Saskia Sassen…Willem Sassen…Adolf Eichmann

Unless we believe in hereditary guilt why should she have to tell anyone anything? She had every right to keep this to herself. I know I would have.

Indeed, why consider the matter at all? Why not put someone togther with someone when one of those so placed by you may well have found, had they known, that they were socialising with someone they they never wanted to have broken bread with – but now must think of themselves as someone who did? That would be hypersentivie and a reliance on hereditary guilt.

Not.

Before dismissing the post as mere voyeurism, or as concerned with the matter of hereditary guilt, it’s worth reading the Chronicle piece linked to in the post. I can’t say it will entirely clear up the question of what Corey’s point was in writing the post, but it will surely help others to understand better why he emphasizes the poignancy of the story.

“I wish she had told me,” Fainstein says, “and given me the option of inviting him to dinner or not on that basis.”

Christ, what an asshole. I fail to see how anyone has the duty to warn people against her own father’s political past. Republicans pose more of a threat to humanity nowadays than ex-Nazis do; must they be disclosed in advance?

“MPAVictoria: You keep wanting to make this an issue about what Sassen told people; I make it very clear that I don’t see it that way. (See also my update.) So you’re doing battle, as is so often the case, with yourself and your own notions. I’ll leave you to carry on.”

Wow Corey. My apologies if I have offended you in some way. I was responding to what I thought you wrote. I am sorry if I misinterpreted what you are trying to say.

Ah. Yes I am sorry for not being more clear. I was most certainly not trying to accuse you of believing in hereditary guilt. I was more speaking to the world in general if you know what I mean. Anyway sorry for throwing the thread off the topic you wanted to explore.

Also just reading Appadurai and Tambiah on ethnic violence, primordialism, imagined communities, and how relatively irrelevant deeper history is. We like to think our affects are deeply rooted. We are probably wrong.

And Pretty Village, Pretty Flame about a Croat and Serb who grew up together, is a very good movie.

“Most of all, I’ve had to rethink the Americanness of the research I’ve done.”

Sennett, Culture of the New Capitalism, intro

To my point 4 above, I opened the Sennett because of this blog post instead of say Ulf Hannerz. Will it be Sassen or the Schmid Sahr Urry?

I’m pretty glad I don’t know these people, or have competing social commitments that influence what I read. Life is short.

This post also made me uneasy. Corey, if you’re getting it from this many different people, you might want to rethink your motivation. And your update doesn’t really make it better: you say that your interest is merely in the fact that you didn’t know. Well, there’s a heck of a lot that you don’t know, and not every illuminated bit of that pile of ignorance will inspire you to write a post here.

She didn’t keep it secret and yet we didn’t know… because nobody cared. Why should we?

It seems kind of straightforward to me: the fact that this info was out in the open & few people know it is a sign that people are by and large decent enough not to want to spread hurtful gossip. I’d have to have an interest in the details of Eichmann’s life story and know who Saskia Sassen is for this to be legitimately interesting and not prurient gossip. (Maybe we could say that there is herd immunity to gossip among the population of folks educated enough to know who Saskia Sassen is.)

I read the Chronicle article and now I am starting to get a little irritated.

In the comments there, uhh, long but “disqus_6Hfn…etc” is helpful

“What everyone is still interested in is Arendt and whether she got Eichmann right. She did, but Parry wants to join the growing consensus that has formed around the view that she didn’t

Saskia Sassen has become the latest pawn in this misbegotten and intellectually malignant game of trying to discredit one of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers by means of willfully misreading her.”
…
Part of the question here is you know, trying to be snarky, who and what Adolf Eichmann really truly was. I feel like quoting full pages of Goffman.

The self. . . can be seen as something that resides in the arrangements prevail-
ing in a social system for its members. The self in this sense is not a property of
the person to whom it is attributed, but dwells rather in the pattern of social con-
trol that is exerted in connection with the person by himself and those around
him. This special kind of institutional arrangement does not so much support
the self as constitute it. (Goffman 1961a: 168)

“The pursuit of a sociological decimation of conventional West-
ern liberal notions of the individual is an analytic impulse animating much of
Goffman’s sociology” (Smith 1999: 10).

Goffman is so old news, so 60s, so beat.

I avoided this above many will become terribly offended and because people are seemingly become more invested in identity and history than ever. There ain’t no identity. There ain’t no self. History is bunk.

