The Investigation by Peter Weiss

The other day I finished reading The Investigation by Peter Weiss. This play took the actual transcripts of the 1963-1965 Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials and arranges the material into 11 cantos giving witness and defendant testimonies of the concentration camps experience from beginning to end. Obviously, this is a tough read but an interesting experience.

I’m very interested in how people think and why people believe what they believe. The next step beyond that interest is why people behave the way they behave. How does power work, particularly within an organization, be it a nation, corporation, or business? How does power dominate individuals within a system?

Theologian Walter Wink assessed the nature of power in the Bible in his Powers Trilogy, discussing how a minority of people can dominate a vast collective through fear. He called it the delusional-dominating system.

So what was most interesting to me in this play was how the system dominated the soldiers, guards, administrators, doctors, and prisoners to perpetuate such evil. So say that they were all just evil is incorrect and an over-simplification. The clichéd excuse we now mock, “We just followed orders”, is also a rather more complex scenario than we would like to think. It seemed that a system was created in which every individual was given tasks that in of itself was not horrendous but when set in motion as an aggregate committed these crimes. Every person could claim that they were simply engaged in a detached task, by orders, on threat of punishment, which could be considered individual and morally removed from collective result. Blame was everywhere and blame was nowhere. There was a practical, rational, moral, and psychological disassociation inherent in all the parts of the system that kept it working, that propped it up. The system could not have maintained itself any other way.

Even concentration camp prisoners were forced to carry out these tasks on fear of death. Should they be held responsible for their actions within this system? If not, then what about concentration camp guards who were forced to carry out tasks on fear of death? Auschwitz had a specific prison block to punish guards.

So I am continuing my studies into how people think and believe and how this relates to the theory of the delusional-dominating system. I am re-reading Tom Stoppard’s play, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, about the Soviet practice of treating political dissidence as a form of mental illness.  I’ve also begun reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago about the forced labor camp system of the Soviet Union. A number of Solzhenitsyn works are probably in order. He himself used the term “The Great Lie” to designate the method by which the Soviet leaders dominated the Russian people. Socialist systems (like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany) tend to be excellent areas of study for this subject.