今日は参議院選挙です。
「日本を取り戻す」とキャッチフレーズを無表情のコアラのような安倍さんが言っていしたが、彼は本当は「大日本帝国を取り戻せ」と言いたかったことでしょう。
さて、先々週、欧米と日本の友人達に送った記事があります。
Guardian (2007.4.7)
The good German
By Ian Thomson
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/apr/07/history.primolevi
ここには、アウシュビッツの生き残りであるイタリア人作家のプリーモ・レーヴィのソウルメイトとなった、ドイツ人女性へティさんのことが書いてあります。
プリーモ・レーヴィは、アウシュビッツの生き残りとして数々の体験本を書き上げてきましたが、その批判はナチスというより、戦争当時にユダヤ人の迫害を見て見ぬふりをしてきた一般ドイツ人に重点を置いていました。
これは、
「ナチスの高官やユダヤ人迫害に関わった人たちは犯罪人となっても、消極的ユダヤ人迫害に加担したドイツ国民は罪を問われず『第三者』となっている。これと向き合わなければまた同じことが起るだろう」
とレーヴィが考えていたからであると思います。
もちろん、アウシュビッツの生き残りであり、多くの大切な人を亡くしたレーヴィにとっては、彼らに個人的に恨みがあったのは当然です。が、レーヴィが戦後、イスラエル、シオニスト達がパレスチナの人々から土地を奪い迫害してきたことに対しても批判(結果、シオニスト達から嫌われました。)をしてきたことからもわかるように、彼は単なる怨念だけで本を書き、後援をしてきたわけではありませんでした。
ただ、アウシュビッツ時代彼らに親切にしたドイツ人に対して、彼はその「善」を頑なに認めようとしなかったこと、これはフェアではないし、レーヴィ自身にとっても不幸であったと思います。
こんなレーヴィの頑なさを変化させたのが、このへティこと、Hety Schmitt-Maas。
彼女はカトリック教徒、戦前から反ナチ精神を持ち、そして彼女の元夫は、レーヴィがアウシュビッツで働かされた化学会社に勤めていました。
彼女は、1966年10月から1983年、65歳で突然亡くなるまでの17年間にレーヴィと文通-彼女は57通、レーヴィは49通 -するだけでなく、もとナチスドイツのアルベルト・シュペーア(ヒトラー政権の軍需大臣、ヒトラーと親しかった人物)とも手紙を交わし、彼の家を訪問してレーヴィの本を読むように働きかけたりしています。
(彼女は、レーヴィ、シュペーア以外にも何人かとも手紙を交わしています。)
私のドイツ人の友人の1人は「岸信介は日本のアルベルト・シュペーア」と書いてきたことがありましたが、戦後、一般の女性が(一応ヘティは1959年から文化省に勤めだしましたが。)、戦争に関わった元高官に反省を促し、そしてその高官がその女性と手紙を交わすようになるということ、日本ではまず考えられなかったことです。
昔、もしヘティのような女性が日本にいてくれたとしたら、岸信介の孫である安倍首相の発言や行動も今とは違っていたかもしれません。
以下、は上のリンクからの抜粋です。興味がある方はどうぞ。
(前略)
Hety Schmitt-Maas - the real-life "Mrs Hety S" - was a Catholic divorcee, born in 1918 to an exemplary anti-Nazi family: when Hitler came to power, her liberal-minded father lost his teaching post. Following his stern example, Hety refused to join the Nazi BDM (Association of German Girls) and was expelled from school. Her family's Jewish doctor had committed suicide in despair at the Goebbels persecution. When, in 1959, she settled in Wiesbaden to work for the local ministry of culture, she began to investigate what she called the entire "Komplex" of Nazism.
She corresponded with Levi for almost 20 years, writing 57 letters to his 49 to her. She was vitally important to him as a writer and sections of Levi's books could not have been written without her; she put him in touch with writer friends and other contacts in Germany, creating an ever-expanding network of correspondence among them. In this way she hoped to counteract Himmler's cynical pledge that the destruction of European Jewry would be an "unwritten page of glory". Hety's great ambition, she told Levi, was to "understand" the Nazi past.
(中略)
Hety sent her first letter to Levi on October 18 1966: "You will never really be able to understand the Germans, we Germans do not understand ourselves." Hety had written to Levi care of his publishers in Turin; If This Is a Man, she told him, was "Pflichtlektüre" - "compulsory reading" - and she was determined to have it read in German schools.
Levi understood at once that his unseen correspondent was a decent, ordinary German with moral struggles of her own. Many Germans, in an excessive self-flagellation, had turned national guilt into a virtue. But Hety was not like that. Over the coming months she was able to provide Levi with an epistolary lifeline out of the marital and parental tensions of his difficult home life, and became his soul mate. So her opening letter marked a new epoch for Levi - the start of an extraordinary 17-year correspondence - though he little suspected it when he replied a month later on November 5 1966: "Yes, even today I find it hard to understand the Germans. If This Is a Man did have the response in Germany I had hoped for, but I do believe it came from the very Germans who least needed to read the book. The innocent, not the guilty, repent: it's absurd - it's so human."
