chapter six
Universal Lessons
During the American presidential election campaign of 2008 in which Barack Obama ran against his Republican opponent, John McCain, an exchange occurred that raised, utterly improbably, a lesson of the Holocaust. Attending one of Obama’s speeches in Ohio, a spectator named Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher questioned Obama about small business taxes. Obama’s reply included words to the effect that it served the greater good to “spread the wealth around.” In the overheated polemics of the day, this response quickly became a cause célèbre, evidence of the Democratic Party candidate’s “socialism.” As the Republican machine seized upon the encounter, pursuing the “gotcha” strategy of political campaigning, it turned out that the questioner, first presented to the media as a plumber and admirable representative of the middle class, was not quite what he appeared: although Wurzelbacher had once worked for a plumbing contractor, it soon emerged that he was a conservative activist, and had been responsible for some personal tax irregularities in the past. He then made some highly aggressive comments on Mexican immigrants (“Put a damn fence on that border going to Mexico and start shooting … that’s how I feel”) that cast into doubt his status as a gentle voice of the common man. Dubbed “Joe the Plumber” by the media, Wurzelbacher became a media sensation, shared a platform with John McCain, and became a candidate in his own right, for Congress, in Ohio’s ninth congressional district, eventually losing to his Democratic opponent.
In the summer of 2012, as part of his congressional campaign, Joe the Plumber issued a short video entitled “I Love America,” in which he referred to the Holocaust. The issue was guns. In 1939, he claimed, Germany “introduced gun control”: consequently, the Jews were disarmed, “could not defend themselves,” and six million of them, “and seven million others,” Wurzelbacher said, were murdered. Wurzelbacher also mentioned the genocide of one and a half million Armenians, just a few years after Turkey supposedly “introduced gun control” in 1911. The Armenians too were “unable to defend themselves.” Needless to say, there was no evidence for either contention.* Expanding on this theme, Wurzelbacher went on to predict that Obama’s victory would mean “the death of Israel.”
In the uproar that followed, Jewish groups denounced these claims as “beyond the Pale.” Some Republicans were embarrassed. Wurzelbacher himself complained that “there were a lot of whiners out there.” His spokesman explained that the candidate was “a student of history” and what he had said was “just historical fact.” Most important, Joe the Plumber understood that the Second Amendment to the US Constitution “was always the people’s last defense against tyrannical government.”
The story of Joe the Plumber relates yet another lesson of the Holocaust: the capacity of American political culture to trivialize via the media, and the disposition to use even the most absurd renderings of Holocaust history for private gain. And the story also demonstrates the quite extraordinary way in which this happens through “lessons” – in this case a lesson for which there was no greater authority than Joe the Plumber, a “student of history.” The story has a distinctively American populist flavour, and some of its elements are not easily transportable. One hopes. Happily, the story faded from the media almost as quickly as it appeared – and it did not even revive when Wurzelbacher showed up in Israel a few months after the American election, purportedly to serve as a war correspondent for a conservative cable television network, PJMedia, covering fighting in Gaza.
As this tale indicates, the growing presence of the Holocaust in our culture since the 1960s has made it inevitable that the topic will be available to promote any number of causes, including the most improbable. Gradually, as we have become more familiar with its significance, we have seen a corresponding erosion of inhibitions from using supposed lessons of the Holocaust to relieve any number of the world’s ills. This prompts the obvious reflection that what is claimed as a lesson is often what is brought to the Holocaust rather than what is drawn from it – a point that Peter Novick made some years ago in The Holocaust in American Life. Opposition to “gun control” is of course only one among many causes that are mischievously brought to the subject, with varying degrees of seriousness. Other examples extend from abortion to bullying in schools, gay rights, military and administrative discipline, animal abuses, excesses of capitalism, the rape of the environment, the harshness of bureaucracy, or what have you. In each case, it is claimed, the Holocaust can teach us how to contend with a great wrong. And from this multiplicity of references come questions that I have tried to raise in this book: What does this explosion of thinking by analogy with the Holocaust say about the popular understanding of the destruction of European Jewry? And does it prompt any wider reflection on lessons of the Holocaust?
What follows are some additional examples of lessons, moving from the vulgar contentions of Joe the Plumber to more serious efforts to link the Holocaust to society’s concerns. But while I think it will be evident that with these we are in a qualitatively different mode of inquiry from that of Joseph Wurzelbacher, I believe that these examples reinforce my contention that lesson seeking often misshapes what we know about the event itself in order to fit particular causes and objectives. My point is not so much a rejection of these deductions as it is to illustrate their extraordinary variability, their frequent unreliable basis in historical evidence, and their unmistakable invitation to avoid nuance. In my view, pronouncing Holocaust lessons promiscuously enlists our horror of mass murder and other atrocities to press cases that ought to be able to stand on their own. I turn now to three famous thinkers and their proposed lessons – Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman, and Elie Wiesel.
