When We Are In a War

Palestinians collect remaining belongings from the rubble of destroyed houses after Israeli attack Gaza City, Gaza, on March 25, 2024. (Yasser Qudaih)

Reading Jenny Erpenbeck’s remarkable novel, Kairos, I was struck by the moment when one of the characters was reading another’s Stasi records which were made available after the regime change that followed the Wall coming down between East and West Berlin on November 9th, 1989.

I had been in East Germany in April 1989 when I had made a pilgrimage to the Death Camps of Eastern Europe. We landed in Berlin and first visited Ravensbruck, the woman’s concentration camp which having been liberated by the Soviet Army remained in East Germany’s domain. Although the newspapers at that time were speaking of opposition to communism and the barbed wire delineating Hungary’s borders was being dismantled and repurposed on individual farms, and strikes and demonstrations were destabilizing Poland, the atmosphere was still very grim in East Berlin when we were there.

We had gone through Check Point Charlie and though it seemed impossible, a gray smog enveloped us as we walked to the nearby hotel, breathing air entirely different from the clear breaths we had taken the night before in a B&B art gallery in West Berlin, a very few miles away. From our hotel window, we watched a platoon of soldiers pass in front of the hotel on the hour.

We had been given the name of a friend of a friend and had brought a dozen jazz LPs which we gifted him after 10 pm at night, in an entirely open area in the middle of a very large park, where he hoped we would not see anyone spying on him and he could not be recorded without awareness. We asked if he thought the Wall was coming down in response to Gorbachev’s introducing perestroika and having stated that “there is no model of socialism to be imitated by all.” Our new friend did not answer, silently indicating that he was very pessimistic about the future. And then, the Wall did come down. But, I wonder, though scrutiny was not as sophisticated as it is now, were we observed after all? Are we noted in his Stasi records?

I am fascinated by the ability to read one’s own or others’ Stasi records made during the regime by the dreaded secret police. No surprise then that Erpenbeck’s novel should have taken me to Christa Wolf, the renowned, dissident writer, who when the Wall fell was confronted with her own Stasi record. In City of Angels, which documents nine months spent in Los Angeles, she speaks of learning that she had briefly been, as a student, an informant for the Stasi, had apparently, though she claimed she had not remembered, participated in a few conversations about colleagues and had given one written document before, seemingly, she had desisted; meanwhile her own surveillance was contained in 42 volumes. I wished I had been able to sit alongside her as she read through these notes, the record of the information she had given and the pages and pages of being observed by hosts of informers who the Stasi manipulated into such activities. But also, did she not exhibit extraordinary courage having been coerced into informing and then refusing to continue and then becoming a well known dissident writer?

A similar dossier, compiled by the Stasi on Timothy Garton Ash, The File, a young writer who had taken up residence in East Germany “to understand tyranny and freedom” and was writing for West German newspapers, “was a meticulous record of his life. Ash said, “For me, unlike for the Stasi, there is a very clear line between working secretly for a government and working (sometimes secretly) as a writer. ... As the man from Speka, I was a spy for “intelligence,” in that older sense. A spy for the reader.”

Though I have obtained my own FBI records, my experience is not the same. The FBI records were essentially redacted, huge swaths of black covered almost every page. Names, places, anything that might identify the informants or reveal something about the FBI was withheld. Such was the same in the records a friend had requested about her father, who had been an FBI agent – very little revealed. The Stasi records, unlike the FBI, Freedom of Information Records, were complete and one could read what one had said, where one had been, who one was with, what they were wearing. Nothing and no one withheld, including comments, observations, impressions, details of all sorts. Even information about the informants and how they were recruited and controlled. Ultimately, my files only confirmed what I had suspected, that the police had followed me when I was suing the Board of Education for my job after being fired from a tenured teaching position for teaching an English unit on censorship, pornography and propaganda, and using a poem I had written to illustrate the significance of intent in literature, then bringing the student’s attention to another aspect of intent by focusing on sexual innuendo in advertising. Several years later, they had recorded my travels to Cuba and back. This was not news to me. I was not surprised by my files and how impersonal they were and the extent of the redaction. The Stassi files were revealed to serve the people after a Europe wide ‘velvet’ revolution while the FBI (and CIA) files are revealed reluctantly and are highly censored. The American agencies are still operative and do not want their internal structures and working mechanisms revealed. But what becomes clear is that every form of surveillance, the intimate and the dispassionate, is its own version of sinister.

Knowing it is occurring, knowing its implications and dangers, also asks us to consider how we will act, even so. These files ask us to ask what we would do under dangerous conditions when we are forced to choose between our deepest values and ethical beliefs and our own welfare, perhaps even survival, and / or discomfort in disrupting our familial arrangements, or maybe even something less ominous, an unwillingness to disturb our comfort zone.

