Scattered feathers on Kristallnacht
Can truth be gathered up after feathers of mischaracterization have been scattered to the wind?
Tonight, the night between November 9 and 10, is a haunted night. Eighty-four years ago, in 1938, the Kristallnacht pogrom was unfolding in Germany and Austria, annihilating the idea that “such a thing cannot happen here.” The eruption of sadism on Kristallnacht, often regarded retrospectively as the beginning of the Holocaust, got its name from the broken glass that filled the streets after the windows of Jewish stores, synagogues and other buildings had been smashed.
The website of the Israeli Yad Vashem Holocaust museum reports that “during the [Kristallnacht] pogrom 91 Jews were murdered, more than 1,400 synagogues across Germany and Austria were torched, and Jewish-owned shops and businesses were plundered and destroyed. In addition, the Jews were forced to pay ‘compensation’ for the damage that had been caused and approximately 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps.”
Pogrom—which many Germanic Jews assumed could happen only in what they had perceived as the “less enlightened” Eastern Europe—was now their own broken reality—with the unimaginable and much worse horror of the Holocaust to follow in the coming years.
If you were there on Kristallnacht, would you cry and turn away in shame? Or would you be among the well-dressed Germans who watched casually or with self-satisfaction as the “engaging” cruelty was unfolding?
https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/newly-discovered-photos-show-nazi-kristallnacht-up-close-1.6145413
The Yad Vashem website quotes the memories of German-born historian and Holocaust survivor Zvi Bacharach, who was ten years old at Kristallnacht:
“That was the heart of the problem of German Jewry: It was so much a part of German society that the Nazi blow hit it from within. Until 1938 my parents never thought of leaving Germany. ‘There’s no way the Germans we live with will continue to do these things. It’s only an episode.’ That was the atmosphere. It was also the atmosphere on Kristallnacht. They couldn’t comprehend it. It came as a blow. I remember my mother standing pale and crying . . . I remember her phoning her gentile friends—she has more gentile friends than Jewish friends—No answer. No one answered her.”
In a previous commentary, I quoted from an interview with Holocaust survivor Harry Alexander who recalls Kristallnacht in Leipzig, Germany: “they arrested my brother Paul; they beat us up; they broke all the dishes, they broke all the furniture . . . they shook [our feather beds] out of the window. They made believe it was Christmas: it snowed.”
A letter from the Viennese Arnold Rosenfeld to his son Robert in Haifa, then in the British mandate of Palestine, compares an alley in Vienna the day after Kristallnacht to a day following snowfall:
“Throughout the night until one o'clock the screams of people being attacked could be heard. Last night we visited Eugen Hess and the alleyway looked the way it does after a snowfall. Everything was covered with feathers that had been thrown from the apartments.”
https://www.yadvashem.org/gathering-fragments/stories/clouds-of-war/kristallnacht-letter.html
To me, the senseless scattering of goose-down feathers is particularly disturbing because in my parents’ home, goose-down duvets have been the very embodiment of empathy. My family is of modest means, so down blankets are not a luxury to be taken for granted—but nevertheless enveloping children and loved ones during winter in the warmth of down duvets is considered essential to health and synonymous with parental and grand-parental love and care. Every effort must thus be made to provide a loved one with a goose-down duvet.
I imagine that the emotional attachment to goose-down duvets that I have inherited has its roots in pre-Holocaust Jewish life in Europe. One of the few objects my parents own that originates in the Jewish European life that was destroyed is a particularly heavy goose-down duvet from Hungary that my grandfather’s parents gave him before he came to what was then the British mandate of Palestine in the 1930’s. My maternal grandparents from Poland made a modest living in Tel Aviv from their small hardware store, but after the birth of each grandchild my grandmother considered it essential to have a custom-ordered thick goose-feather down duvet made. She called us the children her “candles,” alluding to the memory of her parents and siblings who were all murdered in the Holocaust, and was firm in her belief that the goose-feather down duvet was an investment that had to be made without compromise in our health and wellbeing. If my family was asked to take only three objects to a lone island, I have no doubt that a goose-down duvet would be one of them.
This deeply felt association of goose-down feathers with family love and caregiving means that the idea of down-filled products scattered for no other reason but to take pleasure in abusing Jewish people strikes me as the epitome of sadism not only because of the cruelty to the victims and the inherent wastefulness involved—not to mention disrespect to the animals who have given their feathers—but also because of the self-destructiveness of the perpetrators. Was the tactile sensory experience of destroying Jewish property of more emotional value to the perpetrators than perhaps more “rationally” stealing these objects and giving them to loved one to help keep warm during winter? How did the nesting instinct and empathy come to be replaced by nihilism?
