![]() ![]() Had he signed the oath – and it was placed upon a table on his jail cell each day until the day of his death – he would most likely not have been executed. In a letter to his wife on August 8, 1943, the day before Jagerstatter was executed, he wrote, “Do you believe that all would go well for me if I were to tell a lie in order for me to prolong my life?” The lie that Jagerstatter refers to is an oath of loyalty to Hitler. More so, when we come upon such insight, we are to respond metanoically, which is to say, we are to change our lives and commit our entire being to this insight. Namely, that we are to come to insight by means of persuasion and not by violent force. Of course there is so much more in this statement than is revealed at first glance. During these moments, I recalled a passage from Plato’s Republic: “We must be persuaded by the better argument.” At first glance, this statement may seem rather pedestrian, something a first year philosophy student would dutifully write down in a notebook, dredge up for the final exam and then forget. At other points, however, tears would flow down my face as I found it harder and harder to turn away from the truth of Jagerstatter’s insight and actions. Like the Catholic prelates and Austrian officials, I wanted to flee while my hide was still intact. Reading Jagerstatter’s Letters and Writings from Prison was the literary equivalent of walking into a burning building. What sets Jagerstatter apart was not only his ability to see clearly but also to act upon this insight and to actually pay the ultimate price for his refusal to join the Nazis.Īccompanying Jagerstatter in his astonishing witness was his wife, Franziska, who recalled: “In the beginning, I really begged him not to put his life at stake, but then, when everyone was quarreling with him and scolding him, I didn’t do it anymore … If I had not stood by him, he would have had no one.” Perhaps it is not simply a matter of seeing clearly the message of the nonviolent Jesus in the Gospels, after all, is strikingly clear. In his introduction to Franz Jagerstatter: Letters and Writings from Prison, Jim Forest writes that Jagerstatter “would certainly do what he could to preserve his life for the sake of his family … self-preservation did not make it permissible to go and murder other people’s families.” Forest asks how it is that someone “so unimportant,” a relatively uneducated farmer, could see so clearly while those holding positions of leadership in the Catholic Church or in the Austrian government of the Nazi era were utterly blind. Franz Jagerstatter: Letters and Writings from Prison
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