A Vicious Visitor

Helping students make sense of a post-Holocaust world sometimes requires a theatrical touch, which is delivered by George "Mac" McCarthy with an existential lightning bolt.

The professor of sociology has, off and on for twenty years, rattled his classes with an appearance by a swastika-bearing veteran of the Nazi SS Death's Head Units that ran the concentration camps of Germany's Third Reich. What the students get is a grim dose of "anti-Semitism on steroids" as delivered by the role-playing McCarthy.

"A lot of times kids deal with these issues on an intellectual level," he says. "They're going to be thinking about immorality, the ethical and philosophical implications. But I'm going to get them to feel it at the gut level. I say things that turn my stomach, but I'm setting it up because I think it's really important."

The exercise takes place in an introductory course, "Social Dreamers: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud." By week ten, the class has reached Albert Camus' novel The Fall, which explores the capacity for evil and the fate of man in a morally rudderless world.

Is there a moral compass in the house? McCarthy finds out by changing from an avuncular teacher into a persona of relentless venom. There's a casual set-up: he mentions a guest speaker, then leaves the room to "search" for his guest, who, after a few moments, appears in the classroom wearing a Nazi armband and, initially, speaking German.

Students' attempts to find a well-grounded moral argument are met with aggressive disdain by the visitor. Hitler's concentration camps were inspired by American Indian reservations, says the Nazi. Carpet bombing during the Vietnam War took innocent lives. The conflict in Iraq, he sneers, leaves Americans grasping for the moral high ground.

"You're trying to make a profound philosophical if not theological argument about the condition of modern society," says McCarthy. "The more we talk about it and face the issue head on, the greater the possibility that it won't occur again. In the future, the barbed wire will be replaced by a kind of invisible concentration camp--our inability to form ideas, concepts, and theories about morality and social justice; that is, by an eclipse of reason itself."