do you see how our undergraduates look here? Are women supposed to dress that way? You don’t need millions, you just need a few floating around to feel that the world is going to hell in a handbag.
Surrealists, Dadaists, and they put on a big public show. “They’re the kind of I piss on jesus kind of people. They’re real provocative—what will offend people”
Charlie mayer story-humpty dumpty sat on a wall, then wwi happened, and you put it back together again, and you can’t do it through parliament.
“why this would be a subject of interest to anyone is beyond me”
soldiers descended into the shadow of the valley of foucaultian despair (that’s bad)
Masses. The masses have changed a lot. That sounds like an undergraduate statement. It has that sort of bluntness that one sometimes encounters: the industrial revolution happened, you know. Let me invite you to elaborate.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Book review 2, intro/conclusion
editor's note-you can't transfer footnotes to blog postings. I assure you, the paper I handed in contained a-plenty.
Between Lightness and Weight; or, Why Some Historians Ignore Certain Victims of the Nazi Genocide, and Why We Should Stop Doing So.
Natalia Holstein
Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds onto its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends.
-Milan Kundera
Only by means of the power to utilize the past for life and to reshape past events into a history once more—does the human being become a human being; but in an excess of history the human being ceases once again, and without that mantle of the ahistorical he would never have begun and would never have dared to being.
-Nietzsche
Reviewed Works:
Omer Bartov, ed., The Holocaust. Origins, Implementation, Aftermath (Routledge: London, New York, 2000)
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).
Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 2007)
Raoul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: the Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).
Hanna Krall, Shielding the Flame: an Intimate conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (New York: Henry & Holt co., 1986)
Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: an Oral History of the Holocaust. The Complete Text of the Film (1985).
(Intro)
Milan Kundera opens the most beautiful twentieth-century novel with a rumination on Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return and the duality of lightness and weight. “Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.” Because history bows to Chronos in his linear form, the actions of man are light. If time were recurrent, on the other hand, “the weight of unbearable responsibility” would burden our every move. To illustrate the point, Kundera argues that history might be viewed differently if actions recurred:
If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one. There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.
Philosophy, though, is best appreciated when it influences fiction, not history; philosophy tells Kundera that “history is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow,” but those of us who have benefited from the scholastic outpouring of the “memory boom” in historical writing know this to be false. Robespierre did return to chop off French heads throughout the nineteenth century by way of French memory of his precedent. Memory of historical events gives them weight, and in the historical record, weight bestows legitimacy. Both individual and historical memory contain, necessarily, lightness and weight at different times, and the historian’s job is not to choose between the virtues of either, but to balance the scales.
Through all of Kundera’s adult life, memory of the Holocaust has structured international politics and international notions of human rights, and has given Europe a historical burden that she still struggles to carry. Memory has been a well-studied problem in the wake of the Second World War, after which the intellectual marketplace became saturated with individual remembrances, usually through its surviving victims. When given a public voice, these testimonies reveal the unbearable weight of experience; for those who survived the death camps while others, millions of others, were not so fortunate, telling their stories has indeed been “the heaviest of burdens.” In their voices, we can identify a past that recurs, a past that haunts. These survivors have bequeathed historians a copious record of witness-accounts of the experience of genocide. Historians, in turn, have honored their memories by tirelessly researching the death camps; the moral force of this work, and the fact that Israel has made the Holocaust central to its national identity, has ensured the continuing importance of this moment.
