It has taken two generations for most countries that were occupied by Nazi Germany to admit that it was the resisters, not the collaborators, who were the minority. But now we risk swinging too far the other way: normalizing collaboration and making resistance such an exceptional choice that only saints would choose it.
VIENNA – When interviewed for his biography, Isaiah Berlin at one point wondered aloud who, in English high society, would have collaborated had the Germans invaded in 1940. The anti-Semites, chancers, and sycophants of his acquaintance made his list, but who else? Asking himself that question was a way of remaining alert to the possibilities of betrayal lurking beneath the bonhomie and mutual flattery of elite London. Berlin’s point was that when the bottom falls out of the world, you cannot be too sure what anyone will do – yourself included.
Collaborators, argues Ian Buruma in his gripping study of three such figures, are a compelling subject because they have succumbed to a temptation that would confront us all if placed in the same situation. This is not how collaboration used to be understood. When the Nazi occupation regimes were driven out of France and the Netherlands in 1945, collaborators were hunted down as a disgraced minority. Both countries rebuilt their national identities around the myth that their resistance heroes had represented the true spirit of their people.
It has taken two generations for most countries to admit that it was the resisters, not the collaborators, who were the minority. But now we risk swinging too far the other way: normalizing collaboration and making resistance such an exceptional choice that only saints would choose it.
VIENNA – When interviewed for his biography, Isaiah Berlin at one point wondered aloud who, in English high society, would have collaborated had the Germans invaded in 1940. The anti-Semites, chancers, and sycophants of his acquaintance made his list, but who else? Asking himself that question was a way of remaining alert to the possibilities of betrayal lurking beneath the bonhomie and mutual flattery of elite London. Berlin’s point was that when the bottom falls out of the world, you cannot be too sure what anyone will do – yourself included.
Collaborators, argues Ian Buruma in his gripping study of three such figures, are a compelling subject because they have succumbed to a temptation that would confront us all if placed in the same situation. This is not how collaboration used to be understood. When the Nazi occupation regimes were driven out of France and the Netherlands in 1945, collaborators were hunted down as a disgraced minority. Both countries rebuilt their national identities around the myth that their resistance heroes had represented the true spirit of their people.
It has taken two generations for most countries to admit that it was the resisters, not the collaborators, who were the minority. But now we risk swinging too far the other way: normalizing collaboration and making resistance such an exceptional choice that only saints would choose it.