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The Nazi Worldview exchange, part 3: ‘We all tell stories about ourselves to give our lives meaning’

[additional-authors]
July 16, 2015

Alon Confino is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and at Ben Gurion University, Israel. Professor Confino received his PhD from Berkley University. He has written extensively and influentially on historical memory, historical method and German history. He has received grants from the Fulbright, Humboldt, DAAD, and Lady Davis foundations, the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University, the Social Science Research Council, the Israel Academy of Sciences, and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Professor Confino is the author of four books, and this exchange will focus on his latest book, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press, 2014), which received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.

You can find parts one and two here and here.

***

Dear Professor Confino,

In the previous two rounds (and in your book, of course) you stressed the importance of trying to understand the collective Nazi imagination, to delve into the narrative the Nazis told themselves. 

My final question is as short as it is difficult (and, possibly, beyond the realm of your research): what kind of insights, if any, can an exploration of the Nazi narrative teach us when it comes to dealing with current manifestations of extreme nationalism and hatred? 

I’d like to thank you again for doing this exchange and for your very interesting book.

Yours,

Shmuel.

***

Dear Shmuel,

Thank you for this important question. It is indeed not easy to answer, and it certainly has no definitive answer. But we can raise some insights by way of continuing to think about this topic.

The first thing we can learn about the present when we explore the history of the Nazis is that the perpetrators of horrible crimes, generally, are not simply mindless thugs (although some of them may be just that). Recent violent events, such as the beheading of captives by ISIS militants in the Middle East and the murder at Charlie Hebdo in Paris, have raised again the question of the motivation and imagination of perpetrators. It would be a mistake to think that perpetrators have no ideology and beliefs. The opposite is true: when we act badly, as individuals and as collectivities, we require a very good story to go along with it in order to explain to ourselves who we are and why it is justified to act in such a way. And so it is important to listen and to study carefully the ideas of perpetrators.

The second thing we learn is that we all tell stories about the past and about ourselves, and that we tell them not (always) in order to be accurate about the past but in order to give meaning to our life in the present. We should therefore exercise self-criticism and humility when evaluating our own stories and in understanding how we came to believe them. Here is the great value of the study of history: it endows us with self-consciousness and a sense of perspective. It gives us a tool to see our own stories in the context of their times, rather than as eternal truths. Studying history provides an additional important element, which makes it the most radical of all disciplines: it subverts and exposes everything by historicizing it. This is its destabilizing potential, and its liberating one as well, as it shows us where we came from and how we got here.

And so, when we think about the Nazis, we should pause for a moment and consider that by telling a story about themselves, the Nazis and other Germans behaved much like we do. We all tell stories about ourselves in order to give our lives purpose and meaning. And we often tell these stories not in order to get the facts right but in order to get them wrong, to explain our history and justify our motivations for doing things, the good things and especially the bad ones.

Telling stories makes us human, but not all our stories are humane. Stories give life, and stories kill as well.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to elaborate on the themes of the book in this stimulating exchange.

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