In the last years, I have wondered increasingly how those living in Germany under Hitler and Nazi rule lived with what they knew was occurring to political prisoners, Roma people, homosexuals, mentally challenged people and Jews. How was it possible to look away or to cooperate? I wonder this as I see the direction this country is going having to tolerate book banning, violent responses to different sexual orientations, government control of women’s bodies, alarming curriculum restrictions from primary schools through universities, extreme violence through access to military weapons, and racism and prejudices of all sorts seeping from the unconscious of the citizenry into all aspects of government. Such conditions preceded the rise of fascism in Germany and and are recurring to one extreme or another across the globe. As if a plague. As if a virus. Jack Forbes an Indigenous scholar wrote a book, Columbus and Other Cannibals, in which he identified such a virus – he called it Wetiko. If you haven’t read the book, you probably want to, but perhaps you can imagine some of his analysis from the title.

A common phrase: We don’t know, do we, how we will act under such circumstances...? For some the restraints are economic, for some they are relational, for some fear and for some disinterest, obliviousness...

We don’t know, do we, how we will act under such circumstances.... and anyway ... it can’t happen here, right?

I look back on my Facebook postings, and see that the first call for a ceasefire was on October 9, 2023, as Israel’s response to the horrific massacre was already looming as extreme. These photos appeared in the Israeli publication, +972, written by Israelis and Palestinians, started by Michal Omer-man. They knew what was coming; we knew what was coming. Asking for a ceasefire was considered extreme and so the slaughter has been on-going as we continue to send munitions — (Today the Biden Administration authorized the transfer to Israel of 2000 lb bombs and other weapons. Washington Post.)

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The aftermath of an Israeli air strike on the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, Gaza, October 10, 2023. (Mohammed Zaanoun)

Palestinians search the Khan Yunis municipality building after an Israeli air strike, Gaza Strip, October 10 2023. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)

Palestinians inspect the massive destruction caused by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City's Al-Rimal district, October 10, 2023. (Mohammed Zaanoun)

This month I met someone whose grandfather’s company significantly supported Hitler’s war effort. A subcamp of the concentration camp was set up on the premises. “But,” the man said, “my grandfather was not a Nazi. He didn’t join the Party.” What was I as a Jewish woman whose father lost most of his family in the Holocaust to understand or feel?

There is frequently great anger and outrage when our behavior is compared to Nazi Germany in World War II. But, no less than 32,552 Palestinians have been killed and 74,980 wounded in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7. Attacks take place regularly at hospitals. Children are dying of imposed starvation. Aid vehicles are being attacked as as the hungry gather for the possibility of food rations. This horror is a consequence of the actions of the Israeli government, aided, abetted and militarily supplied by the US government. We are, I am, responsible.

I note my anxiety in writing this essay. It is my habit to write and rewrite obsessively, But, I wonder, is this more intense pattern I am observing today related to my unease in comparing our ways with Hitler’s ways and in writing these next words which have also been forbidden? I am hardly the only one to say this, people are in the streets, finally, saying this, but that does not make it easier. These words are taboo but if we allow the circumstances to continue unnamed they will be normalized and the world will suffer and decline inordinately because of our silence.

And so I say it with a broken heart – The war against the Gazans is committing genocide.

You understand, this is not said as an attack, this is said to stop it.

• I want to note: Annelle Sheline and Josh Paul of the State Department have resigned over Gaza. Thank you.

When we look closely at the photos from October and the introductory photo from this March, we see that such is continuing to this day and understand that the war is also committing ecocide as do all contemporary wars. Grievously, we are not reigning in our ability to destroy Earth.

In Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel, Kairos, the actions of the state and the intimate actions between the two lovers ultimately mirror each other. When we get to the end, we understand that the thrust of the entire book is to reveal this pattern between the two. As I think about it, this is something of what I hoped to communicate in my essay, Personal Disarmament, Negotiating With the Inner Government, Tree, Essays and Pieces. We can not separate how we govern from who we are, nor who we are from how we govern. We are a reflection of the State, but the State is also a reflection of us. The divide we hope exists, against which we build a Wall, has no validity.

The moral harm that we and war are creating has no bounds. There is no future if we continue in this way.

I am so sorry – I say, hopelessly – to our descendants.

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Please join us for the 25th Writers’ Intensive May 25-31 On the Land and On Zoom These times: Chaos and collapse cannot be dismissed -- and at the same time, we detect undeniable spiritual presences, complex communications from more than humans and moments of heart rending beauty. A small circle of gifted and exceptional individuals, devoted to their writing, recognizing the dire conditions afflicting all living beings and thinking deeply about literature and how writing can serve these times and the future, will gather both on the land in Topanga, CA as well as on Zoom and form an intimate and conscious community 

Please email Sarah at deenasassistant1222@gmail.com for more information.