The term ‘blood money’ usually brings to mind the thirty pieces of silver Judas Iscariot received for betraying Jesus Christ to the Romans or similar cases in history. Over time, it has come to refer generally to compensation or profit resulting from crimes of violence, particularly murder. Unsurprisingly, when it comes to attitudes to compensation, no matter how justifiable, there is usually more than a hint of moral ambiguity, if not an outright taint, attached to the receipt of such payments. Indeed, the word ‘compensation’ is probably a misnomer, for just as money cannot bring back the dead it cannot ever provide adequate recompense for the loss of a loved one to violent crime. Blood money cannot wipe the slate clean.
As an exploration of one aspect of such ill-gotten gains, a recent play touring provincial theatres in England, to mixed reviews, tells the story of an old watch, found to be rather valuable because it once belonged to Adolph Hitler’s Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. But it is not so much the play, Von Ribbentrop’s Watch, as the story behind the play that takes us to the heart of the moral dilemma with which the playwrights, Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, and their characters wrestle. That is, whether it is morally right for a Jew to profit from a Nazi relic.
In 1985, Mr Marks, then a screenwriter living in Hollywood, bought a second-hand, Longines watch for $200. Five years later, back in London, he took the watch to be serviced and when the back was removed, the initials JVR, a small swastika and the date, 1930, were found engraved. Research by Sotheby’s, the historic auction house, revealed that the watch had belonged to Joachim von Ribbentrop and was estimated to be worth around £40-50,000, perhaps more, depending on how badly a collector wanted it. Any similarity to a story by the likes of Robert Ludlum ends here.
Von Ribbentrop was the Nazi Foreign Minister from 1938 to 1945 and was, from all reports, a pretentious, arrogant, strutting peacock of a man; he was not even an aristocrat, having acquired the aristocratic ‘von’ from an aunt whom he had persuaded to adopt him. Nor was he very intelligent; rather, he was an opportunistic schemer and completely sycophantic in his relations with Hitler. Indeed, had he not also developed into a rabid anti-Semite and a warmonger, he might just have been remembered as a vain, stupid, almost comical oaf, who was even held in contempt by many of his fellow Nazis.
Herr Ribbentrop has however gone down in history as one of the authors, along with the Soviet Foreign Commissar, Vyacheslav Molotov, of the 1939 Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact, which effectively cleared the way for Germany to invade Poland without Soviet intervention and start the Second World War. He was moreover enthusiastically complicit in the deportation of Jews from the satellite countries of the Third Reich to the Nazi death camps. At the end of the war, he was duly found guilty at the Nuremberg Trials of deliberately planning a war of aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and was the first Nazi to be hanged.
Thus, when Mr Marks told Mr Gran, his writing partner, about the origin of the watch, the latter said that there was no way that he could sell it because he would effectively be pocketing Nazi money. As Mr Marks is a Jew, his friend’s point was all the more potent and he even feared that the watch would be a magnet for neo-Nazis. He did consider selling it and giving the money to a Jewish charity. But there were no takers for this blood money.
Mr Gran then suggested writing a play about what to do with the watch, as a way of resolving Mr Marks’s dilemma. But even with the production of Von Ribbentrop’s Watch and the locking away of the watch in a safe, questions remain. Mr Marks himself asks rhetorically what he considers to be “the bigger question,” what would anyone else have done in his position? It is a tough one to answer.
On one level, we can appreciate the philosophical and moral issues raised by the existence of the watch and the evil with which it is associated. On the other hand, the raw emotions that such an inanimate object can unleash, as a symbol of the hidden depths that can underlie even the most banal of objects, are a powerful counterpoint to regarding the story of Von Ribbentrop’s Watch as a mere exercise of the intellect.
But if Mr Marks has locked the watch away, recognizing that to sell it would be to invite the stain of blood money, and was determined to prevent it from becoming an object of desire for Nazi fetishists, why did he not simply destroy it for all time, thereby ensuring that no one might ever profit from its dark history?
Ay, there’s the rub. History cannot and should not be so easily erased, much less a history of violence and almost unimaginable wickedness. Perhaps the watch would be best placed in a museum, as a curiosity, a historical footnote, to remind people of the banality of evil, to use the phrase coined by Hannah Arendt in 1963 to explain how ordinary people are capable of the most unspeakable crimes.