The Willem Sassen who came to dinner is not the Sassen who wrote Nazi propaganda. Saskia Sassen is many different people.

The above at 4:00 may be mostly wrong, even I have a hard time denying that Saskia Sassen carried something continuous with her from place to place that made her good and great. It’s all very complicated.

But social constructivism/interactionism is probably closer to the truth than individualism, and likely much more useful. We are better off changing conditions that foster racism/fascism/capitalism than hunting out actual and potential bad people.

@18 & Corey

Seems like you’re stating the obvious but maybe it’s just you and me. That her father was a Nazi who was in Eichmann’s inner circle. Not her choice. That she brought him to her Jewish friend’s dinner table without asking. Her choice. It’s not her call to let bygones be bygones. She has no obligation to publicize her past, but since her host may well find out the open secret, is it good form to bring along the propagandist for the murderers of your friend’s grandparents, aunts and uncles? I know, I know. He really hated Hitler. (A rare case when Godwin’s law does not apply.)

Open secrets most often occur when the context of the “secret” differs from the context of the relationship. Less notorious instances occur regularly — the IT guy who was in a well known rock band, the plumber who was a professional athlete. The actor Woody Harrelson’s father was a hit man. And many immigrants have open secrets. There are sons and daughters and nephews and nieces of military dictators, mob leaders, and former aristocrats all over the place. Maybe not with the cachet of Eichmann.

Is this really just one of those “six degrees of separation” things?

People are surprised when occasionally there are only two degrees of separation?

Is part of it an emotional reaction to the idea that in recent years, or even today, you might possibly find yourself sitting at a table with an elderly ex-nazi and not know it?

Well, but there’s lots of that sort of thing. The smashed fragments of past structures are all around us. WWI battleships got broken up for scrap, eventually a lot of the steel was recycled. Recycled steel gets mixed into lots of steel. Your washing machine might have bits of a WWI or even WWII battleship in it, or your lawnmower. Much less likely if it was imported from China, of course.

Things built of concrete include “aggregate”, which is partly chunks of concrete from older concrete structures that were destroyed. Roads and government buildings etc contain little chunks of the past.

It’s like that all over. We build the future out of the shattered pieces of the past, because that’s what we have to build with.

So, is Professor Robin the contributor most prone to inspiring thread-elbows from the cantankerous CT commentariat? He gets my vote….

I’m not sure what the point of this is, perhaps just private amusement (I occasionally post comments like this). Anyway, about 5 years ago, D^squared won the award (quite properly IMHO) for a post that bankers not only did not deserve to be drawn and quartered, or hung, or shot, or even tarred and feathered, but that they and their practices were not really to blame for the Crisis. He also happens to be one of my 2 favorite bloggers (Belle is the other: sorry CR, sorry JQ) on this site. So, the award passes around the group over time. CR is just younger and fresher (here, anyway) than most of the others, so is currently enjoying his 15 minutes.

Yet people didn’t know. Not because she kept it a secret — again, she gave interviews on the topic — but because…I don’t know

Because they felt no need to intrude on her own private family business, titillating thought it might be?

You might want to look into the current prime minister of India, or various government officials in Afghanistan, to see just how seriously genocide and other crimes against humanity are taken. (Or Pakistan, or Indonesia, or see what happened to the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide) My hope that the war plans for North Korea involve hanging as many of those involved in crimes against humanity as possible is likely to be shaken: what’s killing a few civilians when there is geopolitics to be done?

Bob McManus@29: you write of “changing conditions that foster racism/fascism/capitalism”. Are you implying that these are all pretty much the same thing? And by “fascism” do you mean some form of radical, militarist authoritarian ethnic nationalism: or merely those who disagree with you?

A minor iteration on connections between Eichmann in Jerusalem and Nazi fathers—well, collaborator-father, in this case: Harry Mulisch, whose father worked for the Germans in Nazi-occupied Netherlands. The father used his Nazi connections to spring his Jewish ex-wife from a concentration camp and to prevent the deportation of the son.*

Arendt made use of Mulisch’s own writings on the trial, and mentions him numerous times in Eichmann, most notably when she recounts Mulisch’s reflections on

the testimony given by Professor Salo W. Baron about the cultural and spiritual achievements of the Jewish people, the following questions suddenly occurred to him: “Would the death of the Jews have been less of an evil if they were a people without a culture, as the Gypsies who were also exterminated? Is Eichmann on trial as a destroyer of human beings or as an annihilator of culture? Is a murderer of human beings more guilty when a culture is also destroyed in the process?” And when he put these questions to the Attorney General, it turned out—“He [Hausner] thinks yes, I think no.”

