The Mumbai Police Force is a pretty remarkable group of men and women. We live in an extended city where much of the law and order is due to the onerous hours that they put in.
Having spent some time recently with some of them - I recall one young policeman telling me that "if you are in the force, you may as well kiss your family good-bye. We tell them to stay in the village and not even come to Mumbai since we don't see them here anyway." The papers tell us that a full 1/4 of the police force was called out recently to protect cinema theatres who were showing the film "My name is Khan" - and then with bomb blasts in Pune taking place that weekend, they were shifted over to protecting Jewish sites...
So it was with some surprise that I saw a picture in our trusty
Indian Express of the men in khaki, wearing a different kind of khaki uniforms - namely that of higher officers in the Third Reich. Alongside swastika-wearing actors were lady police wearing blue contact lenses. A number of police-persons are thespians it seems. At a theatre festival which pitted 19 groups against each other - the winner was the police production of
Death of the Conqueror a 2 hour Marathi play on
the last days of Hitler. The play was written by Dr. Sameer Mone, a Pune-based Ayurvedic doctor - and the whole production was managed by police personnel who worked double shifts in order to prepare for the performance.
I wonder how much of it was based on the German film
Downfall (
Der Untergang), which looks at the last 10 days of Hitler's life. The film was widely criticised at the time for providing a 'human' face to Hitler - but seems to have weathered the tide and is considered one of the best views of the enigma that Hitler was. One writer says that
Downfall shows the wreck of humanity that Hitler was. The Marathi play apparently takes the line that Hitler was scizophrenic. How much that explains him though is a mystery.
I have to think back on my German great-grand-aunt, who when I asked her about Hitler told me: "Hitler, he wasn't even German - he was an Austrian..." I couldn't believe my ears when I heard her stunning denial of the history she lived through as a young woman - but as a green early-teen I kept quiet.
We were blessed by an exceptionally good teacher in my years at the Deutsche Schule Bombay - Mr. Walther Meister - who took us through modern German history with a fine-tooth comb. There were no cover-ups in Mr. Meister's class - we examined the horror of Nazi Germany carefully, painfully, and most of all with a passion for truth. As our history teacher I am forever indebted to "Herr Meister" for drilling in us a healthy fear of unbridled nationalism. At the same time, as our German teacher he gave us a steady dose of Berthold Brecht plays to challenge us - and we looked at post-war writers like Wolfgang Borchert to make sense of the war and its aftermath. Heady stuff for 8-10th graders - but that was it - we were being treated as adults. History and literature were real - to be grappled with. No easy spoonfulls here.
Looking back from 25 years on, perhaps the only thing missing from Mr. Meister's walking us through modern German History was a Christian perspective. I think if we had been able to read some of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church materials - it would have rounded off the Marxist critiques.
And so I come back to our 30 odd Mumbai policemen/women who have so recently immersed themselves in the last days of the Reich. How did it all sound being spoken in Marathi? How much did they understand the terrible lies that the German people had chosen to build their empire on? Or what a massively efficient edifice had been built through the willing participation of so many? It is no secret that some who espouse a form of Maratha nationalism are quite vocal in their admiration of Hitler.
But let them aside. What of my own family's history in all of this? My mother tells me that my grandfather listened secretly to the BBC news during the war. But at least one of his brothers served with the German army and was taken captive in the Italian campaign. Mum remembers allied prisoners of war (mainly Russian - with a Frenchman too) being drafted to help out her father as he supplied coal during the war. How many of the family were involved at what level is a question that I still need to find out.
Each family has somethings that we may not fully want to have known. I think I need to read my grandfather Willy Fischer's diaries this summer - and have an MP3 recorder on hand to take an oral history from Mum. All truth is God's truth. We must know what has gone on - in order to live a life of forgiveness and hope. One of our great Indian tragedies is our inability to honestly say what actually happened in:_______________ (insert your favourite riot / disturbance / tragedy here).
Dark night
