The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV

Tact and Contamination

Tact 271 TactandContamination Were the Nazis tactful? The question is a little disconcerting, perhaps even disturbing, but so is the novel that made me think of it, Jonathan Littell’s Kindly Ones [Les bienveillantes], a long and absorbing book about the Holocaust as told from the perspective of its Nazi narrator. I am not trying to find out whether Nazis were capable of exercising tact—­ or showing a lack of it—­ in normal social situations, that is, in those situations similar to the ones where we too might be called on to exercise tact; I couldn’t care less and I don’t see why they wouldn’t be anyway, since they came out, by and large, of the same cultural mold as other Europeans at the time. What intrigues me is whether the notion of tact may prove pertinent in the context of what Nazis did as Nazis, of what defined them as Nazis—­ the extermination of the Jews. Can tactfulness and tactlessness, in other words, be invoked as part of a political project that negates the very culture whence tact came? We know that high-­ ranking Nazi officials in charge of organizing the “final solution,”chief among them Heinrich Himmler, went to great lengths to avoid nearly all direct mention of what they were doing. Some people involved in the“evacuation”of the Jews (die Judenevakuierung),for example, were referred to as“bearers of secrets” (Geheimnistrager). Was the systematic use of euphemisms, this indirection in and of language, a form of tact in that it sought to avoid discomfort and unease among interlocutors and functioned structurally in the way that tact does? Conversely, would it have been tactless, in some circles, to describe in explicit terms what was occurring in remote corners of the eastern front? In two speeches, now famous but secret then, Himmler did just that as he addressed a selected audience of Nazi officials in Posen, in occupied Poland , on October 4 and 6, 1943. Instructing his listeners never to share with anyone else any of what he is about to tell them about the killing of the Jews, he goes on to discuss the topic bluntly, going as far, in the second speech, as to evoke—­ and justify—­ the killings of women and children. This is the speech the narrator of The Kindly Ones happens to attend. Although he is himself a bearer of secrets and has been directly involved in the extermination , Himmler’s frank speech takes him by surprise:“I found it, considering the secrecy rules we were bound to, truly shocking, almost indecent, and at the beginning, it made me very ill at ease, and I was certainly not the only one, I could see the Gauleiters sigh and mop their foreheads or necks.” Himmler, the narrator continues, 272 Tact insisted that, yes, we were indeed killing the women and the children too, so as not to leave any ambiguity linger, and that’s precisely what was so uncomfortable, that total absence, for once, of ambiguity , and it was as if he were violating an unwritten rule, even stronger than his own rules he decreed for his subordinates, his Sprachregelungen already absolutely strict, the rule of tact perhaps, that tact he spoke of in his first speech. In that speech, two days earlier, Himmler indeed called “tact” the silence that surrounded the so-­ called Night of the Long Knives, the 1934 liquidation of the SA leadership by the SS, and that he now urges with regard to the extermination of the Jews:“That was, thank God, a kind of tact natural to us, the self evidence of tact, that we have never conversed about it amongst ourselves, never spoken about it” (Das war so eine Gottseidank in uns wohnende Takt, Selbstverständlichkeit des Taktes, daß wir uns untereinander nie darüber unterhalten haben, nie darüber sprachen). The notion that tactfulness precludes the mention of bodies is taken here to its extreme. To shroud in silence murders committed collectively is not an unusual phenomenon when both murders and silence bring about and sustain a given community, protecting it like a wall or a barrier, to which silence is often compared, against the intrusion of dangerous foreign bodies. Nazi Germany may represent only the most dramatic occurrence of this. Most of us would balk at the idea of calling tactful the hushing of mass murder and the use of impersonal administrative lingo, but I understand why Nazis would prefer to do so...