Day 5 - If you love someone who is guilty, do you become entangled in their guilt?

Last Monday's session was a BIG ONE. Jam-packed, even. After a rather silly and energetic start playing warm-up games, Simon got the group to focus on creating images. Not only did we rehearse a section in the play where these images would be later installed, but the group also thought about how perpetrators could have been anyone.

There's a brilliant book by Bernhard Schlink called Der Vorleser (The Reader), which was also adapted into a film. I urge you to either read the book or watch the film. It is a retrospective account from a middle-aged man reviewing his life as a young man at a stage in his life when he had an illicit relationship with a woman (whom he later found out had been an ex-Nazi worker). It is a novel about guilt, perpetrators and the fine line between perpetrator and victim. For instance, the protagonist could also have been a victim of the ex-Nazi worker's seduction. Above all, the quote with the most impact is, "was hätten Sie gemacht?" or "what would you have done?", when the ex-Nazi worker questions a court in a post-War trial where a group of Nazis perpetrators are being punished for their actions.


“If you love someone who is guilty, do you become entangled in their guilt? And can we choose who we love? It would be simple if the people who commit monstrous crimes were always monsters. But sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they are just ordinary people, our neighbours, our lovers, our teachers and our friends” (from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre – Operation Last Chance)


Texts like Der Vorleser often make the reader or viewer ask themselves questions. What if Nazis were just following orders, like dehumanised machines? What if normal, average people like you and I would have been too scared to resist Nazi persecution, out of fear of being branded as a Jew sympathiser? If pressure was being put on us by the government, and influences by the Nazi-indoctrinated education system were making our children question, "Daddy, why are you not saving our country like Elsie's daddy?", then surely we would have had no choice but to concede?