Yesterday in an interview with film director Chris Weitz, Terry Gross of Fresh Air opened a window on her identity-formation when she described her fear of Nazis, largely from the consumption of war movies in the 50s and 60s. Though Gross took care to locate this fear in a Jewish frame by bringing in her parents’ generation’s extermination in Europe. And I’d note that Gross places some of the experience in her teens, the 60s (she was born in ’51). The Shoah was of course a grave and lasting trauma and a “sacred Jewish experience” (as I said, to my own surprise, when a guy was interviewing me last week, and I quoted Jacob Cohen of Brandeis University who told me this four years ago). Yet the question that arises from Gross’s statement is, If you saw Nazis as “very present,” well, did you not project those fears on to the Arabs and Palestinians? I sense from Gross’s defensiveness around Israel that she did, and that this great interviewer has not interrogated the trauma or its projection on to a people robbed of everything.
And another question: Inasmuch as this was an apprehension about America itself, how did things work out for you? How are we doing? Were we unfair to America in this fear? Or do you still wonder, who will hide you? Important questions. Thanks to Susie Kneedler. Gross:
GROSS: I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s and watched so many World War II movies on television. And so, like, the Nazis were very present in my life when I was growing up because they were always on television, and so I grew up, like, really living in fear of the Nazis, even though that was over.
So with your father focusing so much on Nazi history, and I think – did his father flee Nazi Germany?
Mr. WEITZ: He did eventually, almost too late. His father had fought on the Eastern front in World War I, for the Germans, and been awarded an Iron Cross, and was one of the very assimilated Jews who almost left too late.
GROSS: So did you grow up, like, afraid of the Nazis and everything that they represented? Did it seem very present to you, as opposed to something safely in the past?
Mr. WEITZ: It was very present but strangely familiar, because my dad was so steeped in that culture. I mean, if you can imagine growing up… And my father’s office had a signature of Adolf Hitler in it, which is, you know, in some ways creepy, but in some ways he knew his enemy so well.
And, you know, I was the guy who organized his library when he was doing his research. So there were all of these books, in both English and German, about the Nazi Party. And he was so familiar with the workings of it and so constantly, I suppose, trying to work out how to still love Germany in spite of what had happened, that it was a constant presence.
GROSS: Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. And I want say, so it doesn’t sound too weird or insensitive what I was just talking about, Nazis in terms of movies on television. I mean, my parents were also of the generation where family who stayed behind in Europe never…
Mr. WEITZ: Lost their lives.
GROSS: Yeah, never survived. So whether it was talked about or not, you always, like, you always knew about that.