Most of these remembrances and thus the thrust of historical research has centered on the Jewish experience of genocide, and the anti-Semitic motivations of the perpetrators. Identifying weight, however, is the easy part; the historian’s duty is the rather trickier business of plumping the gaps in the historical record. As regards the Holocaust, this task is to be completed in a political minefield in which histories have been appropriated as nation-building, in which victimhood has legitimized otherwise inexcusable aggression, and threats to the premier and perhaps exclusive status of one kind of victim are met with hostility and reflexive defensiveness. Ideally, good historians are slaves to the truth as best it can be recovered, not to the more selective truths illuminated by nationalism. Thus, at risk of offending the Israeli interpretation of the Holocaust, I would like to point to a fundamental way in which it has been misunderstood. Others who suffered under the hatred of the Nazis and the indifference of their neighbors remain in a state of historical lightness. Non-Semitic victims of a genocide predicated on racial hierarchy are being forgotten by history. Since questions of agency and complicity are contingent on the kinds of victims generated by the Third Reich, and the consequent lessons drawn from the Holocaust are based on both considerations, the implications of this singular focus, of the discrepancy between the weight and lightness in the historiography of the genocide, is significant. In this review, I will point to the limitations of conceptualizing the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish story predicated on anti-Semitism by highlighting the story of the Roma and Sinti victims of the Nazis, and speculate what results change if the Gypsies were more readily included in Holocaust scholarship. The victim narrative has bequeathed the legacy of the Second World War its universalizing moral imperative. “Never Again,” it tells us; but as time has shown, this warning only applies to some.
Asking Better Questions (conclusion)
An overview of the trends in the historiography of the Final Solution will demonstrate the difficulty with which the present has been able to conceptualize its relationship to its not-so-distant past, and which classifications might change with a turn away from the anti-Semitic explanations for the Holocaust. The major problems that surround Nazi historiography stem from modes of classification—intentionalism, structuralism, totalitarianism, fascism, modernity, technology, bureaucratic politics, racial-biological thinking, anti-Semitism, German character, and so forth. Each of these trends has produced historical analyses with distinct political benefits or challenges. By focusing on the will of Hitler, intentionalsits were able to put the guilt for the atrocities on his shoulders. By focusing on bureaucratic structure, structuralists were able to weave a narrative of the Third Reich that seemed self-propelling and predestined. Scholars disagree about the centrality of Hitler in orchestrating the Final Solution, or the extent to which it evolved through what might perversely be called practical solutions to structural problems faced by the Nazis as the war unfolded. The latter view is supported by Raoul Hilberg in Perpetrators, Bystanders, Victims, in which his narrative, while underscoring the indispensability of Hitler, interprets the Final Solution as a response to the policies of relocating the Jews being limited with the outbreak of war and the economic strain of maintaining the Ghettos. Similarly, Michael Burleigh writes about the T4 program as germinating from the need to cut costs during war and to alleviate the racial burden on Germany by people in the medical profession.
The scale of the Final Solution demands answers that extend beyond the organizations that implemented it, which gets us into the abstract business of measuring attitudes of “ordinary Germans,” or bystanders. This is the problem that Christopher Browning tries to unravel in Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, in which he shifts the focus from the trained killers of the SS, to a more “ordinary” swath of the population that nonetheless killed brutally. His subjects are middle aged and working class men who were either ineligible for the army or chose to join to avoid the draft—though the extent to which his Germans were actually “ordinary” is debatable. This theme is also Bartov’s in “German soldiers and the holocaust: historiography, research and implications,” in which he debunks the purity of arms myth, just as Burleigh debunked the purity of science idea. Attitudes of bystanders are analyzed in relation to their victims, in hopes that in understanding their motivations we might prevent similar catastrophes.
Often, the complicity of bystanders where it can be traced is attributed to a culture of anti-Semitism; this begs the question: do scholars assume the logic of complicity in sending communists, homosexuals, and Gypsies to concentration camps publicly is self-evident? Though surely not the intention of any one scholar who writes on anti-Semitism, the silence in the historiography can be read to imply even some tacit approval of the desire to at least remove these groups from sight. Anti-Semitism is an insufficient explanation for the atrocities of the Third Reich, and in expanding the definition of victim, we might be able to do away with the totalizing arguments of anti-Semitic culture, in favor of an analysis that includes that factor along with others.
