Of Collaborators and Careerists

The announcement of the death of David Greenglass has got me thinking a lot about collaborators. Though much of twentieth-century history could not be written without some discussion of collaborators—from Vichy to Stalinism to the Dirty Wars to McCarthyism—the topic hardly gets a mention in the great texts of political theory. Eichmann in Jerusalem being the sole exception.

In my first book on fear, I tried to open a preliminary discussion of the topic. That discussion drew from a wide range of twentieth-century experiences, in Europe, Latin America, the US, and elsewhere, as well as from my reading of Eichmann and Montesquieu’s Persian Letters.

Reading over what I wrote, I’d say I failed. I was so intent on breaking apart the conventional understanding of the collaborator as someone who aids and abets a foreign enemy that I wound up broadening the category too much. So intent was I, also, on breaking apart the three-legged stool of perpetrator-victim-bystander—where was the collaborator in all this, I wondered—that I wound up conflating low-level perpetrators with collaborators; I now think there’s an important difference there.

That said, I thought I’d reprint my discussion here. As I said, political theorists have yet to grapple with the problem of collaboration. Or of careerism, which is a related topic. One day, when I’m in my dotage, I’d like to write a book, a kind of political theory of careerism and collaboration. Arendt thought we should take our theoretical cues from actual political experience; political theory was first and foremost an attempt to understand what we are doing. That’s why she wrote books and essays on totalitarianism, revolution, action, and other political phenomena. But when it comes to careerism and collaboration, we have yet to understand what we are doing. So here goes.

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By conventional understanding, a collaborator is one who assists an enemy, helping groups to which he does not belong threaten groups to which he does belong. (1) But this definition, it seems to me, is too restrictive. It presumes that a group is a discrete whole, that once in it, we can’t get out of it or have competing affiliations.

Collaborators, however, cannot be so neatly bound. Some do not entirely belong to the group they betray; others, like the French fascists of Vichy, have a deep affinity for the enemy they aid. Informers are perhaps the most common kind of collaborator, but they are notorious chameleons, making it virtually impossible to pin down their affiliations at all.

Knud Wollenberger, an East German dissident who secretly kept the Stasi apprised of his wife’s subversive activities, claims that his collaboration was entirely consistent with his membership in the couple’s oppositional circle. One way to challenge the government, he explains, was “through open dissidence, and the other way [was] through government channels. I was on the inside and the outside at the same time.” (2)

Harvey Matusow joined the American Communist Party in 1947, began informing on it in 1950, recanted his testimony in 1954, and then lied about all three phases of his career in his memoir False Witness, published in 1955. So promiscuous were Matusow’s politics, it is impossible to know what he had been false to, except the truth. The title of another FBI informant’s memoir—I Led Three Lives (as Communist, informer, and “citizen”)—was more apt, suggesting the multiple identities the collaborator regularly assumes. (3)

I don’t wish to carry this notion of multiple affiliations too far. Wollenberger could very well be rationalizing a past of which he is ashamed, and Matusow may simply be the hollow man many at the time suspected him to be. Whether we belong to one group or another in some existential sense, in the course of our lives we do incur moral obligations to our comrades and friends, whom we betray when we aid our opponents.

But to avoid the question of identity that restrictive definitions of collaboration entail, I will use the definition contained in the word’s Latin root collaborare: “to work together.” By collaborator, I simply mean those men and women who work with elites and who occupy the lower tiers of power and make political fear a genuinely civic enterprise.

Collaborators may be low- or mid-level perpetrators; suppliers, like the warehouse in Jedwabne, Poland, which provided the kerosene local residents used in 1941 to burn a barn containing 1,500 Jews, or Ford and General Motors, which funded a Brazilian security outfit that interrogated and tortured leftists; attendants (cooks, secretaries, and other supporting staff); or spies and informers. (4) Though all are not equally compromised by their deeds, each is guilty of complicity.

