling of my name in this inscription resonated with a difference in our respective family histories. “Shriver” is an anglicized version of the common German name “Schreiber.” Niebuhr was the American-born son of a German-speaking household in St. Louis. So far as the genealogists of my own family have determined, the first of our American lineal family members arrived in Philadelphia from Germany in 1688. Not long after, some of their descendants changed the spelling of the family name to conform more nearly to the habits of English pronunciation. My family has probably not spoken German for 150 years. Indeed, it has never occurred to me to call myself a “German American,” particularly in light of the fact that I grew up in a pervasively anti–German American century. My uncle was wounded on the
- 24. introduction 7 Western Front in 1918. With most of my cousins I was drafted into the U.S. Army of World War Two. Niebuhr, on the other hand, along with the German-language congregation in Detroit of which he was pastor in 1917, had to go to great pains to make clear his loyalty to the United States in that year. His congregation began to conduct its worship in English, and it took up a collection of ten dollars to purchase an American flag. In an uncanny way, my “great journey” outside the United States would bring to consciousness a question that seems never quite settled in the minds of many of us in this immigrant nation: What does it mean to be an American? I was about to have that question surface in many a conversation over the next five months in visits to some dozen countries. I was on my way to India to attend the Third World Conference of Christian Youth, sponsored by five world organizations including the World Council of Churches. Successor to a con- ference in Amsterdam in 1939 and another in Oslo in 1947, it was the first such ecumenical youth conference in Asia, a continent that Niebuhr never visited. In one sense, however, he was on his way to India with me as I sat on the deck of the Queen Elizabeth reading The Irony of American History. The book is a sustained critique of the virtues and vices of American po- litical culture. As a fledgling theologian, I found it a bracing intellectual and spiritual tonic. Here was an eloquent demonstration that one could be both appreciative and critical of a country that had recently fought the most destruc- tive war in human history and emerged as an undoubted world power. The book is full of deft Niebuhr aphorisms that summarize his take on what it means to be an American: Next to the Russian pretensions we are . . . the most innocent nation on earth. We find it almost as difficult as the communists to believe that anyone could think ill of us. We are . . . more virtuous than our detractors, whether foes or allies, admit, because we know ourselves to be less innocent than our theo- ries assume. [H]ow much more plausible and dangerous the corruption of the good can be in human history than explicit evil. “American power in the service of American idealism [said one Eu- ropean statesman] could create a situation in which we [Europeans] would be too impotent to correct you when you are wrong and you would be too idealistic to correct yourself.” There is a hidden kinship between the vices of the most vicious and the virtues of even the most upright.6
- 25. 8 honest patriots The pertinence of all this to someone on his way to Europe and Asia for the first time is clear. On those two continents, over the next five months, I would confront many a critic of my newly powerful home country. I would have my first conversation ever with a member of a communist party. I would meet young people from Japan, the Philippines, Korea, Kenya, West Germany, and the Soviet Union, all of whose lives had been touched, for better and worse, by the power of the United States. In the midst of these new experiences of a wide world, however, one sharply clear sense of identity dawned on me: I really am an American! My language, habits of communication, political assump- tions, and character already carried marks of my local cultural upbringing. Whether I celebrate or despise that upbringing, I am as unlikely to shed that cultural skin as my physical skin. Niebuhr’s analysis of “virtue and vice” in this identity lifted the curtain on a lifelong project of intellectual exploration of “Americanness,” but in the first twenty-four years of my upbringing I had already absorbed American culture in my childhood in Norfolk, Virginia. The mix of acceptance and discomfort in this fact puzzled some of my new friends in these other countries: Some asked, “Why do Americans so often ask others what they think of America?” The answer for persons of my upbringing was complex. The conflict be- tween certain American ideals and the facts of American society were easy to read in 1952, especially in the matter of relations beween white and black Americans. Strangely enough, this matter does not often enter the text of this 1952 Niebuhr book. Occasionally in other writings he does comment on the hypocrisy of a country that affirms the “inalienable rights” of all humans what- soever and denies many of those rights to some of its citizens. As moralist and theologian, however, he relentlessly pursued the question: What about the de- fects of these very ideals? For example, what about famous American praise of individualistic “freedom” with its vocal neglect of the social roots of selfhood and the social responsibilities of selves to each other? Or the classic American belief that we are a beacon of enlightenment to the other nations of the world alongside the belief that they have little to tell us about how to organize a just society? What justifies a certain pride in one’s Americanness, and what (if anything) prevents that pride from turning into arrogance? In everything he wrote, Niebuhr turned up tensions and ironies in mixes of power, interest, and cultural ideals in American and world history. The ul- timate source of his talent for irony was Christian theology and ethics. If ex- planation is where the mind is at rest, he was always explicit about resting finally in a Christian view of the world, which summoned in him a restlessness about reigning dogmas in economics, politics, and culture. His “Christian re- alism” gave him some leverage on his own American upbringing, some norms by which to identify the mix of virtue and vice in American history. This lev- erage enabled him to engage in the “difficult but not impossible task of re-
- 26. introduction 9 maining loyal and responsible towards the moral treasures of a free civilization . . . while yet having some religious vantage point over the struggle.”7 Among other precipitates of theology in his political outlook was an ethic of respect for all human beings in their cultural differences as well as in their cultural kinship. The “otherness” of many humans in our domestic and world neighborhood, he said, are signs of finitude in everything we may bring to relations with each other. “The other,” he writes late in Irony, “is the limit beyond which our ambitions must not run and the boundary beyond which our life must not expand.”8 It was his principled rebuke to traces of American imperialism in the twentieth century. That rebuke had great pertinence to my Asian journey. Here was my op- portunity to explore experientially the proposition: “Loyalty to the community is . . . morally tolerable only if it includes values wider than those of the com- munity.” And the thesis: “A democratic society requires some capacity of the individual both to defy social authority on occasion when its standards violate his conscience and to relate himself to larger and larger communities than the primary family group.”9 Reflecting that official American ideology owed much to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as mediated through Thomas Jeffer- son, Niebuhr appreciated the irony that this Jefferson could advocate the “rights of man” with no explicit regard for the rights of women or humans who hap- pened to be slaves on his own plantation. With one exception, glaring contra- dictions between American ideals and American fact constitute the major themes of all eight chapters of The Irony of American History. The exception was the continuing legacies of slavery in the United States of 1952. References to those legacies are almost totally absent from the 1952 book in spite of the fact, as we now know, a prominent historian asked Niebuhr in 1951 about just this omission.10 In my case, there was a kindred irony also not explicit in this book. As a college graduate, with a major in history, and as a second-year theology student, I already possessed some capacity to critique versions of Christian faith offered to me in my Methodist and Presbyterian upbringing in Virginia. Hardly any of my immediate family or local neighbors took pains to dilute their pride in being Virginian with the sobriety of this Niebuhrian critique. In fact, the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, up to 1950, trickled very little into the college bibliographies and other educational reading lists in the American South. However famous and listened to avidly in the halls of Union Seminary in New York and among a growing number of political leaders and social scientists, Niebuhr was not yet a vivid literary presence in the seminary that, in 1952, was my own: the “other” Union Seminary, in the former capital of the Confederacy—Richmond, Virginia. Tell most northerners that you were a Virginian studying theology in Rich- mond, and most would assume that you had to be a “provincial.” Escaping the truth that every human life begins in some province, such comments by north-
- 27. 10 honest patriots erners about southerners are an old story in American cultural history. In fact, the American South in 1950 could still lay claim, with a certain pride, to being the most distinctive cultural province of the United States, an area whose peo- ple sensed themselves shaped by a history different from that of much of the rest of the nation. When they become world travelers, southerners take with them an identity shaped around a certain dualism: I am an American, but I am an American with a certain difference. In 1952, what might have been that difference? The Hurt and Healing of Human Provinces In 1953, C. Vann Woodward, an eminent southern historian, had an answer to the question which, in one place, was explicitly shaped by his reading of The Irony of American History. The final chapter in his book of essays The Burden of Southern History was titled “The Irony of Southern History.” Parts of this essay could have been written by Niebuhr. For example, writing at the begin- ning of the Cold War, the rise of McCarthyism, and unprecedented flexing of American economic muscle on a world scale, Woodward cocked a critical eye at capitalism: We [Americans] have showed a tendency to allow our whole cause, our traditional values, and our way of life to be identified with one economic institution. Some of us have also tended to identify the se- curity of the country with the security of that institution. We have swiftly turned from a mood of criticism [in the 1930s] to one of glo- rifying the institution as the secret of our superiority. We have showed a strong disposition to suppress criticism and repel outside ideas. We have been tempted to define loyalty as conformity of thought, and to run grave risk of moral and intellectual stultifica- tion.11 This is faithful replication of the Niebuhrian critique of American trium- phalism. But Woodward adds another dimension of irony in recording the fact that not only did many southerners of Jefferson’s generation express a painful awareness of the contradiction between their revolutionary ideals and the slav- ery that supported their way of life, but that this awareness flourished more in the Upper South in the 1820s than anywhere in the North. In that decade there were more antislavery societies in the Upper South than in the North. About these few years, [it] is not too much to say that this was a society unafraid of facing its own evils. The movement reached a brilliant climax in the free and full debates over emancipation in the Virginia legislature during the session of 1831–32. . . . [But then] it withered away to almost
- 28. introduction 11 nothing in a very brief period during the middle thirties. By 1837 there was not one antislavery society remaining in the whole south. . . . Opponents changed their opinions or held their tongues.12 Americans have often spoken superficially of their society as one “unafraid of facing its own evils.” That pride is compatible with an ideology of perpetual improvement, a liberal dream of progress, and ever expanding success. Lacking in that ideology is any ambiguous but instructive respect for failure. On this point the South really is different. Against the will of any of its leaders, said Woodward, the American South is the one region of the country that remem- bers failure as the deepest, unforgettable fact of its history. Two decades before the end of the Vietnam War, Woodward put his historian’s finger on a dimen- sion of American history concerning which southerners had special acquain- tance and stubbornly persistent memories: For from a broader point of view it is not the South but America that is unique among the peoples of the world. This peculiarity arises out of the American legend of success and victory, a legend that is not shared by any other people in the civilized world. The col- lective will of this country has simply never known what it means to be confronted by complete frustration. . . . Whether by luck, by abundant resources, by ingenuity, by technology, by organized clev- erness, or by sheer force of arms America has been able to over- come every major historic crisis—economic, political, or foreign— with which it has had to cope. This remarkable record has naturally left a deep imprint on the American mind. It explains in large part the national faith in unlimited progress, in the efficacy of material means, in the importance of mass and speed, the worship of suc- cess, and the belief in the invincibility of American arms.13 What Woodward wrote about American political culture in 1953 could well have been written about a people, two generations later, who watched with horror as the two tallest buildings in Manhattan and a section of the head- quarters of the world’s mightiest military force crumpled at the onslaught of American planes hijacked by foreign terrorists. As Woodward said, for the southerners who lost the Civil War it would be forever impossible to pretend that “history is something unpleasant that happens to other people.” However obscured to their successors’ modern memory may be the “late unpleasant- ness” of 1860–1865, whatever the growing number of young southerners who in recent years have finally joined the ranks of the prosperous, there remains in the history of their region a potential resource for credible identification with the failures that have haunted the majority of humankind: For the inescapable facts of history were that the South had repeat- edly met with frustration and failure. It has learned what it was to
- 29. 12 honest patriots be faced with economic, social, and political problems that refused to yield to all the ingenuity, patience, and intelligence that a people could bring to bear upon them. . . . It has learned to live for long de- cades in quite un-American poverty, and it has learned the equally un-American lesson of submission. For the South had undergone an experience that it could share with no other part of America— though it is shared by nearly all the peoples of Europe and Asia— the experience of military defeat, occupation, and reconstruction. Nothing in this history was conducive to the theory that the South was the darling of divine providence.14 There is one flaw in this Woodward description, however, one omission that is both historical and moral. When it came to experience of “poverty” and involuntary “submission” no segment of the South could rival that fourth of its population who were slaves. In his cultural generalizations, Niebuhr never much distinguished regionally different experiences of “America.” Even Wood- ward, when he spoke here of southern defeat, concentrated on the war and its cost to southern economics, political power, and pride. But there were always two “Souths” with two different perspectives on southern and American his- tory. This was the point of a remarkable 1964 book by a southern writer named James McBride Dabbs. In the title of his book he posed the question, Who Speaks for the South? Dabbs, unimpeachably a southerner, heir to a plantation deep in low country South Carolina, rendered an answer that his neighbors undoubtedly found radical and disturbing: African American southerners— they speak most authentically for the South. They are the ones who, most of all, learned the un-American lessons of poverty, submission, defeat, and centuries- long humiliation at the hands of the powerful who used them to sustain their power, their wealth, and their belief in their white superiority. Having thus endured the worst crime in American history, the slaves and their descendants have had the most right to speak credibly about living in and struggling against the injustices of a society that believed only selectively in “liberty and justice for all.” But more: In their combination of endurance of suffering at the hands of American white-dominated institutions with determination to become full members of American society, the descendants of American slavery and seg- regation have offered to their very oppressors a unique lesson in what it means to be human: to endure defeat, “the great equalizer,” without capitulating to it. In this, African Americans’ only major domestic rival are Native Americans, who were being forcefully exported from the South as slaves were being im- ported. Dabbs’s acquaintance with descendants of the latter led him to write: In the experience of defeat, Negroes are our equals, perhaps our su- periors; certainly they have been able to make better use of defeat than we [whites] have. If the whites of the South could realize and accept their defeat as a mark of their humanity, an indication of