*Mulisch offers a sinister version of the Nazi-father/Jewish-mother relationship in the astonishing The Discovery of Heaven, in which the father is responsible for the mother’s deportation.

What this all means, I have no idea, other than that Clio is a strange bird.

Lots of strange, convoluted Clio facts here. According to wikipedia, after 1960 Willem Sassen, along with a lot of other prominent South American ex-Nazis, worked for the Bundesnachrichtendienst (West German Secret Service), headed by Reinhard Gehlen, Does this mean he got a salary, I wonder? And were they still taking orders and money from the CIA when Sassen later also worked as a publicity man for Pinochet ? It’s a lot to absorb, let alone process. It reminds me of the convoluted history of the French Wars of Religion, where everyone was married to and/or the cousin of everyone else.

Wikipedia says that Saskia Sassen was born in 1949, but apparently she and her mother arrived in Argentina from the Hague as Jewish refugees under the names Maria and Saskia Van der Voort Haremaker in 1948 when Saskia was one year old, which would mean she had to have been born in 1947. Heremaker was Willem Sassen’s alias and appears to have been the name under which Saskia attended Notre Dame. It does begin to look like the Paul de Man case, if only in this respect, since de Man also got his wife and sons shipped to Argentina from Flanders (in a similar manner, possibly? Was the Catholic Church involved?).

http://www.hebrewsurnames.com/arrival_ADELAAR_1948-11-05

Stephen @30 asks whether the de Man story is relevant. That’s what first came to mind as I read Corey’s post. That de Man’s uncle was Hendrik de Man is an important datum in nephew Paul’s biography, pertaining to developments both pre- and post-“Affair” (the revelation of the wartime journalism). It’s fairly clear Paul de Man actively sought to protect certain related secrets about his own career as a fledgling literary scholar. But since the real scandal (as opposed to the silly name-calling leveled against those icky deconstructor types who postmoderned us into meaningless oblivion) arose after his death, we can’t depose the most important party. We have the recent biography. I gather from reviews that it compiles a lot of telling data, but perhaps doesn’t take the greatest care connecting dots. But apropos of Corey’s post and its obvious point, which has nothing to do with “hereditary guilt,” a weird species of guilt by association (also the plight of some literary theorists), these are fascinating biographical connections. Being family relationships, they don’t simply bestow guilt, but they do give us cause to wonder what kind of significance they held for those whose lives were defined in part by them.

I’ve read a bit of Sassen, a bit more of Sennett. Didn’t know until now that they were a married couple!

#46 Watson Ladd

I meant the plans for dealing with North Korea that other people have. I imagine the word “with” has caused no end of confusion in alliances for similar reasons.

?? Who is planning to invade North Korea? The USA? I hope not, surely we learned something from Iraq and Afghanistan. Or for that matter from the Korean war. How close to the Yalu river will we plan to get this time?

China? I could sort of imagine hoping China invaded North Korea, but then South Korea would have them at the border, with China occupying half of Korea. I have a sense that a surviving North Korea might be better than that. Maybe not, but it’s close.

Somebody else? Who? Surely not Japan.

You have an unusual point of view which to me makes you kind of interesting. I’d kind of like to go slow on hanging people guilty of crimes against humanity until more of our own humanity-criminals have died off. We really have an obligation to shoot our own dog first, and we’re plainly not going to. So let’s go easy on the hypocrisy for awhile. Ex-superpowers usually have a very hard time of it even without excess stupidity.
\

From the Chronicle story: “From an early age, she was also very interested in leaving home. In 1970 she set out for the University of Notre Dame, where, despite being an illegal immigrant with no college degree, she intended to pursue graduate work. She earned a Ph.D. in economics and sociology and, over time, a reputation for producing audacious scholarship.”

I can see why Corey is surprised to learn that a woman he’s known within a particular context is the child of a Nazi. And though she never sought to hide her father’s identity, she was not particularly open about it either (as the Fainstein story shows.) Her life seems a remarkable departure from the politics of her family.

