The Boy Who Lived for Germany
1925, Munich
German Middle School
The teacher walked into the class and nodded. The class stood up and took the oath they recited daily before beginning lessons, “I was born to die for Germany.” As they took their seats, the teacher noticed that one boy was still standing. They locked eyes, and the boy found his voice. “I think I was born to live for Germany,” he said.
This was a peculiar statement to make in the Germany of 1925. The nation had lost the First World War six years prior. There was a great sense of humiliation due to the treatment given to Germany, and a strong sense of nationalism. To go against the nationalistic sentiment of being ready to sacrifice one’s life for the country was no small thing, especially for a fifteen-year old.
The teacher looked at the boy with a mixture of curiosity and disgust. “Write a paper justifying your peculiar statement,” he finally said.
The boy wrote an essay, for which he got a high grade but no discussion followed. He followed it up with another essay arguing against capital punishment — the state had no right to take a human life, he wrote. The teacher responded on the margin of that essay, “Then we should not be allowed to exterminate bed bugs either.” The boy wrote back, “No, in the bed bug state, we should not.”
This boy was Robert S. Hartman, who made it his life goal to study values and come up with a scientific way to prevent the horrific decisions of the kind that is now synonymous with the Nazi era. The above story appears in his autobiography, Freedom to Live. Hartman was greatly pained by both the glorification and trivialization of death that had become prevalent around him.
In popular culture, we are all too familiar with glorification of death through war movies and stories where an individual gives up his or her life for the nation, or some other noble cause. Distinguishing between the civil and the military state, Hartman noted in his autobiography[1],“I loved it (civil state) and would, in a given case, die for it, as I would die to save a drowning child, to rescue a person assaulted by a criminal, or to save the victims of a fire. These, I felt sure, are ways in which one may die for life. But can I, who am loved and who loves, disregard the grief, the despair of the human heart deliberately arranged by and for political power? Can I barter compassion for my fellow (hu)man for a mess of collective glory? Is not the choice, again, between truth and falsity, reality and fake? For the glory of the military state, won with the deaths of millions of men, women and children, is not my glory.”
Trivialization of death is far more insidious than the glorification of death, and we tend to engage in it without awareness, for example, when we count casualties. Hartman remembered a Berlin newspaper’s editorial early in the First World War, “We still remain a people of 65 million; a hundred thousand corpses more or less matter nothing.” Hartman notes:
Germany lost in the First World War 1,808,545 dead or three per- cent of her population. After the war the birth rate made up for this loss in 6.4 years. Thus, it could be argued from a collective viewpoint, Germany lost nothing. But the individual casualty was a man, loved and loving, and his loss was irreplaceable. It was a life lost, a life wasted, dumped into a manhole. The state takes human life supposedly to protect the whole. But is a human life of less value than a col- lective? Perhaps, I thought, in the true scale of values, the individual loss weighs more heavily than the supposed gain of the state. Perhaps the individual in his concreteness is worth more than the collective in its abstraction. Perhaps the simple arithmetic of population statistics is morally, and hence truly, false.
The suffering caused in Nazi Germany was not just to those who were the direct targets of violence. A form of suffering that is only now becoming clear is the one Germany wrought on her own people. A story a friend shared with me was that of a German elder, born right after the Second World War ended:
This man, now in his late-70s, was part of a generation of children that was born in post-Holocaust Germany. The atmosphere at home and within neighboring communities was shrouded with feelings of distrust among these children on the role their parents (particularly men) had played during the Holocaust. The result was a generation of boys who had lost the connection with their fathers, and this generation was known as the “generation of lost fathers.” His own father never discussed the Holocaust with him. The sense of mystery with his father was never resolved as long as his father lived. His other friends had similar strained relationships with their fathers. It was only when as teenagers they started going to Guest Houses (community pubs in Germany are called that) to drink beer, that after a few drinks, older men would start talking about things which were suppressed within, and that is how the teenagers learned about the horrors that were perpetrated by the previous generation. But at home, this topic was never brought up — it was as though it never happened. I was quite pained to hear about this dimension of loss and amazed to think of the ramifications such an unfortunate event would have had, on an entire generation of men that were born and raised after the Holocaust. No metric can begin to measure a pathetic loss of such magnitude.
It is easy to think that sweeping human lives into a statistic is something that only happened in the Germany of that era. But if we look around, we will find that we count life in numbers all the time. Any report of a war that one can find on the internet includes the essential statistic of how many people died. A smaller casualty count can sometimes make us feel that the loss of life was regrettable but not too high. As of this writing, the world is just coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic. We have spent the pandemic years comparing countries, states, counties and cities with the number of people who have caught the virus, and those that have died. When we see places with only a few dead, we conclude that they have done well compared to those places that have seen a great many people die. When we reduce a single human life to a metric, in this case, the number 1, we are actually trivializing death and rendering ourselves immune to the invaluable nature of human life. In doing so, we lose a big part of our own humanity and shape a world that is less sensitive to human suffering and more prone to causing suffering.
One life lost is a loss too much.
The incredible richness of human life is dismissed by a method of counting that reduces it to a single number added to the count of an unfortunate collective. Is there a way to avoid such dangerous reductionism?
Excerpted from Chapter 3, Invaluable: Achieving Clarity on Value by Somik Raha, Illustrations by Anwesha Ganguly.
References
1. Robert Hartman, Freedom to Live: The Robert Hartman Story, ed. Arthur R. Ellis (US: Rudopi Publishers, 1994)
