Epicrisis

Epicrisis (e-pi-cri’-sis): When a speaker quotes a certain passage and makes comment upon it.

“Shove it up your ass.” Dieter Biltburg, Class Bully, 11th grade.

Dieter was a foreign student from Hamburg, Germany. It was post-WWII New York. It was 1948 and Dieter was part of a group of German teenagers and children of prominent Nazis that had been chosen to come to the US to participate in a federal program “Democracy for Nazis” intended to “rehabilitate” the young Nazis by relocating them to America: “The home of the free and the land of the brave.”

The program was a failure at my little high school in Watertown, NY. Whenever anybody asked him to do something other than picking on somebody Dieter shouted “Shove it up your ass!” in his authoritarian German accent. He scared everybody and they quit trying to influence him and just got out of his way when he came goose-stepping down the hall in his Jack boots on his way to class.

Completely intimidated, “Shove it up your ass” became our high school’s motto. We would chant it with a German accent at football and basketball games. I started saying “Shove it up your ass” to my parents and teachers, and even to the school crossing guard, a former Marine who had fought in WWII and was missing his right hand, lost in combat. He told me if I didn’t stop mimicking the Nazi Dieter, he would stick his bayonet in my eye. I told him to stick it up his ass. He glowered at me, but didn’t do anything.

The next day he was standing on the curb with his bayonet held above his head. “I’m going to stick this up your asses you little racist shits.” We yelled “Up your ass!” He yelled back, “No, up your ass!” Dieter led the chorus. It went on like this, back and forth, for about 10 minutes. The police came. An ambulance came. Men in white coats wrestled the crossing guard into a straight jacket and took him away. We cheered and carried Dieter on our shoulders to Charlie’s Malt Shop. We all had Black Forest Sundays and toasted Dieter with a chorus of “Shove it up your ass.”

Dieter yelled, get me the smallest boy! We turned over Tiny Bins who was underweight, had asthma, wore thick lens glasses, used an inhaler, and was allergic to milk. Dieter punched and kicked Tiny and beat him on the head with a chair. We all yelled “Shove it up his ass Dieter!” as Tiny bled gasping on the floor.

Tiny was nearly killed. Dieter was deported. We were deeply ashamed, especially for becoming little Nazis, Tiny’s beating, and getting the crossing guard put away. We all memorized the “Declaration of Independence,” carried a copy, and recited it at sites of social injustice. But we could never atone for what we did to Tiny. He’s still in the hospital and his mother told us he holds no ill will—that just the other day he woke up long enough to to sit up and say “Bless us one and all.” I almost said “Shove it up your ass” when I heard what he said. But instead, as I was graduating from high school, I had recently finished my application to work for Simon Wiesenthal hunting fugitive Nazi war criminals. This should go a long way toward healing my guilt and changing my behavior. Already, I have curtailed my goose stepping and no longer say “Shove it up your ass” with a German accent.

Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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