This view is supported by Henry Friedlander, whose essay in Bartov’s compilation, The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath, argues that the emphasis on the history of anti-Semitism to explain an event that hoped to eliminate non-Semitic groups is inadequate. Friedlander submits that the Nazi euthanasia program should be seen as part of the Holocaust because it was carried out by the same motivations; the definition of the Holocaust should therefore be expanded to include all groups of people who were killed under the banner of racial purity, including the handicapped and the Gypsies. Unlike Burleigh’s structural interpretation of T4, Friedlander interprets the euthanasia program as part of the history of genocide, motivated by the need to cleanse Germany of certain racially defined groups. Put differently, the same ideology motivated T4, the murder of Jews, Gypsies, and the handicapped alike, and to the same end. While conceding that anti-Semitism was a major element in Nazi ideology and that Jews were “high on the list of priorities,” Friedman argues that “anti-Semitism was only part of a larger worldview, which divided mankind into worthy and unworthy populations.” Enemies of the race were the “degenerates” and “alien races,” the un-assimilatable Jews and Gypsies. This observation should lead to a richer historiography that moves beyond “The usual interpretation [that] assigns the role of racial victim exclusively to the Jews, and sees anti-Semitism as the only ideological basis for mass murder.”
Friedlander’s was a convincing, well documented, and long-overdue intervention; yet, in his introduction to the piece, the only essay in his volume that strays from the topic of anti-Semitism, Omer Bartov feels the need to criticize it for leaving out an explanation for why the Nazis were especially obsessed with killing Jews, which theoretically elevates its importance above the kind of ideological commitment levied to do away with Gypsies. Friedlander suggests that it might not have been a special obsession, but a project that needed more public defense and justification than the removal of the Gypsies. While it is true that the anti-Semitic programs were legitimized differently, and the Jewish thread was conceived of differently than that posed by the other victims, characterizing these distinctions on a scale of strong or weak obsessions minimizes the contribution of Friedlander’s piece, and indeed the experience of the Gypsies, handicapped, asocial, communist, homosexual, and alcoholic victims. The insistence that the Jewish victims be the center of focus, always, in discussions of the Holocaust is ideological, not scholarly, and has impeded a comprehensive understanding of the Holocaust as a tragedy of human prejudice generally, not just of one sort.
Bartov’s criticism of Henry Friedlander raises the issue of distinguishing between motivations to exterminate, a distinction that is usually absent in most explorations of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, but which elevates the caliber of scholarly work when it is made. In The Years of Extermination, Saul Friedländer focuses exclusively on the Jewish victims of Nazism, though he is careful to qualify this choice: “While all other groups targeted by the Nazi regime (the mentally ill, ‘asocials’ and homosexuals, ‘inferior’ racial groups including Gypsies and Slavs) were essentially passive threats (as long as the Slavs, for example, were not led by the Jews), the Jews were the only group that, since its appearance in history, relentlessly plotted and maneuvered to subdue all of humanity.” In other words, the Nazis viewed the Jews as an active threat and mobilized them as a symbol in a way that was different from their public posturing relating to the other victims. This is a crucial distinction that indeed spells out why anti-Semitism needs to be studied to understand the Nazi state. Few historians, however, bother to make such a necessary point of contrast.
The specifically Jewish experience of genocide should be studied, and indeed can be studied without being subsumed in a general discussion of Nazi crimes. The problem is the un-contextualized focus on the Jewish victims, the tendency to talk about Jews as though they were the only group affected by genocide. This is not only distortion by omission, but affects the entirety of how we understand the Holocaust. We are left with a vision of a perpetrator with a single, explicit hatred that directed action. What we miss by leaving out non-Semitic victims of the Holocaust is the full lesson learned from tragedy. Rather than absorbing more Goldhagen-like arguments into the historiography, we can view the conflict as directed against humanity, not just the humanity of some. And if we really are to “never forget,” then the lesson from the war should include upholding the rights of man regardless of his racial or ethnic classifications. Strict insistence on racial distinctions culminated in the Holocaust—we should not perpetuate it in the record when the evidence calls for us to expand our field of vision.
