RIDGELAND — Recent trends whereby all unpleasant histories, associations and ideas are removed from consciousness continue in ever more absurd ways. Safe spaces and trigger warnings have combined to halt the debate of sensitive issues in the academy. The idea is that suppression of unpleasant events or ideas causes them not to exist for people who find them disturbing.
As one with a long history in higher education, I am ever more alarmed as those trends extend to wider society.
Currently, the cinema is under attack. Amma Asante, a noted film writer and director in England, has had to address controversy surrounding her as-of-yet-unreleased movie “Where Hands Touch.” The plot presents a love story between an Afro-German girl named Leyna and Lutz, a member of the Hitler Youth and son of a prominent SS officer. Although the story is not based upon actual historic characters, the use of a mixed-race German girl in the plot is based upon a true and hitherto neglected population.
At the close of World War I, the Rhineland was occupied by the French. Some of the occupying soldiers were Africans who served in French colonial armies. Consensual liaisons between African soldiers and German women resulted in the birth of many mixed race children. The rise of the Nazi Party with its ideology of racial purity would portend suffering and calamity for those children. They would be called “Rhineland bastards” by Hitler.
In order to promote the idea that German women would not consort with inferiors, the Nazis promoted the idea that the mothers of these children were raped. The truth is, during the occupation of the Rhineland, most Germans preferred encounters with Africans who, unlike the French, did not share a hatred for Germany.
Two primary controversies have arisen concerning the story told in “Where Hands Touch.” The first is the revulsion some report over what they term a Nazi love story. They believe that it somehow glorifies what Nazis represented. There are others dissatisfied with a plot that supposedly writes the Jews out of the Holocaust. Both criticisms widely miss the mark.
No decent or honest person denies the Holocaust nor the deaths of six million persons for no other reason than that they were Jews. Nor can anyone fail to hold persons other than the German High Command responsible for the atrocities. Indeed, efforts to portray German citizens as unaware of or unable to stop Nazi atrocities suffocate under the weight of evidence that they were at least indifferent to if not outwardly supportive of actions against Jews.
Those who wave swastikas today in the name of white supremacy are just as culpable for an acceptance of genocide as the original Nazis. That is their only moral equivalency. We must also be mindful, however, that the horrors of the Holocaust did not touch only Jews. Many others deemed unfit in Hitler’s mind were persecuted. Telling all of their stories does not minimize what happened to any single group. The greater challenge to the memory of the Holocaust comes not from deniers but from those needing safe spaces. For when those spaces become dominant, the event becomes lost to history
As for those who believe that this movie glorifies the Nazi regime, I offer the following argument. Too often history is presented as the outcome of significant events or the actions of powerful people. In such accounts, common persons are seen merely as functionaries and not possessed of individual, let alone moral agency. Such emotions as love and commitment can and do exist apart from dominant ideologies. A story, therefore, of a German boy from a Nazi family falling in love with a German girl of color does not challenge reality. The story of humanity is one of improbable personal relationships, which makes Asante’s story all the more probable.
• Vincent J. Venturini is the retired associate provost and chair of the Department of Social Work at Mississippi Valley State. He currently serves as a part-time professor of social work
