Speech on the 75^th Anniversary Com­mem­or­a­tion of Kristallnacht
by Dr Tim Sout­phom­masane
Race Dis­crim­in­a­tion Com­mis­sion­er
at The Great Synagogue, Sydney

1. Intro­duc­tion
On this night that we gather to remember, can I begin by acknow­ledging the tra­di­tion­al owners of the land, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and pay my respects to elders past and present.
A few weeks ago I had the honour to meet Gerty Jellinek. Gerty is one of the volunteer guides at the Sydney Jewish Museum. Every Friday, Gerty tells visitors of her story of survival. Now in her eighties, Gerty grew up in Vienna. She told me that for a number of years a man had boarded with her family in their home. On 13 March 1938, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria, the boarder appeared in the corridor dressed in brown shirted, storm­troop­er uniform. During the years he had lived in Gerty’s family home, the boarder had been a member of the SA.
It was only a few months later that Kristallnacht took place. We all know what began that night of 9 November. Across Germany and Austria, Jews became the targets of an orgy of violence. Families were attacked in their homes. Hundreds of syn­agogues were destroyed. Thousands of busi­nesses were looted. Cemeter­ies were desec­rated. Beginning on that night, thousands of Jewish men would be arrested and trans­ferred to con­cen­tra­tion camps.
What happened 75 years ago was fateful – the shattered glass across central Europe rep­res­en­ted not just the destruc­tion of Jewish life, but also the shat­ter­ing of civilized society. One British cor­res­pond­ent in Berlin, Hugh Greene (who would later become Director-General of the BBC), observed the events with nauseous disbelief. As Greene put it,
Racial hatred and hysteria seemed to have taken complete hold of otherwise decent people. I saw fash­ion­ably dressed women clapping their hands and screaming with glee, while respect­able middle-class mothers held up their babies to see the “fun”.
These were the scenes that a twelve-year-old Gerty saw in Vienna, where the pogrom against Jews was complete. Nearly all of Vienna’s 94 syn­agogues and prayer houses were destroyed. As Gerty recalled to me, Jewish women in Vienna were made to scrub the pavements on the city’s streets – a ritual of torment and humi­li­ation.
2. Memory
Gerty is one of the living con­nec­tions we have to the events that we remember tonight. Her testimony and her indi­vidu­al memory, as with others who have survived or escaped the Holocaust, con­trib­ute to form our col­lect­ive memory.
There is, of course, a dif­fer­ence between a shared memory and a common memory. Those who were alive during the 1930s and 40s, and were witness to Kristallnacht and what followed, have a common memory. They remember something which they have each exper­i­enced indi­vidu­ally.
A shared memory is different. As the philo­soph­er Avishai Margalit has explained, shared memory is built on a division of mnemonic labour. That is to say, it requires com­mu­nic­a­tion, for the per­spect­ives of those who remember the episode to be brought together into one version. A shared memory means that those who may not have been there at the time of an event may non­ethe­less be “plugged into the exper­i­ence” of those who were. The currents of memory travel through “channels of descrip­tion”, rather than through conduits of direct exper­i­ence.
In tra­di­tion­al societies, shared memory would be trans­mit­ted through the priest, the rabbi, the storyteller. In modern societies, our channels of descrip­tion include insti­tu­tions such as schools and libraries, media and museums.
How memory functions in a modern society is the subject of con­sid­er­able scholarly debate. That is because memory is so often tied up in history. And history, as we know, if often bound up with tradition.
It is in the form of tradition that shared memory is conveyed. Within com­munit­ies, memories are part of a legacy that is passed on from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion. Memory and tradition define the values and prin­ciples that come to mark a community. They sit are the core of who a people consider them­selves to be.
There are some obvious questions that emerge. If memory may define a community, do some shared memories exist only for that given community? How are we to deal with something when we sit outside a community of memory?
