{"id":268,"date":"2020-05-26T15:00:59","date_gmt":"2020-05-26T14:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/?p=268"},"modified":"2020-05-25T21:14:27","modified_gmt":"2020-05-25T20:14:27","slug":"rein","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/2020\/05\/26\/rein\/","title":{"rendered":"Rein"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Cillian McBride<\/em><\/h6>\n\n\n\n
Senior Lecturer in Political Theory<\/em><\/h6>\n\n\n\n
21\/05\/2020<\/em><\/h6>\n\n\n\n
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Outside of a dog, a book is man\u2019s best friend,\u2019\nobserved Groucho Marx, before adding that, \u2018inside of a dog, it\u2019s too dark to\nread…\u2019 In these dark times, we can at least read and so I thought I might\nsuggest something to add to everyone\u2019s lockdown reading list. Perhaps something\nutopian\/dystopian from the world of sci fi would be best but my pick is just\nsomething that struck a chord with me. I\u2019ll try to shoehorn in a Covid-19 link\nby the end, if I can. Don\u2019t worry about missing it: it probably won\u2019t be\nsubtle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book I have in mind is one I read earlier\nthis year in that happy pre-lockdown period when it was still bliss to be alive\n(this may be a slight exaggeration. Belfast in January is not Paris in spring,\nor so I\u2019ve been told). It\u2019s Berlin Finale<\/em> by Heinz Rein. I hadn\u2019t heard\nof it before: it was just something that caught my eye one day in a bookshop.\nThe virtue of browsing in actual bookshops is the limited stock, forcing you to\nbe flexible if you want to come out with any sort of a book to read.\nSecond-hand bookshops are especially good in this regard as they may contain\njust one solitary book that you might actually consider reading and it usually\ntakes some hunting to find it. One Swansea bookshop I knew simply dispensed\nwith any attempt at organisation whatsoever with the result that no shelf could\nbe safely left unexamined. I\u2019m not sure I still have the stamina for that sort\nof thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having spent the summer of 1989 in Berlin\n(missing the fall of the Wall, naturally, but at least getting to peek behind\nthe Iron Curtain while it was still hanging), I have a soft spot for all things\nBerlin. Rein\u2019s book deals with the closing days of the war and the efforts of a\ncollection of surviving leftists to stay alive until the Russians arrive,\ntrying to stay out of the clutches of the remnants of the Nazi regime without\nalso getting themselves killed by their Russian liberators in the confusion.\nThe book was written shortly after the war and Rein punctuates it with passages\nof Nazi propaganda hailing non-existent German victories as the Russians grow\never closer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What really drives the book is its outrage at\nthe complicity of the ordinary population with the regime, the day to day\ncompliance of most citizens, interspersed with enthusiastic cruelty on the part\nof the genuine fanatics. Rein\u2019s heroes, the few who held out and quietly\nresisted the regime, worry that a whole generation may have been poisoned by\ngrowing up in Hitler\u2019s shadow. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question of complicity appealed to me\nbecause I\u2019m interested in the ways our social relationships pull us this way\nand that. This sets the scene for social and political struggles over whose\nvoices are recognised as authoritative, which expectations we have to navigate\naround and which ones we end up internalising. One familiar response to these\npressures is to strike the pose of the heroic individualist who casts off all\nsocial entanglements in the name of personal freedom. This strikes me as a poor\nresponse, not only because it is ultimately an impossible goal, but also\nbecause it also looks a lot like a cop-out. We are inextricably caught up in\nsocial life, weighing the demands of others and making demands on others in\nturn, vulnerable and potentially dominating in turn. If we refuse to\nacknowledge this, we aren\u2019t even going to begin to think about our\nresponsibility for the various roles we play in life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A different sort of mistake is that of the angry\nmoralist who wants to judge everyone equally guilty for collective outcomes\nbecause we were all involved in some way or another. Famously, philosopher Karl\nJaspers claimed that all Germans bore \u2018metaphysical guilt\u2019 for the holocaust.\nThis seems excessive: surely we bear different degrees of responsibility\ndepending on the different roles we play? Attributing responsibility is a\ntricky business. The reckless populist leader who tries to undermine the public\nhealth policies during a pandemic bears more responsibility for the resulting\nfailures than his media-befuddled supporters (to pluck an example out of thin\nair, and, yes, this is the Covid-19 shoehorn bit. You were warned…) but they\nmust bear some<\/em> share of \nresponsibility for putting him there in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One effect of the current crisis has been to\nbring to the fore the fact that our lives are deeply interdependent. Our daily\nlives are sustained by a vast complex scheme of social cooperation, stretching\nfar beyond our borders, which goes largely unnoticed until parts of it stop\nfunctioning. We are responsible for our own contributions to this scheme, of\ncourse and when these are valuable we can take pride in them. But perhaps we\nare also complicit to some degree in sustaining of the more problematic\npatterns of interaction, those that damage the lives of others, whether through\nsocial and economic inequalities or environmental degradation. Being\nresponsible, however, is not just a matter of looking back at the things we\nshould have done differently, acknowledging the times when we should have\nresisted rather than complied, like Rein\u2019s underground heroes. It is also a\nmatter of looking forward, to the ways we can reshape our social relations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Greek historian, Polybius, believed that\nhistory moved in a circle. Human institutions were impermanent and when they\nwere working well we could only hope to stave off decline for as long as\npossible before corruption set in. That was the bad news. The good news was\nthat it was always possible, even when things looked most hopeless, that they\nmight be set on the path to improvement. Whether we have grounds for cautious\noptimism about our future depends entirely on what we do next.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cillian McBride Senior Lecturer in Political Theory 21\/05\/2020 Outside of a dog, a book is man\u2019s best friend,\u2019 observed Groucho Marx, before adding that, \u2018inside of a dog, it\u2019s too dark to read…\u2019 In these dark times, we can at least read and so I thought I might suggest something to add to everyone\u2019s lockdown […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":795,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lifeinlockdown"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/795"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":272,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions\/272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/happ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}