The collaborator is an elusive figure. With the exception of The Persian Letters and Eichmann in Jerusalem, he seldom makes an appearance in the literature of political fear. One of the reasons for his absence, I suspect, is that he confounds our simple categories of elite and victim. Like the elite, the collaborator takes initiative and receives benefits from his collaboration. Like the victim, he may be threatened with punishment or retribution if he does not cooperate. Many collaborators, in fact, are drawn directly from the ranks of the victims.

Perhaps then we can distinguish between collaborators of aspiration, inspired by a desire for gain, and collaborators of aversion, inspired by a fear of loss. The first are akin to elites, the second to victims. But even that distinction is too neat. Elites also fear loss, and victims hope for gain, and as the economist’s notion of opportunity costs attests, the hope of gain often informs the fear of loss. (5)

Collaborators serve two functions. First, they perform tasks that elites themselves cannot or will not perform. These tasks may be considered beneath the dignity of the elite: cooking, cleaning, or other forms of work. They may require local knowledge—as in the case of informers, who provide information elites cannot access on their own—or specialized skills.

We often think of torturers, for example, as thugs from the dregs of society. But torture is a weapon of knowledge, designed to extract information from the victim, often without leaving a physical trace. The torturer must know the body, how far he can go without killing the victim. Who better to assist or direct the torturer than a doctor? Thus, 70 percent of Uruguayan political prisoners under that country’s military regime claim that a doctor sat in on their torture sessions. (6)

Second, collaborators extend the reach of elites into corners of society that elites lack the manpower to patrol. These collaborators are usually figures of influence within communities targeted by elites. Their status may come from the elite, who elevate them because they are willing to enforce the elite’s directives. (7)

More often, their authority is indigenous. Figures of trust among the victims, they can be relied upon to persuade the victims not to resist, to compound the fear of disobedience the victims already feel.

During its war against leftist guerillas in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the Salvadoran army worked closely with such indigenous leaders. In 1982, a battalion officer informed Marcos Díaz, owner of the general store in the hamlet of El Mozote, with friends in the military, that the army was planning a major offensive in the region. To ensure their safety, the officer explained, the townspeople should remain in the village. Though many in El Mozote thought such advice unsound, Díaz was the local potentate who knew the army’s ways. His voice held sway, the villagers did as they were told, and three days later, some eight hundred of them were dead. (8)

Because their functions are so various, collaborators come in all shapes and sizes. Some travel in or near the orbit of elite power; others are drawn from the lower orders and geographic peripheries.

One common, though unappreciated, influence upon their actions is their ambition. While some collaborators hope to stave off threats to their communities and others are true believers (9), many are careerists, who see in collaboration a path of personal advance. In Brazil, for example, torture was a stepping stone, turning one man into the ambassador to Paraguay and another into a general, while doctors advising the torturers in Uruguay could draw salaries four times as high as those of doctors who did not. (10)

Whether the payment is status, power, or money, collaboration promises to elevate men and women, if only slightly, above the fray. Nazi Germany’s Reserve Police Battalion 101, for example, was a unit of five hundred “ordinary men,” drawn from the lower middle and working classes of Hamburg, who joined the battalion because it got them out of military service on the front. All told, they were responsible for executing 38,000 Polish Jews and deporting some 45,000 others to Treblinka.

Why did they do it?

Not because of any fear of punishment. No one in the 101 faced penalties—certainly not death—for not carrying out their mission. The unit’s commander even informed his men that they could opt out of the killing, which 10 to 15 of them did. Why did the remaining 490 or so stay?

According to Christopher Browning, there were different reasons, including anti-Semitism and peer pressure, but a critical one was their desire for advance. Of those who refused to kill Jews, in fact, the most forthright emphasized their lack of career ambitions. One explained that “it was not particularly important to me to be promoted or otherwise to advance. . . . The company chiefs . . . on the other hand were young men and career policemen who wanted to become something.” Another said, “Because I was not a career policeman and also did not want to become one . . . it was of no consequence that my police career would not prosper.” (11)