- 30. introduction 13 their participation in the common human doom, they would see all about them the faces of Negroes who had also participated, even more deeply, in that doom, and they would turn to them, as men in distress always turn to their fellows, seeking the outstretched hand, the encouraging word.15 To have encouragement offered in the neighbors whom one’s society has done so much to discourage is a difficult thought. It is a strange form of justice that goes beyond ordinary justice, involving victims in ministry to the health of victimizers. It would be some years before this young white southerner, on his way to India, would come to acknowledge that two or three African Americans among his shipmates, bound for the same ecumenical conference in South India, embodied this perspective more authentically than could he. Born in the South, acquainted with all the dimensions of racial discrimination except the experi- ence of being its object, I was at most a spokesman for the South at one remove from those who could claim some special authority as representatives of my region. What they brought in their consciousness to India was what a great majority of its population knew at first hand during most of their lives: priva- tion, injustice, suffering. The duty of citizens to pay attention to the unjust, yet-to-be acknowledged historical suffering of some of their fellow citizens is the principal subject of the following book. In particular, I mean to explore how some Germans, South Africans, and Americans, tempted to amnesia toward that suffering, have learned to resist that temptation in new public acts that do justice by remem- bering injustice. I will call this subject: repentance in politics. And I will dare to assert that even from the hurts and losses to Americans in the event of September 11, 2001, we may find anew reasons for both pride and repentance in the history of our country. The Germans and South Africans soon to be quoted are of like mind. No one has expressed it better than Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who loved his country enough to go to prison on behalf of its best in opposition to its Nazi worst. There in his cell, in 1943, he wrote: Gratitude gives me a proper relation to my past; gratitude makes my past fertile for my future. Without gratitude my past sinks into dark- ness, mystery, nothingness. And yet, in order not to lose my past, which God has given me, but to regain it, gratitude must be comple- mented by contrition. In gratitude and contrition my present life and my past are united.16
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- 32. 1 Germany Remembers Only thank God men have done learned how to forget quick what they ain’t brave enough to try to cure. —William Faulkner1 Forgetting is the shears with which you cut away what you cannot use, doing it under the supreme direction of memory. Forgetting and remembering are thus identical arts. . . . When we say that we consign something to oblivion, we suggest simultaneously that it is to be forgotten and yet also remembered. —Søren Kierkegaard2 We who were drafted into the armies of World War Two are glad to remember it as “the Good War.” Whether any war is good, we may doubt; but we remember the Nazism defeated in that war. Some- times we wonder if the Germans remember, too. Not to worry. A single day of touring modern Berlin will dispel any American’s suspicion that Germans in general have forgotten all about the Nazis once headquartered in their capital city. A good vehi- cle for a first survey of Berlin’s “memorial landscape”3 is Bus 100, which stops at a shelter on the fashionable West Berlin Kurfursten- damm. Not advertisements but history blinks out from the glass: This was the 1940s street address of Adolf Eichmann. From a war- destroyed building once here, he administered plans for transporting Jews from all over Europe to death camps. If you had forgotten what he looked like, a big portrait is there to remind you, along with data on the trains, the bureaucrats, and the victims involved in his operation.4
- 33. 16 honest patriots Virtually all the buildings in this center of Berlin were devastated by the bombs of 1944–1945. So it took determined effort for Hanna Renate Laurien to insist on this public-transport memorial to a man who perfected a very different purpose for public transport. Get on Bus 100, and it takes you past many a former location of Nazi terror. Left and right are the new museum of modern art, the new national library, and the curving heights of modernistic Philharmonic Hall. Near the latter is a curving steel wall sculpture which marks the place where the organization and technology were planned for the gassing of the mentally ill and others judged by the Nazis as Leben unwertes leben— “life unworthy of life.” By the time one has rounded the great central park of Berlin, the Tiergarten, one may have postponed a plan to visit the statue of Goethe there. Goethe-Eichmann dualism may already have begun to infect the mind with a certain cognitive dissonance. One is about to encounter complex layers of history at the entrance to Unter den Linden, the most famous boulevard in Berlin. To the left is the restored gray eminence of the Reichstag, built as a gesture to republican gov- ernment by Kaiser Wilhelm II and Bismarck, inhabited by the legislators of Weimar, burned by an arsonist probably hired by the Nazis, left empty by Hitler, and reduced to semiruin by Soviet shells in 1945. Get off Bus 100, stand in the spacious Platz where huge crowds used to gather for purposes of pleasure and politics, and you are likely to stumble over a tribute of modern German democracy to a failed earlier one: a row of some forty slate slabs, two feet high, arranged on the sidewalk like an uptilted deck of thick cards. On the edges are engraved the names of Weimar legislators murdered by the Nazis in their effort to obliterate every remnant of the Republic in 1933. Beside the slate memorials to the Weimar murders, along a fence, are white crosses with names of East Berliners shot as they attempted to cross the Wall at various times between 1960 and 1989. Step through the columned Brandenburg Gate, and these histories begin to collide with each other. Here on the Parisier Platz clustered embassies, offices, and businesses in the 1930s. The new American embassy will be built on an acreage to the right, especially if the diplomats can settle on the claim of a terror-conscious American government that all of its embassies must be surrounded by a fifty-foot security rim. The problem is possible incursion into five empty acres across the street, set aside for the new, great central Mahnmal to the Holocaust. A few buildings farther on is the former Soviet embassy, new hotels, and Friedrichstrasse, whose well-guarded S-bahn station was the trans- fer point between East and West Berlin. The linden trees “under” which gen- erations of Berliners walked, of course, are all gone. Hardly a tree survived the bombing, the artillery, and the fuel shortages of 1945–1946. Reminders of the classic architectural glory of eighteenth-century Berlin do survive just ahead, restored by East German Communists with a pride first engraved in stone by emperors: the Opera, Humbolt University, and Museum Island with its art
- 34. germany remembers 17 treasures from all over the world. In these buildings worked artists, scholars, composers, scientists, and theologians who helped shape two centuries of west- ern cultural life. At this university, founded in 1810, lectured men with names precious in the physical science, social science, and theological curricula of the whole western world: Von Humbolt, Planck, Einstein, Wellhausen, Harnack, Tillich, Bonhoeffer. But directly across the street, in a cobblestone pavement beside the opera house, is a square-meter put-down of academic glory: Here, says the plaque, took place the burning of “un-German” books by faculty and students of this university on May 10, 1933—books yanked out of a great li- brary, branded as degenerate by Nazi criteria, and reduced to ash as an act of intellectual purification. Through a square-meter glass pane set in the cobble- stones appears an underground bookshelf, painted white, empty of books. Above, on the plaque, is a quotation from the philosopher Heinrich Heine: “Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.” A few steps further is a classic, low, columned stone building, the Neue Wach—the “New Guardhouse.” Soldiers of King Friedrich Wilhelm III used it to guard him in 1818. Architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel designed it, and architects still celebrate it as one of his numerous gems on this street. In succession, the Weimar, Nazi, East German, and Federal Republic govern- ments designated the Neue Wach as a general memorial to war dead. Its latest inscription dedicates the place to the memory of “all victims of war and tyr- anny.” Take the “all” literally, and one might remember that wars which Ger- many instigated in the twentieth century killed over 50 million people. By now, lingering here and there, one has walked about a mile down Unter den Linden accompanied by a growing suspicion that this is only the beginning of memorials to the Nazi past around this one street in central Berlin. Just a few blocks away is the excavated site of the former headquarters and prison block of the Gestapo, now named the Topography of Terror. Further south by a kilometer is the new Jewish Museum, whose jagged, off-kilter design by Daniel Liebeskind ushers the visitor into visual and kinetic experience of dis- orienting Nazi slashes in the fabric of German culture. Objects reminiscent of the Jewish contribution to that culture now fill these slanted halls, but the building itself is likely to become the reason why visitors will leave with chills and shivers. Nothing is “straight” in this building. One climbs and descends on slanted hallways. The high walls of one oppressive, claustrophobic room recall Auschwitz and the lie that “Work Makes Free.” So, hardly halfway down Unter Den Linden, one may have had enough history for one day. On another day, perhaps, a stroll up to Hackescher Markt and Oranienburger Strasse, the former neighborhood where thousands of Ber- lin Jews built one of the great Jewish communities in the world. On the wall of the partially restored New Synagogue there is a plaque calling to memory the Berlin policeman who prevented a Nazi crowd from burning it down on November 9, 1938—Pogromnacht, Germans now call it, in Nazi nomenclature,
- 35. 18 honest patriots Kristallnacht. In the neighborhood are remnants of the former Jewish cemetery where Moses Mendelssohn was buried. Across the street, the walls of several apartment buildings bear signs that name predeportation occupants. With guidebook help and another bus ride, one can locate the two rail depots where these residents left Berlin never to return. So to walk through central Berlin is to meet the grandeur and the misery of its history. The tilt of recent monuments is toward the misery. Berlin’s modern leaders are determined that it will never forget 1933–1945. Without doubt, Berlin is a city that remembers.5 Outsiders’ Stakes in Germans’ Capacity to Remember Any non-German, born in the twentieth century and surviving to the twenty- first, has reason to feel implicated in the question: Can present-day Germans be counted on to so remember the Nazi past that they are solidly committed to resisting any repetition of that past? Those of us alive during World War Two ask the question more intensely, perhaps, than do our children and grand- children. We are the ones nagged by the suspicion that Germans, like Amer- icans, like to forget the past amid urgencies of getting on with the future. When asked about it, contemporary Germans are likely to reply with weary patience, “Our reality is complicated. Our third postwar generation is saturated with calls to remember. Young people want to know how to recover some pride in being German. We of the older generation know that we have to install in upcoming generations a permanent awareness of our Nazi past, else our security as a democracy may be threatened. Neither wallowing in guilt nor luxuriating in amnesia can be a key to the German future. We have to help each other to resist being time-prisoners of one or the other side of the bridge between past and future. That is not easy for our fourth postwar generation. We remind them so often of the Holocaust that we can hardly blame those who say, ‘We have had it up to here.’”6 The 1999 American director of the new Jewish Museum in Berlin, Michael Blumenthal, was astutely aware of the balance that Germans must achieve between the rememberers and the forgetters in their modern civic conversa- tion. Blumenthal was born in Germany in 1929. His father was briefly im- prisoned in Buchenwald in 1939; his family then left Berlin in the nick of time. Jewish and non-Jewish Germans, he says, share an analogous problem: If Jews at times seem frozen in their role as victims, many non- Jews are similarly imprisoned by a self-image of shame as citizens of a nation of perpetrators. A clear split on the German side also exists between this group which cannot free themselves from a sense of national guilt and the urge to bear constant witness to re-
- 36. germany remembers 19 morse and readiness to do penance, and a growing number of oth- ers who are tired of it all, and look for reasons to justify that it is time to be done with it. Blumenthal goes on to describe the democratic relevance of struggles to relate negative national memory to positive national change: What matters is that Germans find ways to remember with a purpose and for the right reasons—remembrance, not as a form of breast-beating or routine remorse and not merely through stones and rituals, but for lessons to be learned about the rights of minori- ties, about fairness and civic courage in a democratic society.7 Blumenthal implies two principles that ought to guide all efforts (like this book) to justify citizen-visits to negative pasts in their own society. If “it” hap- pened once, it can happen again. Secondly, something like it may be happening still in new guises. Potentials for hate sleep everywhere. The stranger may still feel threatened in the midst of longtime natives. If and when post-9/11 Amer- icans ponder these unpleasant truths, we might well think first of people in our midst who look Middle Eastern. Foreigners may now trust Germans not to forget, but in fact some Ger- mans do not yet trust each other to remember. They may even welcome help from outsiders in fortifying their national memory, while being well aware that citizens in other countries are adept at hiding their own negative history. They can quietly ask what Americans are doing these days to address, for example, the history of Native Americans since 1492. Abroad and at home, many younger Germans readily identify themselves as “European” in their awareness that “German” is sometimes a conversation-stopper. They may wish that others would more often acknowledge the genuine democratic changes in modern Germany, but they know that what others think of them remains important for their own sense of freedom from the Nazi shadow. As this is written in 2004, American public interest in books, drama, and film coming out of World War Two remains surprisingly strong. Before all of its veterans die, stories of their part in this “good war” command large audi- ences. Some say that every American war since has lacked justification as clear- cut as that of 1941–1945. As one who lived through those years, this writer remembers most the images that came to us in the spring of 1945: the camps, the piles of dead bodies, the crowds of starving and diseased survivors. Well informed as many were, our government leaders never told us the truth about the camps until Allies opened the gates and let the photographers in. Then we had indelible ideas of the evil called Nazism. If any of us had any reservations about the importance of defeating that evil militarily, the camp pictures put reservations to rest. This really was a good-against-evil war. The big question was whether we had really killed the evil or would have to fear its ugly head
- 37. 20 honest patriots rising again. We looked at the pictures of local German citizens compelled by Eisenhower to view the death pits and the emaciated half-alive bodies in Da- chau. We wondered if Germans were being honest when they said, “We didn’t know.” It would be years before we learned that our own leaders did know.8 Meantime we wondered if Germans and their children were capable of joining yet another intoxicated crowd cheering yet another Adolf Hitler. For the next twenty years, some of that worry receded as a new democratic political order emerged in the western side of a divided Germany, as a swiftly knit NATO rose to oppose an aggressive Soviet Union and as America went to war in Korea and Vietnam. Even when we became vocal critics of the American involvement in Vietnam, none of us from the generation of the 1940s were likely to change our minds about the absolute evil of Nazism. Even if we were so inclined, our movie and television industries were sure to refresh our con- victions in the matter. Among the political symbols we wanted our children and grandchildren to recognize as signs of evil, the primary one was the Nazi swastika. A Three-Generation Struggle to “Master the Past” As late as the 1990s, young Germans coming to visit America could be as- saulted by fellow high school students with the question, “Do you know what a Swastika is?” The question could only have been posed by a non-German profoundly out of touch with what German governments, teachers, authors, artists, and public media had been doing especially in the past twenty years to make sure that no student in any cranny of the German educational system had any doubt about what a swastika was and what it symbolized. A survey of the means by which this education has transpired is worth considerable world effort. Nothing is more instructive in such a survey than the story of how three generations of Germans successively assumed responsibility for educating the next generation not to forget the years 1933–1945. The awareness “we were wrong” is likely to overtake the citizens of any country decisively defeated in war. Something, at least, went wrong, else our sufferings would not be so great nor our defeat so total. Many Germans at the end of World War One were far from certain that they had been defeated, and Hitler took shrewd advantage of this uncertainty. May 8, 1945, was radically different: No doubt about Germany’s utter defeat at terrible cost or that Hitler’s Third Reich was a disaster. For years the burdens of that disaster would shadow every German household: grief, poverty, collapse of life support. Well into the 1950s only a few had much energy for speaking about the evils which the Nazis had perpetrated on vast numbers of Jews and non-Germans. One’s own suf- fering can impose hard strictures on one’s ability to think about the suffering of others. In addition, for ordinary West Germans of the 1940s and 1950s
