I have this book in my bookcase, “Fragebogen”, by Ernst von Salomon. It is story of his life under Nazism as answered by the 131 questions of the questionnaire (Fragebogen) used by the US military government for de-Nazification following World War II.
Von Salomon was in the Freikorps after World War I; the Freikorps was the fertile ground from which Ernst Rohm and others grew. Von Salomon’s first novel, Die Geächteten, (The Outlaws), tells the story of those years. He fought communists and took part in the assassination of Walter Rathenau, the Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic. Von Salomon wrote for some of the early journals that provided an intellectual underpinning for what became National Socialism.
Von Salomon broke with Nazism after 1933 and wrote film scripts for UFA. He and his Jewish wife survived the war and were imprisoned in1945 for their previous Nazi associations. Many people were swept up in the de-Nazification effort and held in camps until they could be processed. The most hard core were held in Oberammergau. Von Salomon was held in other camps.
Fragebogen, published in 1951, was one of the first books to examine the question about how Nazism happened and who was responsible for all that had happened. Germany was still digging out from the rubble and this book was picking at scabs that had finally closed but were not healed. The book questions the morality of Americans, that they should be sitting in judgment. This book helped set the tone for German thinking for the next three decades.
During my first years in Germany, from 1974 to 1977, many Germans had adopted a position of moral equivalence with Americans. They pointed to our sojourn in Southeast Asia as proof that we were not morally superior; morality was dictated by the victor in 1945. I would try to explain it to them, the words of Lincoln at Gettysburg, the ideals, the practicalities. But it often fell on deaf ears.
I was out of my depth then. Many of my discussions were with the companion of my first ex-wife’s grandmother. Herbert Frohbose was born in New York but returned to Germany during the 1920’s with his parents. He was a major in the Wehrmacht and spent the years from 1945 - 1955 in a Russian POW camp following the fall of Berlin. I was outmatched in those discussions as I had not developed the philosophical base for engaging with him. He is probably dead now (he, like most of the men who survived the Russian POW camps, came back with health problems) but I would like to address these topics with him again.
I think the arc started by von Salomon closed in 1979. That was the year the American miniseries, “The Holocaust” was shown on German television. Up to that point, holocaust deniers in Germany had an easy time of it. On more than one occasion, I had been in a gasthaus in some place away from US military presence and heard comments from the Stammtisch about how the stuff about the death camps had been made up, etc.
The series was presented with a panel discussion after the program’s airing. On the first night, the discussion ran toward subtle discreditation, with comments about how things were inaccurate and overdone. On the second through fourth nights, the panel was flooded with letters, pictures and memorabilia that substantiated the claims that the Holocaust had happened, and that it was far worse than it had been depicted in the miniseries. It provoked a spasm of national self-reflection. (Perhaps the pump had been primed by the Rot Armee Faktion and the death of Hans Martin Schleyer.) Many people had been living with these memories and pictures of the Holocaust and could not allow the truth to be untold.
I haven’t yet read Fragebogen. I’ve read other books about the Weimar Republic, the Freikorps and the inter-war period in Germany. But I remember the book from time to time and this article by John Hockenberry was one of those times.
John Hockenberry worked for the NBC network for many years, ending up on the show ‘Dateline’. Much of the article is about how network ‘news’ shows are not about news, but about ‘the emotional center’ of a story. If the story had one that could be exploited, then it could get on the air.
Hockenberry recounts these discussions with a sort of wide-eyed innocence that seems out of place. He was working in television, and, to quote Terry Semel, “television exists to sell advertising.” Television does not exist to tell the truth. Hockenberry seems to think it does. After all, television exploits a big lie with bald faced enthusiasm. The lie? That they are practicing Journalism. What is Journalism? Journalism is the process of providing, for the electorate, the information needed to make decisions in our democracy. This is so important that the Founders wrote freedom of the press into the first amendment to the Constitution.
Hockenberry doesn’t get it.
To get airtime, not only did serious news have to audition against the travails of Diana or a new book by Dr. Phil, but it also had to satisfy bizarre conditions. In 2003, one of our producers obtained from a trial lawyer in Connecticut video footage of guards subduing a mentally ill prisoner. Guards themselves took the footage as part of a safety program to ensure that deadly force was avoided and abuses were documented for official review. We saw guards haul the prisoner down a greenish corridor, then heard hysterical screaming as the guard shooting the video dispassionately announced, “The prisoner is resisting.” For 90 seconds several guards pressed the inmate into a bunk. All that could be seen of him was his feet. By the end of the video the inmate was motionless. Asphyxiation would be the official cause of death.
This kind of gruesome video was rare. We also had footage of raw and moving interviews with this and another victim’s relatives. The story had the added relevance that one of the state prison officials had been hired as a consultant to the prison authority in Iraq as the Abu Ghraib debacle was unfolding. There didn’t seem to be much doubt about either the newsworthiness or the topicality of the story. Yet at the conclusion of the screening, the senior producer shook his head as though the story had missed the mark widely. “These inmates aren’t necessarily sympathetic to our audience,” he said. The fact that they had been diagnosed with schizophrenia was unimportant. Worse, he said that as he watched the video of the dying inmate, it didn’t seem as if anything was wrong.
“Except that the inmate died,” I offered.
“But that’s not what it looks like. All you can see is his feet.”
“With all those guards on top of him.”
“Sure, but he just looks like he’s being restrained.”
“But,” I pleaded, “the man died. That’s just a fact. The prison guards shot this footage, and I don’t think their idea was to get it on Dateline.”
“Look,” the producer said sharply, “in an era when most of our audience has seen the Rodney King video, where you can clearly see someone being beaten, this just doesn’t hold up.”
“Rodney King wasn’t a prisoner,” I appealed. “He didn’t die, and this mentally ill inmate is not auditioning to be the next Rodney King. These are the actual pictures of his death.”
“You don’t understand our audience.”
“I’m not trying to understand our audience,” I said. I was getting pretty heated at this point–always a bad idea. “I’m doing a story on the abuse of mentally ill inmates in Connecticut.”
“You don’t get it,” he said, shaking his head.
Hockenberry doesn’t get it. The thrust of his article is that news organizations owned by large corporations (he talks at length about the ownership of NBC by GE) do not try to fulfill their role in our democratic apparatus. Journalists have tried to raise the ethical profile of their profession to that of medicine. But they don’t have a mantra like “first do no harm”. If they had one like “first tell the truth”, their attempts at ethics would have more plausablity. Instead, it seems to be “first get on the air.” Hockenberry doesn’t make a case for treatment of mentally ill people. He makes a case for getting a snuff film on the air.
I remember the book because I think it would be good for people to have a questionnaire that asks the questions about who we are as a nation and what we mean. We have had people sit in the Congress and say baldly that “I don’t know if waterboarding is torture.” I have come to think of these people as democracy deniers, in that they would deny democracy for the rest of us. Democracy is advanced citizenship and too many people think it is just a correspondence course that can be mailed in.