Though ambitious collaborators like to believe that they are adepts of realpolitik, walking the hard path of power because it is the wisest course to take, their realism is freighted with ideology. Careerism has its own moralism, serving as an anesthetic against competing moral claims. Particularly in the United States, where ambition is a civic duty and worldly success a prerequisite of citizenship, enlightened anglers of their own interest can easily be convinced that they are doing not only the smart thing, but also the right thing. They happily admit to their careerism because they presume an audience of shared moral sympathy. How else can we understand this comment of director Elia Kazan in response to a colleague’s request that he justify his decision to name names? “All right, I earned over $400,000 last year from theater. But Skouras [the head of Twentieth-Century Fox] says I’ll never make another movie. You’ve spent your money, haven’t you? It’s easy for you. But I’ve got a stake.” (12)

Notes

(1) According to Jan Gross, the word “collaboration” first took on this negative connotation—as opposed to the more neutral notion of two parties working together—with the Nazi invasion of France, whereupon it was used to refer to natives of occupied countries who colluded with the Germans. Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5, 205-6.

(2) Tina Rosenberg, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism (New York: Vintage, 1995), xiii.

(3) Herbert A. Philbrick, I Led Three Lives: Citizen, ‘Communist,’ Counterspy (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1952); Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little Brown, 1998), 310-13, 344-349.

(4) Gross, 97-100; Lawrence Weschler, A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, 1998), 44.

(5) Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope (New York: Modern Library, 1970, 1999), 42; Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958), 19.

(6) Weschler, 126.

(7) Levi, 33.

(8) Mark Danner, The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War (New York: Vintage, 1993), 17, 20, 23, 50, 59.

(9) Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 77-82; Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Penguin, 1980, 1991), 3-69; Gross, 37-40, 60-62, 65, 91, 123-125; Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992, 1998), 162, 177, 180, 196-200, 202.

(10) Weschler, 76, 127.

(11) Browning, 1-2, 55-77, 169-170; Bauer, 37.

(12) Stefan Kanfer, A Journal of the Plague Years: A Devastating Chronicle of the Blacklist (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 173. Even if Kazan had refused to testify and been penalized by Hollywood, he undoubtedly could have had a thriving career as a Broadway director—a point he affirmed before his death. Bernard Weinraub, “Book Reveals Kazan’s Thoughts on Naming Names,” New York Times (March 4, 1999), E1.

16 Comments

  1. Denis Rancourt October 17, 2014 at 7:38 am | #

    Check out the great “Chapter 4 — Coercion and Collaboration” in the remarkable book “Unfree in Palestine” by Abu-Zahra and Kay (PlutoPress, 2013)

    Also related are my own words on collaborators in my book “Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism”:
    http://fightagainstracismbook.wordpress.com/

  2. Paul Steege October 17, 2014 at 8:07 am | #

    Although their work doesn’t really operate in terms of “collaboration,” German and American scholars working in the history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte) have done some remarkable work exploring the blurred lines between complicity and resistance and thought carefully about the ways that “small” actions matter for “big” processes.

    See, e.g., Alf Lüdtke’s remarkable essay that helped to stake out that terrain, “The Historiography of Everyday Life: The Personal and the Political,” in Culture, Ideology and Politics: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm, ed. Raphael Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones (London, 1982), 38–54.

    A bit more recently, see the discussion moderated by Andrew Stuart Bergerson: “Everyday Life in Nazi Germany: A Forum,” German History 27, no. 4 (October 2009): 560-79.

    • Corey Robin October 17, 2014 at 8:13 am | #

      Thanks for these references, Paul! Look terrific. Hope you’re well.

    • Hattie October 17, 2014 at 3:29 pm | #

      That’s some good stuff.

  3. BillR October 17, 2014 at 8:41 am | #

    The only large Western nation to have been under hostile foreign occupation in living memory is France. Germans had little problem coming across willing and ambivalent collaborators there:

    Frenchmen were among the last soldiers to defend the Führerbunker:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33rd_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS_Charlemagne_%281st_French%29

  4. Roquentin October 17, 2014 at 9:56 am | #

    At first glance I had reservations about defining collaboration only as supporting elites. What of those who aid clandestine terror or revolutionary groups? But then, I got to thinking maybe that really isn’t the same thing. I suppose nearly any definition will have its drawbacks.

