Immediately after the second world war, German people were required to watch documentaries about the horrors of the concentration camps before they could get their ration cards. But the fact that they went, Tony Judt points out in his book Postwar, didn’t mean they actually watched. “In the half-light of the projector, I could see that most people turned their faces away after the beginning of the film, and stayed that way until the film was over,” wrote the German author Stephan Hermlin many years later. “Today I think that turned-away face was indeed the attitude of many millions.” [...]
Our collective sense of responsibility for and engagement in these moments is similarly fickle. People say, “We won the war”, even if they didn’t fight, or “We won the World Cup”, even if they didn’t play. Indeed, one needn’t even have been born to identify with the triumph in question. The “we” is implicitly understood as an embrace. It spans time, place and agency. But few will ever say, in a similar vein: “We raped people” or “We massacred people”. For then, “we” is understood as an accusation. In these moments, individuality becomes the ultimate alibi. “What has that got to do with me? I wasn’t even alive then.”
Even when these atrocities occurred relatively recently, individuals insist on implausible deniability. When interviewing perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, Jean Hatzfeld noticed the men would not admit to participating until the line of questioning shifted from the informal, singular tu to the plural, formal vous. “Although each one is willing to recount, on his own, his experience of the genocide,” he noted, “they all feel the need to hide behind a more diluted syntax.” And so it is that power and glory has many parents while the brutality it takes to acquire and sustain it generally remains an orphan.
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