I have long been pre­oc­cu­pied by such questions. I trace my own schol­ar­ship in matters of national identity and cit­izen­ship to an episode I had as a schoolboy, here in Sydney, listening to a fellow student on Anzac Day. I remember her saying, “Today, we pause to remember the sac­ri­fices made by our forebears so that we can enjoy the Aus­trali­an way of life.”
While they expressed noble sen­ti­ments, the words to me never sounded quite right. Because when I looked at my fellow student, I saw someone who looked like me – someone of southeast Asian extrac­tion. Did it make sense for her to refer to us remem­ber­ing our forebears?
There is, however, room for shared civic memory. People should be able to relate to the history of the com­munit­ies in which they live. People should also be able to recognize the exper­i­ences of their fellow citizens. As citizens, we all inherit a certain civic tradition, even if it’s not by birth. And we all owe an oblig­a­tion of solid­ar­ity with those who are our fellow members.
In any case, there are some things that require us to care and to remember. Members of a civilized society should not ignore crimes against humanity. They certainly should not revel in the lam­ent­a­tions of other human beings.
Shared memory can have a universal ring, too. Earlier this year, the Berliner Phil­har­monik­er gave its first per­form­ance of A Child of Its Time, an oratorio of Michael Tippett’s. The com­pos­i­tion of A Child of Its Time began in 1939. Tippett, an English composer and a committed pacifist, was deeply shaken by the violence against Jews on Kristallnacht and the trial of Herschel Grynspan – whose shooting of German diplomat Ernst von Rath was used by Nazis as a pretext for the pogrom.
The oratorio has been described as “something Handel might have written had he lived in the age of Auschwitz”. Its themes closely track what happened on Kristallnacht, and the role of Grynspan in its eruption. Tippett’s piece tells the story of a “general state of oppres­sion in our time” and a “young man’s attempt to seek justice [with] cata­stroph­ic con­sequences”. Reflect­ing later on his oratorio, Tippett would write that “the growing violence springing out of divisions of nation, race, religion, status, colour, or even just rich and poor is possibly the deepest present threat to the social fabric of all human society”. For Tippett, there was clearly a universal import to the Night of Broken Glass.
3. Universal Lessons
Many scholars have addressed the question of whether it is possible to draw a universal lesson from the Holocaust – a genocide that has been described by some as “uniquely unique”, an event of sin­gu­lar­ity. On the intric­a­cies of this, I confess I am not well qualified.
Yet the his­tor­ic­al sig­ni­fic­ance of Kristallnacht cannot be doubted. It marked the escal­a­tion of Nazi hatred of Jews into sys­tem­at­ic violence. It illus­trated the power of words in the mounting anti-Semitism of the time. It demon­strated what can happen when author­it­ies give people per­mis­sion to conduct violence. It was the opening act of the Holocaust.
The chro­no­logy of events shows that Kristallnacht occurred after Grynspan’s shooting of von Rath in Paris. Nazi Germany would use it as an excuse to call for demon­stra­tions against Jews in retri­bu­tion. Pro­pa­ganda Minister Joseph Goebbels declared that “insofar as they erupt spon­tan­eously”, such demon­stra­tions “are not to be hampered”.
What resulted was orches­trated violence across Germany and Austria. Such a pattern of author­iz­a­tion would be repeated in other episodes of genocide during the twentieth century. In Cambodia, it was Pol Pot’s call for class hatred against educated officials, busi­ness­men, teachers and city-dwellers that preceded the murder of 25 per cent of the Cambodian national pop­u­la­tion. In Rwanda, the but­cher­ing of 800 000 people began when a radio station incited Hutus to wage a final war of exterm­in­a­tion against the Tutsi. Genocide doesn’t begin with violence – it indeed begins with words.
And it also begins with indif­fer­ence. What was perhaps most con­sequen­tial with Kristallnacht was that it was met with such little oppos­i­tion, both inside Germany and Austria, and from outside. The event confirmed that passivity emboldens the per­pet­rat­ors of evil: it gives licence to hate; it desens­it­izes people to the further degrad­a­tion of others.