- 38. germany remembers 21 there were some convenient escape hatches from having to think about their own roles in the Nazi era: the imposition of a new liberal democratic govern- ment by the victorious Allies; the Nuremberg trials of leading Nazi war crim- inals as scapegoats for the disaster; the eventual domestic trials of some five thousand other Nazis, also candidates for signifying to “ordinary” Germans that they were victims, not agents, of the debacle; plus the prompt collaboration of the “new” Germany with NATO against the threat of the USSR, a made-to- order excuse for many a private German reflection that, after all, Hitler knew who was Germany’s biggest enemy. So German adults of the war generation had many a public inducement to avoid talk about their own possible culpability for the Nazi disaster. Numer- ous indeed were the psychological reasons for repressing the question: “What did we do or not do in the 1930s and 1940s that permitted the triumph of Nazism?” Furthermore, during twenty postwar years German survivors of the war were busy founding businesses, getting married, having children, seeing them grow up, and sending them off to universities. Then, especially in the universities in the mid-1960s, public and private avoidance of the great buried questions got rudely challenged. Children plied parents and grandparents with the questions. “Did you vote for Hitler? What did you know about the fate of your Jewish classmates or of our Jewish neighbors? Did you, as a German soldier in the Soviet Union, witness the mass executions of civilians or see Russian POWs dying of starvation and disease?” As one member of the second generation remembered. I was born in 1934. When I was around seventeen years old, I asked my parents questions like these. They answered, reluctantly at first, but they answered. There ensued a painful process of discus- sion between the generations. The younger generation: search for their lost fatherland, reproachful, unjust to their elders, and, deep down, uncertain of how they would have behaved under the chal- lenge of a popular and determined dictatorship. The older genera- tion: bitter, betrayed in their exploited idealism, relieved and forget- ful after surviving the catastrophe, frightened by the demanding questions of their disrespectful children. Post-war Germany was a divided nation.9 By 1968, German university students were joining many of their contem- poraries in Europe and America in protesting the Vietnam War and the nuclear bomb threat; but youthful German protest drew particular power and passion from an undertow of resentment at the silence of elders in their own house- holds. From the silences and evasions as well as from the honest answers they extracted from the older generation, they began to piece together a commit- ment to study the Nazi period and to ensure that Germans of the future would remember its evils—in detail, in the eyes of neighbors who suffered most from
- 39. 22 honest patriots it, and for the sake of building public barriers against any renewal of the Nazi horror in any future generation. To those second-generation postwar sons and daughters we now owe a range of public phenomena which qualify Germany as the country whose var- ious authorities have worked hardest to merit an award as “A Country That Wants Never to Forget.” Prior to 1970, one might have been skeptical of any such assessment of public culture in Germany—what one German historian calls “the morals of millions.” But by the end of the 1970s there began to accumulate in public times and places so many visible reminders of die Nazi- zeit that not even small children in Germany were likely to be innocent of some factual answers to the question, “Who were the Nazis?” Why So Belatedly? Before venturing a survey of these reminders, one might readily ask: Why did it take three and four decades for the politicians, the educators, and other public leaders of this society to launch a vast series of public rehearsals of the history of the 1933–1945 era? Contemporary Germans who were in high school history classes in the 1950s and 1960s say that those classes often ended with the 1920s, with the Weimar Republic, and with teacher excuse of “too little time” for getting into the 1930s. Historians like to say that they cannot write serious history about events less than twenty-five years in the past, but this assumption hardly ex- plains why history books and history teachers in Germany of the 1950s avoided 1933–1945. An amalgam of pain, guilt, and repression must have haunted those classrooms. While a world reading public was beginning to image the Holo- caust through the eyes of Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, and Anne Frank, students in the thirteen-year curriculum of the German territorial educational systems were not required to read much of this literature. Few citizens of the town of Dachau, forced to visit the neighboring camp in 1945, visited it again, nor did they advise their children and visitors to do so.10 Such a psychology of avoidance in history teaching has parallels all over the world. Stalin did not plan to make one of the gulag camps into a memorial of the cruelty practiced there, nor did tour guides, until recently, point visitors to Mount Vernon and Monticello to the sites where the slaves on those plan- tations used to live. Most official, government-sponsored educational systems celebrate collective pasts. Few are the politicians who expect the young to learn how to mourn the guilt of the ancestors. But first-generation amnesia among postwar Germans disguised slum- bering private and public memory. Psychiatrists take great interest in such resistance. What we hide we have not really forgotten. What we have apparently forgotten we can recover. We may want to forget a painful event and go on
- 40. germany remembers 23 living as if it had never happened, but as Søren Kierkegaard suggested, effective forgetting requires genuine remembering. Really to put something in the past, one must consciously put it there. To do so may require an access of strength for coping with weakness. From Private Memory to Public Memorial Exactly forty years after the end of the war in Germany, a former lieutenant in the Wehrmacht, now President of the Federal Republic, delivered a memorial address to its Bundestag in words that achieved immediate worldwide acclaim. In great detail the President, Richard Freiherr von Weizsäcker, catalogued the evils that the Nazis and their German collaborators inflicted upon millions of human beings in a dozen European countries. It was, as a columnist of the New York Times remarked, “one of the great speeches of our time.” It was certainly one of the speeches that few political leaders dare to deliver to their own constituencies: a sustained litany of the evils done by recent predeces- sors.11 Fourteen years later, in the spring of 1999, I asked the author of that speech, “Why did it take forty years before a political leader of your genera- tion—and your political party—felt that he or she could speak as you spoke on May 8, 1985?” (Von Wiezsäcker wrote most of the speech himself.) He answered: “Because we Germans needed time to recover a certain inner and outer security. We had to have enough confidence about our ability not to repeat those evils. We had to feel secure enough to talk openly about it.” The crucial security was not so much in the NATO alliance against the threats of the Soviet Union as in the thirty-five-year experience of Germans in building democratic institutions. That, says one American historian, was an achievement of the first prewar-born generation of leaders. Without it, without the coming of unprecedented limits on government power, freedom of speech, minority rights, and other entrenchments of human rights in their public in- stitutions, Germans in the 1970–1990 era would not have been liberated into a culture of spreading public talk about the Nazi past. University students who scorned the silences and defenses of their parents played an important role in this development; but, like some Americans on college campuses of the 1960s, they did not succeed in shuffling off the “unresolved psychological baggage” of their elders, nor did they acknowledge what they owed to those elders in their very freedom to criticize them. As A. D. Moses says in his study of the two generations, changes that come in the later often are rooted in leadership already present in the earlier. “Generations are complex,” he notes. They are often composed of minority voices which one day will achieve majority support. Early leaders of Germany’s postwar democracy such as Gustav Heineman and Kurt Schumacher might have been muffled by the pragmatic leadership of
- 41. 24 honest patriots Konrad Adenauer, but they were forerunners of the historical honesty de- manded by the students of 1968, just as those students taking up positions of responsibility in the 1980s began to unveil die Nazizeit and thus prepared the way for their children to deal with that challenge in less strident, more matter- of-fact ways.12 The denazification coercions of postwar Allied occupation of Germany played a vital part in this chain of fifty-year change, but as Moses makes clear, the Allied insistence on democratic freedom could only become a power for change as young Germans began to use it for asking their own questions and pursuing their own answers. In their occupation sector of Lower Saxony, for example, the British invited young people to form discussion groups but prac- ticed a hands-off policy of leaving the groups free to talk about anything. “These often informal groups were of enormous importance in providing time and space for reorientation after the war years, and about 40 percent of young Germans were members of one. ‘In probably no other period of German his- tory did such discussion-circles and solidarity-communities play such a great role as in the postwar years.’ ” In addition, in the late 1940s over a million young Germans participated in church youth groups, and a growing number were able to attend international conferences.13 Forced into freedom of opinion and expression, so to speak, postwar Germans began to experience “a long- term learning process.” In each other they could perceive varieties of being human. Such freedom was most experienced, Moses concludes, in the new public structures of German life. It was most muffled in families, where the pain of the war generation persisted into silence around many a dinner table. The ironic psychological effect upon some sons and daughters was a super- sensed burden of responsibility for countering parental silences. From the early 1980s on, they began to produce a mass of public declarations, books, mon- uments, and study projects in all regions of Germany. Rather than asserting a clean break with the feelings and ambiguities of the domestic culture in which the second generation had been raised, Moses concludes, this perspective “re- places the asperity of censure with the emollient historicizing insight that the generations are related to one another by intricate webs of psychological inter- dependence.”14 Germans are not alone illustrations of that facet of the human story. The American campus revolt of the 1960s owed some of its passion to ideas learned in some classrooms and around some family dinner tables. One of the notable beginnings of widespread public dialogue about Na- zism in Germany was the American television series, Holocaust, first viewed there in 1979. Americans raised on the death camp photographs of the 1940s, tutored by the books of Elie Wiesel, and touched early by The Diary of Anne Frank had difficulty understanding the impact of this series on Germans. The scenes of the drama fell far short of many previous historical and fictional film portrayals of the roundups and executions of Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. Like the writing of Anne Frank, Holocaust reduced massive human evil to
- 42. germany remembers 25 small-scale, individualized experience. It made politically engineered evil ac- cessible to personal understanding and imagination. The result in Germany was the recruitment of hundreds of thousands into discussion groups, family talk, and media-analyses that catalyzed, for a while, a national preoccupation. With such breadth of public deliberation, a cross section of West German leaders from the second generation took up the multifaceted task of translating private, sequestered memory into public acknowledgment and public institu- tional expression. They planted seeds in the 1980s that were to flower every- where in the 1990s in an array of studies, monuments, anniversaries, un- earthed sites of Nazi terror, museums, and study centers. Slight though such an American’s survey of this array has to be, I have tried below to describe something of the educational impact of these developments on Germans—but most of all on the education of the Arnerican I know best: myself. 1. Marks in Time: Anniversaries In the late 1990s, the Bundestag of the Federal Republic, still meeting in Bonn, debated the question: If Germany is to observe an annual official “Day of Remembrance,” what should be the date? Among the candidate days were May 8, the day the war in Europe ended, and November 9, Pogromnacht. The latter would have been a tempting choice, for by coincidence it could also mark the founding of the Weimar Constitution in 1918 and the day in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. Pride in either day to the contrary, the final two candidates in Bundestag debate were January 20 and January 27. The former was the day of the 1942 meeting of some fifteen upper-level Nazi bureaucrats in a villa on the shore of Berlin’s largest lake, the Wannsee. In scarcely two hours, under the leadership of SS Commander Reinhard Hey- drich, these men quickly agreed on the procedures for arresting, transporting, and killing of all the Jews of Europe. Secretary of the gathering was Adolf Eichmann. As described below, the Wannsee Conference Center would be- come, in the mid-1990s, its own remarkable Denkmal for contemporary edu- cation on the history of Nazism. But January 27 won the Bundestag vote. It was the day in 1945 when Soviet armies broke into Auschwitz and liberated what remained of its haggard prisoners. It seems likely that one stable feature of this annual commemoration will be a speech to the Bundestag by the Bundespräsident, who in 1999 was Roman Herzog. He was eleven years old in 1945. Like his predecessor Von Weizsäcker, Herzog was active in church as well as civil affairs over several decades. His position in the parliamentary system was largely symbolic, but as representa- tive of the nation (rather than the government) a German president has a “bully pulpit” less compromised by immediate political interests than is usually the case with an American president or a German chancellor. Herzog’s 1999 speech was a worthy successor to that of Von Weizsäcker
- 43. 26 honest patriots in 1985.15 Auschwitz, he began, must become permanent in the national mem- ory, for “if a people seek to live in and with their history, it is good advice that they live in their whole history and not only with its good and pleasant parts.” But he added: “If I attempt to place myself in our history, I attempt it not in shame but in dignity.” That there is moral dignity in facing the sins of the past enters only oc- casionally into the rhetoric of political leaders, and the concept itself escapes most definitions of patriotism. By reminding Germans of the moral dignity of uncovering past evils, Herzog was not far from the word of Saint Augustine: “There is something in humility that lifts up the head.” Herzog soon turned to the audience he wanted most to reach: young peo- ple. Some may say that the Nazi era was no business of theirs, that facing it is a task of the elders. That may be the view of perhaps one fourth of German youth, but surely three fourths of them “know what’s what” regarding: Die Nazizeit. They study that shadow side of our history because they are oriented to the future of our people, not just to debates about the past. “How they think about the future of Germany is incomparably more important than all the debates and conceptual clarifications” of the older generations. But, Herzog warned, members of no German generation should assume the pose of moral superiority over a previous generation, as though in hind- sight fantasizing they think that they would have stood on the side of the victims or would have joined the resisters. “Nazism is our common, frightful inheri- tance.” None of us has the right to forget it or to assume that we are utterly immune to the temptations of our ancestors. How should young people go about their education concerning this neg- ative past? Herzog offers a catalogue of concrete suggestions that many youth are already undertaking. They have read The Diary of Anne Frank, a book about Hitler by Sebastian Haffner, and the diary of Victor Klemperer. They have seen the television series Holocaust and the film Schindler’s List. They travel to the sites of terror, they care for monuments and graves, they work on documen- tation projects with their schools, they see historical broadcasts. Among themes for high school essay competitions none is more likely than “Daily Life Under National Socialism.” “No question about it: Our young people discuss and research, they ask and inquire.” And they often inquire in their own unique ways, however different these may be from those of us elders. Turning to the wider German public, Herzog notes that there is much left for securing the Nazi horror in the national memory. There is the great Mahn- mal to the Holocaust to be built in the center of Berlin, not for the sake of Germany’s image in the eyes of foreigners and not with cheap identification with victims, but above all in memory of the victims and their suffering “and a warning to the living.” But one big monument in the national capital is not enough. We must spread these memory joggers all over Germany.
