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Lidice |
Unsuspecting
eyes might mistake Lidice, a pleasant strip of countryside just
outside of Prague, for an oddly situated national park. From the
viewing platform on the crest of its northern slope a few nondescript
public artworks - grey statues ringed with stone met by a few winding
paths - can be made out at the bottom of the valley's shallow basin.
A bright spring day has brought people from the neighbouring villages
out to play frisbee and tussle with their dogs on the grass. If
people remember what this place is famous for it goes unspoken. On
the night of 10th June 1942 German soldiers arrived in the
then-village to destroy it. They gathered the men together at Horak's
Barn and proceeded systematically to shoot them. Nine other men, who
were not from Lidice but whose bad luck it was to be stranded after
dark in the village, were met with a brief reprieve. The local mayor,
tasked with pointing out the men to the SS troops, let it be known
they were not locals. They would be taken to Prague and later shot
anyway. As soon as his work was done the mayor was also shot. The
women were taken to Ravensbruck; most of the children were sent to
the extermination camp at Chelmno, a decision made personally by
Adolf Eichman. The buildings themselves were not only ruined but
literally pulled from the ground. Nothing was to remain. In the
middle of Lidice's bare northern slope stands a memorial - its text
in English, Czech and German - to the children. On the day of our
visit a few flowers set around it are tugged lightly by a fresh
spring breeze. Second-hand toys addressed from England sit looking up
at the huddled statues. The eyes of the children gaze past us in
either fear or reproach.
Almost
immediately after its destruction, Lidice became a cause
celebre. A famous campaign
in Stoke-on-Trent galantly, if naively, pledged to rebuild the
village entirely. Streets, towns and factories around the non-fascist
world were renamed in tribute to it. The reason for this propaganda
victory - considering the relative quiet surrounding other Nazi
crimes at this point in the war - was its direct relation to the
successful assassination of Rienhard Heydreich, Reichsprotektor
of Bohemia and Moravia, in Prague just days before. Though the two
assassins bore no connection to Lidice, the occupying Nazi regime, in
a blind fury coaxed on by Hitler's extraordinary viciousness, decided
vengeance was necessary no matter the victims. This was hardly an
isolated conclusion in Nazi history (another being the desperate,
orgiastic destruction of Warsaw following the 1944 Uprising), but it
lit a very specific torch. The Czechoslovak Government-in-exile,
still headed by the frenetic plotter and pre-war President Edvard
Beneš, had been behind the startling, courageous murder of Heydrich
by two Czechoslovak agents. Flown over from London, and parachuting
into the Bohemian countryside, Jan Kubiš and Josef Gabčík, later
joined by Jozef Valčík, had studied the movements of Heydrich for
months before confronting his unprotected limo on a bend in a road in
the Libeň district of Prague. It was Kubiš who hurled a bomb at the
Blond Beast, already on his feet and aiming at Gabčík, whose
English Sten had jammed in his hands. The bomb destroyed the car and
chaos quickly ensued. Heydrich looked at first to have survived.
Then, after an operation removing his spleen, he was hit by a fever
and shortly died. Apoplectic with rage - apparently at Heydrich's
naivety as much as the gall of the Czechs - Hitler ordered revenge.
Nazi investigators had soon 'uncovered' conspiratorial connections of
the Resistance with Lidice.
The
story has been told many times, a fact repeatedly recounted in
Laurent Binet's own racy, buoyant effort, HHhH.
Throughout Binet's book, established fact intersects with the reports
of others and the author's own memory:
[New information] has forced me to qualify my opinion of Seven Men at Daybreak, the Allan Burgess novel I had previously thought rather fanciful. I had been particularly skeptical about the swastika branded on Kubis’s ass. I also condescendingly picked up on a glaring error regarding the colour of Heydrich’s Mercedes which the author claimed was green.... Anyway, I’m probably attaching too much importance to what is, at the end of the day, just a background detail. I know that. In fact, it is a classic symptom of neurosis. I must be anal-retentive. Let’s move on……
...I asked Natacha about the Mercedes. She remembers it being black as well.
With
some cunning, Binet transforms his own neurosis into a narratorial
device. By framing this obsessive concern with detail as a quest for
truth, however, Binet dodges over-familiar postmodern reflexivity.
Though the novel's pre-history, its method of production and its
factual and textual shortcomings, are made explicit parts of the
story, this is done for quite specific ends. Here truth is expressed
in the form of scrupulous self-doubt and self-qualification.
