Ghosts

I walked among ghosts yesterday in Nuremberg, Germany – many of whom were far more terrifying than those that populated my dreams as a young child or the celluloid whimsies that Hollywood and its offspring often produce.  For I walked among the ghosts of real people: the ghosts of real people who were steeped in and devoted to the worship of evil; the ghosts of real people who were dedicated to the emasculation of that very same evil.

A visit to the Nuremberg Zeppelin Field is all that is necessary to draw these ghosts out of their hiding places.  The Field is in a state of deliberately induced decay now, but it was once alive with blazing anti-aircraft searchlights drawing so much power that a special electrical substation had to be built to power them, it was once alive to the marching feet of thousands of party faithful entering the Field from three separate points in order to establish and consolidate the fear they sought to induce, it was once alive to the rantings of a monster with a small mustache and hidden horns and tail, a single, frail human monster who was the embodiment of all of the evil of which mankind is capable.

The ghosts of some 60,000,000 others are here too, having no other single location to haunt, having no other single location in which to express their warnings about what happens when evil is allowed to attain the center stage it so constantly seeks.  For evil is always waiting in the wings and seeking a starring role.  It is never gone from our lives, only waiting to be freed anew, to be blessed anew with the affirmation of men: hiding the while in the details; hiding the while in the rules and regulations issued by those seeking to bend others to their will, to their mad, idiosyncratic ideas of universal propriety, of universal Truths which only they can divine or proclaim; hiding the while in places such as Guantanamo, tempting us with illusions of safety, tempting us to beckon it to center stage while disguised as a rational act born of our collective fears.

But yesterday I also walked among the ghosts of the valiant during a visit to Courtroom 6 – ghosts such as that of Robert Jackson, a future US Supreme Court Justice who was the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials which began in November, 1945.  He was already a hero when the trial began for having organized the trials, for having brought together four different nations with four differing legal systems and traditions in order to try those who had served as evil’s handmaidens as opposed to summarily executing them, to take up the burden of proof and carry it as far as judgment day, to legalize the means of execution of those Princes of Evil who remained alive after war’s end.  Ordinary men toiled in this courtroom as well, toiled to bring some form of justice to the 60,000,000 ghosts inhabiting the Zeppelin Field; and the ghosts of these ordinary men, these valiant ordinary men, also walk the halls of the Palace of Justice where Courtroom 6 is located, walk these halls even while their remains are interred in cemeteries spread among the four nations, spread over the fields of Russia, of France, of Great Britain, of the United States.

These were potent ghosts.  To sit in a room where Herman Goering once sat sweating, laughing, taunting fate, spitting in the face of truth is to know him after a fashion.  To stand in a field where Hitler held thousands spellbound with haunting, melodic idiocy is to experience the after-smell, the after-taste of rotten, foul decay.  To stand in the ruins of a Congress Hall dedicated to the triumph of one ogre’s egomania is to experience a profound inability of comprehension, to know failure in a quest to understand why an entire nation of seemingly rational people once allowed evil in, once allowed evil to hold sway while turning their collective heads aside in a futile attempt to avoid seeing its manifold, all too readily apparent manifestations.

I met many ghosts yesterday in Nuremberg, Germany – ghosts who powerfully reminded me of the lessons of history, of lessons that mankind never fully assimilates, never fully takes to heart; lessons mankind prefers to learn anew at erratic intervals after evil is allowed center stage yet again after having been banished to the wings for the space of but too few generations.

By day’s end, those ghosts left me with hope stemming from the great expenditures of my parent’s generation while achieving the last major triumph over unrestrained evil – even as these ghosts reminded me of the power that mass despair has to create the seed bed that evil requires for its parturition; even as these ghosts reminded me of the constant battle humanity must wage to marginalize the effect of the daily evils that men do, to avoid allowing these daily evils to accrete into their desired collective personification as Evil Incarnate, as evil in a starring role.

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