- 44. germany remembers 27 Everywhere were the scenes of horror. Everywhere were the schools from which Jewish children were taken. Everywhere, the shops whose owners were taken off. Everywhere, the SA’s torture- cellars. Everywhere the collection places for the transports. . . . Peo- ple should know this: All of these things took place, not in some re- mote place and in remote antiquity, but here, in Germany, in my city, in a time in which there were already automobiles, telephones, and radios, between humans who lived not very differently than do we. The topography of terror could be found in the daily life of our world. . . . This is no ordinary academic piece of objective study, Herzog warned. Whoever stands in this history will be placed in it as a moral subject. He must simply ask himself: How did the perpetrators go about their business? How, the collaborators? How could they not empathize with their victims? How did seduction and mass- suggestion function? And he will not avoid the question: Am I cer- tain that I would not have collaborated? Would I not have been only an onlooker? Would I not have had such fearful anxiety that I would not have resisted? Herzog goes on to call Germans, especially the young, to undertake “prac- tice in empathy and mistrust of all simplifiers.” It is no simple thing, he im- plies, to understand both the perpetrators and their victims. We must distin- guish between the two and deepen our understanding “in the head and in the heart.” And what about modern German responsibility? “The great majority of Germans living today are not guilty of Auschwitz. But surely: They are also in special measure responsible that never again will something like Holocaust and Auschwitz be repeated.” Let no one make excuse for 1933 by saying that “everyone had to follow” Hitler, nor let anyone indulge in the surmise, in 1999, that “we are immune” to the same dangers. “The one is an historical mistake, the other a pious illusion.” In a powerful paragraph near the end of the speech, Herzog turned to moral-historical anthropology, striking the same note as did Weizsäcker in 1985: One thing is clear: Auschwitz has darkened our image of the human. What once was historical reality belongs forever to the fear- ful possibilities of humans, whose repetition, in whatever form, can- not be ruled out. The dam and safeguards must therefore ever again be built up anew.
- 45. 28 honest patriots In the very years of the Herzog presidency, such “fearful possibilities” had already come to pass in Rwanda and Bosnia. Americans would soon add Sep- tember 11, 2001. The speech ends with an allusion to Bosnia in a quotation from the novel Bridge Over the Drina by Nobel prize winner Ivo Andric. Herzog recollects that, beginning in Sarajevo in 1914, Europe suffered a catastrophe rooted in service to alleged “higher interests.” As Europe went to war that August, “whoever then lived with a pure soul and open eyes could see how an entire society changed in a day.” All in all, this address breathes accumulations of German “memory cul- ture” in the years 1980–2000. In these years leaders high and low were re- covering images of the Nazi era in increasing depth, detail, and public candor. Especially remarkable about this address is its appeals to youth and to their obligation to deal with the scars of history in the localities of the land. For calling attention to sites, sources, and events still to be publicly recognized, the speech was an apt reminder of the diverse forms of a growing, honest German “mas- tery of the past.” 2. Locations of Concentrated Evil: The Camp Museums The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 opened up a huge acreage between the two halves of a politically divided city. For almost thirty years, across this no-man’s land, one hundred to two hundred yards wide, Berliners East and West had stared at each other. To clear out this area in the early 1960s, the DDR govern- ment demolished buildings and fortified the space with dense arrays of barbed wire, mines, automatically activated machine guns, and a paved road for mil- itary vehicles. In twenty-eight years at least seventy-eight people lost their lives in attempting to escape from East to West across this zone. The century-old Protestant Church of the Resurrection was caught between the two walls and was finally dynamited by the DDR in 1985. After the Wall came down, a new church by that name rose on the same site. As we have seen, central Berlin (Die Mitte) was already thick with history: imperial museums, a gilded opera house, palaces, and classic Schinkel- designed facades galore. To this neighborhood the Nazis added their own layers of sleek, angular office buildings. Here Adolf Hitler built the bunker in which he would die. Comparable only to the no-man’s land dividing the two Koreas, the weedy emptiness of this space epitomized the Cold War as few other places on earth. Over the next three decades grafitti on the western side of the Wall advertised the scorn and frustration of the “Wessies” for this violent slash through their city. With November 9, 1989, and the reunification of the two Germanies a year later, the space suddenly opened up to an urban planner’s dream: the
- 46. germany remembers 29 roomy heart of a capital city, ready for filling with new structures for a new era. The government of the Federal Republic could now move from modest quarters in Bonn. It could build new transparent-looking offices symbolizing a nation shorn of nationalism. Here, where Hitler and Albert Speer wanted to establish a victorious Nazi government in architectural grandeur, democracy would build its home. A year before the Wall fell, well-known television talk-show hostess Lea Rosh had proposed a large, ambitious memorial to the Holocaust for West Berlin. With the fall, as space for the memorial, she nominated the newly open five acres to the south of the Reichstag. Then began a decade-long debate in Berlin and throughout Germany around the question: “How could an artist’s design give form to Germany’s need to remember the Holocaust?” What me- morial to that horror, if any, would be appropriate in the heart of the new capital city, many of whose leaders wanted to signal publicly that the new Germany would not forget the evils of the old? The debate was complicated with another key question: how to remind an upcoming generation of events that they could not have directly experienced? Survivors of the death camps often said to others, “You cannot really know what it was like.” Non-Jewish Germans living through the Nazi tyranny could say much the same: How can outsiders understand the price of survival in a police state? War veterans of every country know about a kindred despair that anyone else can rightly comprehend the horrors of a battlefield. In the immediate post-1945 years, suffering and hating the devastations of defeat, many Germans declared that their history now had to begin all over again—with null stunde, zero hour. Twenty years later, an aroused second generation exploded in furious disagreement. It was high time now for all Germans to deliver the Nazi past from public amnesia. Many of those who urged a return to the past under the cry “Never again!” knew that foreigners would be viewing their project with skeptical scrutiny. Perhaps the most skeptical of all would be Jews throughout the world, many of whom had vowed never to trust Germans again or even to visit the country. At the same time, especially in the early writings of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, the evils of Nazism acquired fearful importance as worldwide warning. “This is where hate leads,” said Wiesel in an interview in 1992.16 Worldwide fasci- nation with Nazism continued to grow. But underneath the interest hid anxiety that what “those people” did we people might be capable of doing. Therefore, in a troubling way, Germany became a test case of whether one nation, coping with painful memories of its past, can do memory work on behalf of outsiders. Though it shrinks the focus of my inquiry, I want to begin, precisely as an outsider, with further accounts of my own experience of this German proj- ect. What do Americans have to learn from contemporary German efforts to master their past? Readers can answer for themselves. It is important for this
- 47. 30 honest patriots American, born five years before Hitler came to power, to begin by trying to answer the question for himself. No American student of this same project offers more insightful justifi- cation of this method than James E. Young. In his now classic study, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, he underscores “the essentially participatory nature of all memorials,” including those whose shape and lo- cation have vivid historical connections. Memorial stone tablets on battlefields and museums in the former sites of concentration camps, he observes, have in common the reminder, “Precisely here humans suffered and died at the hands of other humans.” By itself, Young reminds us, a “site” cannot remem- ber. Rather, it is the projection of memory by visitors into a space that makes it a memorial. The site catches visitors unaware but is no longer passive: it intrudes itself into the pedestrians’ thoughts. Of course, such memory can also be avoided by simply crossing the street. . . . But even this would be a memorial act of sorts, if only in opposition. For to avoid the memorial here, we would first have to conjure the memory to be avoided: that is, we would have to remember what it is we want to forget.17 Germans who want to avoid seeing memorials of the Nazi era will have to emigrate. There are thousands scattered across the country.18 For even an in- troduction to this array, some order of contemplation seems necessary. One way to organize a survey is to travel back from the notorious hearts of the Nazi evil (the camps) to the technical support of the camps (railroads and bureau- cratic structures) to the civil society that passively or actively supported these systems (local citizens) to the promulgation of ideas that defined the Nazi vision of a “Thousand-Year Reich” (educational systems). Below is a backtracking into this typography of German memory: from some camps, to a railroad line, to a meeting of Nazi bureaucrats, to some Berlin neighborhoods, and finally to a school. dachau. Memorials are only doorways to history. They invite further inves- tigation. They alert visitors to what they already know but may be in danger of forgetting. They are also invitations to learn what visitors do not yet know. Having met Dachau’s most famous prisoner, Martin Niemoeller, in 1952 and remembering the 1945 photos, I did not want a first trip to Munich to lack a visit to the place. For most American tourists in 1966, however, finding Dachau was not easy. We found it by following a railroad track. Once inside the gate, we experienced the cognitive dissonance of remembering the photos from 1945 while looking at a wheat field dotted with white crosses, a Star of David, and a small Catholic chapel. Only later would we learn that in 1960 fifty thousand Germans had gathered at Dachau at the behest of Munich Cath-
- 48. germany remembers 31 olic bishop Johann Neuhaeusler to make of Dachau the last Station of the Cross, a “Monument of Atonement.” The chapel monument was completed in 1964, when “two model barracks were reconstructed, symbolic concrete foundations laid to recall those destroyed, and the grounds were covered with white gravel.”19 Whatever the historical detail this American brought with him to Dachau, however, my most abiding memory was the absence of any local public ac- knowledgment of the site’s existence. One speculated that the citizens of Da- chau might be glad to change the town’s name. But that very gesture toward future public amnesia would have required current citizens to articulate a neg- ative memory. A short visit to Dachau thus turned out to be for two Americans an accurate, experiential introduction to the challenges facing public efforts among younger Germans to “master the past” in the mid-1960s. German art historian Detlef Hoffmann, JamesYoung reports, visited Dachau in 196l and “had to blaze his way through brush so high that it concealed the fences and outer moat. Twelve years of concentration camp history, he felt, had gone to ruin after the war.” That weedy help to amnesia was a paradoxical symbol, contrasting ironically with the weeds that in 1961 began to divide Berlin. Thousands of Bavarians knew enough of Dachau to want to forget it. In 1933, “every citizen of Dachau watched the camp being constructed, as well as many Müncheners, who traditionally took Sunday excursions to Dachau and its cas- tle.” By 1966 Dachau was getting sanitized to yield a landscape neat, clean, and even beautiful. Hoffmann described it as a “sparkling renovation,” Young as “antiseptic.” Now with the weeds and brush cleaned up, “the town’s former repression had itself been lost to memory,” making it easy to forget the years of forgetting.20 sachsenhausen. As the Nazi system for total control of Germany developed in the mid-1930s, the Nazis established Sachsenhausen, some twenty-five miles north of central Berlin, as a special model and organizational center of the camp system. No town in Nazi Germany was far from one of several thou- sand camps and other prisons in the network of terror. Diverse purposes marked the system and yielded a sliding scale from the relative amenities of Dachau to the industrialization of mass murder in Auschwitz. But thousands died at Dachau, which still has its remnant crematory oven. It is impossible to believe that villagers never glimpsed the smoke from the ovens or the in- creasing trainloads of prisoners transported past the town to the camp. To be sure, Nazi designs for the specialized death camps called for locating them outside of Germany proper, in conquered territory to the east, under the sur- mise that this massive dirty work might disturb the feelings of many ordinary German citizens. Specialized murder required specialized murderers. Hein- rich Himmler, whose SS troops managed the camp system, put the psychology of this strategy into words that became famous after the war. Speaking to a
- 49. 32 honest patriots group of his lieutenants in Posen, Himmler paid tribute to their ability to become murderers without ceasing to be “decent” human beings: Most of you will know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred or a thousand are lying there. To have stuck it out and—apart from a few exceptions due to hu- man weakness—to have remained decent, that is what has made us tough. This is a glorious page in our history, and one that has never been written and can never be written.21 In Sachsenhausen, a crematorium, a whipping post, and an execution ditch are surviving reminders of daily life and death in the camps. But the survival of Himmler’s words constitutes a memorial of a special fundamental terror: Here was the rhetoric of systematic, racism-inspired murder on the lips of a human agent who, with his obedient collaborators, was putting the concept into action throughout Poland, the Ukraine, and all of Nazi-occupied Europe. A picture of Himmler and this text sit in one corner of a museum which the Soviets established in their 1945 takeover of Sachsenhausen. Like the Nazis, they used it for confinement of political enemies, including Nazi officials and German POWs. The museum displays many tangible tools of oppression— chains, whips, tin plates, work tools, striped uniforms. Just outside the gate the post-1989 local territorial government has vividly signaled the technical and social refinements of the place in a diagram of the Idealplan for the camp as conceived for its 1936–1937 construction. The design called for an inner triangular fence around whose base are arrayed, like a fan, dozens of prisoner barracks. This symmetry served surveillance and composed “a stark architec- tural expression of control and terror.”22 Around the inner camp, in close prox- imity to the residents of the neighboring village of Oranienburg, the SS built a large complex of slave-labor factories plus barracks, homes, and offices for its own personnel. Sachsenhausen served as the model, staff training ground, and organizational heart of the developing camp system in Germany and be- yond. Some two hundred thousand prisoners from forty countries eventually were confined here: political dissidents, Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and other “lawbreakers,” most of whom would be dispatched to Auschwitz. A wide ditch near the crematorium served as execution ground. By disease, overwork, hang- ing, and firing squad, at least ten thousand died here. Model crematorium technology met some of its first technical tests in Sachsenhausen. Inmates helped build the Berlin autobahn and worked for numerous adjacent war fac- tories of corporations whose names would survive the war and achieve world- wide renown.23 In 1961 the East German government designated Sachsenhausen, along with Ravensbruck24 and Buchenwald, as one of a trio of major national me- morials of the Nazi era. To one of these camps schoolchildren, citizen groups, and officials made annual pilgrimages in celebration of the Communist resis-