Notwithstanding her disdain for popular readings of the wartime slaughter of Jews, in her book on the Eichmann trial Hannah Arendt promoted a Holocaust-related lesson that reflects her preoccupations with totalitarianism and her interest in a theme about which historians have done a great deal of research and writing – assigning responsibility for the Holocaust and identifying German responsibility in particular. For whatever reason, this line of argument, which concerned Arendt deeply, has been relatively little discussed by commentators. Arendt raised the subject of responsibility in her discussion of the accused, but she did so as well, albeit briefly, in the case of a German soldier who actually assisted Jews in their time of peril. Reporting on witness testimony at the trial, Arendt raised the little-discussed case of Anton Schmidt, a sergeant in the German army who had secretly helped Jewish underground fighters in Vilna, providing them with identification papers and equipment. Schmidt was arrested, convicted by a court martial, and executed in March 1942.
In Beit Ha’am, the large theatre in Jerusalem that served as the Eichmann courtroom, the Jewish partisan leader Abba Kovner, an Israeli resistance figure and a fine poet, relayed the story of Anton Schmidt to a hushed Israeli audience. Deeply moved, for once, Arendt listened with rapt attention to Kovner’s testimony about Schmidt’s selfless efforts to aid Jews. For her, this was not merely one event among many in the trial, it was a moment of extraordinary significance for an understanding of totalitarianism, which was her key to the murder of European Jews. In a passage of rare emotion, Arendt reflected on what she heard and its being beamed outside the Jerusalem court. “Like a burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness, a single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question – how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told.”
Arendt’s point – she called it a “lesson” – was that Schmidt’s reaching out to Jews and thereby exposing what the Nazis intended as “holes of oblivion” constituted a chink in totalitarian armour – a gesture that she pressed passionately upon her readers. Totalitarian aspirations could never completely succeed, Schmidt’s deeds taught us. Thanks to the German sergeant and others like him, totalitarian dominion could never be complete. Information would always emerge. Some individuals would always fail to comply. That was why no resistance could be deemed “practically useless” – as was said of Schmidt’s efforts. For Arendt,
[It]would be of great practical usefulness for Germany today, not merely for her prestige abroad but for her sadly confused inner condition, if there were more such stories [as Schmidt’s] to be told. For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody’s grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply, but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that ‘it could happen’ in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation. (Emphasis in original)
Arendt’s lesson drew vigorous criticisms. These did not entail any dispute over Schmidt and his actions – recognized by Yad Vashem in 1964 when the organization named the German soldier one of the “Righteous among the Nations.” Rather, commentators challenged Arendt’s contentions about his significance. Why was Schmidt’s Germanness so significant and why should his role be so important for his countrymen? asked one investigator. The point here was to claim that Arendt improperly used this atypical case to cast other Germans in a favourable light. Why should Schmidt be “of great practical usefulness”? asked another. Professor Gertrude Ezorsky, a philosophy professor and one of Arendt’s fiercest critics, joined this question to a stinging rebuke of her formulation:
Let it be noted that when Europe’s Jews were being murdered and the toll of Stalin’s victims had reached millions, Miss Arendt’s political requirements for this planet were still satisfied. Some people (not most) who faced totalitarian terror were living up to Miss Arendt’s moral principles and the Final Solution was not happening everywhere. But who with any real moral concern would think that humanly speaking nothing more was required, or could reasonably be asked, to make this planet “a place fit for human habitation”?
With respect, I must take just a moment to dissent from the dissent: while I take the point that Arendt’s somewhat convolutedly expressed thought in this passage (an obscurity for which she was famous) seems to have given rise to this interpretation, I think what is quoted here refers more to Schmidt’s frustration of the Nazis’ efforts to hide their crimes completely and to keep the Jews in a “hole of oblivion,” than it does to one individual’s effort to purge evil from the planet.
In Arendt’s defence, the distinguished Berlin-based philosopher Susan Neiman identified Arendt’s reference to the German sergeant in Eichmann in Jerusalem as “the most moving and memorable passage of the book” – and it is perhaps especially noteworthy that it has received so little attention by comparison with her writing on the Jewish Councils or Eichmann’s supposed banality. Neiman notes that Arendt’s lesson carries a redemptive message – upon which both historians and critics of all sorts have heaped piles of abuse when it comes to lessons of the Holocaust. In this reading, Arendt was trying to say something about the individual’s capacity, even under the most extreme conditions, to resist the power of the state. The notion here, writes Neiman, is that “it is the righteous among us who make the earth habitable [and] someone like Eichmann [who] threatens its moral balance.” Anton Schmidt, in this view, was affirming what Jean Améry called trust in the world, something that he had lost forever – and that most people do not expect as a lesson of the Holocaust.
But was Arendt’s lesson a deduction “simple and within everybody’s grasp”? I think not. Deep in her meditations on the nature of evil, Arendt was comforted by the way in which the story of Schmidt spoke to her as the author of an important book on totalitarianism. Her lesson: people could resist. The dominion of totalitarianism was never complete. Is this what people have in mind when they think of lessons of the Holocaust? I doubt it. People seek lessons as calls to action, providing practical guidance to making the world a better place. Instead, claimed her critics, by raising the issue of “practical usefulness for Germany today” Arendt seemed to be suggesting that more Schmidts might have assisted German public relations. Whatever her intentions, this was what her words seemed to convey. And that is why many opposed her “lesson” so vigorously.
