Saturday, May 20, 2017

"All Our Children" at the Jermyn St Theatre - a "Warning from History"




“All Our children”
Jermyn Street Theatre 16th May 2017

"We had a huge number of very low-value, low-skilled people coming through” – Iain Duncan Smith on BBC Newsnight 9th May 2017



The grotesque idea that you can judge people and divide them by their value to society and discriminate accordingly – as expressed recently by Conservative ex Minister Iain Duncan Smith with his we need fewer "low-value, low-skilled people" remarks – was at the core of the malignant philosophy of Adolf Hitler and was to lead to the Holocaust - the greatest crime the world has ever known. This discrimination placed healthy heterosexual Aryan Caucasians in the “High value” category and Jews, Homosexuals and those with physical or mental disabilities into “Low value”. They were referred to as “Untermenschen” and included citizens of the Eastern European nations, such as Poland, that the Nazi war machine conquered.

By the autumn of 1939 the euphemistically termed “euthanasia action” killing mental patients was underway across the Reich and was, as Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw called it, “… to provide a gateway to the vaster extermination programme to come”. Kershaw explains[1] that the notion that at the bottom of the “low value” pile there were grounds for destroying “life not worth living” (Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens ) dates back to the immediate post WW1 years and was in part an economic argument – why spend money on the care of those who are otherwise a social burden when that money can better be used for “productive” purposes?

In August 1941 a Catholic Bishop, Clemens August Graf von Galen, preached a sermon criticising the Gestapo, and by connection Hitler, for the “euthanasia action”. Von Galen’s initiative was widely publicised, especially in Catholic circles and, wanting to avoid the negative publicity at a critical time in the war, Joseph Goebbels recommended to Hitler that the large scale and organised “euthanasia action”, which by then had killed 70,000 victims, be stopped. (In fact, as Laurence Rees[2] points out, “individual hospitals continued to starve disabled patients to death and to kill them by fatal injection”).  But Hitler followed Goebbels advice and the systematic murder was stopped.

In his new play “All Our Children” Stephen Unwin has constructed a drama around the real life figure of Bishop von Galen. It takes place in a clinic in Winkelheim in January 1941 where Dr. Victor Franz (powerfully and sympathetically played by Colin Tierney) the clinic’s Director, is responsible for the monthly transportation of twenty or thirty disabled children to the killing factories. This involves selection from their patients and deception as to what happened to the children when they were taken away. Frau Pabst has a son, Stefan, in the clinic and visits Franz to discuss him. From their discussion it is clear that she loves the boy who is severely handicapped but the unspoken reality is that he will be selected for one of the transports (it later transpires that this has already happened and Frau Pabst is informed that he has “died of natural causes”). When Frau Pabst has left Dr. Franz’s deputy, a young staunch Nazi called Eric, explains the ideology. “These youngsters here, they’re nothing really they aren’t… the Fuhrer’s right: they’re leading “lives unworthy of life. It’s as simple as that”. When Frau Pabst hears the news about her son she returns and confronts Dr. Franz who is forced to admit what has happened. “He was killed because of his condition. Because he’ll never be able to make a contribution to society. Because looking after him costs too much money and because there’s no need for such people in the Third Reich”

Bishop von Galen (a very authentic-feeling portrayal by David Yelland) has made an appointment to see Dr. Franz and the last part of the play comprises his challenge to Franz about the moral basis of the “euthanasia action” of which he is part. Although the Bishop bases his challenge on his Catholic faith it is actually a broader argument arguing that Franz’s “Ends justify the means” defence – that there are no absolutes and that as a doctor he is always involved in making tough choices - is “moral relativism”. Von Galen segues from the purely religious to the argument that Germans are “not barbarians. This is Germany: the land of Goethe and Schiller… how can we be doing this to our fellow human beings?”

The cultured Germany - the sophisticated modern 20th Century European State descending into unimaginable barbarism - is at the heart of this play. “The Holocaust” was around the corner in 1941 and the audience of course knows that. The characters – the “Only obeying orders” Dr. Franz, the Nazi apparatchik Eric and the others just caught up in, and often victims of, the terror – Frau Pabst the mother and Martha the maid - are symbols and victims of the utterly dysfunctional society that the Nazis created and of the further, greater terror to come. Bishop von Galen is a special case. Opposition to the Nazi regime was not tolerated and was ruthlessly put down. But the Bishop was a distinguished figure in the church and Hitler knew that recent attacks on the churches were causing morale problems in the population which he, in the end, judged it was unwise to exacerbate. Others in the Nazi leadership wanted to hang von Galen. Martin Bormann, Goebbels and eventually Hitler himself decided to wait. In the end von Galen survived dying of natural causes a year after the War’s end. He was beatified by Pope John Paull II in October 2005.


Ian Kershaw and Laurence Rees collaborated on the TV Series about the Nazis “A Warning from History” and the title was well chosen. I think that Stephen Unwin, with his fine first play, is also warning us. Was his character Dr Victor Franz a “Bad man” – certainly no more so than others caught up in, rather than being instigators of, the terror.  Was Bishop von Galen a “Good man” as his later beatification suggests he was – perhaps yes, certainly one who challenged the system rather than acquiescing to it. And the lessons? It shouldn’t need stating, but judging from the hierarchical categorising being indulged in by some like Iain Duncan Smith it does. John Donne said “Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind”. And Robbie Burns probably summed it up best of all: “A Man's a Man for a' that”.

And who are we to judge the value of a life anyway?




 
   





[1] “Hitler 1936-1945. Nemesis” Penguin Books 2001
[2] “The Holocaust” Penguin Books 2017

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home