- 50. germany remembers 33 tance to Nazism and of the Soviet liberation of the camps. One historic pho- tograph shows a crowd of thousands of East Germans behind the DDR pres- ident, all emerging from Sachsenhausen with smiles of liberation joy on all faces. In every sense the evils of the place lie behind them, and Communism takes the credit. When, after the fall of the Wall, the Brandenburg territorial government assumed responsibility for the camp, a new emotion afflicted every aspect of the site. No celebration now—mourning rather—and no disavowal of ancestral responsibility for the terror. The section of the camp built by the Soviets for their prisoners has been reidentified as integral to camp history. Outside the gate now, along with the schematic of camp design, is a poster display of the original eighteen Nazi categories of prisoners, all marked by their own trian- gular badges. As one enters the gate, with its famous mocking wrought-iron motto, Arbeit macht frei, one sees at the far end of the camp a tall chimney- shaped pillar with a high-up replication those eighteen triangles. From the Soviet era, however, all the triangles were colored with the red that the Nazis reserved for designating Communist prisoners. Soviet ideology required that the victims of the camp be selectively remembered. Notoriously, as in other Soviet-zone camps, the deaths of Jews, homosexuals, Sinti, Roma, and other non-Communists had little recognition of their places in the Nazi catalogue of the biologically unfit—lebensunwertes Leben. The technology of murder partly survived the Soviet takeover in remnants of crematorium ovens on one edge of the camp, in easy sight of the town of Oranienburg. In an odd, coincidental experience of this particular visitor on a spring day in 1999, a plume of black smoke was ascending from the village. It was easily visible from the crematorium site. Later we learned that a local town business was burning a large pile of rubber tires. Feelings, and most of all fantasies, have small ordinary place in guidebook writing, not to speak of history writing. What can one make of a nearby fire that attended that day’s visit to Sachsenhausen? The smoke assaulted this vis- itor with a sudden sense of how human bodies were burned here more me- thodically than were those old tires. Yet smoke, even crematorium smoke, is only an abstract remnant of human lives and those who murdered them on this very ground. During visits to Auschwitz, as one gazes at bins piled with shoes, toothbrushes, luggage, or eyeglasses, the English guide is likely to say, “Try to remember that behind every pair of these eyeglasses was once a real human person.” She is seeking to furnish and discipline the visitor’s imagi- nation and feeling. Were one to visit any of these camps and to carry out in memory only a bundle of objective images and “the facts” of the place, shorn of shadows and weights of feeling, one might say that one has not really visited this place. Black smoke over Sachnsenhausen has an indelible place in our memory of going there. Remnants of methods by which some humans have perpetrated evil on
- 51. 34 honest patriots others are only “metonymies”—parts that signify a whole. Yet they can speak with eloquence and realism that overcome a viewer’s emotions. If they did not, would one really be “seeing” what is here before one’s eyes? For many visitors to the Nazi (and other) sites of terror in recent history, notably those with well- developed imaginations, the visit can be devastating. Even for those with learned capacity for keeping their distance emotionally from typographies of terror, there is a limit to what they can absorb about the human suffering here so partially symbolized. Stories of humanly enacted evil should include not only the victims but also the perpetrators. In remembering twentieth-century terror we are likely to pay first attention to the victims and to dismiss the perpetrators as hardly worth remembering. This is a moral mistake. For the sake of putting teeth into the commitment “Never again!” we must try to understand the perpetrators—a task more difficult than understanding the victims. Only in later years have the museum makers of Sachsenhausen begun to ask, “What should we do with the barracks in which the SS lived around the camp, the residences of the officers, and the other buildings in which rules were devised for administration of the death camps in Poland?” Doubtless the ordinary citizens of nearby Or- anienburg, in the 1990s, are sorry to hear that question raised. Second- and third-generation families now live in some of the former SS residences. Nearby slave labor factory sites have long ago been adapted to new productive uses. What if the village itself became part of the Sachsenhausen memorial? Dis- cussion of this possibility—and the prospect of foreign visitors like me troop- ing down these village streets—disturbed many a local resident in the late 1990s. Outside one home in 1997 hung a poster in German: “Former SS houses, now a memorial?” That day in Sachsenhausen, some in our party declined to visit one of the last little structures in the camp. They already knew what was inside: the lab- oratory where camp doctors dissected bodies on way to the crematorium for “scientific” and other purposes. Says a German inscription beside one of the display cases: “Skins with tattoo marks were tanned and fashioned into objects (book covers, handbags, cases). Skulls with a perfect set of teeth were special ‘souvenirs’ for the brutal SS-Leader. A special skeleton-collection was done for the Institute of the Central Office for Race-Settlements.” One remembers that the SS insignia included a human skull. At such moments of memorial view- ing, one is likely to come up against a wall in the self that prompts the con- fession: “No feeling of mine is adequate to this horror, nor will I ever concep- tualize it in language or art adequate to it.” Such awareness has long-since dimmed the enthusiasm of many German artists, including writers, for ex- pressing the truth about the Nazi terror and most of all the Holocaust. Their anxiety about doing justice to the object has an analogy in the anxiety of mys- tical theologians about trying to describe God. Demonry prompts the same anxiety. For the less mystical, the compromise of St. Augustine prevails: “We
- 52. germany remembers 35 speak in order not to be silent.” Not to speak of Sachsenhausen, once visited, is inexcusable, as would be the removal of the place from sight and memory. One remembers that the Nazis expected to plow under all the death camps once their work was done. But to speak and memorialize as though speech and memorials match the reality of what transpired here, is to deny human expressive finitude and the self-effacing function of symbols. In short, one passes back under those iron-wrought words, “Work makes free,” newly aware of the limits of one’s awareness and willingness to become aware. It is as though, on a descent into Dante’s Inferno, one caught a glimpse of its lower, lowest depths and asked the guide to take you back to Purgatory. buchenwald. Located like Sachsenhausen in the formerly Soviet-dominated zone of East Germany, Buchenwald is also a site of contested history. The Nazis collected political enemies there plus growing numbers of Jews en route to Auschwitz, in a total of at least 239,000 people, some 56,000 of whom died. Patton’s Third Army overran the camp in April 1945, on the heels of a prisoner revolt which the East German government was to make into an icon of the Communist role in the liberation of Germany from the Nazis. For the next forty years, in ceremony, history books, and mandatory citizen visits, Bu- chenwald would be understood as a place where Communists finally won the battle against the capitalists. By 1958 the eastern government completed a mon- ument to the heroes of the revolt: eleven giant figures lifting fists and guns in the hours preceding the arrival of the Americans, representative of the struggle and victory of the working class inmates over their tormentors. The architects of 1958 set this monument on the far slope of the mostly empty spaces of the camp as the climax of a trail that led past “eighteen pylons with bowls flanking the ‘Street of Nations,’ seven granite cubes emblazoned with reliefs telling the camp’s story” in its Communist version. In the pre-1989 era Buchenwald be- came the central monument of the DDR regime, “the most gargantuan com- plex of memorial sculpture and edifices located in any of the German camps.” Over the years since 1958, millions of east Germans, young and old, gathered around this monument to applaud this version of history, to celebrate the heroic Communist resisters, but not to mourn the vast range of fellow sufferers alive or dead. No visitor to Buchenwald up to 1989 would experience it as a place of sorrow, contrition, or humility before the evil uses of political power. Like pre-1989 Sachsenhausen, only small scattered stones served as reminders that Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, POWs, and other non-Communist enemies of Nazism all died here, including eight to thirteen thousand anti-Communist Germans killed in the post-1948 years.25 A visitor to Buchenwald in 1999 walks on another layer of history laid down by new local and national governments. James Young relates the visit of a Western reporter soon after the 1990 reunification of the two Germanies. He found the Buchenwald museum closed for renovations and a sign reading,
- 53. 36 honest patriots “Dear Visitor: Be patient. Changes are being made.” Among the changes would be new museum tokens of the Germans who died here under Soviet com- mand.26 Now, when pan-German chancellor Helmut Kohl came for memori- alizing a new version of post-1945 German history, he could place a wreath in memory of those Germans. For this 1999 visitor, the most imposing feature of the new installations of the 1990s is a multistoried major research center whose documents, books, artifacts, and biographies of victims and perpetrators offer scholars depths of detail on the operation of the camp and its place in the Nazi system. Here is a workshop for historians dedicated to the axiom that some facts, buried in the past, must be unearthed before ideology gets its chance to shape their meaning. Just to visit the rooms of this center is to touch the contemporary German commitment to get as near to the bottom of Die Nazizeit as such remnants of the evil permit. But again, this research, as many a modern scholar is bound to testify, never reaches bottom. Where is the “bottom” of the evils of 1933– 1945? 1966–1976—China? 1992–1995—Bosnia? 1994—Rwanda? 2003— Abu Graib prison? Those who have excavated the typographies of these terrors are likely to confess that no one can really get to the bottom of it all. A “mystery of iniquity” haunts Buchenwald.27 It certainly haunts Germans who live in Weimar. No sign evokes this fact so vividly as one that stands directly in front of the Weimar train station. In the spring of 1999 it read: WEIMAR LIEGT BEI BUCHENWALD (“Weimar Is Neighbor to Buchenwald”) In 1937 the National Socialists built Buchenwald concentration camp on a slope of the Ettersberg—near Schloss Ettersburg, the set- ting from 1776 to 1780 for Anna Amelia’s Court of Muses. The camp served to remove political opponents, known as “criminal and antisocial” elements, from the “national German community.” From 1938, inmates were also sent here on racial grounds. They were brought to the camp from the railway station in Weimar. Other trains, carrying deportees to the death camps, passed through. Dur- ing the final months, the camp had a larger population than the town. Although Buchenwald was not specifically intended to play a role in systematic genocide, of its 250,000 or more prisoners, from about 40 nations, over 56,000 died. On 11 April 1945, the camp was liberated by the Third U.S. Army. On 16 April General Patton or- dered a thousand residents of Weimar to visit the camp. From August 1945 until January 1950, the Soviet intelligence service ran the site as an internment camp: Special Camp No. 2 Buchen-
- 54. germany remembers 37 wald. Of altogether 28,500 detainees, 7,100 died from disease and neglect. The year 1999 was special for this special German city. The European Union had designated it as the year’s “Cultural City” of Europe. Weimar had long signified to the world both political failure and artistic eminence. The 1919 constitution was written here. Goethe and Schiller called Weimar home. For a time so did Richard Wagner. The Bauhaus Movement museum is one of the town’s gems. Spruced up in the post-Communist era, with its repaired houses, streets, statues, shops and hotels, Weimar in early 1999 looked pre- pared for an influx of tourists. The double statue of Goethe and Schiller stood proudly in the platz before the opera house, whose banner announced “The Marriage of Figaro.” Nearby is Goethe’s carefully preserved house, replete with the art and the lifestyle of early nineteenth-century romanticism. But there is another remnant of Goethe’s life and work in the region that amounts to an ominous, fearsome historic scar. It is the stump of an oak tree. It remains there in an open space on the grounds of Buchenwald. Here, in the former eighteenth-century forest, the great German poet wrote and meditated on the beauties of the Ettersberg Valley. Himmler had the tree cut down to make way for the camp and a new, corrupt version of romanticism. Blaise Pascal remarked that humans are creatures of “grandeur and mis- ery.” If there is anywhere in Germany associated with the grandeur of its classic culture, it is Weimar. If there is anywhere in contemporary Germany where government has decided to assert public clarity about a misery-laden chapter in its history, it also is Weimar. In the 1930s Hitler mouthed the name “Wei- mar” to remind Germans that in 1918 their politicians betrayed a scarcely defeated country and wrote a failed democratic constitution here. Now the name stands for a more awful betrayal, three miles away: Buchenwald. The dualism must have afflicted many a visitor to Weimar in its cultural year of 1999. The sign in front of the Bahnhof provides a rare bit of tourist orientation: “Yes, this is the city where so much great art was created. It is also the city next to Buchenwald. Weimar is both, and we want you to be aware of this awful contradiction while you are here.” The contradictions are so many that a plunge into memories of ideological conflicts that have swirled in and around this city can pull the feelings of a visitor into depression and vertigo. James Young captures the irony, tragedy, and fearfulness of this history in an eloquent paragraph: When Himmler cynically designated Goethe’s oak as the center of the camp he would begin in July 1937, he hoped to neutralize the memory of Goethe even as he invoked the philosopher’s cultural au- thority. What better way to commemorate the obliteration of Weimar culture than to seal it in barbed wire, to turn it into its own prison?
