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fpbThe following essay was first published in London's THE TIMES on March 16, 1977.
There was a little-regarded news item the other day, about a woman and her fifteen-year-old son being found floating in a collapsible dinghy in the Baltic; her husband and their two daughters, aged twelve and fourteen respectively, had been in a similarly frail vessel, but had drowned.
The cruel sea, you may think, up to its usual tricks. The family's boat had been swamped; they had taken to the dinghies which, as prudent sailors, they had been careful to have aboard, dividing the family as they had no doubt long planned against the possibility of just such a disaster; probably they had had regu-lar lifeboat drill, joking as they did so. And now the grey, imper-sonal waves had shown themselves stronger than all the precau-tions, and the world contained one more widow and one more fatherless child. And that is really all there is for any outsider to say about it.
Or rather: almost all. For there is an extra dimension to the story, which it now behoves me to disclose. The family had not taken to their rubber dinghies from a sinking yacht; they had em-barked in those very craft. And they were not indulging a taste for hazardous sport, or putting their children through some kind of Outward Bound toughening process. They were not seeking fitness, relaxation or sunken treasure; what they were after was freedom. For they were a family of East Germans, from the wes-tern marches of the Soviet Empire, and they were trying to get away from it. The mother and the son did; the father and the two daughters did not. We record a 40 per cent success rate (or, if we are of a pessimistic tendency, a 6o per cent failure rate), and pass on.
We pass on to a fairly obvious reflection. How peculiarly vile must a system of government be, if citizens compelled to live under it are willing to trust their lives, and the lives of their children, in a challenge to the might of a northern sea, to a couple of toy boats? (If your first thought is that they were foolhardy not to wait until the weather was better, have a second; when the A weather around the shores of Soviet Germany is such as to make the waters navigable without risk, the State watchers are on permanent alert for any kind of boat putting out to sea, be it never so innocent in appearance. Only when it is very dangerous indeed to sail such seas is there any chance of the vigilance being sufficiently slack to offer any chance of escape.)
I ask how vile a regime must be if its citizens are compelled to take such chances to get away from it. For consider: the Soviet imperialists have been in occupation of Eastern Germany for a third of a century; an entire generation has been born, and grown mid created another, under Soviet rule.
They have never read any permitted printed word, never heard or seen anything on their country's radio or television program-mes, never learnt anything in school or university, never had any public instruction or exhortation, never come across any public information at their place of work or of social relations, that had not been carefully searched and screened by people highly skilled in the appropriate techniques, to ensure that not a single word of truth about the world, or communism, or their Soviet masters, or their own puppet government, would get through. Whatever it was that this family felt, and that drove all of them to danger and most of them to death, came from their lifetime's experience of the delights of communism.
That these delights are insufficient to keep seventeen million people indefinitely delighted is made plain by the episode I have recounted. But it is made plainer by the fact that the regime lines its Western borders, land and sea, with guards and guns, electrified fences and lethal mines, watchtowers and dogs and pursuit ves-sels, all intended not to keep invaders out but to keep the regime’s citizens in.
When the Berlin Wall was built I thought, and I have never seen reason to revise my view, that the standard excuse for it among Soviet apologists in the West- that it was justified be-cause of the `brain drain' of East Germany- was the most squalid item the fellow-travellers' repertoire had ever encompassed. Students of such matters will have noticed that in recent years the line has changed; now we are expected to believe that East Ger-many is an immensely wealthy state, its citizens revelling in a standard of living that puts Stockholm and California to shame. Some might say that if the new line is true, the Wall has become something of an anomaly, but I have not detected many sugges-tions that it should now be demolished, and I have even less ex-pectation that it actually will be.
In the end, we have to turn to that much (and ill) used word, empathy. It should be possible, by an effort of the moral imagina-tion, to put ourselves in the position of that family, so that we can see the beach from which they set out, feel their hearts beating with fear and resolution, look upon the sea that faced them, en-trust our minds, as they their bodies, to a bubble of air and a film of rubber, and set off with them into the darkness. Beyond that it would be indecent to follow them, to death and deprivation; and beyond that, it is unnecessary to follow them; two, at any rate, reached the freedom that is so familiar to us that most of us have no idea why it is so precious, and that some work day and night to stamp out. But if we can get far enough towards merg-ing our feelings with the feelings of a family to whom death was an acceptable alternative to communism, we shall understand two things it is important to understand -more important, it may be, than we know.