Omer Bartov writes that the Holocaust, “one of whose most devastating consequences was a vast erasure of memory, accompanied by widespread trauma and repression, has now come to be seen as an event whose personal ramifications can be understood only by means of a sensitive and subtle analysis of survivors’ oral testimonies.” Like Kundera with the French Revolution, Bartov only gets it half right. It is true that part of the tragedy of the Holocaust includes a vast erasure of memory. However, this erasure cannot be rectified merely by analysis of survivor testimony—not all survivors have a voice. To understand the Holocaust, the record needs a more careful balance between lightness and weight, a challenge that commands the historian to write an inclusive, comprehensive history that may have to rely less on oral testimony and more on traditional tools of the trade. There are limitations to every man’s genius: Kundera underestimated the importance of memory. Most scholars of the Holocaust forget that what isn’t said is often as important as what is publicly remembered.
Between Lightness and Weight; or, Why Some Historians Ignore Certain Victims of the Nazi Genocide, and Why We Should Stop Doing So.
Natalia Holstein
Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds onto its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends.
-Milan Kundera
Only by means of the power to utilize the past for life and to reshape past events into a history once more—does the human being become a human being; but in an excess of history the human being ceases once again, and without that mantle of the ahistorical he would never have begun and would never have dared to being.
-Nietzsche
Reviewed Works:
Omer Bartov, ed., The Holocaust. Origins, Implementation, Aftermath (Routledge: London, New York, 2000)
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).
Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 2007)
Raoul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: the Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).
Hanna Krall, Shielding the Flame: an Intimate conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (New York: Henry & Holt co., 1986)
Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: an Oral History of the Holocaust. The Complete Text of the Film (1985).
(Intro)
Milan Kundera opens the most beautiful twentieth-century novel with a rumination on Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return and the duality of lightness and weight. “Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.” Because history bows to Chronos in his linear form, the actions of man are light. If time were recurrent, on the other hand, “the weight of unbearable responsibility” would burden our every move. To illustrate the point, Kundera argues that history might be viewed differently if actions recurred:
If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one. There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.
Philosophy, though, is best appreciated when it influences fiction, not history; philosophy tells Kundera that “history is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow,” but those of us who have benefited from the scholastic outpouring of the “memory boom” in historical writing know this to be false. Robespierre did return to chop off French heads throughout the nineteenth century by way of French memory of his precedent. Memory of historical events gives them weight, and in the historical record, weight bestows legitimacy. Both individual and historical memory contain, necessarily, lightness and weight at different times, and the historian’s job is not to choose between the virtues of either, but to balance the scales.
Through all of Kundera’s adult life, memory of the Holocaust has structured international politics and international notions of human rights, and has given Europe a historical burden that she still struggles to carry. Memory has been a well-studied problem in the wake of the Second World War, after which the intellectual marketplace became saturated with individual remembrances, usually through its surviving victims. When given a public voice, these testimonies reveal the unbearable weight of experience; for those who survived the death camps while others, millions of others, were not so fortunate, telling their stories has indeed been “the heaviest of burdens.” In their voices, we can identify a past that recurs, a past that haunts. These survivors have bequeathed historians a copious record of witness-accounts of the experience of genocide. Historians, in turn, have honored their memories by tirelessly researching the death camps; the moral force of this work, and the fact that Israel has made the Holocaust central to its national identity, has ensured the continuing importance of this moment.
Most of these remembrances and thus the thrust of historical research has centered on the Jewish experience of genocide, and the anti-Semitic motivations of the perpetrators. Identifying weight, however, is the easy part; the historian’s duty is the rather trickier business of plumping the gaps in the historical record. As regards the Holocaust, this task is to be completed in a political minefield in which histories have been appropriated as nation-building, in which victimhood has legitimized otherwise inexcusable aggression, and threats to the premier and perhaps exclusive status of one kind of victim are met with hostility and reflexive defensiveness. Ideally, good historians are slaves to the truth as best it can be recovered, not to the more selective truths illuminated by nationalism. Thus, at risk of offending the Israeli interpretation of the Holocaust, I would like to point to a fundamental way in which it has been misunderstood. Others who suffered under the hatred of the Nazis and the indifference of their neighbors remain in a state of historical lightness. Non-Semitic victims of a genocide predicated on racial hierarchy are being forgotten by history. Since questions of agency and complicity are contingent on the kinds of victims generated by the Third Reich, and the consequent lessons drawn from the Holocaust are based on both considerations, the implications of this singular focus, of the discrepancy between the weight and lightness in the historiography of the genocide, is significant. In this review, I will point to the limitations of conceptualizing the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish story predicated on anti-Semitism by highlighting the story of the Roma and Sinti victims of the Nazis, and speculate what results change if the Gypsies were more readily included in Holocaust scholarship. The victim narrative has bequeathed the legacy of the Second World War its universalizing moral imperative. “Never Again,” it tells us; but as time has shown, this warning only applies to some.