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- 56. entering Tlatonac, they would lay down their arms and retire to the forests. I trust this may be so, said Maraquando, addressing himself to Jack, not unimpressed by the Indian's speech; but where, Señor Duval, do you propose to let them see the opal? In the chapel of Padre Ignatius, outside the walls, replied Jack, promptly. Cocom knows where there is an image of the war-god. He will set it up on the altar of the chapel. Before it, by a thread, we will hang the sacred stone. At dawn all will be ready, and Cocom can so twist the thread that when the opal hangs motionless it will glow blue. The Indians will arrive during the night. At dawn they will spread themselves through the suburbs, and enter the chapel of the good Padre. There they will see the image of their god, the sacred splendour of the opal. They will kneel down and worship, watching the twisting of the gem. When it stops and glows blue, then will they know Huitzilopochtli is satisfied with the sacking of the two towns, and now commands peace. Before noon, Excelencia, there will not be a single Indian left before the walls. They will retire into the forests, to the sacred city of Totatzine, and thus will Xuarez lose his allies. Maraquando listened to this proposal in silence, his cheek resting in the palm of his right hand, nor when Jack had concluded did he alter his position. He mused long and deeply, neither of his guests attempting to interrupt his meditations. This idea of detaching the Indians from Xuarez, by means of the opal, seemed to him to be childish. That an army of six thousand untutored savages flushed with victory should voluntarily retire at the bidding of Huitzilopochtli spoken through the stone, seemed improbable. But then Maraquando had never been to Totatzine, he did not know in what extreme veneration the opal was held by the Indians, and thus deemed Jack's proposition weak, when in reality it could scarcely have been stronger. Nothing is so powerful as superstition, and to
- 57. work on the minds of the Indians through their abject belief in the virtues of the shining precious stone was a master-stroke on the part of Duval. It seems to me, said Maraquando, at length raising his eyes, that the carrying out of this scheme will entail the loss of the opal. Without doubt, Señor, replied Duval, coolly; but by such a sacrifice you gain more than you lose. The Indians will desert Xuarez, you will be able to march your army south, and conquer him in the neighbourhood of Centeotl before he has time to approach nearer to the capital. Then you can crush his nest of traitors in Acauhtzin. Better lose the opal than Tlatonac, and if we do not succeed in getting rid of the Indians it may be that the city will fall. What says my niece Doña Dolores? I have spoken to her, Señor, and for the sake of the city, she is willing to run the risk of losing the jewel. Don Miguel smiled approvingly. He was patriotic himself, and liked to see the same quality displayed by all his family. At the same time, he was a just man, and knowing how Dolores loved the gem, did not care about taking advantage of her offer to sacrifice the same, unless she voluntarily consented to surrender the sacred stone. We will ask the lady herself, he said, rising from his chair. One moment, Señor; I shall return with my niece. He disappeared down the staircase leading to the patio, and Jack was left alone with Cocom. It may be that the Indians will not dare to take the jewel, said Jack, looking at the old man. Cocom uttered a grunt which might have meant anything.
- 58. Rest content, Don Juan. Once the Chalchuih Tlatonac leaves the walls of the city, it will never return again. Back to the sacred shrine of Totatzine shall it go. The high priest has ordered it be sought for far and wide, lest the god afflict the people with plagues for its loss. Still, if I remained in the chapel, and watched it. You, Señor? Nay, that, indeed, would be rash. The Indians would slay you. Only one will watch the jewel; but that one cannot prevent the worshippers seizing it. You mean yourself? It is said. I speak of Cocom. He shall sit by the image of the god, when the Indians enter the chapel of the good father. But the Indians might slay you, Cocom. That which is to be must be, replied the old man, stolidly. Cocom must watch the sacred gem, so that it sends the blue ray of peace from its breast. The tribes have been told by Ixtlilxochitli that Cocom is a traitor, and false to the worship of the old gods. When he is seen, he must die. But my friend, I—— Be silent, Señor. Not you nor any man can turn aside the spear of Teoyamiqui. Why should I murmur if death be my portion? I am old, I am mutilated, I am weary of life. If I die I die, and for the safety of the white people. It may be, Señor, that, as says the good Padre, Cocom shall go to the heaven of the Christians. With the Virgin such going rests. Jack found no words to reply to this speech, and remained silently thinking of how he could save the old man from death. He had as yet arrived at no conclusion, when Don Miguel appeared with his
- 59. niece on the floor of the azotea. Dolores ran towards Jack and threw herself into his arms. Querido, she said in a tender voice, my good uncle tells me of your scheme. It is that of which you spoke to me. It may save Tlatonac from savage foes, and thus do I aid you to the extent of my powers. She held out the opal towards him. You may lose it altogether, Dolores. No matter, Juanito. It may save the city. And you consent to this sacrifice, Don Miguel? Yes, Señor. I think it will turn aside this host of savages. With them away, we can hope to conquer Xuarez. Otherwise—— Maraquando stopped suddenly, and made a gesture of despair. Of course it is merely an experiment, said Jack, doubtfully. But one which must be successful, cried Dolores, quickly. Querido, can you doubt that, after what we saw in the sacred city? As the god speaks through the opal, so will the Indians act. Let it dart, then, its blue ray, and drive them back to their forests. You are sure you can make it shine blue, Cocom? Señor, said the old man, with great dignity, I give my life to prove that this shall be so. Jack took the opal from the outstretched hand of Dolores. So be it! he cried, fervently. The opal has brought the Indians to Tlatonac; the opal shall send them back again to Totatzine. Tim suddenly made his appearance with a face full of excitement.
- 60. Jack! Señor Maraquando! he said, quickly, in Spanish, the messenger you sent to spy on the Indians at Chichimec has returned. What does he say, Señor Correspoñsal? That the whole host of Indians are marching from Chichimec, and will be camped round the walls at dawn. Dios! We are lost! No, cried Jack, brightly, we are saved! What the deuce will save us, Jack? asked Tim, in English. This! Duval held up the harlequin opal. A ray of sunlight struck the jewel, and a blue ray darted out like a tongue of steel. Bueno! said Cocom, stolidly, the Chalchuih Tlatonac prophesies peace.
- 61. CHAPTER VI. THE LUCK OF THE OPAL. The red ray dies in the opal stone, The god hath spoken, Arrow and bow and spear be broken, Red of war is the fiery token, And lo! in the zone, It pales, and fades, and faints, and dies, As sunsets wane in the eastern skies. The blue ray glows in the opal's heart, The god is smiling, Victims no more need we be piling, On altar stone for his dread beguiling; The blue rays dart To tell us war must surely cease, So in the land let there be peace. Jack at once proceeded to execute his project. Fortunately Padre Ignatius had gone south in The Iturbide, thinking his ministrations might be required by the wounded, else Duval would never have gained the good priest's consent to such a desecration of his chapel. As it was, Jack hoped to carry out his scheme, and restore the chapel to its original state before the return of the old man. The actual elevation of a heathen idol on the shrine of the Virgin, not being seen by Padre Ignatius, he would think less of the sacrilegious act, more especially when he would find on his return the altar in nearly the same state as when he left it. Being a Protestant, Jack had no scruples about the matter, and Cocom was such a queer mixture of paganism and Catholicism, that his views were not very decided. He believed in the Virgin certainly; but seeing that her altar
- 62. was required to save the city, Cocom thought that she surely would not object to the conversion for a time of her chapel into a heathen temple. Besides, if this was not done, the Indians would be sure to destroy the shrine, so it was best to make an attempt to avert such a disaster, even in such an illegitimate way, rather than risk the whole place being destroyed by the savages. This was Cocom's idea in the matter, therefore he proceeded to put an image of Huitzilopochtli in the place occupied by the cross. Father Ignatius would have died of horror had he witnessed such daring. All the afternoon they laboured to transfer the chapel into a semblance of the temple of the war-god, and at length succeeded in making it a very fair representation. Huitzilopochtli, his left foot decked with humming-bird feathers, was set up on the shrine itself, a small altar on which a fire was lighted burned before him, and the walls were draped with mats of featherwork and pictured linen, whereon were depicted the hideous forms of Aztec deities. From the roof, by a golden thread, hung the famous opal, spinning in the dim light. After some calculation, Cocom made a hole in the roof of the chapel, so that when the sun rose over the walls of the city his beams would pour through the opening and bathe the gem in floods of gold. Where Cocom had discovered all this idolatrous paraphernalia Jack could not make out, nor would the old Indian tell. But it confirmed Duval in his belief that in the near neighbourhood of Tlatonac the natives still worshipped the gods of their ancestors, for the celerity with which Cocom had produced statue, pictured linen, and altar, pointed to the existence of some hidden temple close at hand. In fact, despite Cocom's asseverations to the contrary, Jack began to be doubtful as to his really being a Christian, for he betrayed far too much knowledge of paganism in its worst form to be quite orthodox. One thing, however, was certain, that, pagan or not, Cocom was greatly incensed against Ixtlilxochitli for maiming him, and was doing his best to thwart the plans of the savage old priest.
