What Do You Call Home?

'My Argument with the Gestapo' and Thomas Merton’s ideas of Pacifism and Nationalism

I recently read Thomas Merton’s first novel, My Argument with the Gestapo. Merton, a Trappist monk, wrote the novel in 1941, just at the beginning of World War II. Exploring his imagined view of bombed-out buildings, the odd quiet in the streets of London, and the far-flung check points across countrysides in England and France, we see Merton’s eponymously named narrator explore the Europe of his childhood. It is a soft story, one filled by the narrator’s curiosity of what this war has made of his home. While Merton never fought in the war, many of the recollections of the narrator's past are based on his own childhood, creating space for Merton to wonder what might have been happening to his home during the Nazi bombings. Dream-like, he blends his imaginings of this world, and how his friends have sold themselves to the efforts of a violent war, through multiple languages and odd conversations with the people that he meets.

When the narrator meets friends in London, they ask him what he’s doing there. “I’m writing a diary,” he usually says. The officers he meets don't trust him. He clearly must be a spy, they think. And so, spies follow him. Officials in the war effort, along with police officers, ask what his nationality is and he says he has none. He shares his American passport, but still, he remains firm that this is not his nation. Everyone is suspicious of this pedantic character, unsatisfied with his disinterest in participating in the violence of the war.

Through the narrator's mundane encounters, Merton is attempting to point to the lunacy of national identity, which he saw more as a tool of wartime propaganda than any true cultural tether. It is also an expression of his own fervent aversion to violence and disdain for human pain with his care and empathy for humanity — his pacifism defining much of his writing. The book pushes us to wonder if all this bloody destruction could truly be for the better of the world?

While at the time of his writing this in 1941 the public knew little of the Holocaust in Germany, Merton’s interest in pacifism was rooted in his certainty that to kill another person is to believe they are, in some respect, inferior to you. To kill and be at war was then to delude yourself into thinking you were somehow superior to those you wanted to kill. This, ultimately, is where his push back against the destructive nature of war comes from.

Yet, is there hope in destruction? It’s easy to look at that question and, in the abstract, say yes. With destruction is the reformation of what was left over. There is hope in destruction. There will be new ways to celebrate and amend our realities, tethering them to new ideas. Out with individualism in with community? In the toppling of regimes there is the prospect of alteration — like getting a tear in your jeans, there’s the chance for a new attempt at mending. In the abstract, and in truth, it is fair to say there is hope in destruction.

However, to arrive at that hope through war is to forget to a degree the pain of that destruction. Merton, I believe and it is made clear in this book, understood how much this world needed to change in order to provide care for more people. A truly empathetic person, open to various ideas and world-views throughout his life, especially eastern philosophy, in My Argument with the Gestapo, Merton shares the beginnings of his own stand against war as a means toward a new future, perhaps tainting that future’s prospect with its own disregard for humanity with the act of mass killing.

Reading this book, it made me wonder how traumas are left over after war for the newer society to fix. Historians, writers, and artists after WWII were trying to come to an understanding of this nonsensical brutality. What was to be made of the blood, famines, sexual violence, all the horrors of war? Why did this all happen? How can anything triumph if we lead ourselves toward a new future through violence that made the past? This is a genuine question that has never been fully answered after WWII, and one that still haunts our society in many ways still. We have not fully faced this trauma, or we are beginning to try to forget it, at the least.. Maybe the truth is that those in power, almost sociopathic, believe that’s just an antiquated, narrow-minded, and unrealistic way to look at the world. That violence, to those in control, is just a necessary part of so-called civilization.

Reading this book today I was reminded that nationalism has only been around for so long. Nation-states have only been an idea since the 19th century. Through My Argument with the Gestapo, I am reminded that nationalism, the thing that follows nation-states, is just a device for control rather than something tangible. It’s one of those ideas, like individualism, that has permeated our world so thoroughly we forget that it is still just an idea.

Merton reminds us that we don't have to believe in national violence. That it's important we don’t. That borders can be one of the most dangerous ideas. He was raised in England, France, lived in Bermuda, and elsewhere, but never thought of a place as his nation. His homes, maybe, but not his nation. Just the other week, bombs were dropped on Iran by the US and Israel, as Israel continues its unrelenting bombing of thousands of people under their control in Gaza. All of this violence and unneeded destruction in a time when we are closer to climate collapse than ever before, is done under the premise of national interest. I’m unsure if citizens in any of these places would really want a war at all.

What is the place you call home? Is it a shape? Is it the land? Is it a body of water? We are tied to families, neighborhoods, towns. But we are not nations. We are communities. We make our home in cities, on mountainsides, in valleys, beside rivers, or coasts. We live in small towns where we can’t stand how we all know too much about each other. Belonging to a nation is to belong to an idea of home, but not a real home. I’ll support a national sports team, but beyond that, I’ll settle with calling my home the Bay Area. This is where I have spent most of my life. This is the place I call home.

Buy the Book Here !

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