Star Trek and History (48 page)

Audiences can recognize parallels between Cardassia and modern Germany. As in Germany before the rise of Nazism, Cardassia was not defined solely by militarism. Many of the greatest artistic and intellectual luminaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were from German-speaking Europe; the works of Beethoven, Schiller, Goethe, Marx, and Wagner helped to define modern Western society. Cardassian artistic achievement was no less significant. Gul Madred discusses the vast array of archeological artifacts that demonstrate the cultural prowess of his people in a conversation with Captain Picard (
TNG
, “Chain of Command”). Another example is Garak, the lone Cardassian on Deep Space Nine, not to mention its resident tailor and spy, who extols the virtues of Cardassian literature during his weekly lunches with the station's Federation doctor, Bashir.
8

Besides highlighting a distinct culture, literature functions in a second way to establish a parallel with Germany. Bashir occasionally reads Cardassian novels that Garak has recommended. Bashir's reactions to the novels as well as Garak's counterreactions to the doctor's perspective underscore specific Germanic features of Cardassian culture. One of the novels they discuss is
The Never-Ending Sacrifice.
To Garak, the work is “superb” and “without a doubt, the finest Cardassian novel ever written,” but to Bashir, it is dreadfully repetitive. He complains that over the seven generations of a family chronicled in the tale, all of them do the exact same thing—lead a selfless life in service of the state. He does not understand, as Garak reveals in the
Deep Space Nine
episode “The Wire,” that
that
is the point:

Garak:
The repetitive epic is the most elegant form in Cardassian literature, and
The Never-Ending Sacrifice
is its greatest achievement.

Bashir:
There's more to life than duty to the state.

Garak:
A Federation viewpoint if ever I heard one.

The Cardassian emphasis on duty to the state seems similar to earlier Prussian culture. In the eighteenth century, Prussian civil servants worked according to a code of honor and obedience to a king who considered himself a servant of his own kingdom.
9
Devotion to the sovereign state remained a defining cultural ideal in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in unified Germany, particularly among Germans on the right side of the political spectrum. It was seen by many people as a life of highest honor, especially when it came to fighting for the nation during World War I.
10
When the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, it drew upon existing concepts of duty to popularize the idea of subordination of the individual to the needs of the state.
11
Nazi propaganda lionized the concept of duty to the state through the creation of martyrs, both those who had died during war and those who had given their lives to further the Nazi cause.
12

Serving the state is not the only characteristic that Germans and Cardassians share. Many
Deep Space Nine
episodes mention additional attributes that link the two, leading recurrent
Star Trek
director Winrich Kolbe to define Cardassians as “the Prussians of the universe.”
13
Both cultures emphasized cleanliness, order, punctuality, and efficiency and took pride in keeping meticulous records (
DS9
, “Duet,” “Cardassians,” “The Wire,” “The Way of the Warrior,” and “Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night”). Among these traits, order, efficiency, and record-keeping are not merely mentioned, but they find representation in the historic Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, and the Cardassian fictional counterpart, the Obsidian Order.

It was a commonly held but erroneous belief among German citizens in the Third Reich and many postwar historians that the Nazi secret police was an extensive organization that had the capability to monitor every word a person spoke or action he committed.
14
While the Gestapo did accumulate a vast array of records, it was not an all-powerful organization that had the ability to know everything about all people at all times; it merely created the perception of being omnipotent. In order to carry out its tasks, the Gestapo relied on the support of ordinary citizens, who sometimes denounced their neighbors or acquaintances to the authorities. The Gestapo primarily acted on the information that citizens provided and would have been unable to exercise authority without popular cooperation.

The writers of
Deep Space Nine
had the Gestapo in mind when they created the Obsidian Order.
15
However, they chose to show much less about its inner workings than historians know about the Gestapo. Viewers do not see whether the Order relies on informants, collaborators, or spies for information or if it accumulates data through technological means. Instead, characters assert that the Order has the ability to find out anything. As one operative boasts, “When it comes to the Obsidian Order, nothing is impossible” (
DS9
, “Second Skin”). While such a remark could be dismissed as self-serving, Odo, who is the station's constable for first the Cardassians and then the Federation and a more objective observer, confirms it with his own assessment: “They're the ever vigilant eyes and ears of the Cardassian Empire. It is said that a Cardassian citizen cannot sit down to a meal without each dish being duly noted and recorded by the Order” (
DS9
, “The Wire”). Whether or not this is true, this belief gives the Cardassians very good reasons to remain dutiful citizens.

Thus, the Order is in a position similar to that of the Gestapo. In both cases, the public belief in omnipotence is more important than the actual capabilities of either organization. Fear of repression by the state is as powerful a deterrent as is the perception—whether true or not—that the authorities have the ability to detect any type of deviation by its citizens and to punish them at any time.
16
For the Gestapo, this perceived ability lasted until the end of the Third Reich, whereas for the Obsidian Order, its demise comes years before the destruction of Cardassia by the Founders.