This needn’t mean that indif­fer­ence trans­forms otherwise upright or good people into menacing agents of evil. Over the decades, prompted by the arguments of Hannah Arendt, we have come to accept that evil may assume much more banal forms. As Arendt reminds us, “the sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never made their minds up to be or do evil at all”. When it comes to the worst of crimes against humanity, the problem is that normal people commit them.
We can take from all of this the following. Context and cir­cum­stance matter. Moral judge­ments seldom appear in absolute form. And none of us is ever exempt from human defi­ciency.
The evidence supports this. Exper­i­ments in social psy­cho­logy reveal how small changes in situ­ation­al context can affect our moral responses.
In one famous exper­i­ment, the psy­cho­lo­gist Philip Zimbardo took a group of healthy young men to a makeshift prison in the basement of a uni­ver­sity labor­at­ory. He assigned one half to act as prisoners and the other half to act as guards. Zimbardo appointed himself prison super­in­tend­ent. He gave the guards instruc­tions that they should refrain from physical torture.
Within two days, the student guards had set about inflict­ing upon prisoners pun­ish­ments: verbal abuse, sleep depriva­tion, hours spent in stress positions. Prisoners were forced to repeat physical and mental exercises. Within even this con­trolled, benign prison envir­on­ment, the guards grew sadistic. Some prisoners broke into hysteria; others broke into hives. A cycle of degrad­a­tion had been unleashed.
Here is Zimbardo’s con­clu­sion:
Any deed that any human being has ever committed, however horrible, is possible for any of us – under the right or wrong situ­ation­al cir­cum­stances. That knowledge does not excuse evil; rather, it demo­crat­ises it, sharing its blame among ordinary actors rather than declaring it the province only of deviants and despots – of Them but not Us.
4. Racial Dis­crim­in­a­tion and Vili­fic­a­tion
It is a dangerous thing, then, to throw around the language of evil. To call someone evil, after all, is to cast a judgment upon someone’s soul. But calling someone’s actions evil is another thing. This may be one way to avoid moral laziness: focus on the action rather than the agent.
Such matters bear upon the question of race in con­tem­por­ary Australia. We see regularly from our public debates that leveling the charge of racism isn’t to be done lightly. Fre­quently, those who are alleged to have said or done something will respond – or someone will respond on their behalf – with indig­na­tion. To be called racist, they will say, involves a con­dem­na­tion of moral character that goes well beyond censuring any ignorance.
In my view, it is important that we not be sheepish about con­demning bad behaviour when we see it. Something needn’t be violent or mali­ciously directed in order to count as racism. Racism, as we know, begins with words. And it needn’t be about a doctrinal belief in racial superi­or­ity. More often than, it is about the prejudice born of ethnic ste­reo­types.
But while acts of racism may sometimes be unin­ten­tion­al, they always have con­sequences. Racism is as much about impact as it is about intention; it is about the impact of actions on the standing that someone enjoys as a member of society.
In Australia, it is the federal Racial Dis­crim­in­a­tion Act, which writes into our laws that everyone can par­ti­cip­ate in the life of the nation as an equal. But the Act is more than just an instru­ment for guar­an­tee­ing equal oppor­tun­ity. It is also a statement about racial tolerance in a mul­ti­cul­tur­al society – that we regard civility as a cardinal value, and social cohesion as an absolute necessity.
Since 1995, the pro­vi­sions of the Racial Dis­crim­in­a­tion Act have included pro­tec­tions against racial vili­fic­a­tion, through sections 18C and 18D. Section 18C makes it unlawful for someone to do an act that is reas­on­ably likely “to offend, insult, humiliate or intim­id­ate” someone on the grounds of their race or ethnicity. Reflect­ing the fun­da­ment­al import­ance of freedom of speech, section 18D ensures that artistic works, sci­entif­ic debate, and fair comment on a matter of public interest are exempt from being in breach of the Act – provided that something is said or done reas­on­ably and in good faith.
