As I said in the previous post, when I was a teenager, the two most important adult role models who were not my parents were a former WWII soldier in the German army named Kurt and a concentration camp survivor named Saul.
Despite their different backgrounds and cultures, Kurt and Saul had a lot in common. Both men had a certain sadness inside them. Kurt concealed his sadness with boozy, clownish antics, and Saul concealed his with a ceaseless drive to work and earn enough to maintain a middle-class lifestyle for his family. Both married women who were lively, talkative, big-hearted and at least a decade their juniors. Both spoke multiple languages, as did their wives and children. Both told me stories about getting frostbite during the war, and this really hit home because I too had suffered frostbite when I was eight or nine years old. Both understood that time is precious. They never articulated this in so many words, but they demonstrated it in their attentiveness to the people and the details around them.
Getting to know Saul and Kurt at a young age made a strong impact on my development. For one, it made me mistrustful of stereotypes. Neither of these men remotely resembled the stereotypes about their cultures. Their friendships taught me the lesson that a person is not the group and a group is not the person.
Individuals are more complex than groups and have more nuances. Each person has his own unique traits and ambitions and fears, pet peeves, pecadilloes and bugaboos, even without considering any physical uniqueness. From one individual to another, there are lots of variabilities. But these variabilities get smoothed over and blended away when you gather together many people and start referring to them collectively as a group. People have fingerprints; groups do not.
When you stereotype, you obscure the humanness of the individuals in the group. That is certainly what the Nazis did during WWII and what all totalitarian regimes do when they oppress certain segments of society. They focus on the stereotypical traits of the segment, and this conveniently allows them to sidestep the inherent variability of its individual members. As Joseph Stalin alledgedly said, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.”
The field of statistics enumerates this phenomenon. If you were to choose a person randomly from the population and measure that person’s height, you might have chosen a tiny 18-inch infant or a hulking 7-foot giant. But if you repeat this random process many times over and over, the average height of all your samples will converge towards the population average.
In the United States, the average height of adults is currently 5 feet, 6 inches, according to some group of actuaries. If you were to measure the height of all actuaries, you would find some tall ones and some short ones and you shouldn’t be surprised if, on average, their height is around 5 feet, 6 inches too.
Problems arise if you tag the individuals with the perceived traits of the group. If you went through life thinking all actuaries are 5 feet, 6 inches, you would not only be wrong but you would also think the tall woman at the cocktail party was lying to you when she said she was an actuary. Very awkward.
So it is with stereotyping.
To this day when I think of the German military regime during WWII, I think of a determined force that conquered and colonized diverse regions where it brutally imposed a narrow, fanatical ideology. This was true for the regime, but obviously not true for all the people wearing the uniforms of the regime.
My friend Kurt was a caring man, cultured and virtuous. He carried the situational awareness of a professional comic and a vaudevillian’s knack for improv. He loved to laugh and tell raucous stories, ironic, peppered with quirky details, and often showcasing his own blunders. But I also knew he had served as a soldier in a brutal regime where he fought against others in a kill-or-be-killed environment. He was an inherent contradiction, not a stereotype. Getting to know him over the years, I believe that he acted dutifully during the war, but not dishonorably. The Kurt I knew was a conscientious man, not a man bedeviled by a guilty conscience.
Saul had been imprisoned in a concentration camp, stripped of all possessions, tattooed, enslaved, beaten, humiliated, forced to endure hard labor and watch helplessly as friends and loved ones were deleted. Did he hold a grudge? Not that I ever saw. Saul was one of the most tolerant, forgiving people I ever knew. Also, not a stereotype.
Before the war, Kurt had been living in Paris where he worked in a hotel with his French girlfriend who was named Marie. Or maybe I just misremembered her name to be Marie which is, after all, a stereotypical name for a wartime French girlfriend. In any case, they were heartbroken when the war broke out and he was drafted back to Deutscheland and assigned to the army. When he left her, he vowed they would be together again.
When Kurt marched back into Paris with the occupying troops, he went back to the hotel where he had worked with Marie which the Germans by then had converted to one of their military residences. He knew the hotel better than any of the men stationed there, and he knew how to sneack through some little-used corridors to make his way to the kitchen where he hoped he would find his girlfriend.
In fact, when he arrived, Marie was in the kitchen. But she did not recognize him in his military uniform and for a moment she feared for her safety.
He called her by name, and took off his helmet so as to be recognized. They embraced, they kissed. They were able to maintain a clandestine relationship for the short time he remained in Paris. This, or course, was incredibly dangerous for both of them. But they got away with it.
This story is an apt analogy for Kurt’s personality. His uniformed appearance showed him to be a soldier of the Wehrmacht, but his risky actions to find Marie showed him to be a heartfelt romantic, daring, passionate, some would say foolish. The story is a caution to the pitfalls of stereotyping.
In a future post I will explore how linking these two men in my life helped to shape the person I became and the person I am eventually becoming.