The transcendence of evil
Deutsches Requiem, by Jorge Luis Borges
Deutsches Requiem is an odd duck among Borges’s fictions. Borges’s ideas typically have a timeless quality, like they could have been conceived of at any point in history or in the future. But Borges was also an intellectual of his time, and one of the events he lived through was World War II. In the wake of the Nuremberg Trials, he wrote Deutsches Requiem.
The protagonist, Otto Dietrich zur Linde, is a Nazi torturer on trial in Nuremberg. He admits his guilt freely, though he expresses no remorse, and is sentenced to death. The story is framed as his confession before his execution, motivated by his certainty that “cases such as mine, exceptional and shocking today, will very soon be unremarkable.”
zur Linde is an unusual picture of a Nazi. He reminisces about a childhood spent on the twin passions of music and metaphysics, about his love for the music of Brahms, the sonnets of Shakespeare, the philosophical treatises of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Throughout his confession, he continuously cites works of art or literature or philosophy, showing that he was an intellectual. Yet in 1929 he joins the National Socialist Party at the age of 21, and grimly set about bringing forth the Third Reich.
Two bullets to his leg render zur Linde incapable of serving as a soldier, so he becomes an administrator in Tarnowitz concentration camp. In this role, he tortures an archetypal Jewish scholar named David Jerusalem, even though – especially because – he is a great admirer of Jerusalem’s. He argues that compassion is the ultimate sin that all men are tempted towards, that Jerusalem was his own temptation towards compassion, and that he destroyed Jerusalem in order to destroy a hated part of himself.
While zur Linde covers himself in glory in the war against his better nature, Germany loses the actual war. Yet zur Linde finds himself somehow happy at Germany’s defeat. He concludes that he is happy because even as Germany has lost World War II, it has won the philosophical war – the war to shatter people’s faith in religion.
The world was dying of Judaism, and of that disease of Judaism that is belief in Christ; we proffered it violence and faith in the sword. That sword killed us, and we are like the wizard who weaves a labyrinth and is forced to wander through it till the end of his days, or like David, who sits in judgment on a stranger and sentences him to death, and then hears the revelation: Thou art that man. There are many things that must be destroyed in order to build the new order; now we know that Germany was one of them. We have given something more than our lives; we have given the life of our beloved nation. Let others curse and others weep; I rejoice in the fact that our gift is orbicular and perfect.
Now an implacable age looms over the world. We forged that age, we who are now its victim. What does it matter that England is the hammer and we the anvil? What matters is that violence, not servile Christian acts of timidity, now rules. If victory and injustice and happiness do not belong to Germany, let them belong to other nations. Let heaven exist, though our place be in hell.
Otto Dietrich zur Linde looks in the mirror before his death, and accepts his martyrdom for the new cruel world.
It seems clear to me that zur Linde’s ideology is nihilism, even though that word summons people from the woodworks who know a lot more about it than me. His primary intellectual influences are Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. His rebirth process is very much focused on becoming an Übermensch. He emphasizes that he was never a violent person, and argues that that makes his journey even more impressive, since he was able to overcome his traditional morality for his metamorphosis. He views compassion as the hated part of his soul that has to be destroyed in order for him to be reborn.
But perhaps the most telling sign of that ideology is the way zur Linde sees his work as part of an eternally recurring conflict. “Down through the centuries and latitudes, the names change, the dialects, the faces, but not the eternal antagonists.” That is why he does not characterize his ideology in terms of Aryans or Jews; that would be focusing on the names and faces, rather than the eternal antagonists. So even though zur Linde pays lip service to Jews as the enemy, it’s clear from the quote above that his real enemy is religion, and the morality that comes from religion. He wants a post-religious world, and spends his whole life engineering that outcome. It is bittersweet, then, for him to realize that he will succeed but never be able to see it himself.
In reality, during the Nuremberg trials, the prototypical defense by Nazi war criminals was that they had simply been acting under orders, that they had not made those decisions themselves. This idea was supercharged by Hannah Arendt writing about the banality of evil at Adolf Eichmann’s trial in 1963. Arendt observed that Eichmann was not some kind of supervillain who had decided to enact evil in the world, but a bland bureaucrat who had recused himself from making moral judgments. The Holocaust has left us with a narrative in which evil rises as a result of people failing to exercise their moral judgment, rather than making active choices.
The banality of evil may be an accurate description of group psychology and how people come to participate in evil, but it is ideology-agnostic. If Adolf Eichmann committed genocide because he saw himself as just a bureaucrat pushing around numbers on sheets, that suggests that he could have committed genocide for any number of ideologies. So the banality of evil cannot characterize what the true ideology of Nazism was – indeed, it rejects that that true ideology mattered at all.
But Borges was above all someone who believed in the power of ideas, so it makes sense that he would not have subscribed to this ideology-free theory of evil. Perhaps that is why Borges made Otto Dietrich zur Linde a philosopher, who sees his own justification as central to Nazism. Even though he was merely an administrator in one concentration camp, he sees the whole nation of Germany as a party to his vision. In other words, zur Linde is the polar opposite of the prototypical Nazi who says he was only following someone else’s order. His evil is not banal; his evil is the center of the universe, a moral project of divine scale.
I thought of this story after reading about vice signaling in Silicon Valley. Because it captures the type of person who does not want to be good – and who does not want to live in a good world. We are not equipped to handle those people. Our only recourse is to hope that, contrary to zur Linde’s prediction, they never become common.