As many of you know, the Federal Gov­ern­ment has said that it wishes to change the racial vili­fic­a­tion pro­vi­sions of the Act. Namely, it wishes that the Act no longer makes it unlawful to offend or insult someone on the grounds of race.
There will be debate about this issue in the coming months. That is how it should be. As citizens in a liberal democracy, we should be able to conduct robust dis­cus­sions and arguments. If there are to be limits on what we can say, they should have good jus­ti­fic­a­tions.
But free speech has never been an absolute value. In practice, free speech has never been entirely unres­tric­ted. We have many laws that limit our freedom of speech: for example, laws con­cern­ing defam­a­tion, laws con­cern­ing advert­ising, laws con­cern­ing obscenity, laws con­cern­ing fraud, laws con­cern­ing public order, laws con­cern­ing national security.
We should ask a number of questions. Would a change to the law leave people with adequate pro­tec­tions against racial vili­fic­a­tion? Would a change have the effect of encour­aging people to think that they can harass and vilify others on the grounds of race with impunity? What would be the overall impact on our human rights and freedoms?
Any debate should also pay attention to the manner in which the current racial vili­fic­a­tion pro­vi­sions actually operate. Often it is forgotten that section 18D expli­citly protects the fun­da­ment­al value of free speech. Often it is thought that the operation of section 18C serves only to protect hurt feelings and personal sens­it­iv­it­ies.
Yet the courts have inter­preted the law during the past two decades in a con­sist­ent manner. Section 18C consists of an objective test: unlawful acts are those that are proven reas­on­ably likely, in all the cir­cum­stances, to cause harm. It doesn’t apply to “mere slights” but only to acts that involve “profound and serious effects.” Where people have fallen foul of section 18C in the courts, it has involved racial vili­fic­a­tion of a standard that goes well beyond trivial name-calling.
Certainly, in the com­plaints that reach the Aus­trali­an Human Rights Com­mis­sion, it is clear that the current legis­la­tion provides redress to people who have been subjected to withering and degrading racial abuse. In what follows, I should warn you that I will be using actual language used in our com­plaints that may offend.
In recent times, the Com­mis­sion has con­cili­ated a complaint made about a police officer who was alleged to have called Abori­gin­al bus pas­sen­gers “you f***ing hairy monkeys”. Another complaint involved a website inciting people to yell at Asians, “You Gook F**k Off to China”, and encour­aging people “to express their anger phys­ic­ally by laying the Gooks out”. Another case involved a man of Jewish ethnic origin putting forward a complaint about a video sharing site on the internet: the website included content in the form of people offering money to kill Jewish people.
These are just some examples of the ugliness that the law in practice serves to combat. Indeed, the Racial Dis­crim­in­a­tion Act provides important pro­tec­tions against racial hatred. The apparent anti-Semitic attack in Bondi just over two weeks ago provides a sad reminder of why sections 18C and 18D were intro­duced to the Act during the 1990s. As many of you know, there was determ­in­a­tion at the time that stopping racial violence required legis­lat­ive action against racial vili­fic­a­tion – it required action aimed at the roots of racial violence.
5. Con­clu­sion
As we com­mem­or­ate 75 years after Kristallnacht, we naturally reflect on what it may tell us today. For members of Sydney’s Jewish community, as for members of Jewish com­munit­ies every­where, the Night of Broken Glass is an episode of common and shared memory. It is part of the story of what is your community of memory.
It is also important, I believe, that Kristallnacht be the subject of shared memory for all of us. The reason is simple: a crime against humanity anywhere is a crime against humanity every­where. And the lessons of Kristallnacht are profound and universal. Let us never be com­pla­cent about human frailty. Let us never under­es­tim­ate our capacity to do evil. Let us never license hatred, for we can never know its bounds.