Asking Better Questions (conclusion)
An overview of the trends in the historiography of the Final Solution will demonstrate the difficulty with which the present has been able to conceptualize its relationship to its not-so-distant past, and which classifications might change with a turn away from the anti-Semitic explanations for the Holocaust. The major problems that surround Nazi historiography stem from modes of classification—intentionalism, structuralism, totalitarianism, fascism, modernity, technology, bureaucratic politics, racial-biological thinking, anti-Semitism, German character, and so forth. Each of these trends has produced historical analyses with distinct political benefits or challenges. By focusing on the will of Hitler, intentionalsits were able to put the guilt for the atrocities on his shoulders. By focusing on bureaucratic structure, structuralists were able to weave a narrative of the Third Reich that seemed self-propelling and predestined. Scholars disagree about the centrality of Hitler in orchestrating the Final Solution, or the extent to which it evolved through what might perversely be called practical solutions to structural problems faced by the Nazis as the war unfolded. The latter view is supported by Raoul Hilberg in Perpetrators, Bystanders, Victims, in which his narrative, while underscoring the indispensability of Hitler, interprets the Final Solution as a response to the policies of relocating the Jews being limited with the outbreak of war and the economic strain of maintaining the Ghettos. Similarly, Michael Burleigh writes about the T4 program as germinating from the need to cut costs during war and to alleviate the racial burden on Germany by people in the medical profession.
The scale of the Final Solution demands answers that extend beyond the organizations that implemented it, which gets us into the abstract business of measuring attitudes of “ordinary Germans,” or bystanders. This is the problem that Christopher Browning tries to unravel in Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, in which he shifts the focus from the trained killers of the SS, to a more “ordinary” swath of the population that nonetheless killed brutally. His subjects are middle aged and working class men who were either ineligible for the army or chose to join to avoid the draft—though the extent to which his Germans were actually “ordinary” is debatable. This theme is also Bartov’s in “German soldiers and the holocaust: historiography, research and implications,” in which he debunks the purity of arms myth, just as Burleigh debunked the purity of science idea. Attitudes of bystanders are analyzed in relation to their victims, in hopes that in understanding their motivations we might prevent similar catastrophes.
Often, the complicity of bystanders where it can be traced is attributed to a culture of anti-Semitism; this begs the question: do scholars assume the logic of complicity in sending communists, homosexuals, and Gypsies to concentration camps publicly is self-evident? Though surely not the intention of any one scholar who writes on anti-Semitism, the silence in the historiography can be read to imply even some tacit approval of the desire to at least remove these groups from sight. Anti-Semitism is an insufficient explanation for the atrocities of the Third Reich, and in expanding the definition of victim, we might be able to do away with the totalizing arguments of anti-Semitic culture, in favor of an analysis that includes that factor along with others.
This view is supported by Henry Friedlander, whose essay in Bartov’s compilation, The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath, argues that the emphasis on the history of anti-Semitism to explain an event that hoped to eliminate non-Semitic groups is inadequate. Friedlander submits that the Nazi euthanasia program should be seen as part of the Holocaust because it was carried out by the same motivations; the definition of the Holocaust should therefore be expanded to include all groups of people who were killed under the banner of racial purity, including the handicapped and the Gypsies. Unlike Burleigh’s structural interpretation of T4, Friedlander interprets the euthanasia program as part of the history of genocide, motivated by the need to cleanse Germany of certain racially defined groups. Put differently, the same ideology motivated T4, the murder of Jews, Gypsies, and the handicapped alike, and to the same end. While conceding that anti-Semitism was a major element in Nazi ideology and that Jews were “high on the list of priorities,” Friedman argues that “anti-Semitism was only part of a larger worldview, which divided mankind into worthy and unworthy populations.” Enemies of the race were the “degenerates” and “alien races,” the un-assimilatable Jews and Gypsies. This observation should lead to a richer historiography that moves beyond “The usual interpretation [that] assigns the role of racial victim exclusively to the Jews, and sees anti-Semitism as the only ideological basis for mass murder.”
