From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DE GUSTIBUS
The German Chair
A tale of torture at the hands of an America-hating diplomat.
In Beirut last month, I met a Lebanese man who had been savagely tortured over the course of a 12-year odyssey in Syrian prisons. Among the things he had endured were electrocutions, beatings with electric cables, and being hanged from ropes by his ankles.
And then there was "the German chair."
The German chair, as he described it, was something akin to a medieval rack, in which progressively greater doses of pain are administered an inch at a time. Yet why was it known as the German chair? It's a question I neglected to ask. But I found my answer several weeks later, in New York.
What occasioned this discovery was meeting a relatively senior German diplomat posted to the New York consulate. My wife--also German--knows his wife socially; our children use the same playground. They had invited us to their home for Sunday brunch.
I should say here that I speak almost no German, and it quickly became apparent that the diplomat's wife spoke almost no English. So it was perhaps natural that, soon after we arrived, she and my wife took to one corner of the spacious apartment while the diplomat ushered me into his study. Less natural was the conversation that followed. I made the normal chitchat of first encounters: praise for the unobstructed (and million-dollar) views of the Hudson River; a query about what he did at the consulate.
But the diplomat had no patience for my small talk. Apropos of nothing, he said he had recently made a study of U.S. tax laws and concluded that practices here were inferior to those in Germany. Given recent rates of German economic growth, I found this comment odd. But I offered no rejoinder. I was, after all, a guest in his home.
The diplomat, however, was just getting started. Bad as U.S. economic policy was, it was as nothing next to our human-rights record. Had I read the recent Amnesty International report on Guantanamo? "You mean the one that compared it to the Soviet gulag?" Yes, that one. My host disagreed with it: The gulag was better than Gitmo, since at least the Stalinist system offered its victims a trial of sorts.
Nor was that all. Civil rights in the U.S., he said, were on a par with those of North Korea and rather behind what they had been in Europe in the Middle Ages. When I offered that, as a journalist, I had encountered no restrictions on press freedom, he cut me off. "That's because The Wall Street Journal takes its orders from the government."
By then we had sat down at the formal dining table, with our backs to Ground Zero a half-mile away and our eyes on the boats on the river below us. My wife and I made abortive attempts at ordinary conversation. We were met with non sequiturs: "The only people who appreciate American foreign policy are poodles." After further bizarre pronouncements, including a lecture on the illegality of the Holocaust under Nazi law, my wife said that she felt unwell. We gathered our things and left.
For days now, I've been asking myself why I didn't answer the diplomat in the way he deserved. Partly it had to do with my wish not to spoil the friendship between our wives. Partly, too, his assault was so discombobulating I didn't trust myself to respond coherently. But the main reason is that, as his guest, I was restrained by an innate sense of propriety, a sense the diplomat did not share. And herein lies the essence of the torturer's art.
To inflict harm on a defenseless person--whoever he may be, whatever he has done--goes against the human grain. It is one thing to strike out at somebody who has just hit you. It's another thing entirely to abuse someone who, whether as prisoner or as guest, is in your power.
Long ago the Greeks understood that nothing is so barbarous as inhospitality. And according to popular exegesis, God did not destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because of its citizens' sexual crimes but because of their crimes against hospitality--the rape of strangers.
Torturers, however, are those rare people who can inflict injury on the defenseless, work which is made easier for them because they know most people are unable to respond in kind. Thus it was with the German diplomat. Seated at his table, I submitted to his rules. But rather than oblige my submission with courtesy, he took the opportunity to inflict his insults--insults to which I, as a guest, was bound not to resist. I was, so to speak, in his German chair.
I am tempted to violate journalistic standards here by revealing the diplomat's name. Of course I won't: That's not the sort of man I am. The trouble is, that's one big reason why he is the man he is. German readers especially may recall the words of Brecht: The womb is fertile still, which bore this fruit.
Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