First, we shall be virtually immune to all the lies, all the ex-cuses, all the apologies, all the breathlessly enthusiastic travelo-gues, that the servants and fellow-travellers of totalitarianism pour out incessantly. Next time one of them is telling us that the system is of course different from ours, but ill its way valid, and that anyway the people who live under it seem to like it, all we have to do is to close our eyes; then we can hear the waves lapping, feel the cold, sec the darkness, and remember that the waves, the cold, the darkness and the death were considered preferable to continued existence wider Soviet communism And in a single moment the whole edifice of deceit will vanish like a nightmare at dawn.
That is one half of what we may gain from the exercise in empathy that I have proposed. The other half is even more important. By trying to feel what the family felt, we can remind our-selves of what is in some ways the most wonderful and extra-ordinary of all the attributes of man, the inextinguishable spark of freedom in his soul. For what did that family know of free-dom? East Germany went directly from Nazism to communism; today, a citizen of that repulsive helotry would have to be sixty-five to have lived as an adult in a free society; a Soviet citizen would, of course, have to be much older. And yet in both there are men and women who divine what freedom is, though all their lives they have been denied it, and seek it though they perish in the search.
So the story of the family that fled together and died apart can teach us something of enduring value; that the most valuable thing of all is also the most enduring. Just as science teaches us that matter, however many times it may change its form, is ultimately indestructible, so we can see that at the core of Man's being is a rock that, though it can be cracked, scored, crushed, ground to rubble, cannot be made to disappear; and it was upon that living rock that five human beings set sail into the Baltic. And eloquent testimony to its eternal strength is given by a woman and her son who live now in Federal Germany; and by a man and his two daughters who sleep now beneath the Baltic waves.
I have only one thing to add: that Levin underrates the length of tyranny most East Germans had known. Most of East Germany passed into Nazism not from any very liberal system, but from the repressive social environment of Prussia and Mecklemburg, which the brief experience of the Weimar Republic had not really dented at all. Most East Germans had never known anything that any ordinary Westerner would recognize as even moderate freedom. They came by it for the first time in their history in 1989.
There was a little-regarded news item the other day, about a woman and her fifteen-year-old son being found floating in a collapsible dinghy in the Baltic; her husband and their two daughters, aged twelve and fourteen respectively, had been in a similarly frail vessel, but had drowned.
The cruel sea, you may think, up to its usual tricks. The family's boat had been swamped; they had taken to the dinghies which, as prudent sailors, they had been careful to have aboard, dividing the family as they had no doubt long planned against the possibility of just such a disaster; probably they had had regu-lar lifeboat drill, joking as they did so. And now the grey, imper-sonal waves had shown themselves stronger than all the precau-tions, and the world contained one more widow and one more fatherless child. And that is really all there is for any outsider to say about it.
Or rather: almost all. For there is an extra dimension to the story, which it now behoves me to disclose. The family had not taken to their rubber dinghies from a sinking yacht; they had em-barked in those very craft. And they were not indulging a taste for hazardous sport, or putting their children through some kind of Outward Bound toughening process. They were not seeking fitness, relaxation or sunken treasure; what they were after was freedom. For they were a family of East Germans, from the wes-tern marches of the Soviet Empire, and they were trying to get away from it. The mother and the son did; the father and the two daughters did not. We record a 40 per cent success rate (or, if we are of a pessimistic tendency, a 6o per cent failure rate), and pass on.
We pass on to a fairly obvious reflection. How peculiarly vile must a system of government be, if citizens compelled to live under it are willing to trust their lives, and the lives of their children, in a challenge to the might of a northern sea, to a couple of toy boats? (If your first thought is that they were foolhardy not to wait until the weather was better, have a second; when the A weather around the shores of Soviet Germany is such as to make the waters navigable without risk, the State watchers are on permanent alert for any kind of boat putting out to sea, be it never so innocent in appearance. Only when it is very dangerous indeed to sail such seas is there any chance of the vigilance being sufficiently slack to offer any chance of escape.)
I ask how vile a regime must be if its citizens are compelled to take such chances to get away from it. For consider: the Soviet imperialists have been in occupation of Eastern Germany for a third of a century; an entire generation has been born, and grown mid created another, under Soviet rule.