In addition to making the Obsidian Order an analogue to the Gestapo, the show's writers also established similarities between the Cardassians and the Nazis as occupiers of conquered nations. Between 1938 and 1945, Nazi Germany annexed or conquered a good portion of continental Europe. Nazi occupation policies were determined by ideology, including a plan to eradicate all Jews and a belief in German racial superiority to Slavs. The regime expanded the concentration camp system it had initially designed to incarcerate political enemies to imprison racial enemies. These included Jewish Germans who were already segregated by racist laws prior to World War II. Through policies of forced labor, mass shootings, and starvation, the Nazis killed millions of civilians; in Poland alone, six million civilians died, about half of whom were Polish Jews. Finally, in 1941, the Nazis set up death camps and began to systematically gas their racial and ideological enemies. Jews were prominent among the victims as they were deported to these death camps from every occupied city in Europe.
17

The Bajorans accuse the Cardassians of genocide. Dukat describes Cardassian atrocities as “alleged,” but he later admits that he believes he should have killed every Bajoran when he had the opportunity (
DS9
, “Duet” and “Waltz”). However, no episodes have flashbacks to mass murder; instead, most of them that delve into the occupation focus on the labor camps. The camp on the station is shown most often; when it was Terok Nor, there were mines and an ore-processing facility where Bajorans worked. When not toiling, they lived behind a fenced-off, guarded, communal living space, one that production designer Herman Zimmerman described as “a ghetto area.”
18
Cardassians harshly punished Bajoran disobedience and insurgency, usually by executing random, and thus possibly innocent, workers to make an example (
DS9
, “Necessary Evil,” “Civil Defense,” and “Things Past”).

Besides the use of Bajoran forced labor on Terok Nor, Cardassians are shown to be Nazi-like in another important way. One episode of
Voyager
fictionalizes the medical experiments conducted in the Nazi camps by physicians including Josef Mengele and Sigmund Rascher by referencing Cardassian doctors experimenting on Bajorans.
19
Officers on
Voyager
face the moral dilemma of whether to use the research gained by unethical means during the experiments of one Cardassian doctor, Crell Moset, to save a crewmember's life. Some officers, including the one whose life is at stake, are adamantly against using the work of that “infamous Cardassian doctor,” but in the end, Captain Janeway authorizes a procedure based on Moset's knowledge, knowing that she has earned the enmity of several crewmembers (
VOY
, “Nothing Human”).

Life for Bajorans under Cardassian rule is analogous to the real-life suffering of civilians under Nazi occupation, and both groups face the question of whether to mitigate their suffering by collaborating with occupation authorities.
20
There is a Bajoran puppet government under the Cardassian occupation, and the workers on Terok Nor talk about how individual collaborators receive money, are treated favorably, and receive private living quarters (
DS9
, “Necessary Evil” and “The Collaborator”). One of the main characters, Kira—a former resistance fighter and the current second-in-command of Deep Space Nine—learns after the end of the occupation that her mother was one of many Bajoran women who served Cardassian officers as “comfort women,” the name Japanese officers gave to the Korean women they used as prostitutes during World War II.
21
Kira has difficulty reconciling her cherished memories of her mother, her hatred for the collaborators, and the knowledge that her mother willingly had a sexual relationship with Dukat, of all Cardassians, in order to ensure that her husband and children received better food (
DS9
, “Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night”).

Kira's personal angst only reinforces her long-standing hatred for Dukat, yet their tumultuous relationship throughout the series raises one final issue. For all of the traits given to Cardassians that liken them to the Nazis, part of the reason a comparison between the two is possible is how Bajorans are defined as a people and in relation to the Cardassians. In many regards, the Bajorans represent the Jewish victims of Nazi persecution.
22
Beyond the aforementioned parallel of how Bajorans are akin to the conquered peoples of Eastern Europe, the Bajorans are presented as an extremely religious species. Many Bajorans allude to the fact that religion sustained them during the occupation and now provides them with a focal point to unify them when political strife threatens to do the opposite (
DS9
, “Emissary”). Faith and religious observance also sustained some Jews in the ghettos and camps, where they sometimes practiced their religion clandestinely. In addition, they created a Jewish cultural life that incorporated both religious and secular expressions of identity and solidarity. Although only some of the Jews imprisoned by the Nazis were religious, many of them rebelled against the authorities in part by preserving their religious practice and secular culture.
23

This Bajoran-Jewish correlation buttresses the Cardassian-German association, as does the simultaneous representation of Bajorans as comparable to the Vichy government in France and the French resistance. Bajorans vilify their collaboration government after the Cardassian withdrawal for having sent Bajorans to work at the Cardassian camps, and therefore to their deaths (
DS9
, “The Collaborator” and “Destiny”). Many French people similarly criticized the Vichy government for cooperating with German occupiers and colluding in the deportation of the Jews, and they subsequently placed previous legitimately elected French leaders on trial.
24
In addition, in the post-occupation period, Bajorans revel in glorifying their resistance movement. A similar pattern of mythologizing the resistance existed in France, and only more recent histories have separated real heroism from postwar glorification.
25

The Cardassians are like the Nazis in many ways; they believe in their own racial superiority, and they have a government dominated by militarism with an important role for the secret police. Nonetheless, there are several notable differences. After World War II, Germany was split into two states, both of which disassociated themselves from their Nazi past. Although the Cardassians no longer occupy Bajor by the events of
Deep Space Nine
and are no longer at war with the Federation, there is little disruption in continuity between one military-dominated government and the next. This difference is significant when comparing post-occupation relations between Cardassia and Bajor to those between Germany and the nations that the Nazis occupied or tried to destroy.
Star Trek
writers even based an entire
Deep Space Nine
episode on what would have happened if Jews and Nazis had been forced to work together after the war.
26
Stuck together on a ship and facing an implacable Klingon foe, Kira has no choice but to join forces with Dukat in order to survive (
DS9
, “Return to Grace”).

The fate of the Cardassian Empire and the possible continuation of its post-occupation relationship with Bajor remain unclear following Cardassia's alliance with the Founders and its participation in a second war. Ironically, the Founders order the Cardassians exterminated—another facet that distinguishes Cardassia from Germany as it is both the perpetrator and the victim of genocide. Nonetheless, despite the war and the slaughter of eight hundred million people, Cardassia still exists, leaving the possibility that a peaceful civilian government could emerge, as happened in postwar West Germany. Yet, given Cardassia's past, the return of a militant regime cannot be precluded, because most of the casualities are civilians. The future of Cardassia has not been determined yet by the
Star Trek
canon.