Their ages were hard to guess. They might have been anything between nine and thirteen. They were wearing pants that were too short and no longer covered their shoes, and sweaters that were too long which had been handed down by their siblings. They were loiterers, children aimlessly roaming about the streets of the Jenin Refugee Camp during the unguarded hours of the afternoon in search of diversion, of something that would render this passage between childhood and adulthood more bearable.
And then he must have crossed their path.This little dog. Hardly eight weeks old. They had tied him to a rope and were dragging him behind. Without a collar. Who knows from whom they had learned that. The coarse rope was strangling the trembling dog. You could hear him panting already from a distance of a few meters. He was a crossbreed, a biscuit-colored dog with somewhat oversized paws, which nevertheless gave him no support on the ground. The puppy was skidding rather than scampering, he was bracing his paws against the pulling, against suffocating, against the kicks of the boys, who wanted to drive him across the street this way, for fun, to pass time, out of pleasure with the fear that made the little dog twitch. The boys pulled him so much that he was hanging in the air, his neck extended and his front legs no longer able to touch the ground.
They had to be seeing the panic in the puppy's eyes. They had to be hearing how he was whimpering. They had to know that it hurt him, when they beat his body with the branch they had brought along. They had to feel how soft the fuzzy fur and how young this creature was.
I set upon them. I could not contain myself. I could not bear the defenselessness of the puppy. I am not proud of it, because I did everything wrong that one can do wrong in a situation like this.
What were they thinking of? I could not control my voice. I screamed. How dare they drag this dog like that? What were they going to do with him?
I knew the answer. They would torture him. All afternoon. Probably, they would drown him. Or strike him until he would no longer budge. There were three of them. One would hold him, so that he would have no chance, the puppy, and the others would abuse him.
They stood with their backs to the wall and stared at Salwa, my Palestinian translator, who was almost as startled by my anger as the boys and who probably softened my outburst in the Arabic translation – and they laughed. Half embarrassed, half defiant. What did I want from them? What business had I with the doggy? It was theirs.
I was getting more and more furious. Not only about the mercilessness of these boys, but also about my own powerlessness: I felt like thrashing them, to hit them really hard. I wanted to hurt them, so that they would feel what they were doing to this animal, which was now huddling between my feet, trembling and quivering, unaware that its life was being negotiated.
The boys were right. The dog was theirs. Or at least more theirs than mine. If I would take the dog away from them, I would just affirm the law of force in the area, which upset me so much.
Salwa looked at me. Internally I was standing with my back to the wall myself by now. I was shaking with anger about as much as the puppy with panic and did not know how to protect the dog from the children.
Why did what seemed self-evident to me not at all seem self-evident to them: compassion? Who was more reprehensible in this scene: they, who felt no compassion, or I, who wanted to beat the pain they were causing the dog into them?
Until today I am ashamed of this scene.
And yet I wonder what it was that upset me so, why I could not comprehendthat they were capable of causing such pain to this puppy. That could only be possible if they were unable to empathize.
How could that be? Was compassion not a normal reaction? Not an impulse that arises automatically from the sight of another's suffering? Were there limits to compassion? What were they?
In the story of the Good Samaritan, which we are told from childhood on, the Samaritan sees the wounded man lying on the ground and immediately recognizes the suffering. It is not a relative who is lying there, it is a stranger, and the Samaritan receives no reward for his help. On the contrary: not only does he bandage the wounds of the man who had "fallen among thieves," he also puts him on his animal and takes him to the nearest inn, where he continues to take care of him. When he departs, he gives the innkeeper – thus the story goes – two silver coins for the extant costs of the care.That means he even pays for the help hegives the other.
The Samaritan, we are told, helps for no reason, there is no self-interested motif behind his deed. He simply sees a sufferingperson, and he reacts to the other's suffering as if it were his own. Thus, the story is introduced as an illustrationof brotherly love, in which the difference between self and other is removed,because I am supposed to treat and love my neighbor as myself.
Perhaps that was the mistake. Perhaps "as myself"should never have appeared in the explanation of compassion,mercy and readiness to help. Perhaps compassion and solidarity, all these terms that refer to the suffering of another,should always have been decoupled from myself.