Born in 1925, Zygmunt Bauman is a grizzled veteran of the troubled relations among Poles and Jews. A famous Polish-Jewish sociologist who, like many Polish Jews, was part of the Communist apparatus in postwar Poland, he was a fervent supporter of the Soviet-backed regime that set itself up after the war. As these pitiful remnants of Polish Jewry saw it, their main priority was to beat back the nationalist, conservative, and antisemitic forces that contended for power at that time. In the longer run, however, Communism proved very bad for the Jews. In 1968, turned upon by the party with which he had so enthusiastically thrown his lot, Bauman emigrated to Israel and, after a few years, moved to the United Kingdom, where he taught sociology at the University of Leeds. In 1980 he published an influential book entitled Modernity and the Holocaust, in which he contended that the destruction of the European Jews was a window onto modern society, a horrible demonstration of how an Enlightenment ideal – the reordering of the natural and man-made environments – could entail monstrous, murderous acts in pursuit of “the design of the perfect society.”
For Bauman, Nazism was not a harking back to the barbaric past; rather, it represented, together with the Communist regime of the Soviet Union, a state hell-bent on realizing modern goals and operating without traditional or moral constraints. Each of these regimes sought to construct an ideal, perfect society. Hitler’s and Stalin’s projects, while differing in the notions of perfection, blended with race on the one hand and class on the other, shared a murderous aspiration:
Stalin’s and Hitler’s victims were not killed in order to capture and colonize the territory they occupied. Often they were killed in a dull, mechanical fashion with no human emotions – hatred included – to enliven it. They were killed because they did not fit, for one reason or another, the scheme of a perfect society. Their killing was not the work of destruction, but creation. They were eliminated, so that an objectively better human world – more efficient, more moral, more beautiful – could be established. A Communist world. Or a racially pure, Aryan world.
The Holocaust, in this view, was part of a great wave of modernity. Quoting the American rabbi Richard Rubinstein, Bauman saw “the ultimate lesson of the Holocaust as bearing witness ‘to the advance of civilization.’” “It was an advance,” he added, in a double sense. “In the Final Solution, the industrial potential and technological know-how boasted by our civilization has scaled new heights in coping successfully with a task of unprecedented magnitude. And in the same Final Solution our society has disclosed to us heretofore-unsuspected capacity. Taught to respect and admire technical efficiency and good design, we cannot but admit that, in the praise of material progress which our civilization has brought, we have sorely underestimated its true potential.” Bauman had no time for the idea that the Nazis were monstrous individuals, or that they deviated from enlightened, liberal notions of progress. This way of thinking was “self-exculpatory,” turning a blind eye to how modernity was misshaping our own society. Rather, he believed that modernist visions infused modern societies and were themselves responsible for grotesque attacks on humane values. Modern activists contemplated society as “an object of administration, as a collection of so many ‘problems’ to be solved, as a legitimate target for ‘social engineering’, and in general a garden to be designed and kept in the planned shape by force (the gardening posture divides vegetation into ‘cultured plants’ to be taken care of, and weeds to be exterminated).” This was, says Bauman, “the very atmosphere in which the idea of the Holocaust could be conceived, slowly yet consistently developed, and brought to its conclusion.” He was greatly apprehensive of “the grand design at the helm of modern state bureaucracy, emancipated from the constraints of non-political (economic, social, cultural) powers.”
Following Max Weber, Bauman understood bureaucracy as stripping away the moral obstacles to the pursuit of its objectives – in the case of Nazi Germany, a socially engineered society “meant to bring about a social order conforming to the design of a perfect society.” Before this intoxicating vision, previously operating moral standards atrophied. Violence was moved to the fringes of society – “off-limits for a large majority of societies’ members; or exported to distant places which on the whole are irrelevant for the life-business of civilized humans.” What the Holocaust revealed most of all was the erosion of “pre-existing ethical norms or modern inhibitions.” Bauman closed his book with a discussion of “the challenge of the Holocaust,” that set off “a feverish search for alternative groundings of ethical principles.” What he called for was a reconstruction of a pre-social or supra-social societal morality – notions that he derives from the philosophical anthropology of Emmanuel Levinas.
Part of a significant body of literature that discusses the relationship of modernity to the Holocaust, Bauman’s work has generated a cluster of lessons, many of which can be found in his own texts. As with other cases examined here, Bauman’s lessons sometimes stand on shaky historical ground and are certainly far from carrying the field of Holocaust historians. To start with the most obvious, most modern states did not emulate the destructive spasms of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Indeed, some of them expended considerable blood and treasure to constrain modernist experiments and destroy their visions. And moreover, many of the worst atrocities of so-called modernist regimes relied in their killing upon primitive technology and method. At the same time, there is a powerful case to be made that modern bureaucracies can and do serve the public good. Enlightenment thinking is not only the preserve of the weeded garden and the egregious atrocity; it is also an arena of tolerance, humanitarianism, and critical analysis. Bauman’s views have been battered about by critics who have pursued these and other charges against him, and his work, while respected, has emerged considerably the worse for wear. Clearly, few would want to disarm anyone who sought to mitigate the destructive effects of modernity. But as a universal lesson of the Holocaust this is hardly a call to arms that would win the support of many historians.