Levi's attitude to postwar Germany, until now mistrustful, changed as he learned of Hety's extraordinary background. Hety's second letter to Levi began: "Sehr geehrter [Most Honoured - a very formal greeting] Herr Dr Levi", and she seemed to want to unburden herself of guilt. "The only consolation for those of us who were on the other side of the barbed-wire fence is to know that people like you were able to start new lives after all." Hety's restless mission to understand Germany had been provoked, she said, by her husband's tacit compliance with IG Farben and the Hitler government; in his impotent silence Hety thought she could detect many of postwar Germany's problems.
With Hety's help, Levi was now able to track down his former IG Farben overseer at Auschwitz, Dr Ferdinand Meyer, an inadequate rather than infamous man who had issued Levi with leather shoes and shown him other kindnesses in the camp. Levi could hardly see Meyer as representative of the Auschwitz butchers; yet in his memoir The Periodic Table (1975) he portrayed Meyer as the slyly mendacious former Nazi "Dr Lothar Müller", who apparently felt no shame for his past.
Hety, shocked by the "unkind" transformation of Meyer, suspected literary untruthfulness in Levi. As the years passed, Hety's letters to Levi became five, six, sometimes 10 pages long, and contained personal disclosures about family and private life. Furious rows had erupted between Hety and her daughter, who did not want to listen to her talk of Nazism. Undeterred, Hety sent Levi German books and newspaper clippings on the subject; as the material began to pile up unread at his end, Levi resolved to make his letters more skimpy ("Don't be cross"); but still this did not abate Hety's postal onslaught. It was time they met.
I n September 1968, while touring Germany, Levi called on Hety at her home in Wiesbaden. They had not exchanged photographs during their correspondence, and Levi had expected Hety to look rather intense. Instead, he found an unprepossessing, pale-faced woman in glasses; the real surprise was Primo Levi. From his author photograph on the German edition of If This Is a Man, Hety was sure he would look "tormented" or "worn down"; in reality she found him "relaxed" and even "blooming". More, he seemed to emanate "Strahlkraft" - a kind of charisma.
Three years later, however, when they met again, Hety thought him quite transformed. The Levi she encountered in Turin in 1971 was a fear-ridden and nervous man, whose German revealingly dried up as soon as his wife Lucia came into the room. Levi's "Sprachprobleme" ("speech-problems"), as Hety referred to them in her diary, may have been connected to the guilt he felt at betraying his marital problems to her in the correspondence. Not for the first time, Levi was depressed - and his depressive inarticulacy was striking. Afterwards Hety watched in embarrassment as Levi's wife "shrunk" from view across the restaurant table until she was "quite absent": Lucia spoke no German, and Levi soon gave up on his attempts to include her in the conversation.
On November 12 1975, hoping to fathom a darker side of post-Hitler Germany, Hety visited the apparently repentant Albert Speer in his home at Heidelberg. Though she was under no illusions about this Faustian figure, she wanted to commend Levi's books to him. Later she wrote excitedly to Levi that she had left a copy of If This Is a Man with the former Nazi. "I said he absolutely must read it!" Levi was bewildered: as Hitler's arms minister, Speer had been the principal Nazi exploiter of slave and Jewish labour. To Hety he wrote: "It looks to me like an odd dream that this book of mine, born in the mud of Auschwitz, is going to sail upstream - to one of the very Almighties of that time!" But he was unsettled by Hety's cosy audience with the enemy. "Explain to me: what moved you to interview Speer? Curiosity? Sense of duty? Mission?"
Did Speer read If This Is a Man? On New Year's Day 1976 Speer wrote to Hety that he had "skimmed" part of the book. Two weeks later, on January 16, he added that he did not wish to "disturb" Levi by reading his Auschwitz testimony. To this puzzling utterance Hety replied a full six months later: "I find it a great pity that you have not yet read If This Is a Man; if you did, the insanity and diabolicism of the Nazi system would finally be made clear to you." Speer never replied: Hety's last letter to him, dated May 5 1981, went unanswered. Four months later, Speer died of a cerebral haemorrhage in a London hospital. "I would have had some problems with writing to this ambiguous fellow," Levi told me when I interviewed him in 1986.
In 1983, suddenly and unexpectedly, Hety Schmitt-Maas died. She was 65. Her admiration for Levi (not always reciprocated) had been extraordinary, and Levi was always fond of her; she had helped to fill a void in Levi's life and gave him access to the intellectual ferment of postwar Germany. Her death precipitated another depressive episode for Levi. Part of his moral support had gone: everything about the friends' mutual solicitude, affection and trust stemmed from their shared hatred of Nazism and their need to understand Hitler's war against the Jews. For as long as he was in contact with Germans like Hety Schmitt-Maas, Primo Levi could believe that a Fourth Reich would be impossible; she had become his idea of the good German.