January 28, 2001

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Sounds of Silence

A Holocaust historian examines the challenge of writing about the Nazi genocide.

By MORRIS DICKSTEIN

RETHINKING THE HOLOCAUST
By Yehuda Bauer.
335 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press. $29.95.

IN THE passionate debates about the Holocaust over the last three decades, which shattered the near-silence of the postwar years, some striking differences have emerged. Many writers take their inspiration from Theodor Adorno's dictum that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. They are convinced that the enormity of the Holocaust opened up a rift in human consciousness that cannot be bridged by conventional forms of discourse. The challenge of writing about mass extermination, according to the historian Dan Diner, comes from "the inconceivability, the basic unimaginability of the event itself." Writers, critics and historians as unlike each other as Elie Wiesel, Geoffrey Hartman, Dominick LaCapra, Lawrence Langer and Saul Friedländer have probed the boundaries between history and memory, witness and objective narration. They look to safeguard the subject from kitsch and normalization, arguing that such unspeakable events test the limits of our ability to represent them.

On the other hand, most historians (and many survivors) have simply labored to reconstruct and explain what actually happened, to shed light in darkness, something that the perpetrators, by covering their traces and eliminating nearly all witnesses, tried to make sure would never be done. Heinrich Himmler, in his notorious speech to SS officers in Poznan in 1943, congratulated them on remaining "decent" in the face of a mountain of corpses, adding: "This is a glorious page in our history which has never been written and never will be written." Events that followed, beginning with the Nuremberg trials in November 1945, proved him wrong. In its wealth of documentary detail, Raul Hilberg's (left) "Destruction of the European Jews" (1961) did much to clarify how the Holocaust was physically organized. His operational approach strongly influenced nine-hour documentary film "Shoah." Another respected and authoritative figure in the field is Yehuda Bauer, the former research director of Yad Vashem and a retired professor of Holocaust studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His eloquent new book, "Rethinking the Holocaust," recast and rewritten from separate essays and lectures, is an eye-opening synthesis of the whole historiography of the Shoah.

Bauer's writing, like Hilberg's, is stringently matter-of-fact, altogether free of the fear and trembling of those who approach the subject in the spirit of Adorno or Wiesel. To him their qualms about whether the Holocaust can be described or explained smack of a "retreat into mysticism."+ "If we label the Holocaust as inexplicable," he insists, "it becomes relevant to lamentations and liturgy, but not to historical analysis." He maintains that "the murder was committed by humans for reasons whose sources are found in history and which can therefore be rationally analyzed." Instead of asking whether the Holocaust was unique, which could be seen as a metaphysical question, he compares it to other genocidal projects and points to factors that made it "unprecedented." The Germans, for example, subjected Jews to a degrading regimen of shame, humiliation and loss of identity, even depriving them of "control over their bodily functions" before actually killing them. He finds it deeply troubling that no Nazi document has come to light ordaining this "systematic humiliation." This reveals how much it simply emerged from the logic of the whole system.

Bauer's book has its debunking side, aimed at the "mystification" not only of literary interpreters but of Orthodox religious thinkers like the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who compared the Holocaust to a surgical amputation resulting from the sins of the Jews past and present. Here Bauer's customary empathy fails him. As a secular humanist he adopts a tone of light sarcasm, wondering indignantly whether God is really more concerned about what Jews eat for lunch than about the death of a million children. He applies the same skepticism to social scientists like Zygmunt Bauman, who invoke murky concepts like modernity to explain the Holocaust, and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, whose notion of a special German brand of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" he finds too crude and indiscriminate to explain anything. Bauer's critique of Goldhagen inspires some of his best writing, since he himself insists that anti-Semitism provided the ideological "push" that, combined with Hitler's fanaticism, the enthusiastic embrace of the bureaucracy and professional elites and the milder but not yet murderous prejudices of the broad German public, made the Holocaust possible.

But where most historians, including Hilberg, see the Holocaust from the angle of the Germans, who conceived and executed it, Bauer, as an Israeli, is determined to integrate the perspective of the Jews, whom he portrays not simply as victims or objects of persecution but as living principals with ever diminishing choices as Eastern Europe turned into a vast prison-house after 1941. The meat of the book is a brilliant review of vexed issues like Jewish resistance (armed and unarmed), the role of the Judenräte, or Nazi-imposed Jewish Councils, and the plans to rescue Jews by buying their freedom or alerting them to what awaited them if they boarded the trains for Auschwitz. Undercutting tenacious assumptions about Jewish passivity or cooperation, Bauer surveys the widely different conditions from ghetto to ghetto, from council to council, showing us how the Jews behaved in the face of whatever options remained to them. He neither exaggerates nor dismisses the degree of resistance, but extends the concept of resistance to other forms of opposition, including superhuman efforts to build up morale and sustain traces of normal life.

Responding to bitter recriminations that more could have been done to alert Hungarian Jews, the last surviving community in Eastern Europe, to what was in store for them if they were deported, Bauer, in a rare recourse to metaphor, shows how both ordinary Jews and their communal leaders "were caught on an island in shark-infested waters, and they had no boat. If the island was flooded, they were doomed. Most people reacted, therefore, by closing their eyes to the dangers." He usefully distinguishes between "information" about the camps, which had been leaking out for years, and any real "knowledge" or understanding of them, and he is viscerally offended by the idea of blaming the victims for their own fate. This is not simply a form of apologetics. Bauer maintains that historians must recreate the real choices available to people, including the limits on those choices, and he likes to remind us that what happened didn't always have to happen, for things might have turned out differently. Had the Russians arrived a little sooner, he says, the Lodz ghetto might have been saved, and its dictatorial leader, Chaim Rumkowski, seen as a savior rather than a power-mad collaborator.

In one of his many superb chapter summations, Bauer conveys the "nearly total helplessness" of Jews during the war, including Jews in other countries, like the United States, who could do little to intervene. Most rescue efforts failed, as nearly all forms of resistance failed, "not because those who tried were bunglers but because they lived in dire and desperate times, times that their detractors have no inner understanding of." With the skill of a sleuth and the assiduous patience of a born scholar, Bauer reconstructs the schemes, characters and motives in a spirit of factual inquiry, keen empathy and, of all unlikely things, common sense. "In this book I do not memorialize the Holocaust," he says. "I ask questions about what happened and why." Bauer's empirical cast of mind cannot tell us all we want to know. It resists speculative flights and avoids the dark corners that only intuition or art can fathom. He loves quoting Hilberg to the effect that "we historians are in the truth business." Impatient with the scruples of postmodern skepticism, which reminds us of the limits of our knowledge, Bauer in "Rethinking the Holocaust" makes a strong case for the tact and insight of the historical imagination as it confronts the unimaginable.

Morris Dickstein is distinguished professor of English at the City University of New York. His study of postwar fiction, "Leopards in the Temple," will be published later this year.

 
above: Elie Wiesel

First Chapter: 'Rethinking the Holocaust'

Raul Hilberg index

Elie Wiesel index