Reflections on Bernhard Schlink’s 20 July
There are questions so uncomfortable that one would gladly leave them to historians. There, they rest safely among footnotes, dates, and the reassuring feeling that everything happened long ago.
The question of when resistance becomes necessary is not one of them.
It is troublesome because it never stays in the past.
After every catastrophe, people emerge who claim they knew exactly when action should have been taken. After the First World War. After the Second World War. After every dictatorship. After every failed republic.
History is full of generals who win their battles retrospectively.
Particularly popular is the role of the historical clairvoyant.
Hitler? Should have been stopped earlier.
Stalin? Obviously.
Mao? Without question.
In hindsight, humanity possesses remarkable prophetic abilities. The rear-view mirror is not only the most precise instrument of political analysis; it also appears to be a time machine for retrospective brilliance.
In his play 20 July, Bernhard Schlink does something rather impolite: he removes the descendants from their comfortable seats in history’s grandstand.
His students discuss resistance against Hitler and quickly arrive at what seems an obvious conclusion: the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944, came too late. Far too late. Hitler should have been stopped in the early 1930s.
That sounds reasonable.
In fact, it sounds so reasonable that one may easily overlook the question that follows immediately:
How could anyone have known that at the time?
Today we know Auschwitz, the war, the millions of dead, and the collapse of Europe.
In 1932, nobody knew that future.
People then did not know how the story would end. They merely knew that a gifted demagogue was offering remarkably simple answers to remarkably complex questions—a species that, unfortunately, shows no signs of extinction.
This is where Schlink’s play reveals its true strength.
It is not really about tyrannicide.
It is about knowledge.
Or more precisely, about the uncomfortable fact that political decisions are almost always made under conditions of uncertainty.
The students believe they have learned from history.
The problem is that they already know the ending.
They see the completed puzzle.
The people of the Weimar Republic had to take the exam without being allowed to look at the answer sheet.
This is where Bertolt Brecht enters the conversation.
In his poem To Those Born Later, no historian is speaking. A contemporary witness is.
“Truly, I live in dark times.”
That sentence possesses a quality often absent from later reflections.
Brecht did not know how the story would end.
He had no documentary films, no memorial days, no television specials with dramatic music, and no historian sixty years later explaining what should have been obvious.
He had only the present.
And the present is rarely enough to make anyone certain.
Brecht describes not the certainty of hindsight, but the confusion of the moment.
And with that, he asks a different question from Schlink’s students.
Not:
“When should we have acted?”
But:
“How do we act correctly when nobody knows what is correct?”
At this point, it is worth consulting two other inconvenient contemporaries.
Kurt Tucholsky wrote:
“Nothing is more difficult and nothing requires more character than openly opposing one’s own time and saying ‘No’ out loud.”
That sounds wonderful.
Until one realizes that every age has its dissenters.
Some are right.
Some believe the Earth is flat.
The difficulty is not saying “No.”
The difficulty lies in recognizing when “No” is necessary.
Erich Kästner, looking back after 1945, offered his famous snowball metaphor:
“You must crush the rolling snowball. No one can stop the avalanche.”
That, too, sounds convincing.
Of course the snowball must be crushed.
The problem begins with identifying the snowball.
History produces new snowballs every day:
Parties.
Movements.
Ideologies.
Trends.
Politicians.
Waves of outrage.
Moral certainties.
Especially moral certainties. They often begin as snowballs and end with the firm conviction that everyone else is the snow.
Most disappear.
Some grow.
A few become avalanches.
Whoever tries to crush every snowball eventually becomes a danger himself.
Whoever crushes none may become one as well.
This is precisely where democracy exists:
Between Brecht’s warning against passivity and Schlink’s warning against certainty.
Between Kästner’s snowball and Tucholsky’s “No.”
Between the desire to act and the fear of acting wrongly.
The fanatic knows nothing of this problem.
He possesses certainty.
He knows who is good and who is evil.
Who is friend and who is enemy.
Who must be saved and who must be fought.
The fanatic’s world is pleasantly simple. It fits neatly into slogans, campaign posters, and comment sections.
Democracy, by contrast, is a system of fragile complexity.
It demands that citizens take responsibility despite uncertainty.
That they object although they may be mistaken.
That they act although they doubt.
Or, put differently:
The democrat must live with less certainty than the fanatic and still make decisions.
That is exhausting.
Which is why simple answers remain so popular.
They spare us the effort of thinking.
They deliver villains directly to our doorstep.
They promise orientation without the burden of understanding.
One might call them fast food for the political mind: quickly consumed, conveniently digestible, and rarely part of a healthy intellectual diet.
The bill arrives later.
Sometimes much later.
And then the ritual begins again:
Historians write books.
Journalists write editorials.
Politicians deliver commemorative speeches.
Suddenly everyone knows exactly when action should have been taken.
When the danger was still small.
When everything was obvious.
When any reasonable person should have seen it coming.
Curiously, among these retrospective heroes one rarely finds anyone who actually knew then what everyone supposedly knows now.
This is the moment when the dead remain silently agreeable while the living pretend they would naturally have been on the right side of history.
History is full of resistance fighters who were born after the victory.
And full of people who retrospectively cast themselves as early warning voices, although at the time they were mostly occupied with misjudging the weather forecast.
Perhaps, then, the real lesson offered by Schlink, Brecht, Kästner, and Tucholsky is not that one must always act or always doubt.
It is that one must endure both at the same time:
The uncertainty of the present.
And the responsibility of decision.
For that is the true price of freedom:
Not certainty.
But the responsibility to decide without it.
Too early.
Too late.
And in between, democracy.
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