Emil Fackenheim and Yehuda Bauer: The Temptation to Blame God
In which contemplation of Hitler as an actor prompts the leading theologian of the Holocaust to make a “double move”
I came to Jerusalem to speak about theology with a historian and about history with a theologian. In the time I spent talking with Yehuda Bauer and Emil Fackenheim—respectively the foremost historian of the Holocaust and the preeminent theologian of the Holocaust—I’m not sure which struck me more forcefully: their agreements or their disagreements.
Their disagreements were, certainly, more dramatic. There was their clash over Hitler’s “normality.” For Bauer, Hitler’s murderousness was “not ordinary” but “unfortunately not abnormal,” not in human history, not in Nazi Germany. While for Fackenheim, Hitler was beyond any previous notion of normal humanness—for Fackenheim, there is a radical disjuncture between human nature and Hitler nature, a radical disjuncture between ordinary evil and “radical evil.”
Then there was their even deeper disagreement over the theoretical possibility of explaining Hitler. To Bauer, Hitler was, “in principle” at least, “perfectly explicable,” as all men are. To Fackenheim, even the best explanations of Hitler are doomed to failure—only God can account for such radical evil, and he’s not talking.
Wide as the gulf is between them on these issues, more remarkable to me are those matters on which—coming from such differing perspectives—they agree. Both historian and theologian agree that Hitler is still a mystery, that Hitler has not been explained in practice, as opposed to theory. “That something is explicable in principle,” Bauer told me, “does not mean it has been explained already.” And it hasn’t been—Hitler hasn’t been—this most thoughtful and searching student of Holocaust history insists: the evidence on Hitler’s evolution is too thin to support a confident conjecture about the source of his evil. “I’d like to find it, yes,” Bauer told me, “but I haven’t. I just don’t know.”
Another surprising point of agreement: the use of the word evil. They agree on the applicability to Hitler of a term that so many are reluctant to use. This might not be surprising coming from a theologian such as Fackenheim, although he has wrestled at great length to try to redefine the nature of evil in the light of the radical evil he believes Hitler’s regime brought into being. But it is somewhat surprising for a historian such as Bauer, a professed atheist, not at all given to unnecessary metaphysical speculation. But Bauer had no hesitation in employing the term contemporary sophisticates are reluctant to employ. “Hitler is not insane,” Bauer told me. “He is evil. What I would call near-ultimate evil.”
To reach Yehuda Bauer’s office on the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University, I found myself crossing Nancy Reagan Plaza, passing by the Frank Sinatra Student Center, before winding down some steps to the more modest edifice that housed the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism. The disjuncture between the styling-mousse aura of the Sassoon brand name and the seriousness of the center’s mission (although Sassoon did serve in the Israeli army) disappeared once I found myself in the presence, the fiercely focused, intimidating presence, of Yehuda Bauer, whom I’d come to regard with some awe for the historical and moral authority of his work.
In addition to being founder and chairman of the Department of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University, Bauer must be considered one, if not the chief, founder of the entire discipline. His work is prodigious in its scope and profusion. At the time we spoke, he was also serving as editor in chief of the scholarly journal he founded, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, serving on the editorial board of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial publishing project, and all the while writing and publishing some dozen books of his own, including The Holocaust in Historical Perspective, The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness, American Jewry and the Holocaust, and A History of the Holocaust. It was almost as if Bauer’s remarkable output was in some way a personal response, an embodiment of “the Jewish emergence from powerlessness” in history, a way of regaining control over the history that in the past had made Jews powerless victims.
But it was not so much the quantity of his work as its intelligence and penetration that impressed me: the direct, unsparing clarity, the surgical precision with which he opened up and examined the most difficult, highly charged questions raised by the behavior of the perpetrators and the experience of the victims; the courage he had to confront such issues without sentimentality; his impassioned commitment to the subject combined with the scholarly dispassion with which he dissected ultimate questions of the relationship between the Holocaust and history, between the Holocaust and Hitler.
I was drawn initially to Bauer’s work by a couple of powerfully argued polemics in Holocaust and Genocide Studies in which he attacked those he called “mystifiers.” In “Is the Holocaust Explicable?” he speaks of “an increasing number of commentators—theologians, writers as well as historians—[who] argue that ultimately the Holocaust is a mystery, an inexplicable event in human history. Various expressions are used such as tremendum, with its theological connotations. . . . They all indicate a measure of final incomprehension.” They’ve given up too soon, he says, in effect. It does not diminish the gravity and terror of the Holocaust to say that in some ways it can be compared to other tragedies and that in some ways it can’t. But the fact that in some ways it can’t, that in some ways it’s unprecedented, doesn’t remove it from the realm of human nature or human comprehension; it makes it a new disturbing fact of human nature, not necessarily a metaphysical mystery we must sacralize with the “circle of flame” around it, the barrier to thought Claude Lanzmann wants to erect.
Although Bauer doesn’t name Fackenheim specifically as one of the “mystifiers,” I had a sense he might have had in mind the man dubbed the preeminent “theologian of the Holocaust,” and I wanted to see what the most searching historian of the Holocaust had to say about some of the issues raised by the leading theologian of the Holocaust.