- 63. Things having been thus arranged, towards sunset Jack tried to persuade Cocom to return with him to the city, and leave the opal to work out its own spell. This the obstinate octogenarian refused to do, averring that without his personal superintendence the scheme would fail. Jack unwilling that a man from whom he had derived so many benefits should be left unprotected amid a horde of bloodthirsty savages, insisted on remaining with him to keep vigil during the night. This offer Cocom also refused, and implored Jack to return at once to the city, and have the gates closed, as it was near sunset, and the Indian army would soon be close at hand. Leave me here, Señor, he said, with quiet obstinacy. It may be that I fall not into their hands. They may take the opal—that is sure —but they may not take me. If you remain, your white skin will attract their fury, and they may sacrifice you before that very altar you have assisted to rear. I am an Indian, a Maya. Dog does not bite dog. It may be that I shall escape. Not if Ixtlilxochitli can help it. Oh, that evil one! He would have my blood, I know, Don Juan. But behold, Señor, if I—as the Indians, my countrymen, think—took the opal from Totatzine, I now bring it back again. That may save me! But, Cocom—— Depart, Señor; I have my own plans. What says the proverb of the white people? 'Every one is master of his own soul.' Go! I save mine as I will! It seemed to Jack that Cocom was desirous of wearing the crown of martyrdom. However, it was useless to turn him from his purpose, as he was obstinately set on daring the fury of the Indians. Jack, for a moment, thought of employing force, and looked at the spare frame of the old man, with the idea of picking him up and bearing him inside the city. Perhaps something of his purpose showed itself in his
- 64. eyes, for Cocom suddenly darted out of the chapel and disappeared. Though he searched everywhere, Jack was unable to find him, so proceeded to the Puerta de la Culebra, and reported his arrival to Don Sebastian, who was stationed there in command of the guard. And the Indian, Señor? Refuses to come within, Don Sebastian. He says he is safe outside. De Ahumada shrugged his shoulders, and made the same remark as had Cocom some quarter of an hour before. Bueno! Dog does not bite dog. Then he ordered the gates to be closed, which was accordingly done. It was now too late to alter existing circumstances, and the whole chances of detaching the Indian host from the cause of Xuarez lay with Cocom and the opal. Jack went off to the Casa Maraquando, in order to inform Don Miguel of all that had been done, and then rewarded himself for that wearisome afternoon by chatting with Dolores. It had been deemed advisable, by Don Miguel, to keep Jack's scheme secret, lest, should the attempt fail, and the opal be lost, the populace should lose heart in the forthcoming struggle with Xuarez. So long as the opal was in the city, they deemed themselves invincible; so, whether the attempt to detach the Indians succeeded or failed, Maraquando determined that the people of Tlatonac should still think that the sacred stone was in the possession of his niece. Late that night Jack went on the walls with Tim, and together they watched the Indians gather round the walls. Above the Puerta de la Culebra was fixed a powerful electric light, which irradiated a considerable portion of the space beyond the gate. Without the walls there was quite a town, as the huts of the peons stretched away in long lines, alternating with palms, cacti, aloes, and densely foliaged ombú trees. Close to the gate these huts clustered thickly together,
- 65. but after a time became scattered, and finally ceased on the verge of the plains, where the ground was thickly covered with brushwood. The Indians, fearful of the guns protruding from the walls, and doubtful of the weird glare of the electric light, kept away beyond the line of huts, and finally camped in the open ground beyond. Notwithstanding the distance they kept from the town the powerful rays of electric light blazed full on their camp, and caused them considerable uneasiness. The two Englishmen could see their tall, dark forms, gliding like ghosts through the white radiance, and at times a mounted troop of horsemen would dash furiously across the circle of light, disappearing into the further darkness. Just below, a stone's throw from the wall, arose the little chapel of Father Ignatius, beneath whose roof Cocom, with the opal, awaited the dawn. For some hours Jack watched the strange sight that savage picture, starting out of the surrounding darkness, and ultimately retired to his house, hopeful that before noon of the next day all the Indians would have disappeared. Tim remained behind, talking to Don Sebastian, and scribbling notes in his book; but at last he also went to rest, and the wall was left in possession of De Ahumada and his guard. All night long the electric light flashed its beams on the camp, so as to guard against an unexpected attack by the Indians. At dawn, the savages were up and doing before sunrise. They gathered together in groups, and talked of how they were to attack this formidable city, whose colossal walls bid defiance to their puny weapons. They could see soldiers moving along the ramparts, the black muzzles of the guns frowning fiercely down, and wondered at the absolute indifference of the Republic, who thus permitted her hereditary enemies to camp before the gates of her principal city. Everything within the town was quiet, the gates were firmly closed, no peons were to be seen moving about the suburbs, and the
- 66. Indians, blackening the plain with their thousands of men and horses stood perplexed before this intensely silent town. The east was flaming redly over the ocean waves. The Indians could see the long line of battlements black against the clear crimson sky. No wind blew across the desert, and the great banner of the opal hung motionless from its tall staff. Suddenly, in the red sky, a yellow beam shot up into the cold blue of the zenith; another and another followed, spreading like a gigantic fan. The savages threw themselves on their knees, and held up their hands in supplication to the great deity, who was even now being invoked with sacrifice in the hidden town of Totatzine. The gold of the sky seemed to boil up behind the walls of the town, as though it would run over in yellow streams. Then the dazzling orb appeared, and fierce arrows shot across the green suburbs to the sandy desert, where those thousands of naked Indians were kneeling. Suddenly a man started in surprise, and looked inquiringly at his companions. They listened as he had done, and also looked astonished. In a miraculously short space of time the whole host were in a state of commotion. Those in front stood still in a listening attitude, those behind pressed forward to hear this miracle which had startled their companions. Loud and shrill arose the song from the chapel of Padre Ignatius. It was the hymn of the opal daily chaunted by the priests of Huitzilopochtli in the city of Totatzine. The chiefs hastily gathered together, and consulted as to the meaning of this prodigy. Never before had the sacred song been heard beyond the shrine of the sacred city, and now its music was thrilling through the still morning air under the very walls of the capital. The mystery must be solved at any cost, and commanding their warriors to wait in the camp, all five chiefs, the leaders of the host, flung themselves on their horses, and galloped bravely up to the chapel. It was a dangerous thing to do, for at any moment those terrible guns might vomit forth fire and death; but the chiefs did not
- 67. care. Fanaticism, dread of the gods, was their most powerful characteristic, and dismounting from their horses, they entered the door of the chapel whence the chaunt of the opal proceeded. At the entrance they stood transfixed with surprise, and for the moment deemed they were in the Shrine of the Opal at Totatzine. Half-veiled by clouds of white smoke rolling upward from a small altar, they could see the terrible features of Huitzilopochtli, in all his blood-stained glory. The mats of feather-work hung glittering from the walls; they marked the grotesque visages of their deities scowling from pictured walls, and behind the altar, the hidden minstrel chaunted the hymn of the opal. The opal! There it hung in the centre of the white smoke. A ray of golden light, like a finger from heaven, smote it with terrible glory. It was turning rapidly, as they had seen it in the temple of the god at Totatzine. Chalchuih Tlatonac! they cried, and all five prostrated themselves before the sacred gem. High and shrill rang out the song from the hidden singer, and the chiefs, with reverential awe, watched the spinning opal. Red, yellow, blue, green, the rays flashed out jets of many-coloured fire every second. It began to revolve more slowly. Slower and slower! a pause!—it hung motionless, and a ray of azure shone benignly from its breast. The song ceased, and a tall man, arrayed in white garments, came from behind the shrine, holding a blue cloak full length in his arms. This was the ritual prescribed at the shrine of Huitzilopochtli when the god spoke through the opal. The god proclaims peace! His voice broke the spell. The Indians dashed forward, and strove to seize him, but he eluded their grip, and vanished.
- 68. Peace! Peace! Peace! they heard him cry three times. Their attention was fixed on the opal, and they did not pursue him. The sacred stone! cried the supreme chief; we must bear it back to the shrine of the god. Forgive us, oh, holy one. He snapped the stone off the string, and darted out of the door, followed by his four companions. At the door an old Indian, now divested of his sacerdotal garments, met them, and rushed on their principal with a cry of anger. The opal! Give me back the sacred gem! Cocom! cried the chief, raising his tomahawk. It was thou who thieved the gem! Die, vile wretch, who desecrated the shrine of the god. His companions restrained his wrath. The fear of the opal was on them. Nay, Tezuco. The god says peace! The stone burns blue rays. Bind him, then, and we will take him to Totatzine; there to be sacrificed on the altar of the offended god. In a moment Cocom, in spite of his struggles, was thrown across the back of the horse of one of the chiefs, and they all rode off rapidly towards the camp. In the centre of the throng, Tezuco halted, and held up his hand. Therein flashed the opal, and a cry of delight arose from the host, who in a moment recognised the gem, and at once prostrated themselves before its glory. Children of the war-god. This hath been given to us again. We saw the stone revolve—we saw it stay. Blue was the ray of the gem. Blue, my children, is the sign of peace. Huitzilopochtli, the lord of war, is appeased. He proclaims peace. No longer wait we here. To Totatzine!
- 69. To Totatzine! roared the vast host, and, at a signal, rushed for their horses. War, plunder, Xuarez, all was forgotten. The blue ray of the opal proclaimed peace, and this vast host, laying down its arms, departed at the bidding of the god. The townspeople on the walls of the city saw with amazement the Indians suddenly, without any apparent reason, strike their camp, and file off in long lines towards the north. Astonished at the sight, Don Sebastian sent off a message to the President. In a quarter of an hour he arrived at the Puerta de la Culebra, followed by Jack and Tim. Behold, Señor! cried Jack, triumphantly pointing to the myriads tramping across the plain. Did I not speak truly? The opal has done its work. The opal! The opal! murmured those around him, and the cry being caught up by the populace, passed from one mouth to another. The crowd on the walls, seeing in the departure of the Indians the influence of the opal, began to cry out madly. They deemed that the opal was still within the walls of Tlatonac. Viva el opale! El Chalchuih Tlatonac! Bueno! said Maraquando, with satisfaction, shaking Jack by the hand; you were right, Señor. The Indians will give us no more trouble. Now we can crush Xuarez in the south. Señor de Ahumada open the gates! In a few moments His Excellency, followed by Jack, Tim, and Don Sebastian, was galloping in the direction of the chapel. They reached it, dismounted, and entered. The opal was gone and Cocom also! I knew we would lose the opal, said Jack, cheerfully; but I thought they would kill Cocom. Fortunately they have only taken him prisoner.
- 70. To reserve him for a more cruel death in Totatzine, Señor, replied Maraquando, his delight slightly damped. He has served the Republic well. I would he could have been saved. Poor devil! murmured Tim, in English, as they remounted their horses. In any case, Jack, his death has saved the Republic. Now the savages have gone away, it won't be difficult to thrash Don Hypolito. At the city gates a new surprise awaited them. Don Rafael, mounted on a mustang, came galloping through the gate, and reined up his steed in front of his astonished father. My father! Great news; good news! I have just returned in The Montezuma. We have captured The Cortes and the transports. Don Miguel looked incredulous. This news, coming after the departure of the Indians, seemed too good to be true. It is true, my father, said Rafael, proudly. By noon to-day you will see them in the harbour. Now Don Hypolito has no fleet. Hurrah! cried Jack, tossing his hat in the air. The luck of the opal! Those near repeated his exclamation. It swelled into a roar, and throughout Tlatonac only one cry could be heard, Vive el opale.
- 71. CHAPTER VII. UNDER THE OPAL FLAG. Marching away; joyous and gay, Rank upon rank with a splendid display, Leaving the city at breaking of day. Riding along, gallant and strong, Round us the populace tearfully throng, Greeting our going with patriot's song. Under our feet, flower-buds sweet; Tread we in marching through plaza and street, Never our kinsfolk again may we meet. Laurels to earn; foemen to spurn; Only for glory we anxiously yearn, Conquerors all we will hither return. Juan, said Dolores, seriously, I believe the opal brought us bad fortune. While it was in the city, Janjalla fell, Don Francisco died, and all went wrong. Now it is lost, the Indians have departed, the fleet of Xuarez is destroyed, and everything promises well for the future. That is true, in one sense, yet wrong in another, replied Jack, smiling. You must not forget that it was through the opal the Indians departed, and while it was in Tlatonac, The Pizarro was sunk, and the two other warships captured. I suppose never again shall I behold the opal, Juanito? Not unless you care to pay a second visit to Totatzine.
- 72. Dolores shuddered. The memory of their peril in the hidden city was a painful one. Recent events had not obliterated the recollection of that terrible journey to the coast through the tropical forest. I would certainly not care about seeing Totatzine again, querido. And yet I would—if only to save Cocom! It is impossible to save Cocom, responded Jack, a trifle sadly. The only way to do so would be to lead an army to the hidden city, and rescue him. But how can such a thing be done in that narrow, secret way? Our soldiers would be cut to pieces in those rocky defiles. There is no other way, I suppose? I am not sure, Dolores. That cañon road leads to the outer world. If we could only enter the valley where Totatzine is built by that way, we might succeed in capturing the city; but I am afraid such an entrance will never be discovered. Ay di mi. Then poor Cocom is lost. It is his own fault, querida. I tried to save him; but he refused to obey my orders. Still, there is one chance of aiding him, though I am afraid but a faint one. And that, my Juan? Listen, angelito! The sacrifice of the cycle does not take place for two months. I have escaped it, but Cocom may now be selected by Ixtlilxochitli as the victim. If we can crush Xuarez and finish the war within the next few weeks, it may be that we can march troops to the sacred city, and save his life. But how can you get to the city? By the secret way? No; by the cañon road. See, Dolores! I have an idea!
- 73. They were sitting on the azotea, two days after the Indians had retreated from Tlatonac. Rafael had just left them, full of glee at the proposed expedition to Janjalla, and it was then that Dolores had made the remark about the opal which lead to the conversation regarding Cocom, Totatzine, and the cañon road. In her lap Dolores had a pile of flowers, which she was arranging for the use of the house. Jack took a handful of these, and, kneeling down on the floor of the azotea, proceeded to illustrate his theory by constructing a map with the blossoms. Behold, my own! he said, deftly placing a bud here and there, this rose is Totatzine, situate fifty miles from the coast in a straight line. Here is Tlatonac, indicated by this scarlet verbena. From the point where we embarked in the canoe to the capital is twenty miles. I understand, said Dolores, much interested in this explanation. From Totatzine to the point where we embarked, and from thence to Tlatonac, is what we call a right angle. Now, if I draw a straight line from the capital in a slanting direction, you can see that it passes through Totatzine. I see that, querido! but the third line is longer than the other two. It is longer than each of the other two lines if you take them separately. Shorter if you take them together. You do not know Euclid, Dolores, else you would discover that any two sides of a triangle are together greater than the third side. Wait a moment, Juanito! exclaimed Dolores, vivaciously. From Totatzine to the point where we embarked is fifty miles, from thence to Tlatonac twenty miles—in all, seventy miles. But by your reasoning this third line is not seventy miles. Of course not! Still I believe it is quite seventy miles from Tlatonac to Totatzine by this new way.
- 74. How so? Because we cannot go thither in a straight line. If we went by this one I have drawn, the distance would be much shorter than by the secret way of the sea. But as we have to follow the railway it is a longer journey—quite seventy miles. See! This is Cuavaca, at the foot of Xicotencatl—thirty miles from Tlatonac; from Cuavaca to the terminus of the railway it is twenty miles; from thence to Totatzine possibly another twenty—in all seventy miles. So you see that the distance each way, owing to the configuration of the country, is precisely the same. Yes; but what of that? Can you not see? At the point where the railway stops it is only twenty miles to Totatzine. Now, if, as I suspect, there is a road leading up the cañon to the city, the distance from the termination of the railway works to that road cannot be very far. If, therefore, we discover the hidden road, we can take our troops up by rail, march the rest of the distance, and enter Totatzine through the mouth of the cañon. Oh! cried Dolores, astonished at this idea. And you propose to attempt this entrance? If it can be found. Unfortunately Cocom is the only Indian who could supply such information, and he is a prisoner to Ixtlilxochitli. But if he knew of this cañon road, why did he not lead us by that way instead of towards the coast? You forget the whole country is overrun by Indians. We could not have disguised ourselves as pilgrims had we gone by the cañon road. That is evidently the secular path. The other way to the coast is sacred. It might be done, Juanito.