At the end of the Holocaust, as Primo Levi and other starving and sick Auschwitz survivors were waiting to be liberated, they took practical steps to use the objects that the Nazis had left behind. Life and the hope to survive are, after all, associated with the rational use of material items, not with their senseless squandering:
“The camp guards must have left in a great hurry. On the tables we found plates half full of a by now frozen soup, which we devoured with intense pleasure; mugs of beer, transformed into a yellowish ice; a chessboard with an unfinished game. In the dormitories there were a lot of valuable things. We loaded ourselves up with a bottle of vodka, various medicines, newspapers and magazines, and four excellent quilts, one of which is in my house in Turin today.”
Levi, Primo. The Complete Works of Primo Levi (p. 158). Liveright. Kindle Edition.
I wonder how Levi felt, knowing that the excellent quilt in his possession had once been the property of a Nazi at Auschwitz. What does a duvet mean without positive emotional attachment—does it matter where it comes from?
Excellent down duvets are a symbol of family love. They are also a symbol of practicality—preparing to face the harshness of winter with love and warmth.
In Ottawa, Canada, first snow will come sometime soon. According to Germanic legend, the first snow falls when Frau Holle’s goose-down bedsheets are shaken in the open air. Frau Holle tells a girl who works for her: “‘But you must make sure you make my bed properly and shake it out thoroughly, so that the feathers fly – then it will snow the world over.’”
https://blogs.transparent.com/german/a-unique-german-way-to-say-its-snowing/
Last year’s snow in Ottawa resonates with memories of the Freedom Convoy—trucks parked in snowy downtown Ottawa, protesting with dignity for the restoration of bodily autonomy and other basic civil liberties. But what for some was a bold but peaceful statement for hope and liberty was for others a menacing threat.
How does one discern the truth among these conflicting perceptions—and how can truth be distinguished from subjective feeling and hearsay? The Public Order Emergency Commission is now charged with the important task of contemplating these and other questions. Was there a real risk to the sovereignty of Canada that justified the declaration of emergency, treating the truckers as occupiers—or was the perception of risk and threat fueled by bias against the truckers and on blind belief in rumors that were being spread about them—as well as by obedience to the social cues of COVID culture.
https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/
In a legend told by various cultures, the scattering of goose-down feathers is a symbol of slander.
The following excerpt is quoted from <https://burg.com/2009/02/feathers-in-the-wind/>:
“There is a 19th century folktale about a young fellow who went about town slandering the town’s wise man. One day, he went to the wise man’s home and asked for forgiveness. The wise man, realizing that this man had not internalized the gravity of his transgressions, told him that he would forgive him on one condition: that he go home, take a feather pillow from his house, cut it up, and scatter the feathers to the wind. After he had done so, he should then return to the wise man’s house.
Though puzzled by this strange request, the young man was happy to be let off with so easy a penance. He quickly cut up the pillow, scattered the feathers, and returned to the house.
“Am I now forgiven?” he asked.
“Just one more thing,” the wise man said. “Go now and gather up all the feathers.”
“But that’s impossible. The wind has already scattered them.”
And here is a Jewish version of the story:
https://www.jewishlearningmatters.com/AC1-A-Sack-Full-Of-Feathers-Storytelling-371.aspx
As the Public Order Emergency Commission does its work, it remains to be seen if the ideas that have been spread about the truckers can be gathered up into a more accurate picture. Were the truckers a threat to national security and public safety—or were they primarily legitimate protesters who posed a threat to the feeling of personal power that some elected and unelected officials wish would go unchallenged? Were the negative feelings that become widespread about the truckers primarily a response to empirical reality or to the social cues that citizens were given by authority figures about what they are “supposed” to feel? These are questions that must be studied with as little bias as possible—Or truth, as well as the democratic right to protest, might remain a luxury item that had been scattered to the wind.
Scattered feathers on Kristallnacht
Thank you for the novel recommendation. Erich Fromm was also concerned about the potential of democracies in the west to deteriorate into totalitarianism. There are some quotes from him to this effect in the first commentary on this Substack. I do not have enough knowledge of the examples you mention to comment meaningfully. I do hope that Russia gets out of the Ukraine so that peace can be achieved. Speaking in general and not about these specific examples: I agree that not enough is done to call out antisemitism and reject it. And it is indeed disturbing that some Jewish people seem to "go along" with antisemitic ways of thinking, perhaps believing that this puts them above the Jewish people or in some way protects them from antisemitism. The truth is that antisemitism is toxic for humanity as a whole, and no person who engages it in will truly benefit when it comes to fulfilling their human potential. Antisemitism is spiritually empty, projecting common human flaws in an exaggerated way upon the Jewish people instead of taking personal responsibility, and it has to be confronted peacefully at the individual level through soul searching. People have to ask themselves soul-searching questions about why Jew hate or why collaborating with antisemitism is attractive to them and then try to self-improve so that this toxic phenomenon is no longer appealing.