REMEMBERING

Meditations on the Past, Part 1

Adria and I are recently returned from time in Europe. We visited among other places Berlin, Prague, and Vienna. In these places we were confronted with the remnants of the still close past, the history of Naziism and of Soviet era communism. In thinking about this history, I’ve been thinking about the role of past in faith. We live in a time when many in our country find history—the study of the past—inconvenient. Finding history inconvenient has always been the way of authoritarian societies (see on this George Orwell’s 1984). But in the faith which many of us profess, the past plays a crucial role. It’s that role that I hope to explore in a series of posts I’m calling “Meditations on the Past.” In this first post in the series, I introduce two prophets: Isaiah and Gerhard Strassgschwandtner.

. . . . . . . . . .

Gerhard Strassgschwandtner wants us to remember what he believes has been forgotten in his native Austria. Forgotten there, and never understood in the US and perhaps other Western countries. Gerhard and his wife Karin Höfler own and operate the Third Man Museum in Vienna, dedicated to the 1949 movie by the same name. In the quirky manner singular to Gerhard (with the help of Karin’s keen eye for design), he has used the movie to center the moment in the history of Vienna when the ruined city and Austria transitioned, first, from Hitler and the Third Reich to partitioning under an uneasy alliance of allies, including the US and the Russians, and, second, to Austrian independence (May 15, 1955) all in the span of a decade. Gerhard Strassgschwandtner wants us to remember this not merely for antiquarian interest but because it illuminates the world in which we live. And warns us of what may come.

Gerhard

To understand Gerhard, we should begin, as he does, with the movie.  Written by Graham Greene, directed by Carol Reed, and starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten, The Third Man is as much about the city as it is about the story that holds the movie loosely together. At the time of the movie, the city was occupied, divided, along with the rest of Austria, into four sectors, each governed by one of the post-war powers: Russia, the UK, France, and the US. The central district of Vienna was governed jointly. Command rotated every month. 

Late in the war, when US bombers could finally reach Vienna, the city was extensively bombed. The movie shows us the ruined city and the desperate people who lived in it, scraping together what they can to stay alive. Starved of food and other supplies, the people were dependent on the black market for basic supplies, including medicine. The movie turns on a scheme to steal and market adulterated penicillin. Underneath it all, allowing criminals like Harry Lime (Orson Welles) to slip from sector to sector and from criminal scheme to criminal scheme, are the sewers. It’s the sewers, what lies under the city, that Gerhard would have us remember. What everyone would like to forget.

Beginning with Vienna’s buried Nazi past. Quoting Anthony Grenville from the Third Man Museum Catalogue, 

“. . . the city fell easily to the Nazis. The ecstatic reception extended to Hitler on his triumphal return to Vienna in 1938 exploded into a veritable orgy of antisemitic violence that took demonic delight in humiliating the defenceless Jews. Many Viennese supported the criminal Nazi regime at least passively, and they shared in the devastation—material and moral—of its defeat, emerging from the war into a world where the city’s physical destruction matched its moral bankruptcy. (93)

The Third Man story plays out mostly in the lives of two characters: Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), a naïve American who has misread his longtime friend Harry, and Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), a woman who has only her savvy, her looks, and, for a while at least, Harry to keep her alive. Anna is Vienna, desperate, trying only to survive, fond of the criminal Harry Lime even after he has betrayed her; in contrast, Holly is America, eager to help, to do the right thing, but often misreading reality. In the end, it’s not clear that Anna—and Vienna—can or will accept the help offered her. 

The movie captures well the moral complexity of Vienna post-WW2. In 1949 when the movie appeared, the fate of Vienna remained very much in doubt. It’s Nazi past was still raw and immediate; it remained to be sorted out what would happen to the city, whether it would, like Berlin, remain partitioned into an East Vienna and a West Vienna. And this past remains important for Vienna and Austria in the present moment.

 Gerhard believes that Austria has not owned up to this history. His museum exists to remind not only tourists but the people of the city of the choices that were made, of what lies beneath the present prosperity of Vienna. He’s convinced that this history has largely been forgotten. After the war, a generation passed with mostly silence in the schools and public arena about Austrian participation in the Third Reich. More Austrians, Gerhard claims, than Germans by percentage of the population were Nazis. Gerhard would also have Vienna and the rest of Austria remember how close it came to becoming a Soviet satellite along the lines of East Germany. It was only the steady hand of American policy and the generosity of the American people like CARE and the Marshall Plan that preserved the independence of Austria as a sovereign state. He regards this as a great American legacy—a legacy now at risk.

As Gerhard told us this story in his museum, surrounded by thousands of artifacts from the immediate post-war period, there was an urgency in his voice, speaking to us in our own time of forgetting. We stand, he urged us, in a place where we too must choose. Naziism did not die with Adolf Hitler. It remains an all-too-real political option in Austria and in the US.

Topography of Terror

Our tour group stood together not only in Gerhard’s museum, but in Berlin at the Topography of Terror, the site where once the buildings housing the SS and the Gestapo stood. In the instructional display at the Topography of Terror, signboards with pictures and text chronicle the rise of the Nazi state in Germany. As we walked from signboard to signboard, I took mental note of the steps already taken in our country in the direction of fascism: widespread adoption of the idea that not all Americans are true Americans (das Volk in Nazi-speak), militant action taken against marginalized people, consolidation of power into a single executive authority, creation of a quasi-official militia separate from the regular army, attacks on the press, concentration camps to imprison perceived enemies of the state, violating the constitution at will, and more.