Even the most fervent admirers of Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and acclaimed as the most prominent spokesman for Holocaust survivors worldwide, would probably appreciate that he is one of the last places to go for lessons of the Holocaust. Of Rumanian background, born in the town of Sighet, he has written over fifty books, and is most famous for his reflections on his experiences in Auschwitz – in recognition of which he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Speaking of that work, the Norwegian Nobel committee referred to him as a “messenger to mankind.” In both his writing and his public addresses, Wiesel’s technique is to present an experience, not a road map. His Holocaust communication involves feelings, vignettes, and, very importantly, questions – none of which, in my view, lend themselves to the formulation of lessons. Often, he speaks in parables, making statements that many might challenge and in which his meaning can be susceptible to different interpretations or downright obscure. “While not all the victims were Jews,” he famously wrote to US president Jimmy Carter about the new Holocaust Museum, “all Jews were victims.” Michael Berenbaum, who worked closely with Wiesel on the Museum, has described the tightrope that Wiesel walked, as chairman of the Holocaust Memorial Council, between Jewish and non-Jewish victims of Nazism. Writing to Carter, he was trying to communicate the particular importance for Jews of the Nazi atrocities against them. But “all Jews were victims”? Note that his claim was not about German intentions, but simply that all Jews were victims. How can this be? Surely, those Jews who spent the war safe and sound in North America cannot be counted as victims. Yet the statement lives on, making an explicit claim of universal Jewish victimhood that many refer to as a lesson of the Holocaust – however unreasonably.
For many years Wiesel spoke about the ineffability of the Holocaust – the inability of people who were not “there” to succeed in grasping the murder of European Jews. “Only those who were there will ever know,” he has said, “and those who were there can never tell.” Pursuing this theme, he spun this message into a kind of winding conversation rather than a description or analysis. In this rhetorical construction, questions are central, and direct the content of his speech. “What was Auschwitz: an end or a beginning, an apocalyptic consequence of centuries-old bigotry and hatred, or was it the final convulsion of demonic forces in human nature?” Who can say? Certainly Wiesel does not, and in the end his discourse can be read as demonstrating the elusiveness of lessons. Does the Holocaust teach pessimism? Well yes, but we must not give in to it. And so we try to be optimistic. Will the world ever learn? It seems not. But then again we must try to teach it. Is the message man’s inhumanity to man? No, it was man’s inhumanity to Jews. Still, the Holocaust calls us to challenge the evil side of humanity wherever it appears. Might the Holocaust have prompted Wiesel to move to Israel? Yes, but he is unworthy.
Wiesel has been called “the single most influential Jew in America,” perhaps the most influential worldwide. In a speech to the United Nations in 2005, on the occasion of its sixtieth anniversary, he came as close as he has to a clear formulation of lessons: “Those who survived Auschwitz advocate hope, not despair; generosity, not rancor or bitterness; gratitude, not violence. We must be engaged, we must reject indifference as an option. Indifference always helps the aggressor, never his victims. And what is memory if not a noble and necessary response to and against indifference?” Are these his lessons from the Holocaust? I have seen them described as such. Many turn to his work precisely in a quest for lessons. But the higher one rises in generality, the less clear are these admonitions as a source of guidance and the less helpful they become in specific instances. And the less reliable they seem as deductions from the circumstances to which they refer. Indeed, few students of the Holocaust would see much connection between Wiesel’s frequently articulated questions, his responses, often read as lessons, and the specific events they study. Did generosity accomplish more during the Holocaust than rancour or bitterness? Maybe not. Was gratitude helpful? I can think of plenty of occasions when it wasn’t. Was the violence of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising to be condemned? Most would say no, although many Jews elsewhere, still not knowing what lay in store, opposed insurgents for putting entire communities at risk. And, when rejecting indifference, how does one decide where to put one’s efforts, which of so many wrongs to oppose? And what about problematic consequences of action? Surely these cannot be ignored. More than once I have served on committees in which the question has been put whether Elie Wiesel might be persuaded to join a particular cause. I do not know if the Holocaust has a lesson that helps him to decide.
Human rights authority and former Canadian Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff sums up the remarkable way in which, in our era, outstanding catastrophes like the Holocaust have taken on a universal resonance. “We are scarcely aware of the extent to which our moral imagination has been transformed since 1945 by the growth of a language and practice of moral universalism,” he writes. At the beginning of this process, during the 1980s, writers on the Holocaust began to move past one of the important debates that preoccupied some of the pioneers of Holocaust thought such as Elie Wiesel and Emil Fackenheim. Working with a largely blank public slate in the 1960s and 1970s, these writers emphasized the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Fackenheim folding it into his Jewish theology and Wiesel formulating a view of Jewish victimhood through his experience with the camps and evidence of the special obsessiveness of Nazi persecution.
