The Power of One

How can Jeff Bezos look at this photo and not feel just a smidgen of shame?

A Nazi rally in 1936 The one folding his arms as Hitler spoke is August Landmesser.

“No man is an island,” said Amos Oz, the great Israeli writer. “But everyone is a peninsula.  Yes, we are inextricably connected to our neighbors on the mainland, to our tribe. But ultimately, each of us must face the ocean alone.”

I first saw the picture above during my first trip to Berlin, when visiting the “Topography of Terror,” a museum located in the former headquarters of the SS. It mesmerized me. I couldn’t stop looking at it. In depicting the courage of one against many, that iconic photo is equaled perhaps only by the iconic picture of the man in front of the line of tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

• See both photos and some Jewish sources in the packet I compiled of source material on the power of the individual

The man in this photo was not motivated by a survival instinct, nor by altruism.  He wasn’t hiding anyone in his attic or employing a thousand condemned Jews in his factory.  It was a different kind of bravery that he demonstrated.  All he was doing was not raising his arm in the Nazi salute. 

But when you look at everyone around him – just look.  This was a huge rally. And this photo was taken in 1936, by which time the disease of Nazism had spread to the entire country. Hitler’s power had been consolidated.  The free press was no more.  Same with the independent judiciary.  There were no opposition parties.  The Reichstag was destroyed.  All the political enemies had been murdered or placed into concentration camps.  The mentally ill were being euthanized.  In a flash, democracy had yielded to a police state. Germany had become the fulfillment of George Orwell’s vision in 1984: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

It’s almost inconceivable that an ordinary citizen would have had the courage to protest Hitler so brazenly. It was no longer safe to. That time had passed. They had already rushed passed the “first they came for the socialists and I did not speak out” part of Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous dictum – which he penned in hindsight after the war.  They had already come for the trade unionists, and he did not speak out— because he was not a trade unionist.  Then they came for the Jews, and he did not speak out—because he was not a Jew.  “Then they came for me,” he wrote “—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

But without the benefit of hindsight, without knowing about the crimes that were yet to be committed; the guy in the photo just saw what was happening right then and there and he dared to protest it.

Oh, and one other thing.  Hitler was speaking at the time this photo was taken.  And so I wondered how someone could have the chutzpah to do that – to defy Hitler to his face.  What would lead to an act of such audacity – an act that was, incidentally, illegal?  The sieg heil salute was mandatory for all German citizens as a demonstration of loyalty to the Führer, his party, and his nation.  And the three were indistinguishable.

Think of how few have shown such courage in this fateful year? How many people in relatively safe positions here have demonstrated inconceivable cowardice recently, including most of the Republican party and many in the business world. How can Jeff Bezos look at that photo and not feel just a smidgen of shame?

Turns out the guy in the picture was probably someone named August Landmesser.  (There are some who claim, with solid evidence, that it was a guy named Gustav Wegert, but Landmesser’s story fits better into this essay, so therefore it was him).

Landmesser joined the Nazi party in 1931, hoping it would help him get a job.  But in 1935, two years after Hitler’s rise to power, he became engaged to Irma Eckler, a Jewish woman, and he was expelled from the party. They registered to be married in Hamburg, but the Nuremberg Laws, which had just been enacted, made their union illegal. On October 29, 1935, their daughter, Ingrid, was born. The photo was taken just a few months after that, so August’s refusal to raise his arm could have been a protest against the discriminatory policies of a racist state – or maybe it was just a gut response from an aggrieved husband and father.

One year after that photo was taken, Landmesser and Eckler tried to flee to Denmark but were apprehended at the border. She was again pregnant, and he was charged and found guilty of "dishonoring the race." The couple continued their relationship, until he was arrested again and sentenced to two and a half years in a concentration camp.  He later died in battle in Croatia in 1944 and two years before that, it is believed that Irma was among the 14,000 to be killed at Bernburg Euthanasia Centre.

So the guy who had the temerity to stand up to Hitler paid a steep price.  But his children kept fighting to restore the honor of their parents.  Their marriage was recognized retroactively by the Senate of Hamburg in the summer of 1951, and when the photo of the rally came to light in 1991, Landmesser became a phenomenon. 

So in other words, after his death, August Landmesser’s life improved tremendously.

How hard is it to be the only one to fold your arms when everyone is saluting?  How much does one have to believe in the justice of a cause to deliberately break the law?  How unjust does a law have to be for it to be deliberately broken?  And how low does a society have to sink before there is only one person, one among thousands, willing to take the risks and stand up for what is right?

These are very important questions for our day, for Jews and for everyone. And this is not merely for people from one political silo.  It’s for everyone. Again and again in our sources (as you can see in the packet), we see rabbis reminding us to hold ourselves and our society to the highest standards.  The Torah believes in the Power of One, the primacy of justice, and speaking truth to those in charge - or who wish to be.

And that is what we must do right now. This is not a drill. No one in this country is garbage (!), but millions of minds have already been tainted by an insidious propaganda that diminishes the sanctity and dignity of our fellow human beings. We must act, given the hate we are witnessing increasingly, and all the signs of totalitarian intent that have been plainly on display, including direct mimicking of Hitler’s words and ways.

Midas Touch Network

This cannot be coincidence.

The poison here, the enemy within, is hate itself, and those flames must be snuffed out before irreparable damage occurs. And those flames are being fanned as we speak.

Throughout this past turbulent decade, no American academician has been more influential in alerting us to the dangers Donald Trump poses to democracy than Timothy Snyder, author of the On Tyranny, a pocket guide sharing the keys to maintaining a free society and helping us to recognize the signs that a threat is lurking. Snyder just released today a short lecture highlighting some of his main points. It’s must listening, especially for undecided voters.

Especially jarring is his first of twenty keys to advancing the agenda of the autocrat:

#1. Do not obey in advance.  Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.  A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.  

The leadership of the Washington Post, L.A. Times and USA Today just gave the would-be dictator the greatest gift they could possibly have given, even if not a single vote would have been changed by the now-cancelled endorsements.

See below some quotes from Hannah Arendt, a modern day prophet who gave moral context to the Trial of the (20th) Century. (Here is the original New Yorker essay that she wrote on the Eichmann trial, printed in Feb. 1963). Best to close with Arendt’s own words rather than my own.

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1.  "Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it." - Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism)

2. "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist." - Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

3. "One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive." - Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

4. "True goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion, but organization of the polity. ... What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part." - Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

5. "Men have been found to resist the most powerful monarchs and to refuse to bow down before them, but few indeed have been found to resist the crowd, to stand up alone before misguided masses, to face their implacable frenzy without weapons and with folded arms (see photo below) to dare a no when a yes is demanded. Such a man was Zola!" - Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

6. “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness." - Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

7. "Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty." - Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

8. "There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is a dangerous activity."  Hannah Arendt