From the Chronicle story: “”I tried not to have too many very personal friends,” she says. “Because I knew that then I would have to get into histories that I didn’t want to talk about.”

However we seek to remove ourselves from the baggage of our parents, it seems to burden us for a lifetime.

agnotology–is that what this post about in general? Not convinced that this is best case to discuss it, though.

Just want to be clear that I wasn’t trying to “give it” to anyone. I honestly thought I was engaging with what had been posted. Anyway I have apologized to Corey so I am going to leave it there.

Anyway, for Fainstein’s reaction the thing to understand is what Bernard Williams called “agent regret”. I think Shame and Necessity is the book to look at for those who might be interested.

Talking about Korea…
The current president is the daughter of a Manchukuo officer (and USA-backed dictator for 30 years, but hey whats ). It is really funny to see her doing the ritual complaints against Japanese aggresion…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Chung-hee

62: the “writings” you refer to are, IIRC, a single column, where he did indeed write more or less what you have written, while including among the great European authors one Kafka. Which indicates that he was complying with the Nazi party line while cocking a snook at them. (In other contemporaneous articles he wrote approvingly of other Jewish writes, such as Proust.)

Now, does that make the essay okay? No, it does not. However heady the experience for a 24-year-old to be editing the book section of Belgium’s main newspaper, such cleverness was too clever by half. But if “anti-Semitic” means that one hates Jews, then de Man’s career tells us that he was not anti-Semitic … whatever other problems he evidently suffered from. (Louis Menand’s evenhanded review of the Barish bio is available online & worth a look.)

“So for me this whole story is really about a puzzle: about how certain things can be in plain sight, yet not seen or known. The purloined letter, as I mentioned.”

Dr. Robin. People only accidentally see things other than what they are looking for, that is what they want to see.
From Thomas Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions”

In a psychological experiment that deserves to be far better known outside the trade, Bruner and Postman asked experimental subjects to identify on short and controlled exposure a series of playing cards. Many of the cards were normal, but some were made anomalous, e.g., a red six of spades and a black four of hearts. Each experimental run was constituted by the display of a single card to a single subject in a series of gradually increased exposures. After each exposure the subject was asked what he had seen, and the run was terminated by two successive correct identifications.

Even on the shortest exposures many subjects identified most of the cards, and after a small increase all the subjects identified them all. For the normal cards these identifications were usually correct, but the anomalous cards were almost always identified, without apparent hesitation or puzzlement, as normal. The black four of hearts might, for example, be identified as the four of either spades or hearts. Without any awareness of trouble, it was immediately fitted to one of the conceptual categories pre- pared by prior experience. One would not even like to say that the subjects had seen something different from what they identified. With a further increase of exposure to the anomalous cards, subjects did begin to hesitate and to display awareness of anomaly. Exposed, for example, to the red six of spades, some would say: That’s the six of spades, but there’s something wrong with it-the black has a red border. Further increase of exposure resulted in still more hesitation and confusion until finally, and sometimes quite suddenly, most subjects would produce the correct identification without hesitation. Moreover, after doing this with two or three of the anomalous cards, they would have little further difficulty with the others. A few subjects, however, were never able to make the requisite adjustment of their categories. Even at forty times the average exposure required to recognize normal cards for what they were, more than 10 per cent of the anomalous cards were not correctly identified. And the subjects who then failed often experienced acute personal distress. One of them exclaimed: I can’t make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn’t even look like a card that time. I don’t know what color it is now or whether it’s a spade or a heart. not even sure now what a spade looks like. My God!”

Oh yeah, I am the world’s worst at this, I really am, and I have had to develop my own ways of copping with it.

Hmm…to be more direct, I mean that open secrets are open secrets so long as you’re A-OK within the societal fabric. If things are NOT OK, just because you had nothing to do with the character who commited the crime(s), or that you’re a better person now, having renounced the previous criminal self, that doesn’t protect you from society’s censure. Sassen always had the social privilege of discreet disclosure, and she always worked in a world where doors remained open to her, and not shut, and hidden besides.

“Hereditary guilt? An obligation to say something? Are you people fucking insane?”

I also what to say that I agree, even if — as one post above mentioned — there were even worse posts, there is absolutely nothing in that post or the body of work of Dr. Robin that even remotely legitimizes any of those questions but the third.