More recently, however, writers seem to prefer universal themes. During the second half of the 1980s in Germany, in the so-called Historikerstreit, or historians’ debate on the Holocaust, intellectuals went after each other, to considerable media attention, over the question of how the Holocaust should be interpreted and remembered in Germany. Part of this quarrel centred on the notion of the uniqueness of the Nazis’ campaign to murder the Jews. Critics of this idea, mainly on the Right, made increasing reference to the validity of comparisons – with the Soviet Union, in the first instance, but eventually also with other cases of genocide, particularly in colonial situations. The implications for lessons were inescapable, although not all realized it at the time. If the Holocaust were unique, it was difficult to see how universal lessons could emerge from it; on the other hand, if the Holocaust could be compared with other instances of mass killing, it might be possible to establish patterns that applied to other situations. At the same time, not all comparisons were valid. But more and more, students of the Holocaust juxtaposed the wartime murder of Jews with the Nazis’ other imperial visions and with other episodes of mass killing. While the debate faded in the post–Cold War context, the study of the Holocaust remained vigorous in Germany and benefited substantially from the availability of new archival material made available in former Soviet-dominated countries.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the gravitation of international politics to human rights issues, policies of the Clinton administration in the United States brought Holocaust-related matters to a new level of public attention. A major issue was restitution – the settlement of material claims of survivors of the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities that had never been properly adjudicated at the end of the Second World War. These claims involved class action lawsuits brought against Swiss banks for so-called “dormant accounts,” litigation against German corporations for slave and forced labour, and proceedings against international insurance companies for unpaid policies originally held by murdered victims – all of which were accompanied by detailed, complicated negotiations for settlement. Another issue was Holocaust education and the shaping of its historical memory, themes that assumed quite extraordinary international attention, to a degree that could scarcely have been imagined in the period following the collapse of Nazism and the end of the Second World War. The global linkage, as many observed, was human rights.
Links between the Holocaust and human rights surfaced at an international conference on Holocaust Education Remembrance and Research called by the Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson and his government, with the support of the Americans, that assembled in Stockholm in January 2000. This meeting, the first in a series organized by the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, brought together twenty-three heads of state or prime ministers and fourteen deputy prime ministers or ministers from forty-six governments, including the Vatican. US Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, the American representative to the European Union, spoke for his government on Holocaust and human rights issues. As he told the US Senate, it was time to go from questions of money, that is, restitution, to memory: “The last word on the Holocaust should be the memory of its victims and the teaching of its enduring lessons.” And because the focus was international – that is, relations between states – American leadership was essential.
In this environment, publicly articulated lessons of the Holocaust shifted from constant analogies with Nazi Germany to global issues of genocide and mass murder that extended beyond the reference point of the Second World War. References to the Holocaust took on a particular American flavour. Eizenstat claimed a special leadership role for the United States to resolve Holocaust issues globally, a process that some have even referred to as “the Americanization of the Holocaust.” Understandably, Europeans did not always accept this with equanimity. Some chafed at American claims to be liberators in 1945 when it was the Red Army, and not soldiers of the United States, which liberated the vast majority of Holocaust victims. American claims of moral leadership as the country untainted by responsibilities for the destruction of European Jewry did not necessarily sit well with many Europeans during Holocaust-era restitution campaigns of the 1990s. The problem then was the role assumed by American courts in class action lawsuits, and later in settlement proceedings, to direct a process that mainly affected European governments, corporations, and banks.
These efforts persist – an outstanding example, only recently resolved through a bilateral settlement between the American government and France, involved skirmishes in the United States over claims of some Holocaust survivors against the French National Railways, or SNCF. Particularly vexatious to the French was that plaintiffs only turned to American courts after the failure of such lawsuits in France. Jan Surmann, an astute academic critic of the Stockholm process, has noted the way in which this global trend “decontextualized Holocaust remembrance,” removing it from the countries in which the events transpired and transferring the action to the United States in highly symbolic litigation. “The U.S. politics of history,” he writes, “can be understood as instigating a process that transformed the postwar Holocaust narrative and embedded it in a new, transnational meta-narrative wherein the lessons of Auschwitz lead to universal responsibility for human rights.” Thereby, the “real historical event [has grown] blurry,” and has been “trivialized and dehistoricized.”
In the years that have followed the first Stockholm conference on the Holocaust, there has been a significant acceleration of linkages of the Holocaust and human rights, and a vast outpouring of lessons from innumerable institutions and individuals who constitute an echo chamber for an increasingly global discourse on the Holocaust. At the United Nations, secretary general Ban Ki-moon speaks of the lessons of the Holocaust. President Barack Obama does so as well, as does Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper. So do countless dignitaries on countless commemorative occasions in many countries. In London, the Imperial War Museum created a permanent exhibit on the Holocaust, opened by Queen Elizabeth II. National monuments to the Holocaust have appeared in various countries, and a Canadian one, designed by the German architect Daniel Libeskind, is being built in Ottawa. At the domestic level, scores of Holocaust-related institutions in North America have written lessons of the Holocaust into their mission statements. There was constant repetition of Santayana’s observation about those who do not remember history, or the comment – often attributed to Edmund Burke, although without conclusive evidence – about evil triumphing when good people do nothing. And with this have come ever more lessons.
