On Nov. 9, 1938, an event took place so unthinkable, so unspeakable that it gave a shock to my system the first time I heard about it in school from which I have not recovered since. On Nov. 9, 1938, occurred what is now called the Reichsprogromnacht also known as the Reichskristallnacht – the crystal night or the night of the broken glass. In this night, instigated by the SS and SA a mob took to the streets in Germany and vandalized shops owned by Jews, targeted Jews, dispossessed Jews, captured and deported Jews: about 100 Jews killed, over a 1,000 synagogues burnt down, 8,000 stores and numerous homes destroyed, 30,000 Jews deported; not to mention the innumerable cases in which store front windows were trashed and Jews publicly humiliated. Yet, the Reichsprogromnacht did not even mark the beginning of antisemitism, the systematic persecution of Jewish people, or the policies of deportation and dispossession of the Jewish people in the Third Reich; it also did not mark the unspeakable horror of the systematic genocide decided at the Wannsee conference on Jan. 20, 1942. But because it symbolizes more than anything else the moral bankruptcy of a self-acclaimed civilization going berserk and the destruction of human community when neighbors turn on neighbors, this night has become the symbol of racism, genocide and human perversion.

The second world war was supposed to be war that ends all wars, but it was not. After the Nuremberg (Nürnberg) trials the world was sure that we as humanity had learned our lesson and that such a horror would never be repeated again: we did not. A look at human history is depressing. We humans have excelled in inventing ways to dehumanize and destroy each other whether it is by means of the institution of slavery, seemingly endless techniques of torture, or all-out genocides. No community seems free from this curse. The U.S.A. is still suffering the results of slavery and not far from here is the Wounded Knee Massacre Museum that bears witness to the violence inflicted upon the Native Americans by the settlers, pioneers and the U.S. government. As a Japanologist, who takes our students to Japan and who has been in the Republic of Korea, the P.R.C. and Taiwan, I have visited the Hiroshima Peace Park and Memorial Museum, the Nanjing Massacre Museum and the House of Sharing, which commemorates the plight of the comfort women during the Pacific War. While those events lie in the past their effects are ever-present in the politics and international relations along the Pacific rim. In addition, the seemingly endless list of human atrocities has not come to an end. The world has witnessed the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the Bosnian genocide in 1995, and the War of Darfur in 2003. And it is not that now finally the era of peace and intercultural understanding has arrived. The world is still riddled by wars, oppression and hatred. The number of victims is staggering, the atrocities committed mind-boggling, and our seeming helplessness discouraging.

What is even more depressing is that while in hindsight we can identify the emergence of fascism, the rise of the politics of discrimination, and an increase in the rhetoric of dehumanization, for contemporaries, these things are often more difficult to discern. This does not mean that contemporaries are insensitive to moral considerations but that the rhetoric of hatred is insidious and has its own history as well. It is not too often that politicians actually run on a platform of genocide or a program of discrimination. Rather, the rhetoric of would-be oppressors is often disguised as a discourse of victimization. Even in the Third Reich, anti-Semitism had its roots in the rhetoric of victimization. In addition, the politics of hatred did not come overnight; neither did the oppression of dissent and the deprivation and dispossession of citizens. These policies were instituted gradually one by one; they were covered up by political rhetoric that sought to locate the blame for economic misery and that were supposed to establish national security. In the Third Reich, the Jews were falsely and unjustifiably blamed for an economic crisis and cast as the enemies of the nation. The Reichsprogramnacht itself was billed as an act of revenge. Revenge, because on Nov. 7, the 17-year-old Herzel Grynszpan had attacked the secretary of Germany to France, Ernst von Rath, in Paris. In short, the rhetoric of the Third Reich systematically dehumanized the Jewish people to create the image of an enemy. What made the anti-Semitism and the politics of hatred possible was a rhetoric that idealized one ethnic group and demonized an other.

A second feature of these histories that is disheartening is that, in many of these instances of brutality, some if not many victimizers did not start out as monsters but rather were people like us. When Hannah Arendt covered the Eichmann trial in Jersualem for the New Yorker, she was shocked by what she described the "normalcy" of the defendant. In her philosophical reflections on the trial she coined the term "banality of evil" to describe precisely this phenomenon. In "Eichmann in Jersualem," Arendt argued that Eichmann's evils were rooted in his refusal to think critically and independently and to look beyond the confines of his own world and discourse. Inspired by Arendt's thesis, Stanley Milgram conducted his famous obedience experiment in 1960s to support Arendt's thesis. Philip Zimbardo's infamous Stanford prison experiment in 1971 seemed to lend further support to the sentiment that most of us are capable of more atrocious behavior than we would like to admit. To me as a philosopher this means that evil is as much an internal reality as well as an external one. And it is exactly this dichotomization of the world in good and evil and, the assumption that the "others," whoever they are, constitute the cause for our problems, be they moral, economic, social, or psychological that constitutes the "root of all evil."

As human beings, we use narratives that construct our identities, personal as well as communal. Many of these national, communal or personal narratives are anchored in what I call "unique inescapable ruptures," points of no return that change the way we think about ourselves and the world in a radical way. For current US politics, it is 9/11; for the world community it is Aug. 6, 1945, the dropping of the first atomic bomb; for us Germans it is the Holocaust symbolized by the Reichsprogromnacht and commemorated on Nov. 9. The anniversaries of those unique inescapable ruptures usually commemorate the evil inflicted on one's community and, less frequently, the evil committed by one's own community. Either form of commemoration, however, tends to essentialize one event and bifurcate humanity into good and evil. As tempting as this dichotomization of the world into good and evil is, as dangerous is it. Such a thinking not only oversimplifies human psychology and the complexity of history, it also makes the unrealistic claim that human beings are either 100% good or 100% evil and denies the possibility of transformation. Of course, history, psychology and even religious philosophy teaches us otherwise. For example even though John Rabe was a card carrying member of the NSDAP, he risked his own life to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Chinese people during the Nanjing massacre. In her "Eichmann in Jerusalem," Hannah Arendt suggests a solution to the traps of the rhetoric of dichotomization: She asserts that the Holocaust was most of all a crime against humanity: it denied Jews their humanity when all of us are first and foremost humans. I think it is this acceptance of the commonality among human beings and the universality of humanity, especially if it is coupled with recognition of the particularity of communities and cultures and the individuality of persons that allows us to deconstruct the rhetoric of divisiveness and dehumanization that provides the justification for the rhetoric of and the politics of discrimination and oppression.

For me as a German this means that on Nov. 9, I revisit the Reichsprogromnacht. I also visit the memorial to the unique inescapable ruptures of the countries I visit and the communities I live in. Whenever I reflect on the events of Nov. 9, 1938, or confront the despicable acts of cruelty that occurred during the Third Reich and at other above-mentioned sites in films such as Night and Fog, books or during my visits to the former labor camp in Dachau, I am shocked by the insanity we humans are capable of and by the insidiousness with which the Third Reich introduced policies of discrimination and attempted to justify systematic genocide. I am disheartened by our inability to learn from past events and by our tendency to look for evil in the eyes of the other rather than on our heart. But I also hope that memorial sites like these and the memory of our past will help us detect our commonality that overrides and subverts our constructed dichotomies. Most of all, I remember those who suffered and died during the Holocaust. The memory of their lives calls us to responsibility; our solidarity with them gives us hope.