Apartheid and Nazi Germany

p. 150

Solomon Katzen

‘Then in 1932 (Sic) Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and our lives as Jews very became difficult.  There were very few of us still at university, and for the rest I had only  ’

‘At first they used force to exclude us from the universities and professions.  But when that was not sufficiently effective, they passed laws.  Why is it that the more frightened people become the more laws they pass? Confident people do not need to pass so many laws?  You have heard of…Nurnberg Laws.  Those laws took away our citizenship or what was left of it.  We became Staatsangehörige – subject people, people who did not have the vote, people who did not have any say in the government.’

p. 151

We could not vote.  We could not marry gentiles.  There was a law which said it was immoral and illegal for us to do so. It was called “The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour”. If we married a gentile then we broke the law.  Nobody consulted us about the laws which governed us.  You understand?

My parents…could not force themselves to leave …they could only see themselves as Germans and loved Germany in spite of the new way it was treating them.

We were banned from schools, from universities and professions.  They regarded us as untermenschen – sub-humans.

p. 152

Untermenschen

‘It is very funny for me.  In Germany they treated me as an untermenschen’.  Here they force me to be part of the herrenvolk. But I cannot forget what they did to us in Germany.  So my heart is with all the untermenschen, whoever and wherever they are.’

wherever they are.’

They tell me that if I want to sell my houses in the District, I can only sell me that I want to sell my houses in the District, I can only sell to white people. If I want to sell my business, I can only sell it to white people.  If anyone moves out of any of my houses, only white people can move in. So I have decided that while this evil law remains I will never sell my houses. I will never sell my business.  If any of you move out, the houses will stand empty.  And I will also not give them any information.  I will not fill in any of their forms.

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--- The novel describes the destruction of a so-called coloured community in the District Six slum of Cape Town.  A very lively community, with history, spirit and colourful, original, living, kicking and full of life, characters who ended up “”flickered…determined to stay alive” (p. 198), alienated and lost, with no past, present and only hope that the future will repay the injustices done to them and their sufferings and the injustices done to them be remembered forever and become a collective memory in the country’s collective history.

The novel compares apartheid to the Nazi ideology and action, up to the final solution.  It compares the Nurnberg Laws, the anti-Jewish laws, set to separate between the sub-humans and the humans and the master race and the inferior race and, and the complete dehumanization of the Jews in Nazi Germany, to the anti-non-whites laws and the dehumanization of the non-Whites in South Africa’s apartheid whose role was to serve the whites and their economy and economic development.  It compares the ideology of the superiority of the Aryan master race over the non-Aryan race in Hitler’s Germany to the ideology of the superiority of the Whites baas (or bosses) over their non-Whites servants in apartheid South Africa.