Nevertheless, I tried just that. I said to the boys: if it were them, on that rope there, would they want to be tortured like that? If they had no mercy for the dog, I thought intuitively, I had to stirtheir imagination. They should imagine somebody would do a thing like that to them. How would that feel?
They held the rope firmly in their hands and remained mum. If we are being beaten and humiliated, said the eyes of the children from the Jenin Refugee Camp, this puppy can get the same treatment.
For if what applies to me is also supposed to apply to my neighbor, then – thus the silent logic of these children – what does not apply to me perhaps also does not apply to my neighbor.
And in any case: this was a dog, not a human being.
Does this, then, make compassion more difficult? Is it a question of similarity that makes me recognize my neighbor as my neighbor before I am able to recognize his suffering as equal to mine?
That would explain why all regimes that humiliate and maltreat people visually transform them first. That would explain why captives get their heads shorn, why personal effects are taken away from them, why they are deprived of all signs of individuality. For it is harder to perceive the thus de-personified beings as humans. It makes torturing easier if the victim seems to bear no similarity whatsoever to the torturer, if he is naked and smells of urine and sweat, if he only resembles the other victims anymore, but not me. That would explain why we turn away when he who is in need drools or stammers, smells or can only crawl anymore, why we plead disgust, when what is really called for is compassion.
That would explain why the inmates at Abu Ghraib had plastic sacks put over their heads, why they had to crawl on the ground, on a leash, like animals. That would explain why it is easier to torment, if he who is to be abused as a first step is aesthetically so dehumanized that he is no longer comparable with me.
Is that it: the qualitative limit to compassion? The similarity? The recognizability?
That would also explain why the famous image from the Trnopolye Camp in Bosnia, in which the naked, emaciated upper bodies of Muslim inmates were visible, could have such an effect on the shocked European public: not only did the image quote the historical photographs of the bony inmates of German concentration camps, but on top of this, the people in these pictures resembled us. Would an image with less blond victimshave produced the same effect?
That would also explain why the seemingly boundless compassion for the victims of the tsunami possibly wasn't so boundless after all: the pain simply wasn't the suffering of others but that of one's own friends and acquaintances, who as tourists had become victims.
And is that it, the quantitative limit of compassion? The sheer practical impossibility to react to all the images that are transmitted to us from all parts of the world on a daily basis? Who could bear it, this boundless compassion?
That would explain why we become immune over time, why the images appear staged to us – even if they aren't, why we bemoan the aestheticization of suffering rather than suffering itself. That would explain why we want to see and read only the personalized stories, because this way we can delude ourselves into believing that suffering is individual and isolated, even if it is collective and structural.
And it would explain why we have come to deride compassion as an empathic feeling. It is permissible to mention it at Christmas, in sentimental remembrance of those times when the world was still so homogenous and limited that our neighbors could seem similar and manageable to us.
So if they have been agreed upon, the limits of compassion, of similarity and of boundlessness, then why don't we give up on it? The pretension and the expectation that it should exist, empathy with the suffering of the other?
I was standing in front of the boys by the dirty wall, and none of us moved. We did not know a way out. What explanation could I have given that they would have understood? What words would soften them? How could I have curbed my anger without projecting indifference to the fate of the puppy?
I was speaking German. Suddenly, unwittingly rather than consciously, I changed from English into German. All I wanted to say, all I found unforgivable about their behavior, no matter what they themselves had suffered, no matter how much they were used to the violence they were exercising, no matter how small they were, no matter if this was a dog and not a human being.
They were stunned. Incredulously, they looked back and forth between Salwa and me until they understood that there was not going to be a translation for this language. And only now that they could not understand anything anymore did they seem to comprehend for the first time. Here was a stranger, more desperate than angry, to whom it made a difference how they acted, to whom it was not a matter of indifference, who was upset because there was something they did not understand,who did not want to take anything away from them but to give them something: how it feels to be interested in another creature.
I do not know what became of the dog. Sometimes I'm afraid I only harmed the animal. Sometimes I'm afraid the children might have killed it out of revenge for the fear I caused them. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't have beaten them up after all and set the dog free.
But then I hope they felt my compassion. Not only for the puppy, but for them. And I hope they let him run, the dog. Not just for his sake, but for theirs.
Translation: Barbara Ann Schmutzler
Copyright: DIE ZEIT