None of this considerable Holocaust-related activity has brought us closer to any consensus about the content of lessons. Matters have not been helped by the fact that policy makers and commentators attuned to this new public rhetoric frequently had little knowledge of the Holocaust itself or its German or Jewish or European context. More often than not, the substance of Holocaust lessons is simply assumed, as are the ways in which these lessons will somehow do their work. Universal lessons are a mixed bag, extending from some obvious admonitions about good behaviour to some that are highly controversial, both politically and ethically. Reduced sometimes to slogans, the lessons can become familiar through their packaging, but more often than not, I suspect, are discarded as easily as are advertisements.
Some of the discourse on lessons involves eloquent or rhetorically appropriate commentary. I have always appreciated the radical journalist I.F. Stone’s humane observation: “the lesson of the Holocaust is that to treat other human beings as less than human can lead to the furnaces,” but I do not hear it so much recently. I am less enthusiastic about the Canadian parliamentarian and human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler’s frequently declared “the Holocaust is uniquely evil in its genocidal singularity,” the meaning of which escapes me. However, taken as a whole, the category of lessons is remarkably unclear. Part of the problem is that the lessons sometimes contradict each other. Some are predictive. A series of lessons include variations on the theme of Jews being “canaries in the coal mine.” Closely related is the claim that the lessons are universal and should be projected globally. From this come lessons to the effect that “it” happened to the Jews, but could happen to anyone. Then, different lessons have been crafted that derive from different victims’ Holocaust experiences. Some survivors, as we know, emerged crushed by brutality and indescribable cruelty; others accented small acts of kindness or selflessness that saved their lives. Contrasting lessons emerge from each group. Some readers of Holocaust history might derive from Daniel Jonah Goldhagen a lesson about incorrigible German “eliminationist” antisemitism. But admirers of author Daniel Mendelsohn’s finely crafted inquiry into the fate of his murdered relatives in wartime Poland might prefer what the author once told an interviewer for National Public Radio, namely that “anybody is capable of anything” – certainly the most capacious lesson of any that I have encountered in my own reading.
To complicate matters, Holocaust lessons change as new problems arise and new generations consider its history. “The horizon is shifting,” I read in a blog produced by the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine, with offices in Portland and Augusta. “With it the role and reach of Holocaust organizations must inevitably evolve.” Maine’s Holocaust Center offers “a suite of free films, panels and workshops to discuss bullying and a related program of restorative justice,” pursuing its mission “to advance the cause of ethical literacy.” This sounds like admirable work. But some might well be concerned with the way in which those who oversee such programs are increasingly detached from the Holocaust itself, the event from which they claim to take their inspiration. A related problem is the collapse of distinctions, with differences among all wrongs being presented as simply a matter of degree. All the easier is it, therefore, to misinterpret, distort, or even abandon the history of the Holocaust, the elements of which may seem too remote and too horrifying to pursue without an excessive investment of time and energy. And it is here where we need to underscore the variability of lessons.
This is perhaps best demonstrated through examples. Here are some of the most commonly articulated universal lessons that raise questions for which there are no conclusive answers. I stress that these are examples, hardly an exhaustive list.
The Holocaust as a school for tolerance. Probably the most commonly articulated lesson of the Holocaust, in North America at least, is the idea that studying the Holocaust promotes tolerance, deepening an appreciation of cultural, ethnic, and racial diversity and thus making the world a better place in which to live. This is the explicit commitment of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, in which a main exhibition on the Holocaust is accompanied by a “Tolerancenter,” where “visitors focus on the major issues of intolerance that are part of daily life.” I certainly have no quarrel with admirable objectives such as these. Nor do I have the competence to criticize any primary school curricula in which such education might take place. However, I am more than a little uneasy about museological or educational messages that promote present-day notions of tolerance and diversity, concepts that have virtually no relation to the destruction of European Jewry, by linking them to the Holocaust. To historians, the idea that “intolerance” or “prejudice” is what the Holocaust is all about would be laughable if this were not a serious matter, maintained seriously by men and women of obvious good will. Let us be clear: people in history have forever been “intolerant” and “prejudiced” by our twenty-first-century, North American definitions, without necessarily slaughtering each other and committing genocide in a manner that practically defies belief for any society. The Holocaust is about mass killing, on a continental scale, of a particular group of victims, and not about intolerance or prejudice. Throughout history, societies have commonly stigmatized, exploited, brutalized, punished, and persecuted groups and individuals – and even worse – without slaughtering them so obsessively or seeking to wipe them off the face of the earth. An important question about the Holocaust is why and how barriers of law and custom and religion seem to have collapsed under the Third Reich and how the Germans managed to organize killing on such a vast scale. Narrowing the Holocaust to an issue of intolerance and prejudice not only prompts a misunderstanding of such wrongdoing in our world today, it also misstates the significance of the event, the authority of which we are then borrowing so disrespectfully.