Motivating Binet's modesty is a thoroughly traditional, realist
concern with justice and the passing of historical judgement. Memory
- that notoriously unreliable relayer of facts - constantly
interweaves itself with established truths, undermining them and also
adapting them. Thus the author's own memories of Košice, the
Slovakian town where he was once stationed as a French teacher to the
Slovakian military, forms the basis of Jozef Gabčík's introduction
to the story. As it turns out, Gabčík couldn't have been in Košice
in 1938 because it had already been absorbed by Hungary. How and when
did Gabčík and Kubiš first meet? Binet asks himself. "I'm not
yet sure if I'm going to visualize (that is, 'invent') this meeting
or not. If I do, it will be the clinching proof that fiction does not
respect anything." Inevitably the novel ends with Gabčík and
Kubiš meeting for the first time on a rusty boat on the moonlit
Baltic ("like in a Nezval poem").
By
assuming that all fictional intrusions on the facticity
of history are artificial, Binet permits himself errors but only
insofar as he tries to atone for them. The overriding goal is to
overcome one's factual shortcomings by acknowledging them, and
through such acknowledgement pass judgement on history itself. Thus
by passing judgement, Binet can bring the protagonists of the past to
justice. It is in the grey areas between which parts of history -
Tukhachevsky's defeat outside Warsaw and Heydrich's role in his later
downfall under Stalin; or the ghosts of the thousands of anonymous
Czech resistance members who are "haunting" Binet with
their demands for inclusion - truly form part of the story that
Binet's concern with justice is most pronounced. Here the author
explicitly takes on the role of a historical judge.
Justice
can be understood in two related senses: on the one hand there is
just representation, or the writer's responsibility to do justice to
her subject. On the other, there is the need to bring people to
justice through the passing of certain normative moral judgements.
Binet deals with the former on a regular, explicit basis (though in
French justice would
be substituted here for honneur).
The book is punctuated at steady intervals with Binet's concerns
about his own adequacy to the task of representation. More
controversial for contemporary readers is the latter notion,
conferred by the author and legitimate only if one accepts the right
of the author to pose as transhistorical moral judge. Thus naming and
describing the families who aided and sheltered Gabčík and Kubiš
gives them fitting and appropriate representation and also confers
justice on their sacrifices (they would mostly be murdered after
Heydrich's assassination). However, it is only when the story comes
to the climactic moment of Lidice's destruction that Binet allows his
concern with judgement and justice to directly seize the narrative.
As
it happens Kubiš and Gabčík were still alive when the Nazis
attacked Lidice. In fact, the assassins were hiding in a church on
Karlovo náměstí (Charles Square) in Prague. Binet tells us that
they knew about the Nazis' terrible retribution. The assassins sat
with their comrades in a dank cellar and could do nothing but blame
themselves for the town's destruction. No amount of pleading would
convince them they were not personally responsible for the slaughter.
Indeed they were sure that Heydrich's death had achieved nothing.
"Perhaps I am writing this book," Binet says, "to make
them understand that they are wrong." The obsessive compiling of
facts is thus less significant for Binet than justifying the
assassination of Heydrich.
In
the same chapter, Binet makes clear what exactly the destruction of
Lidice meant for the world resistance to Nazism:
With
Lidice, the scales have fallen from the whole world's eyes. In the
days that follow, Hitler will understand. For once, it is not his SS
who will be let loose, but an entity he does not fully understand:
world opinion. Soviet newspapers declare that, from today, people
will fight with the name of Lidice on their lips - and they're
right... By reacting like the crude psychopath he is (rather than the
head of state that he also is), Hitler will suffer his most
devastating defeat in a domain he once mastered: by the end of the
month the propaganda war will be irredeemably lost.
That
was no mean feat in a world where European ruling classes had long
been anticipating, and indeed making, compromises with Nazism. World
opinion aside, however, the actual job of bringing history's
protagonists to justice is undertaken by the novel itself. More than
a catalogue of events, HHhH
attempts to formulate a moral judgement about Heydrich's
assassination and the consequent destruction of Lidice; in other
words, a kind of post-mortal redemption of the assassins ("I am
writing this book to make them understand..."). Redemption
through testimony; justice through perspicacious analysis of the
facts; judgement through the exercise of universal moral norms. Binet
himself admits he's a scion of Communist parents and a believer in
French Enlightenment values. Whatever the self-conscious, postmodern
form, Binet's ambition is to conjure a classically modern moral
universe.