Days later our group stood in Terezin, the “show camp” in Czech territory. It was to Terezin that the Nazis sent the Red Cross inspection teams. In order to reduce the Terezin population to manageable levels, they loaded thousands on rail cars and sent them for execution to Auschwitz. We stood by the remains of the rail line that carried those designated to die out of Terezin. And then, as if out of the Bible, we stood moments later in a windowless room in a small house which only recently was discovered to have been an underground synagogue. When a covering of paint was removed, on the wall was discovered the ancient Jewish prayer, “May our eyes see your return in mercy to Zion.” 

Isaiah

We are called to remember, and to remember intelligently, analytically, passionately, and accurately. There is perhaps no greater call to this kind of memory than a biblical passage that instructs us paradoxically not to remember—not to remember to remember better. Not to remember in order to remember deeper.

The passage is Isaiah 43:16-21. It begins with memory:

Thus, says Yhwh,

who set out a path in the sea,

a way in mighty waters,

who lured out chariot and rider,

army and militia

to where they lie down together,

never to rise again,

their flame snuffed out,

quenched like a wick. . .

This is, of course, not just any memory; it’s the canonical exodus memory, the origin story of ancient Israel, sung in ancient verse in Exodus 15: the people of Israel, long enslaved, having fled Egypt, stand before the implacable sea with the army of Pharaoh bearing down on them. In an act of faith, they step out, and miraculously their feet find a way through the sea created by Yhwh. Still in hot pursuit, the chariots of Pharaoh plunge in after the people, but instead of a path through the water, they find water swirling over them, and they drown. 

Having invoked this powerful collective memory Yhwh issues a surprising, seemingly contradictory, command:

. . .do not remember these former things; 

do not spend your time pondering these things of old;

pay attention, I’m doing a new thing;

now it emerges. Have you not noticed?

“Do not remember.” But how can they, and we, not remember. On hearing those earlier words reminiscent of the poem in Exodus 15, they—the people addressed by the prophet—have already remembered, as indeed have we. The call is not to forget but to remember in a new way: to remember the past in the light of the present. The call is to recover the past so as to address the moment in which these ancient exiles find themselves.

Yhwh goes on, describing that moment in which they find themselves, standing again on the edge:

I, Yhwh, am laying down a track in wilderness,

streams of water in the wasteland.

The beasts of the wild, jackals and their young, owls honor me,

for I provide water in the wilderness,

streams in the wasteland

to provide drink for my chosen people.

The people here addressed by the prophet face a new exodus, this time not from Egypt but from Babylon. Before them is not sea but desert. In the earlier time, they faced drowning if they did not find the path through the sea. In this new time, they face the opposite: dying of thirst in the desert. In both cases, what lies beyond them, whether through sea or desert, is freedom.

It’s tempting to press the metaphors in this passage to ask which we face today. Is it death by drowning or by thirst? Those who have recently taken over the denomination of my youth, the Christian Reformed Church, seem to fear drowning in the waters of the culture. They are looking for the dry land through the sea in order to emerge on the other side without getting wet. But what if the problem is not drowning, not this time? What if the problem is aridity, a theology so out of touch with the moment in which we find ourselves that people and churches find themselves dying of thirst—thirst for the living water of the Spirit of God?

It’s this sort of question the prophet here addresses to the people of his time. Yhwh’s instruction not to remember the former things does not mean literally forgetting but understanding that they face a new threat—a new threat that requires the old courage to step forward, not now into the water but into the desert. 

Remembering

Return for a moment to Gerhard and his passion for remembering the moment when Austria moved from its Nazi past to independence, his passion for remembering what has not been remembered, for remembering it better. He calls us to remember because his beloved Austria faces the challenges of the past in new ways. One cannot choose freedom just once; one must choose it again and again. Each time, the challenge is different, desert instead of sea, perhaps, but each time it requires the same courage to step out in faith.

But it’s not Austria I have in mind; it’s my own country. In our time, the past is contested. There are many, including those presently in power in the US, who believe that the past is about white Europeans, and then, truth be told, not even all Europeans but those from the northern European countries. For those who believe this version of the story, every new wave of immigration is seen as a threat to the integrity of the nation. But this way of telling the story is false, has always been false. It’s this telling of the story that needs to be addressed by the old prophecy:

Do not remember what you think you remember;

do not remember the way the past has been construed.

See, says the Lord, I am doing a new thing,

(which is the old thing):

I am creating a path in the wilderness,

a way in the wasteland of this time.

Step out, the prophecy implicitly concludes, step out in courage. For this, we need to remember the courage of those who dared to say, standing as they were on the edge of their moment in history:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Nothing here of citizenship except as we all are citizens of the earth. The generation of the American Revolution took this step into the sea or desert—you pick the metaphor—without fully comprehending what “men” in the sentence means. You don’t know everything when you take the first step. We have learned slowly, imprecisely, that “men” is a placeholder for all of us, regardless of gender, race, place of origin, sexual orientation, faith, language—whatever else would separate us. And we have not yet reached the other shore. Each time we come to what seems a place beyond which we cannot go, we must find again the courage to feel our way forward, toward the dry ground.

It’s this work of remembering anew in a new place and a new time that is the work of our generation and of every generation. Let’s be at that work.

Clay