Sunday, April 05, 2009
Moral Courage and Civic Engagement- More Than Just a Hobby
When I was twenty I had my first conversation about the Third Reich with my father. One of the questions I asked him was how he reacted to the attempt on Hitler’s life on 20th July. While in no way trying to justify himself, he sought to explain to me the moral qualms of most officers in light of the oath they had sworn.
“I swear by God this sacred oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, supreme commander of the armed forces, and that I shall at all times be ready, as a brave soldier, to give my life for this oath.”
It is easy, not to say cheap, to either smile at people who take their word seriously enough to feel themselves bound by an oath or to discredit them morally for having taken it in the first place. We are not in the habit of taking any meaningful oaths anymore; but I remember my own petty promise I made when I became a boy scout and the awe and fear that filled me when I thought that I might not be able to keep it.
In other words if we want to understand the story around the Stauffenberg plot, we need to discard our own post-modern moral framework and seek to enter a mindset which was built on honour, loyalty and patriotism, for good or for ill. (This is where the recent film “Valkyrie” most fails its viewers: the question of a binding oath hardly figures in the plot).
The characters in Valkyrie did not consider themselves supreme moral arbiters, free to choose courses of acti
on as they saw fit, without any framework to refer back to. They understood themselves bound by loyalties and obligations, as laid out by their beliefs, their upbringing and their conscience. Taking an oath was not something they did lightly and and they considered it a moral obligation to keep it at all cost. When I met the last survivor of the 20th July, Freiherr von Boeselager, about 15 years ago, he still knew this oath by heart: other than allegiance to the flag which some of us have to pledge when we become citizens, this was solemn, serious and potentially deadly.
Only against this background can we begin to glimpse the pangs of conscience of the perpetrators of the 20th July: it was becoming increasingly clear that the interests of the German people (and indeed of humanity) and loyalty to the Führer were at odds with each another; for some also their supreme allegiance to Christ required the breaking of their oath. That not more people decided to join the conspiracy is due, not simply to lack of vision of what was going on; it was rather the price of moral courage which you were required to pay which caused many to remain “neutral”. In other words once you resolved your moral dilemma you still needed to be ready to face the cost of chosing what seems right to you. In this particular case it meant risking death.
The story of Valkyrie rather leaves me with two fundamental questions, no less relevant today than they were in 1944. The first is whether I would be ready to swear allegiance to anything today, or whether I prefer to be cynical and remain on the sidelines: Robert Redford’s recent movie “Lions for Lambs” very effectively challenges this attitude.
The second question Valkyrie raises for me is how far my moral courage would take me: Boeslager, the man mentioned earlier, risked his own life and that of his family. Others, like Christian believers in the German Democratic Republic, put their professional future on the line when they refused the oath to the flag when they turned fifteen. Neither has been asked of me yet; but what am I prepared to risk in opposing societal pressure to condone abortion, euthanasia and same-sex activity. Where do I draw the line?
It is easy to condemn regimes such as those of
