Invisible tension and public embarrassment

It is surprising how, in spite of our best efforts, life insists on reminding us that can also be wrong, that not every correction we make is justified and that humility is a good general rule to move around life. I am no exception to this rule, and occasionally I find myself in an embarrassing situation for just trying to win a fight that was not mine.

A few days ago someone posted in a linguistics-related Facebook book a partial photograph of a census card of undoubted German origin (all fields were labeled in German) filled, scratched over and corrected with a seemingly unpronounceable Polish name. The author of the post commented "I can only pity the poor Nazi that struggled to fill this card". Apart of the obvious oxymoron of "poor Nazi" my first reaction, lacking any kind of context, was of certain disgust at the use of that term to refer to a generic German clerk. I hesitated for a second, but then I decided that the general discourse on the Internet was already polarized enough to allow this kind of terminology to flow undisturbed, so I replied "Maybe not all Germans are Nazis...", just trying to be a mild as possible.

Photo: alice / SV

The fact that someone that I know dubs an unknown German a Nazi is obviously not my battle, but I felt compelled to take the side of the underdog. However, a third person explained that the author of the post is a historian of Nazi Germany and that he was currently inspecting municipal records of the time to trace the ancestry of the inhabitants of a city. Of course, I rushed to admit my error and apologize, although it was arguably not 100% my fault. Nowadays that chapter of history is mostly only referred to in derision and only in rare cases in a literal sense, so I was only able to interpret it in my own context.

This is the problem of the invisible tension: when you run time and time again in rhetoric that is hard to digest because it is sexist, racist or simply bigoted it is normal to turn defensive and a little bit oversensitive. Seen in the proper light, the photograph was particularly hilarious for several reasons: knowing the long standing appreciation of rule following in Germany, it is easy to imagine how trouble the registrar was when faced with a name that he could not transcribe reliably; furthermore, having to amend the card because he had failed on the first attempt was doubly funny, because it would count forever more as a blemish in the record.

My only consolation is that my comment, even if turned out to be out of line, was at least mild. I could have as easily stormed in with a tirade about xenophobia and prejudice but, luckily, I listened at least to some part of my common sense. On the other hand, I have to admit that these tiny embarrassments pay off well enough in the few occasions when the correction is truly warranted and the offender has to admit having overstepped the line and apologize.

The famous quote attributed to John Stuart Mill, "Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing" is very graphical in the description of the potential damage caused by inaction. I shall not look on and do nothing, even if leads sometimes to a (mild) public embarrassment. Have a nice evening.