They have never read any permitted printed word, never heard or seen anything on their country's radio or television program-mes, never learnt anything in school or university, never had any public instruction or exhortation, never come across any public information at their place of work or of social relations, that had not been carefully searched and screened by people highly skilled in the appropriate techniques, to ensure that not a single word of truth about the world, or communism, or their Soviet masters, or their own puppet government, would get through. Whatever it was that this family felt, and that drove all of them to danger and most of them to death, came from their lifetime's experience of the delights of communism.
That these delights are insufficient to keep seventeen million people indefinitely delighted is made plain by the episode I have recounted. But it is made plainer by the fact that the regime lines its Western borders, land and sea, with guards and guns, electrified fences and lethal mines, watchtowers and dogs and pursuit ves-sels, all intended not to keep invaders out but to keep the regime’s citizens in.
When the Berlin Wall was built I thought, and I have never seen reason to revise my view, that the standard excuse for it among Soviet apologists in the West- that it was justified be-cause of the `brain drain' of East Germany- was the most squalid item the fellow-travellers' repertoire had ever encompassed. Students of such matters will have noticed that in recent years the line has changed; now we are expected to believe that East Ger-many is an immensely wealthy state, its citizens revelling in a standard of living that puts Stockholm and California to shame. Some might say that if the new line is true, the Wall has become something of an anomaly, but I have not detected many sugges-tions that it should now be demolished, and I have even less ex-pectation that it actually will be.
In the end, we have to turn to that much (and ill) used word, empathy. It should be possible, by an effort of the moral imagina-tion, to put ourselves in the position of that family, so that we can see the beach from which they set out, feel their hearts beating with fear and resolution, look upon the sea that faced them, en-trust our minds, as they their bodies, to a bubble of air and a film of rubber, and set off with them into the darkness. Beyond that it would be indecent to follow them, to death and deprivation; and beyond that, it is unnecessary to follow them; two, at any rate, reached the freedom that is so familiar to us that most of us have no idea why it is so precious, and that some work day and night to stamp out. But if we can get far enough towards merg-ing our feelings with the feelings of a family to whom death was an acceptable alternative to communism, we shall understand two things it is important to understand -more important, it may be, than we know.
First, we shall be virtually immune to all the lies, all the ex-cuses, all the apologies, all the breathlessly enthusiastic travelo-gues, that the servants and fellow-travellers of totalitarianism pour out incessantly. Next time one of them is telling us that the system is of course different from ours, but ill its way valid, and that anyway the people who live under it seem to like it, all we have to do is to close our eyes; then we can hear the waves lapping, feel the cold, sec the darkness, and remember that the waves, the cold, the darkness and the death were considered preferable to continued existence wider Soviet communism And in a single moment the whole edifice of deceit will vanish like a nightmare at dawn.
That is one half of what we may gain from the exercise in empathy that I have proposed. The other half is even more important. By trying to feel what the family felt, we can remind our-selves of what is in some ways the most wonderful and extra-ordinary of all the attributes of man, the inextinguishable spark of freedom in his soul. For what did that family know of free-dom? East Germany went directly from Nazism to communism; today, a citizen of that repulsive helotry would have to be sixty-five to have lived as an adult in a free society; a Soviet citizen would, of course, have to be much older. And yet in both there are men and women who divine what freedom is, though all their lives they have been denied it, and seek it though they perish in the search.
So the story of the family that fled together and died apart can teach us something of enduring value; that the most valuable thing of all is also the most enduring. Just as science teaches us that matter, however many times it may change its form, is ultimately indestructible, so we can see that at the core of Man's being is a rock that, though it can be cracked, scored, crushed, ground to rubble, cannot be made to disappear; and it was upon that living rock that five human beings set sail into the Baltic. And eloquent testimony to its eternal strength is given by a woman and her son who live now in Federal Germany; and by a man and his two daughters who sleep now beneath the Baltic waves.
I have only one thing to add: that Levin underrates the length of tyranny most East Germans had known. Most of East Germany passed into Nazism not from any very liberal system, but from the repressive social environment of Prussia and Mecklemburg, which the brief experience of the Weimar Republic had not really dented at all. Most East Germans had never known anything that any ordinary Westerner would recognize as even moderate freedom. They came by it for the first time in their history in 1989.
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no subject
Date: 2005-07-06 08:06 am (UTC)I don't believe anyone in modernity ought be allowed the luxury of escaping learning the facts about the "other side" during the Cold War, the world which was antithetical to -- and indeed fighting for domination of -- the West, which is now derided as the worst of worlds by so many intellectuals, elitists and 'great thinkers of our day'.
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Date: 2005-07-06 09:17 am (UTC)