    Also, kudos to you for pointing out that careerism is an ideology. Discourse in the US is so thoroughly dominated by neoliberalism that the idea that following an economic incentive is an ethical imperative as opposed to the only rational, logical thing to do is rarely said. Ayn Rand was dead wrong with this talk about “the virtue of selfishness.” An inverted set of morals is morality just the same. It matters not if you say “you must be charitable” or “you must be greedy.” These are both statements on ethics.

  5. s. wallerstein October 17, 2014 at 9:57 am | #

    One category of collaborationists are people who break down while being tortured and begin to work for the secret police. There are several famous cases in Chile, one being the ex-Mirista, la Flaca Alejandra:

    The novel, La Vida Doble, written by the Chilean author, Arturo Fontaine, is a fictional description of one such case. (Not translated into English as far as I know).
    http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arturo_Fontaine_Talavera

  6. s. wallerstein October 17, 2014 at 10:34 am | #

    Here’s a link (in Spanish) to another Chilean collaborationist: Miguel Estay, known as El Fanta, Communist Party member, who after being tortured, became a police informer and ended up participating in the 1986 murder (by a police death squad) of 3 Communist leaders. Currently, in jail for that murder.

  7. s. wallerstein October 17, 2014 at 10:36 am | #

    http://ciperchile.cl/2007/11/02/fanta/

    the link I forgot in my haste

  8. Hattie October 17, 2014 at 2:50 pm | #

    Fascinating topic.
    The movie, Omar, features a Palestinian collaborator working with the Israelis. I cheered at the end of it! Available on streaming Netflix. My obsession is with the “everyday” Germans who went along with the Nazi State. Examining their motives is illuminating.

  9. David Chuter October 17, 2014 at 3:34 pm | #

    There”‘s

  10. dcrawford October 17, 2014 at 3:47 pm | #

    I think there is an important difference between working with a government in your own country and collaborating with an occupying power. For example, many of those in Latin America who supported the military dictatorships (and their torturers) did so out of conviction that the military regime was protecting them from communism. The best estimates are that from a third to a half of the population of these countries supported the military dictatorships, and, interestingly, these proportions appear to be fairly stable, even among the young born after the dictatorships disappeared. You can’t really talk of “collaboration” when such large numbers are involved.
    There are different kinds of collaboration. Vichy was elite collaboration, where the French elite considered that their country’s interests were best served by a policy of constructive engagement (as we would now say) with the occupiers. But there was also popular collaboration, generally non-ideological, and seeking material benefits, protection, status etc. Life in occupied Europe was harder than perhaps we can even imagine today, and ordinary people did what was necessary to survive.
    Then there was deliberate collaboration between individuals. Very large numbers of Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Croats etc. served in the Waffen SS, mostly out of anti-communist conviction. They saw themselves as fighting to free their countries from communist tyranny, or to oppose a communist threat,and would not have understood their designation as “collaborators”: in their eyes they were patriots.
    And finally, there were ideological collaborators who willingly went to fight beside the Germans against communism, even though in some cases (like Spain) their countries were not even occupied.
    And what about Afghans and Iraqis working with the Americans (or in the Afghan case the Soviets as well)à. Are they collaborators, and if not why not.

    • Matt October 18, 2014 at 3:59 am | #

      Which estimates are you referring to that say that a third to half of the populations of Latin American countries supported the dictatorships? I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’d just like to know, because that’s a fascinating statistic if true.

      • s. wallerstein October 18, 2014 at 2:20 pm | #

        In the 1988 Chilean plebiscite, considered a fair election, Pinochet got 44% of the vote.

  11. Glenn October 18, 2014 at 12:27 am | #

    I once met a retired chief of police of a neighboring town in a coffee shop.

    I took the opportunity to ask him what he would have done if, for example, a recent presidential election had been stolen and the new coup administration was blatantly violating US law and the Constitution. Would he collaborate with a resistance, should it form, or would he be a good soldier and suppress any civic disturbance, as if no such significant event had ever occurred?

    He just looked at me blankly and pitifully, as if I were accusing him of collaboration with a coup government.

    This meeting took place early post 2001.

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