Friedlander’s was a convincing, well documented, and long-overdue intervention; yet, in his introduction to the piece, the only essay in his volume that strays from the topic of anti-Semitism, Omer Bartov feels the need to criticize it for leaving out an explanation for why the Nazis were especially obsessed with killing Jews, which theoretically elevates its importance above the kind of ideological commitment levied to do away with Gypsies. Friedlander suggests that it might not have been a special obsession, but a project that needed more public defense and justification than the removal of the Gypsies. While it is true that the anti-Semitic programs were legitimized differently, and the Jewish thread was conceived of differently than that posed by the other victims, characterizing these distinctions on a scale of strong or weak obsessions minimizes the contribution of Friedlander’s piece, and indeed the experience of the Gypsies, handicapped, asocial, communist, homosexual, and alcoholic victims. The insistence that the Jewish victims be the center of focus, always, in discussions of the Holocaust is ideological, not scholarly, and has impeded a comprehensive understanding of the Holocaust as a tragedy of human prejudice generally, not just of one sort.
Bartov’s criticism of Henry Friedlander raises the issue of distinguishing between motivations to exterminate, a distinction that is usually absent in most explorations of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, but which elevates the caliber of scholarly work when it is made. In The Years of Extermination, Saul Friedländer focuses exclusively on the Jewish victims of Nazism, though he is careful to qualify this choice: “While all other groups targeted by the Nazi regime (the mentally ill, ‘asocials’ and homosexuals, ‘inferior’ racial groups including Gypsies and Slavs) were essentially passive threats (as long as the Slavs, for example, were not led by the Jews), the Jews were the only group that, since its appearance in history, relentlessly plotted and maneuvered to subdue all of humanity.” In other words, the Nazis viewed the Jews as an active threat and mobilized them as a symbol in a way that was different from their public posturing relating to the other victims. This is a crucial distinction that indeed spells out why anti-Semitism needs to be studied to understand the Nazi state. Few historians, however, bother to make such a necessary point of contrast.
The specifically Jewish experience of genocide should be studied, and indeed can be studied without being subsumed in a general discussion of Nazi crimes. The problem is the un-contextualized focus on the Jewish victims, the tendency to talk about Jews as though they were the only group affected by genocide. This is not only distortion by omission, but affects the entirety of how we understand the Holocaust. We are left with a vision of a perpetrator with a single, explicit hatred that directed action. What we miss by leaving out non-Semitic victims of the Holocaust is the full lesson learned from tragedy. Rather than absorbing more Goldhagen-like arguments into the historiography, we can view the conflict as directed against humanity, not just the humanity of some. And if we really are to “never forget,” then the lesson from the war should include upholding the rights of man regardless of his racial or ethnic classifications. Strict insistence on racial distinctions culminated in the Holocaust—we should not perpetuate it in the record when the evidence calls for us to expand our field of vision.
Omer Bartov writes that the Holocaust, “one of whose most devastating consequences was a vast erasure of memory, accompanied by widespread trauma and repression, has now come to be seen as an event whose personal ramifications can be understood only by means of a sensitive and subtle analysis of survivors’ oral testimonies.” Like Kundera with the French Revolution, Bartov only gets it half right. It is true that part of the tragedy of the Holocaust includes a vast erasure of memory. However, this erasure cannot be rectified merely by analysis of survivor testimony—not all survivors have a voice. To understand the Holocaust, the record needs a more careful balance between lightness and weight, a challenge that commands the historian to write an inclusive, comprehensive history that may have to rely less on oral testimony and more on traditional tools of the trade. There are limitations to every man’s genius: Kundera underestimated the importance of memory. Most scholars of the Holocaust forget that what isn’t said is often as important as what is publicly remembered.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