It began with words. Public personalities who have called for restrictions on hate speech in the media and on the Internet have ahistorically invoked the Holocaust with the claim that “it began with words,” suggesting that unfettered speech was a fundamental cause of the Holocaust, if not the fundamental cause, and that restrictions on such speech would be an appropriate preventative response, a lesson derived from the Holocaust. Unsurprisingly, this particular lesson seems to have much less currency in the United States, with its extremely robust traditions of free speech deriving from the US Constitution, than in European countries and for that matter Canada, with very different traditions. I have heard this statement hundreds of times, however, on both sides of the Canadian-American border. This contention is subject to the same observations that have been made previously: there are no grounds, historically, for singling out this particular element as a cause of the Holocaust. Rather, doing so distorts the history we claim to be trying to understand. Demonizing others has unfortunately been a common attribute of many societies historically and for that matter exists in many parts of the world today, without the kind of genocidal massacres we associate with the Holocaust. Historians have repeatedly shown how inapt this commentary is for an understanding of the Holocaust. While no one would consider the subject of antisemitism unimportant for a study of Nazism, most historians would certainly challenge the idea that it paved the way for Hitler’s rise to power or that it mobilized Germans to a genocidal attack on Jews. Some years ago, historian William Sheridan Allen summed up a historical consensus succinctly when he said that more Germans became antisemites because they became Nazis than became Nazis because they were antisemites. Then, too, claims about the salience of antisemitism dissolve when examined comparatively. Was German antisemitism, for example, any more widespread and venomous than, say, Polish or Hungarian or Rumanian antisemitism? Probably not. And how would it compare, for that matter, with the Canadian antisemitism of the prewar era? George Mosse used to illustrate how useless were Holocaust explanations based on antisemitic reputation. If you were situated in the 1890s and were told that one of the European states of the day would be responsible for a Holocaust, which would you choose? he would ask. More often than not, anyone who knew anything about European antisemitism of that era would probably select Tsarist Russia. And after that, almost certainly France. Germany would not be high on the list. So, why Germany?
All it takes for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Among the most popular of Holocaust lessons, this statement blends good intentions with popular clichés. Just as there are few who would champion hate speech, there are few who believe that good men should “do nothing.” But “all it takes”? Doris Bergen puts her own critique well: “The slogan ‘all it takes’ is a call for civil courage. It urges us to stand up, to speak out against social justice. At the same time, it assumes a softened version of the Holocaust that is politically safe and even comforting, because it involves no killers, only victims and witnesses.” Holocaust historians have carefully examined the motivations of perpetrators, the mindset of facilitators, and the politics of collaboration. And they have taken great care to examine the institutional and situational factors that facilitated mass killing. In any assessment of the rise of Nazism or the Holocaust, it would be an outrageous misstatement to claim that “good men did nothing” to oppose Nazism – or even, for that matter, to resist the Germans’ carrying out the Final Solution. Too few, certainly. Too late, as is so often the case in human affairs. Without sufficient energy, maybe presumptuous of us to say so. But “all it takes,” “did nothing” are bits of slogans, hardly constituting a serious assessment. Worse still, promoting them as a lesson that if “good men” would only act responsibly all may be well not only presents a childishly simple view of how genocide functions but also slights resistance that did occur to no effect whatever.
One person can make a difference. Another distortion of Holocaust history in the service of good intentions is the idea that every individual has the capacity to thwart the evils of a state like Nazi Germany – a notion that would be quite properly scorned by any who actually had to face its unrelenting power. Arguably, the history of daily lives of Jews under Nazism suggests precisely the opposite – how even the most resourceful, the bravest, those who were willing to hurl themselves against the machinery of destruction, more often than not failed even to slow the killing process. Coming from a religious discourse that may celebrate acts of goodness wherever they appear, this claim probably has more to do with our hunger for redemptive messages than anything else. And there are some cruel implications. One of them is that ordinary people ought to have had a clearer vision of what they were facing, or more courage in dealing with it. Or that bystanders ought to have acted more forcefully. But the slightest effort at comparison suggests how fanciful is this idea. Peter Hayes points rightly to the case of Soviet prisoners of war who perished at such staggering rates and numbers – and these were young men, with military training and fighting experience, of whom close to three and a half million, almost 60 per cent of those captured, succumbed to starvation, abuse, and outright massacre. “The contest was so uneven that it is cruel to the memory of the victims to talk of how much they could have gummed up the German operations if only they’d been less cooperative,” he says. It may gratify us to identify heroes who sacrificed themselves or who became martyrs to a good cause. We may well choose to identify them as examples. But formulating such cases as lessons of the Holocaust obscures the historical reality of wartime genocide and falsifies the situation that bystanders actually faced.
