Resistance is Useless

I am not much interested in popes, but I am interested in the political concept of resistance, so Eric Muller’s “Resistance Was Possible. Even For Young People” naturally piqued my curiosity. What Eric is saying is that the former Cardinal Ratzinger’s claim that it was “impossible” for his teenage self to resist compulsory service in the Hitlerjugend (HJ) is a “self-absolving" attitude which is empirically untrue and which demonstrates a troubling lack of self-reflection. To show that resistance to and within the HJ was not impossible, Eric cites an extract from Michael Kater’s 2004 book Hitler Youth:

”Young Germans who mustered the courage to resist HJ incorporation often did so not just out of boredom or dislike of annoying routines and drills. Many were individualistic enough to reject, on their own behalf, the stereotypical mold into which the Hitler Youth leadership wished to press all of its members . . .

"Thus, even during times of (officially) universal HJ membership, when most members ... loved the daily cult and sports routines, there were always some reflective adolescents of both sexes who were different. They protested against the stifling rigor by refusing the state's youth conscription. . . . One boy in northern German Rendsburg, supported by his father, risked total confrontation with his leaders simply by growing his hair long. Another, Max von der Grun, later a writer, resented the demanding HJ because his father was incarcerated. Peter Wapnewski, later a professor of German literature, as a youth was hypnotized by American jazz and swing and thus forged a doctor's letter to stay away. A Frankfurt boy who skipped the Hitler Youth meetings in favor of the movies altered his HJ identity card in order to view the adult-only films. A particularly sensitive girl in Hamburg risked expulsion from the BDM [the girls' equivalent of the HJ] because she found its views to be drivel, after she had seen paintings by Emil Nolde, George Grosz, and members of the Bauhaus school which were displayed as deterrents at the 1937 Exhibition of Degenerate Art. . . . Like Wapnewski, Rosemarie Heise, socialized by Social Democratic parents, forged a medical certificate in order to stay home and listen clandestinely to the BBC. The noted Hitler biographer Joachim C. Fest, who even at seventeen was a critic of the Fuhrer and his Nazi regime, had never bothered to join the HJ. After he carved a small caricature of Hitler on his wooden desk in 1941, he faced expulsion from school as well as political recriminations from the Hitler Youth."

Now I have not read Kater’s book, and so I have no idea whether Eric’s extract is a fair and comprehensive summary of its argument or not, but assuming that it is I do have to wonder whether this description of HJ ‘resistance’ has been well thought through. The problem of defining resistance to (and collaboration with) an authoritarian state or institution is not of course restricted to the Third Reich, as students of, say, European imperialism will be well aware. It is an important topic in the study of Vichy France, and when I read the Kater extract I was immediately reminded of a piece in Julian Jackson’s excellent France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944, which I think is worth quoting at length:

”There are two possible pitfalls to avoid when broaching this subject [of resistance]. The first is the temptation to adopt an excessively narrow and military interpretation … [but] it is also necessary to avoid the other extreme of adopting an excessively broad interpretation of resistance, extending the term to include any manifestation of opposition to the German presence. This was the attitude satirized by Anouilh in his play L’Orchestre where one character who had performed in an orchestra during the Occupation defends herself by saying that it was an orchestra of resisters: ‘When there were German officers in the audience, we played wrong notes. It took a certain courage! We risked being denounced at any moment; they were all very musical.’ Several observers during the war were even to claim that the elegance of Parisian women was a form of resistance against the German attempt to break France’s spirit.

“The Resistance was increasingly sustained by the hostility of the mass of the population towards the Occupation, but not all acts of individual hostility can be characterized as resistance, although they are the necessary precondition of it. A distinction needs to be drawn between dissidence and resistance. Workers who evaded STO, or Jews who escaped the round-ups, or peasants who withheld their produce from the Germans, were transgressing the law, and their actions were subversive of authority. But they were not resisters in the same way as those who organized the escape of réfractaires and Jews. Contesting or disobeying a law on an individual basis is not the same as challenging the authority that makes those laws.

“Resistance, then, requires some congruence between intentions and actions. Just as it is not enough to think anti-German thoughts to be a resister if nothing results from these thoughts, so acts which might have had unintended consequences beneficial to the Resistance cannot be qualified as resistance. On the other hand, once the organized Resistance grew in strength, and became a presence in society, there were increasing opportunities for individuals to contribute to it in informal ways. What might have once been individual acts of disobedience became part of the Resistance. In short, the Resistance must always be considered dynamically in relationship to the population at large.” (p. 387-88)

With this in mind, Kater’s HJ ‘resisters’ are an eclectic and not particularly coherent mix, and their (mostly rather trivial) acts of protest seem motivated more by adolescent bloody-mindedness than conviction. Only Rosemarie Heise, the unnamed Bauhaus admirer, and possibly Joachim Fest really qualify as resisters in any kind of political sense, and even then this conclusion remains provisional in the absence of more information: was finding the BDM’s rhetoric on aesthetics “drivel” (though not, it seems, going any further than that) necessarily proof that one actively rejected other facets of the Third Reich? What seems to tie Kater’s malcontents together, if anything, is not resistance to Hitler specifically but a generalized dislike of hierarchical authority – hardly unusual in teenagers, and deserving of neither praise nor censure in itself (juvenile halls are full of ‘resisters’ such as these). In other words, for the young Benedict XVI to join Kater’s roll of honor he would most likely have been the kind of boy who had a gut distaste for institutional life – an unlikely characteristic to find in the future leader of a dogmatic world religion. Or he would had to have been a saint: and saints had a poor life expectancy in Hitler’s Germany.