The Wages of Silence
When I was an undergraduate historian at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1980s, the must-attend lectures in our department were given by Professor Thomas Childers on the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. He was (and is) the leading expert on the ‘Nazi voter’, that is, he addresses the question of how the monstrosity of German fascism rose from the democratic process of the Weimar Republic.
The last lecture of the series was known to be essential academic theatre, and did not disappoint in the year I experienced it. Childers, a soft-spoken and serious man, described the Nazi state in its death throes, a mad leader increasingly lashing out in unhinged fury at imagined betrayals, latching on to fantasies of saving himself at whatever cost to his countrymen, and concluding in his final hours that the German nation and people had been unworthy of him and his visionary leadership.
Dr Thomas Childers, University of Pennsylvania
After telling of the last events in the bunker of the Berlin Reich Chancellery, Childers asked the crowd of students in the lecture hall matter-of-factly what the lessons were in what he had described. Without pausing he told us, his voice gathering intensity: these are the wages of silence. If you ignore politics, the politics around you, you might well share the fate of Nazi Germany. With that, we spontaneously rose to our feet and as we gave our standing ovation he gathered his notes, turned from the podium, and with our applause ringing out, strode dramatically out of the room.
I have never before or since seen a lecturer reach an academic audience as did Thomas Childers that day. As impressed as we were though with the lessons learned by the details of the rise and fall of the Nazis in Germany, I don’t think many – any – of us in the audience seriously thought we would ever personally face the challenges Germans had in the 1920s and 30s: the rise of a mass movement that would centre on a single leader who demanded personal allegiance to him even over allegiance to a nation or idea. We did not expect official systematic distortion of basic truths, or a future regime to endorse ideas of racial supremacy in whipping up mass enthusiasm and loyalty to it.
In a way, I never really left Thomas Childers’ lecture in 1982. Now, 38 years later, at Cambridge, I myself teach about the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Somewhat unusually, I also teach modern American history. I cannot help but make the comparisons.
As we survey the damage done to the US Capitol on the day after the 6th of January – the idea of it as well as the physical building - Americans face their own reckoning for what has led them to this point. How Germans faced theirs comprises a whole field of study in itself: the ‘Nuremberg defence’ (‘I was only following orders’), and the idea of ‘collective guilt’. Were ‘ordinary’ Germans victims of the Nazis, or its ‘willing executioners’?
As I watched the coverage of the storming of the Capitol, I was struck by how many voices, across the political spectrum, repeated the phrase ‘this is not America’ – ‘this’ presumably meaning the incitement to the invasion of the US Capitol by a sitting US president seeking to overturn the results of a free and legitimate election in which he had been defeated. Many pieties were expressed about the ‘exceptionalism’ and durability of American democracy, and the ‘sacred space’ of the US Capitol. At least they condemned the rioters – but historians by nature do not put much stock in pieties, of the past or of the present.
The US Capitol has certainly been a historic site where social progress has been made. On its steps, Abraham Lincoln gave his second inaugural address in 1865 (‘with malice toward none, with charity to all’), only a few weeks before he would be assassinated by a Confederate sympathiser. The chambers of this building also saw the passage of the 19th amendment granting the vote to American women in 1920, and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet this ‘sacred’ space also saw the legitimation by Senate treaty of the internal deportation of Native Cherokees in 1836 (the infamous ‘trail of tears’), the stubborn and politically cynical resistance to proposed anti-lynching laws through the first decades of the twentieth century, and the failure to remove a rogue president during the Senate impeachment trial in January and February of 2020. Many are the crimes – and there are deep roots to the responses provoked by a White House tweet or presidential incitement. And they have never been sacred.
It was a long road that led us to the 6th of January 2021. The nature of this road, how small crimes lead to large ones, was expressed eloquently in the 1961 film drama ‘Judgment at Nuremberg’. In the climatic scene at the end of the film, the convicted Nazi judge protests that he never knew his own actions on the bench would ‘come to that’ - meaning the enormity of Nazi atrocities. The American judge who has just sentenced the German replies that ‘it came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent’.
And it ‘comes to that’ now, every time a US official tells a lie. The United States, and the republic for which it stands, will always be scarred by the events of the 6th of January 2021. The mark is permanent. The successors to Thomas Childers at Penn, and my successors in Cambridge, will be describing this date in perpetuity. And the lessons about the wages of silence will be the same.