Siding with victims. “Indifference and inaction always mean coming down on the side of the victimizer, never the victim” goes another familiar slogan. There is a considerable historical discourse on what might have been done to rescue Jews during the Holocaust, and there are specialists in Holocaust lessons who relentlessly pursue long-gone historical actors, charging that they could and should have done more to save the victimized. Who could deny such assertions, in general terms at least? In hindsight, there are few instances, and few individuals, for whom this is not true for virtually every human-made catastrophe – either in our personal lives or in public affairs. Afterwards, we can almost always identify how things might have been done better. But while in hindsight more could have always been done, and while it can be instructive to engage in such counterfactual history, it is wise to exercise care in doing so. During the Second World War, when so few, including the victims themselves, grasped the reality of the Final Solution, and in the throes of a worldwide conflict of unimaginable destructiveness, people did not have the luxury to act as we might like to think we would act – and as it is so easy imagine them doing now. What is important if we want fully to understand is to assess the situation people faced with as clear-eyed judgment and as full an awareness of the evidence as we can. Disagreement over such things is inevitable. Historians are by no means unanimous that, practically speaking, large numbers of Jews could have been saved from the Nazis’ implementation of mass murder, and they also disagree on whether prioritizing rescue was a conceivable choice for decision makers involved in a desperate struggle against the Third Reich.
The strongest part of this argument has to do with the Depression years, when Allied immigration policies turned increasingly towards restrictions in the late 1930s, following the Anschluss with Austria and the events of Kristallnacht. Still, in country after country where policies towards Jews have been examined, historians have identified fierce opposition to opening the door to refugees in general and Jews in particular. Once the lethal machinery of destruction began to operate, accelerating powerfully in mid-1941 with the Germans’ invasion of the Soviet Union, Jews were almost completely inaccessible to Allied rescue possibilities, and in any event such “humanitarian intervention,” as we came to call it in the 1990s, efforts on behalf of millions of people in wartime, was about as foreign an idea to the Allied governments as modern-day human rights might be to the nineteenth-century imperial powers. Such notions were generations in the future. Without prejudging particular cases, those who invoke the Holocaust have an obligation, it seems to me, to assess all of the evidence we can bring to bear, rather than just the evidence that conforms to particular moral injunctions cast as lessons.
Summing up the lessons of the Holocaust I have discussed in this book, I want to clarify some limits of my critique. My quarrel is not necessarily with the probity of any of the purported lessons as various people have drawn them. Some of these may be quite true; many are valuable as admonitions; and people who advance them are often very well intentioned, even exemplary. The problem is not with intentions or goals; the problem is an insufficient acquaintance with Holocaust history. Bullying in the schoolyard is clearly wrong, and it is admirable that some people have taken up this cause. However, my problem with lessons remains, both when people allude to them historically and when they reduce their conclusions to formulae that cannot bear the weight put on them. My problem with such formulae is that they generally do not depend upon the Holocaust for their veracity; nor are they necessarily true in every respect; nor should they necessarily need or depend upon the Holocaust as a source of validation; nor are they always a guide to modern-day challenges; nor do they necessarily follow from an understanding of the Holocaust that is undertaken by Holocaust historians. And finally, nor do they derive from what I think should be the first responsibility of Holocaust educators and researchers – to get the history right, which is to say to be faithful to the event from which the lesson is claimed to derive. And that, I suggest, is the first test for anyone who claims to speak with authority about this subject – to be as true as we can possibly be to the facts and circumstances of the Holocaust, and to seek as deep and sophisticated and independent-minded an understanding of these events as we can manage.
As I write these lines, my computer’s inbox notifies me of today’s email harvest from the Huffington Post with a bizarre example to add to my list of lessons. It comes from high places. “Antonin Scalia: Holocaust Was Partially Brought About by Judicial Activism,” says a headline broadcast on the Web. The story comes from a report in Colorado’s Aspen Times covering United States Supreme Court Justice Scalia’s address to the Utah Bar Association’s 2013 summer convention in Snowmass, Colorado. In it, Scalia excoriated judicial activism, as he has so often done in public addresses. In this case, however, the distinguished conservative jurist raised the matter of Nazi Germany. As the Aspen Times recorded it,
Scalia opened his talk with a reference to the Holocaust, which happened to occur in a society that was, at the time, “the most advanced country in the world.” One of the many mistakes that Germany made in the 1930s was that judges began to interpret the law in ways that reflected “the spirit of the age.” When judges accept this sort of moral authority, as Scalia claims they’re doing now in the U.S., they get themselves into trouble.
So far as I can tell from this brief report, Scalia did not precisely attribute the Holocaust to judicial activism. Mercifully, his speech was about legal matters, not lessons of the Holocaust. But given the tone and the warm reception of his talk as a call to action (he received a standing ovation), dozens of headline writers were ready to claim that he did.
Scalia’s lesson, if that’s what it was, will certainly have been forgotten by the time people read these lines. Nevertheless, we may understand his extraordinary claim in the context of a growing comfort with Holocaust analogies and the temptation to make a strongly felt point by packaging it as a lesson of the Holocaust. There is a limit, however, and this is as good a time as any to declare mine. I believe that when speaking about the Holocaust we all have a fundamental duty to be as faithful as we can be to the epoch-making events from which we issue statements that are supposedly validated by the campaign against European Jewry. To me, there is something fundamentally wrong with using the Holocaust so casually as a source of validation, a means by which we seek special authority for courses of action for which we seek support and approval. As acknowledgment of the significance of the Holocaust has increased globally, an unfortunate accompaniment has been a loss of respect for detailed knowledge of what actually happened. I have seen too much of this. My principal lesson of the Holocaust is, therefore, beware of lessons.