Fear arises not just through a lack of action but also through, as Lillian Smith puts it, “the singsong voices of politicians who preached their demonic suggestions to us as if elected by Satan to do so.” The creation of an enemy, of an other, outside of ourselves, someone we look down upon as “uncivilized,” “unintelligent,” “inferior,” or “”bestial,” serves as a weaponization of the psyche as a way to make it easier to hate that individual. We know this. We’ve seen it. We have taken it into ourselves, looking upon our neighbors as “enemies,” thus making them into the opposite of ourselves, the “humans.”

Talking to campers at Laurel Falls Camp for Girls following the end of World War II, Smith speaks with them about their fears and the importance of building bridges to one another, across geographic boundraies, instead of encasing ourselves in shells. The girls talk about the fact that if they were in Hiroshima when the bomb fell they would have died too, even though they, like the children and others in the city, had nothing to do with the war. One of the girls tells those gathered by the campfire, “But coming back to our enemies . . . suppose we felt everything our enemies were feeling, it’d be terrible! You’d never be able to fight them. It’d be like bombing your own family!” The girl recognizes the ways that the construction of an “enemy,” and the distance from that “enemy,” makes it easier to inflict violence upon them; however, if one comes face to face with their enemy, then what happens?

Smith responds to the girl by saying, “We’d find it hard to have enemies if we cared about what happened to them. War makes us cut a lot of bridges we’ve been spinning all our life.” It’s easy, once we deem someone an enemy, to strip away any semblance of humanity from them because we want to see them suffer. We want to see them struggle. We want to see them as beneath us in every imaginable way. It also provides us with a mechanism to ignore our own issues and the ways we oppress others. This is what Smith gets at when she says that nowhere is hatred for the Nazis more vehement than in the deep South because when Southerners looked across the ocean to the atrocities in Europe they saw themselves, and instead of asking themselves why they saw themselves reflected back at them, they merely positioned themselves against the Nazis. This is not to say that they weren’t on the right side of history; it is just to say that found it easy to demonize others when they were committed similar atrocities at home.

Coupled with this construction of an “enemy,” we ask ourselves, “How could someone become so consumed by an ideology that they commit such atrocities like the Holocaust? How could they be so complicit?” This is a question that numerous thinkers have worked to answer, and their conclusions are not always what we want to hear. Anna Seghers, throughout much of her work, asks this question, and she delves into the process of succumbing to virulent ideologies. In “A Man Becomes a Nazi,” Seghers chronicles Fritz Mueller’s descent into Nazism and his role as an SS officer. The story begins and ends with him in front a Russian military field court in 1942 for crimes against humanity.

Seghers presents Mueller as evil. She presents him as an active and willing participant in Nazi atrocities. However, she also works, detailing Mueller’s life from his birth until 1942 to humanize him, to highlight the moments that made him turn to Nazism, specifically focusing on the economic hardships throughout Germany following World War I and the propaganda that positioned Jews, Communists, and others as the reasons for so much hardship. Seghers doesn’t glamorize Mueller, but she shows him as a person, making us, in some ways, feel sorry for him. She drives this home at the end of the story when Lt. Kaschemnikov, after the commission reaches a verdict, asks, “Is it possible to comprehend that such a creature could have been born of a human mother?” Kaschemnikov’s question is asking how Mueller could even be “human,” how he could even have individuals who cared for him, who raised him, who loved him.

To this question, Seghers ends the story by drawing our attention back to Mueller’s mother. The narrator states, “But this mother existed, and she was living on Ufergasse in Düsseldorf, waiting all along for field mail from her sons, from the youngest one too, whom she had given birth to in the year 1917, nine months after the metalworker, Frederich Mueller’s last furlough home.” Seghers concludes by pointing out Mueller’s mother, specifically her love for him and her worrying about his safety and whether or not he will return to home. This moment, like the friendships between the young schoolchildren in Seghers’ “The Dead Girls Class Trip,” highlights the fact that Mueller was an individual, a person. Yet, when he becomes an “enemy,” that personhood disappears.

Gert Ledig’s The Stalin Front, a short novel that spans a couple of days on the Eastern Front during World War II, presents similar moments where a Nazi major thinks back to his wife and daughter and a Soviet captain thinks back to a lover who is serving elsewhere. When a Russian solider gets captured by the Nazis or vice versa, each always has a recognition of humanity, of seeing the captive face to face, not as distant form on the horizon, but as a face staring back at them. They begin to see one another not as enemies but as individuals. When a Nazi captain gets taken by the Russians, he thinks that most captives get shot in the initial moments due to confusion, but that didn’t happen to him. The narrator notes that the captain thinks, “Russian soldiers didn’t seem that different from his own men. Just different uniforms and other face-shapes. Apart from that, they were equally filthy, equally over-strained, and equally obedient.”

The captain’s response dismantles his preconceived image of the Russian soldiers. They become like him, like his men. They become human. When he looks his “enemy” in the eye, the façade of “enemy” falls away because each of them, in this moment, are fighting to survive, to keep themselves alive. The narratives of otherness peel off, and while a complete bridge does not form between them, allowing them to end the battle, a recognition happens. There are numerous moments like this in Ledig’s novel, and they are important moments because they highlight the impact that the construction of an enemy and war causes on individuals.

I’m going to pick up on this thread in the next post as I look at Nora Krug’s Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home. Krug traces her family’s involvement with the Nazis during World War II, and like Seghers she does not glamorize their actions, but she does humanize them. Until then, what are your thoughts? As always, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.