CHAPTER 5

Holocaust Pop: The Holy Bible’s Nazi Materials

In his wonderful piece “There Are No Horizons: The Holy Bible At 20,” Taylor Parkes mentions “issues which, generally speaking, no band should even contemplate writing about, issues no pop song could ever contain.” How do you square the Holocaust with a pop song? How do you speak of the holocaust in a pop song? Matthew Boswell’s Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film (2012) looks at how it’s been done, examining the lineage of The Ramones, the Sex Pistols, Joy Division and Manic Street Preachers. Boswell goes as far as to say that “the impact of the Holocaust on punk was total,” and “central to the formation of the abrasive, disenchanted punk world-view” (130).

The Holy Bible is deeply imbued with Nazi and Holocaust subject matter: not merely the two songs traditionally understood as explicitly dealing with the Holocaust, “Mausoleum” and “The Intense Humming of Evil.” The topic frames and permeates the album in a totalizing way, becoming on some level an ultimate evil to which all other themes converge. Personal depression is thus also rooted in an awareness of the Holocaust, an event which appears to negate any possible hope or optimism in humanity.

With the concept of “Holocaust impiety,” Boswell builds on Gillian Rose’s critique of “Holocaust piety” which he summarizes as “overly sentimental or sanctimonious approaches to the genocide” (130) that are solemn, self-righteous and lead to a notions of Holocaust ineffability and unrepresentability. Holocaust impiety represents a rupture with Holocaust piety on the part of artists and writers, in particular in the field of popular, even low culture, such as stalag Nazploitation B-movies: an irreverent use of the Holocaust, that breaks with and challenges the pietist tradition in order to make fantastic, jarring, speculative or otherwise creative uses of it. Having become a sacred cow itself, the Holocaust is fertile ground for imaginative deconstruction: its fixed and monolithic message of ultimate and inexplicable horror an opportunity for re-imagination. Boswell mentions the Chapman Brothers in passing. They are a clear example of Holocaust impiety. Their Hell (1999–) installations model a grotesque fairground Holocaust landscape, in which Ronald McDonald and Stephen Hawking jostle for space amid Nazis, skeleton zombie Nazis, and victims in Games Workshop-like scenarios of torture and death. The Holocaust has not ended, does not end, in this vision of endless hell: the Holocaust is displaced from its historical context, its podium as historical and politicized artefact, and through the teenage-angst eyes of the miniature gamer, who would lord over fantasy future wars and Warhammer 40,000 Space Marines, is exploded into a wicked commentary on our world today. Holocaust Nazism as not a distant or historical aberration, but rather as the underlying premise to how we do things today.

Boswell’s seven pages on The Holy Bible, in particular his close reading of “The Intense Humming of Evil,” offer some of the most insightful and productive readings of the album. Boswell’s analysis of the song makes the case for its belonging to the genre or mode of Holocaust impiety by noting how it rages not merely at the perpetrators, but also at the victims themselves. Whilst the intro sample “vocalises the anger of the victims and their claim to retribution” (127), the actual verses turn their anger on the victims themselves, attacking the idea that their suffering somehow ennobled them, and scathing at their deaths as pointless. Boswell contends that the song offers a conflicted view that wrestles with and performatively calls attention to its own “insidious Nazification” (128), especially where it seems to adopt the point of view of the Nazi in the lyric “you always mistook fists for flowers.” Levelling blame and anger at the victims, as the song does, feeds from the long-standing and dubious tradition of casting Holocaust Jews as passive, almost willing participants, lambs to the slaughter. The song, according to Boswell’s reading, offers a laconic, nihilistic take on Holocaust butchery, by which the speaker rejects any form of lesson to be drawn from their deaths: “6 million screaming souls ∙ maybe misery – maybe nothing at all ∙ lives that wouldn’t have changed a thing ∙ never counted – never mattered – never be ∙ arbeit macht frei.”

“The Intense Humming of Evil” and “Mausoleum” may be read as a response to Primo Levi’s 1985 poem “Song of Those Who Died in Vain,” which is reprinted on the back cover of Gold Against the Soul. The content of Levi’s poem is a challenge to its title’s negative assertion: those who died in vain are ghosts huddled around the living, pressing upon them the challenge that their deaths be not in vain. They died in vain, but there is still a chance to change that, to make their deaths mean something, and use them to change the world. The ghosts order the living to sit down and “bargain,” to figure out a way to configure global human society free from the massacre of innocent people. If you do not achieve this, “if the havoc and shame continue,” warn the ghosts, “we will drown you in our putrefaction.” We will have died in vain if you cannot solve the problem of the slaughter of innocent lives. The poem is a challenge to the politics of today and its “never again.” But in 1994, in the middle of the Sarajevo siege (1992–96), with the images of Bosnian prisoners, victims of Serbian “ethnic cleansing,” on television and in the newspapers, recalling with their ribcages and barbed wire photos of Holocaust concentration camps, how could those “never again” exhortations not ring entirely hollow? While we were busy believing in “never again,” here it was happening again in front of our eyes. That humans fail to learn the lesson — are resolutely set against doing so — cannot but obliterate any meaning those deaths may have ever hoped for. Thus, in answer to the “Song of Those Who Died in Vain,” we have failed, and are drowning in your putrefaction, and your curse is nihilism made flesh. The Holy Bible is the sound of that drowning.