- 75. Yes; but it cannot be done till Xuarez is conquered and the war is ended. Santissima! sighed Dolores, sadly; and when will that be? Very shortly. Now we have succeeded in getting rid of the Indians, we shall be able to crush Xuarez at one blow. When do you march south? To-morrow at the latest. Will Señor Felipe be back? No, I am afraid not. In three days I expect the yacht will return. By that time who knows but what we may not have conquered the rebels? Shortly afterwards this conversation came to an abrupt conclusion as Don Miguel sent a special messenger to call Jack to the Palacio Nacional. In those days Jack was a very important personage. Maraquando was so impressed by the way in which the Indians had been dealt with that he entertained a higher opinion than ever of Duval's capabilities, and frequently appealed to him for advice. Nor did this create any jealousy, for the Cholacacans were now beginning to regard Duval as one of themselves. He was going to marry the niece of their President; he was the engineer who had constructed the railway; he was deeply interested in the future of the Republic; so it was generally supposed that when the war was at an end he would be naturalized, a citizen of Cholacaca, and take up his abode there altogether. A clever, brilliant young man like Jack was a distinct acquisition to the country, and the liberal-minded Cholacacans welcomed him accordingly. From the deepest despair the city had passed into a state of great elation. With the death of Gomez, all the bad fortune of the Republic seemed to have vanished. Since Maraquando had seated himself in
- 76. the Presidential chair, all had gone well, and the superstitious Tlatonacians looked upon him as a ruler likely to bring good fortune to the Republic. Nor was such a belief to be wondered at, seeing how suddenly the tide of fortune had turned within the last few days in favour of the governmental party. The Indians had departed, and thus was Don Hypolito deprived at one swoop of half his power. The Cortes menaced by The Columbus, The Iturbide and the torpederas had surrendered, and now with the transports were lying in the harbour of the capital. Xuarez, by the loss of his fleet, was cut off completely from the north, and shut up in Janjalla with but six thousand troops. After these events had transpired, the Junta met in the hall of the Palacio Nacional to map out the coming campaign. The whole of the members were on the side of Maraquando. Before the peril which threatened the Republic in the south all party differences had disappeared, and the representatives of the several provinces united in upholding the policy of Don Miguel. This judicious unity was the salvation of the Republic. The capital was garrisoned by ten thousand troops plentifully supplied with cannon, ammunition, and rifles. This force was under the command of General Benito, who had been elevated to the command after the death of the ill-fated Gigedo at Janjalla. The troops were in a great state of excitement, as it was well known that they were no longer to be held back within the walls of the capital. Maraquando had decided to throw forward nine thousand men as far as Centeotl, and leaving one thousand to defend Tlatonac, try conclusions with the rebels in the open plains. At the second conference of the Junta, this decision was somewhat modified by the advice of Benito. That astute commander pointed out that in Janjalla lay the strength of Xuarez. If he was defeated at Centeotl, he could fall back on the southern capital, whereas, if that was in the power of the Government, he would have no chance of
- 77. retreat, and be thus crushed at one blow. The main thing, therefore, was to capture Janjalla, and deprive the rebels of this last refuge in case of defeat. It was Rafael who supported the General, and proposed a plan by which the southern city could be taken. Señores, cried Rafael, vehemently, what General Benito says is true. We must leave Xuarez no refuge. He must be crushed between our armies in the north and south. Behold, Señores, in the harbour of our city lie two warships taken from the enemy, now manned by faithful sailors of the Junta. Also the armed cruiser Iturbide, and the two torpedo-boats Zuloaga and Montezuma, one of which I have the honour of commanding. Give us, Señores, the order to steam south. Put two thousand troops on board of the transports. Then we will lie in the harbour of Janjalla, and bombard the town. As Don Hypolito has probably gone north with the bulk of his army to Centeotl, the town will be ill defended. In the end it must surrender, and then we can land our troops and push forward to gain the rear of the rebels. From the north, Señores, seven thousand men will march under the command of General Benito. Thus Xuarez will find himself between two armies, and be forced to surrender or submit to be cut to pieces. The rebels will be defeated and the war will be ended. This proposition commended itself to the Junta, and was ultimately adopted. At once the fleet, under the command of Captain Pedraza, was sent south, with instructions to bombard and capture Janjalla. Then to lead the troops and push forward to effect a conjunction with General Benito at Centeotl. The warships, the cruiser, torpederas, and transports, left the harbour of the capital that afternoon amid great excitement, and then the populace rolled from sea-gate to land-gate in order to witness the departure of the army for the south. As yet The Bohemian had not returned from Truxillo, a delay which vexed Tim mightily, as he wanted to send the boat off again with
- 78. fresh despatches. Besides, he knew that Philip would be annoyed at missing the battle which was to decide the fate of the war. When he had left for Truxillo, there had been no chance of the loyalists and rebels meeting in open battle; but of late events had developed so rapidly that it was impossible to delay matters further. The army was marching for Centeotl, and Philip was absent at Truxillo. Only one person was pleased at this. Eulalia was afraid of losing her lover in what promised to be a terribly sanguinary affair, and was therefore pleased that he was out of danger. She had not the Spartan spirit of her cousin, who, though downcast at the prospect of being separated from Jack, yet bade him march forward with the army to conquer the rebels, and made no attempt to detain him by her side. Two thousand infantry had embarked on board the transports for Janjalla, and now the army, consisting of five thousand foot and two thousand horse, left for the front by the Puerta de la Culebra. Maraquando was nominally Commander-in-Chief of the forces, but, his presence being required at Tlatonac, he left the conduct of the campaign to General Benito. The army of Janjalla, proceeding thither by sea, was commanded by Colonel Palo, and he was directed, when the southern city was captured, to march to Centeotl, and effect, if possible, a junction with the troops from the north. There were also forty field-guns, and a battery of gatlings, with a corps of engineers. Thus provided, the army of the Government deemed themselves invincible. When they set out, Maraquando solemnly delivered to Benito the great standard of the opal, which had never before left the walls of the capital. Now, in all its splendour, it floated over the heads of the soldiers, a shining star, with its glitter of feather-work and jewels, leading them south to victory. With that standard the army could scarcely conceive that there was any chance of defeat.
- 79. All signs of the Indians had disappeared. There was no doubt that, obeying the opal, they had retired to the sacred city, and there delivered the recovered treasure to the high priest. Doubtless Ixtlilxochitli, still desirous of aiding Xuarez, would stir them up to war; but before they could again emerge from the forests, General Benito hoped to cut the army of Don Hypolito to pieces, reduce the south to order, and then marching north, defeat the savage forces under the walls of the capital. The great strength of the Republic lay in the fact that by strategy they had succeeded in isolating Xuarez in the south. Owing to the loss of his fleet, he could no longer depend upon help from Acauhtzin, and now that his Indian allies had deserted him, he was forced to meet the Royalist army with a comparatively small army. On Monday afternoon the transports, filled with troops, and convoyed by the warships, left for Janjalla, and at dawn on Wednesday the army began to march out of the Puerta de la Culebra on its way to the south. Jack took a fond farewell of Dolores, and soothed her with promises of his speedy return. Don Miguel, with some members of the Junta, accompanied Benito some miles on his way, and then returned to the capital to wait the upshot of this bold attempt to end the war at a single blow. From Tlatonac the army marched to Chichimec, which they found in ruins. Hardly a soul was left in the town, for those who survived the massacre had fled southward to Puebla de los Naranjos. It was true that there, also, they would find but ruins. This they did not know, as the telegraph-wires had been cut by the Indians, but as those savages were between Chichimec and the capital, the unfortunate townspeople were only able to escape southward. Leaving Chichimec, Benito marched to Puebla de los Naranjos, and there found a considerable number of fugitives from the former city. He was informed that Centeotl still held out against the rebels, though Xuarez was besieging it hotly, and that Hermanita was
- 80. untouched by either savage or rebel. This news was very comforting, and desirous of reaching that town by nightfall, the General pushed forward his troops by forced marches. By eight o'clock the army came in sight of Hermanita, and were joyfully greeted by its citizens, who threw open their gates to receive these whom they justly regarded as their deliverers. That night the troops occupied the town. Centeotl was but twenty miles further on, and Benito was desirous of ascertaining the position of Xuarez before venturing to give battle. He sent out Indian spies, and these speedily brought reports as to the numerical strength of the rebels. It appeared that Xuarez had in all about seven thousand troops, as he had been joined by several of the smaller towns of the Republic. He had left but five hundred to garrison Janjalla, never for a moment dreaming that, guarded as was the town by The Cortes, it would be attacked by the loyalists from the sea. Now having lost his sole remaining warship, he could not help seeing that his position was desperate. By his spies, he learned that the army under Benito was camped at Hermanita, and that Janjalla was being bombarded by the fleet of the Junta. At one time he thought of falling back on Janjalla, concentrating all his force within its walls, and holding out against the loyalists, until reinforced by his Indian allies. As yet he knew not that they had deserted him and withdrawn to their forests. Had he been aware of his isolated position, he might have come to terms with the Junta, but relying on the aid of the savages, and trusting to Ixtlilxochitli's promises, he felt confident that he would gain a victory. As Janjalla was being bombarded by the warships, he decided not to fall back there, as he would but expose his troops to a double danger: the land army of Benito and the bombs from the sea. What he proposed to do was to meet Benito at Centeotl, defeat his army, and then either occupy that town, and hold out till his allies came south, or march north to effect a conjunction with them before
- 81. the capital. As to Janjalla, he could do nothing to relieve it. It was absolutely necessary that he should keep his troops together, so as to meet the army of the Republic under Benito. Before Janjalla fell into the hands of the Junta, he hoped to conquer the land forces. It was all a chance, and he fully recognised that his position was most perilous. The only hope he had of turning the tide of fortune in his favour was to be joined by the Indians from the north. The warships had left Tlatonac on Monday afternoon, and General Benito, knowing the weak garrison at Janjalla, calculated that the city would succumb to the bombardment by Friday at the latest. It was now the morning of that day, and he determined to march his troops forward to meet the rebel army. From Janjalla, from Hermanita to Centeotl, it was but twenty miles each way; and assuming that Janjalla was captured, as there was every reason to believe, General Benito hoped that the two thousand troops from the south, and his own forces from the north would meet at Centeotl about the same time. With this idea, he marched with his full strength to Centeotl, for now that the Indians had vanished, he had no fear of being attacked in the rear, and if forced to retreat, could fall back on Hermanita, that city being defended by its ordinary garrison. Don Hypolito, so as not to expose his troops to the double fire of town and plain, left the shelter of the walls, and occupied a low range of hillocks running at right angles from the city. Between him and Benito flowed the river broad and sluggish. By noon the armies faced one another. At one o'clock the first shot was fired, and the battle of Centeotl began.
- 82. CHAPTER VIII. THE BATTLE OF CENTEOTL.
- 83. The squadrons move across the plain, Beneath a rain Of deadly missiles falling, falling. Oh, could we gain Those heights beyond, where guns are calling, Of deeds appalling, One to the other not in vain, Then might we conquer in the fray, And victors be e'er close of day. The stream lying between the two armies was called the Rio Tardo, from its slow-flowing current, and emerging from the interior mountains, pursued its way in many windings to the sea. Centeotl was built on the left bank, so that the loyalists were unable to occupy the town without crossing the river, and to do so they would have had to force a passage at the point of the sword. The battle took place about three miles from the city, on a large plain streaked here and there with low ranges of sandy hills, and intersected by the broad stream of the Rio Tardo. On one of these ranges Don Hypolito had planted his artillery, and swept the river with his heavy guns. He also disposed his infantry along the banks, whence they kept up a regular fire of musketry on the loyalists. The bridge at Centeotl had been destroyed prior to the arrival of Benito, so that there was no way of crossing, save under fire from the foot soldiers, or in the teeth of the battery posted on the sandy ridges. Behind this battery Xuarez held his cavalry in reserve, lest the loyalists should accomplish the passage of the river, and the combatants come to closer quarters. Between Centeotl and the position he had taken up, he placed a line of some thousand horse, with the object of preventing an attack by the besieged in his rear.
- 84. In the disposition of his troops, he showed a wonderful skill in taking advantage of the capabilities of the ground, and General Benito saw plainly that it would be with considerable difficulty that he could effect a crossing of the Rio Tardo. On his side there were no ranges of hills upon which he could post his artillery, or by which he could protect his men. Nothing but a desolate plain covered with brushwood incapable of offering the least shelter against the devastating fire of the insurgents. His only way of crossing the river was to silence the battery on the sandhills. With this object, he brought up his field-guns, and opened a heavy cannonade on the heights beyond. The rebels replied, and for over two hours this cross fire went on without intermission on either side. Benito trusted by this gunnery to deceive the insurgents as to his real purpose, which was to attempt a crossing with five hundred horse three miles further up the stream, near the ruins of the bridge. By doing so he could take Xuarez in the rear, and while the rebels were employed in facing this new danger from an unexpected quarter, hoped to cross the river with his full force. Don Hypolito evidently suspected this stratagem, for he kept a sharp eye on the disposition of the loyalist army in the direction of Centeotl. When he saw a body of horse move citywards to effect a crossing, he at once sent a troop of cavalry to dispute the passage. Benito seeing this, despatched a battery of six gatlings to support his troops, trusting that under the cover of these guns playing on the enemy they could force the stream. At once Xuarez brought up his field-artillery, and in a short space of time the cannonading lower down the river was being repeated further up at the ruins of the bridge. The right wing of the loyalist army, consisting entirely of infantry, was thrown forward in the direction of Centeotl, and kept up a fusillade, under cover of which the cavalry in scattered groups tried to cross. The insurgents, however, could not be dislodged from the
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