There
is something of Hegel's system of historical judgement to this
ambition, the account of which given by Angelica Nuzzo in her book
Memory,
History, Justice in Hegel (2012)
I am entirely indebted to. Nuzzo understands Hegel as having two
separate philosophical models of historical process, the cumulative
moment of which comes in the Philosophy
of Right when
Hegel describes how the ethical collective system of historical
understanding is "overcome"(aufgehoben)
by a properly universal system of judgement - in Hegel's own words,
from "objective" to "absolute", in which
Weltgeschichte
(world
history) emerges as Weltgericht
(the
world's tribunal). This being Hegel, there is no fine line drawn
between the working of the logical system and the actual material
stuff of history upon which the interpretive intellect acts (ideas
being history's motive force). Nuzzo argues that historical judgement
and justice are systemically possible because, in a Hegelian way,
history is grounded in the logic of the dialectic. In sum, history is
not just the accumulation of random effects, of chaos producing
further unintended chaos, but proceeds via contradiction, and
contains conflictual stages which are themselves subject to the logic
Hegel describes as belonging to the dialectic.
What
does "absolute judgement" mean in the context of history?
Nuzzo separates the dialectical logic of history proper, which
achieves universality in art, philosophy and religious
representation, from memory, which is always enclosed by particular
ethical-collective "national" consciousness. In short, the
collective memory of particular national identities - subject to the
social structuring of meaning - is not adequate for historical
judgement. One cannot adequately write history from a particular,
narrow perspective, but must aim for this universal possibility of
judgement and justice. To take a concrete example, no adherence to,
say, Serbian or Croatian "national consciousness" will
provide a convincingly full explanation of the Balkan Wars of the
1990s. That task falls to a kind of "absolute"
philosophical judgement, though how one articulates such an unbiased
judgement is hard to say.
To
return to Binet's HHhH,
the
textual demand for historical justice, or the demand for a kind of
redemption of the novel's heroes and condemnation of its villains,
stems from just such a Hegelian urge for universality - that is, an
urge for a form of judgement not constrained by particular
considerations but one able to take a "God's-eye-view" of
historical events. Appropriately for a Hegelian project, however,
historical judgement is interwoven throughout the novel with its
opposite - the act or process of remembrance. Yet whereas the latter
always takes place within a particular ideological configuration of
social values, history proper exists in a space of "absolute"
or universal judgement.
This
brings us to a crucial moral impasse pertaining to three events, all
of which are covered in Binet's book. Can the decision to assassinate
Heydrich be justified, despite the destruction of Lidice and the
terror inflicted after it, because of its achievement in mobilizing
anti-Nazi sentiment? And does it matter that the widest propaganda
success in the wake of the assassination came about as a result of
Lidice's destruction? Debates about the wisdom - on the part,
especially, of Beneš, comfortably housed in Britain - of the
assassination of Heydrich will continue interminably. Aside from
Lidice and later the village of Ležáky (which was also utterly
destroyed), an estimated 1,357 Czechs were executed and 3,188 arrests
made as a result of the Heydrichiada
(the
month-long terror that resulted from Heydrich's assassination). It
was, in the assessment of the historian Mary Heimann, "the most
horrifying chapter of the war" for protectorate Czechs "since
the brutal assault on the universities at its beginning. Worse,
because it resulted in the liquidation of the underground resistance,
it represented the loss of the bravest and most steadfast patriots,
the flower of the Czech nation." Being the "politically
savvy" operator he was, Beneš was able to capitalize on
Heydrich's assassination for the benefit of his own propaganda
effort. Even at the time UVOD
had advised the government-in-exile that the assassination of a Czech
quisling would have been a wiser tactical move. But Beneš plumped
for a major German target, reprisals be damned. Binet, fulsome in his
praise for the exiled Czechoslovak president, will have none of this.
He sees the agents of Operation Anthropoid's sacrifice as among the
greatest of the war.
At
stake here is more than just the tactical salience of Beneš's
wartime decision-making or the heroism of Gabčík and Kubiš. The
thousands of Czechs murdered in the aftermath of Operation Anthropoid
beg a broader moral view. In a certain sense, and despite his streak
of heroic romanticism, Binet provides it. Historical fiction of the
type he creates in HHhH
escapes morally unanswerable questions of historical cause and
effect, and instead, by reflecting on the lives involved, produces a
representation of the aspect of a
priori
goodness of certain historical acts without having to measure them
against the unintended tragedies which followed from them. This,
then, might be the the value behind Hegel's dialectical "absolute"
judgement: not to paint the impossibly complex web of historical
interconnection, of cause and effect, in its entirety; but rather to
pronounce the universal, properly philosophical "goodness"
of acts - say, the assassination of Heydrich or the sheltering and
protection of his assassins by various families who put themselves at
extreme risk and very often died because of it - irrespective of
ethical or pragmatic considerations about such actions' effects. It
would be impossible to inhabit a day-to-day world ordered only by
such "absolute" philosophical considerations; art, however,
can provide the space for such reflections.
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