A thin, intense, no-nonsense scholar in white shirtsleeves and black-framed glasses, Bauer grew up in post-Kafka Prague (he was born in 1926) until his family escaped to Haifa in 1939. And he might look at home as an actuary in Kafka’s insurance office. His powerful and passionate commitment to historical truth is belied by a dry, dismissive, self-effacing style of discourse. Perhaps it’s the bleak, bone-dry ironies of a desert kibbutznik. (Bauer had made his home in Kibbutz Shoval in the Negev desert since 1953.)
Bauer was, as usual, busy that day. He confined himself largely to short, compressed answers, ones that nonetheless frequently concealed slow-detonating shocks. It was difficult to draw him out at length on “Hitler-centric” questions because he believes the evidence is too fragmentary for conclusive judgments. But he did register agreement with Milton Himmelfarb’s “No Hitler, No Holocaust” stance—that the tragedy was not an inevitable consequence of unstoppable forces. “Without the driving force of Hitler,” Bauer told me, “there probably would not have been a Holocaust.” Hitler “radicalized” a nation that was otherwise anti-Semitic enough to be complicit with his Final Solution but not enough so to have demanded or forced it themselves.
Bauer made an important distinction about Hitler: Although Hitler was not “ordinary,” Bauer believes he was not “abnormal,” not “inhuman—that’s the problem we have with them [the Nazis], because they are like us and we are like them” in many ways.
He did offer a provisional judgment about the origin of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, one he believes is originally traceable “to his Viennese environment that included extreme anti-Semitic ideologies, especially of the sort of half-occult groups like the Ostara group and others.” And while, during his wartime service in the trenches, Hitler exhibited little hostility to Jews, after 1918 with “the trauma of the defeat, with the destruction of his world—he goes back to the explanation he found in Vienna.”
To Bauer, the locus of the real mystery about Hitler and the Holocaust is the question of when Hitler made up his mind for extermination, when Hitler crossed what Bauer calls “the moral Rubicon” between imagining the Final Solution and ordering and implementing it. He finds the attempts to answer that question frustrated by what he believes was Hitler’s deliberate obfuscation. He believes Hitler issued an oral order to proceed with a final solution in March 1941. But how long before that had Hitler envisioned extermination—did it lurk beneath ostensible plans for mass expulsion that were the public face of Nazi Jewish policy until then?
“Hitler’s a very careful individual, very circumspect,” with regard to that, Bauer told me. “He proceeds with that in a very crafty manner.”
“Deliberately covering his tracks?” I asked.
“Well, maybe there were no tracks.”
All the more reason, Bauer believes, not to dismiss him as insane, a psycho path. “You can only assume he’s evil if he’s not insane.” And Bauer has no doubt Hitler is evil. Hitler is “what I would call near-ultimate evil.”
The notion of near-ultimate evil was a bridge to Bauer’s surprising, even shocking remarks about God. For someone who doesn’t believe in God’s existence—he’d told me he was an atheist—Bauer has some strong opinions of his character if he did exist. I’d asked Bauer if he’d become an atheist because of the “near-ultimate” evil he saw unleashed—unchecked by God or man—during the Holocaust.
“Post factum maybe,” he said. “But I had no room for any relevance of a God, even if he existed, before that.” He grew up in a nonobservant family, he said, his mother an atheist, his father nominally Reform. “I was religious at the age of seventeen,” he said, which would have been in 1943, and he’s still “very interested in religion, because I think it’s a very important phenomenon historically, certainly among Jews, so you could call me a religion-loving atheist.” One who, he says, “looks at religion on the positive-negative scale in terms of what’s good for the Jews or bad for the Jews. Certainly religion was good for the Jews for a very long period of time. It doesn’t work too well today—you know, ‘Where was God during the Holocaust?’—the record of God as far as the Jewish people is concerned is not too overwhelming of late. But you can talk in terms of Hitler’s evil whether you are religious or not actually.”
“What about certain Orthodox seers here in Israel who’ve said the Holocaust was part of God’s plan, who even describe Hitler as ‘the rod of God’s anger’ at the Jews of Europe who were falling away from strict Torah worship? Or the Holocaust as a way for God to set up the establishment of the State of Israel?”
“Well, that’s idiotic, isn’t it?” Bauer said with some of the kibbutznik’s contempt for the seers who’d credit their pioneering courage and sacrifice to a God who supposedly needed the sacrifice of six million for his “plan.” “I’ve just written about that,” he told me. “What I say is that there’s no way that Hit—” he stops, correcting an apparent slip, as if he was about to say “Hitler” when he meant to say “God.” But, in fact, the syllogism he goes on to propose envisions God as a figure perhaps even more evil—ultimate rather than near-ultimate evil:
“There’s no way that there can be an all-powerful and just God. He can either be all-powerful or just. Because if he’s all-powerful, he’s Satan. If he’s just, he’s a nebbish.”
God as Satan? I’ve rarely heard a more radical formulation of the problem of theodicy (the attempt to reconcile the existence of a supposedly loving and just God with the persistence of evil). What Bauer is saying, to unpack the assumptions compressed in his God-is-Satan-or-nebbish syllogism, is this: An all-powerful God who was just and loving would not have permitted six million innocents to be slaughtered for any reason, any plan. If he’s all-powerful, he could have intervened (as he did on so many lesser occasions of peril in the Bible), and if he’s just, he would have intervened. If he’s all-powerful and permitted near-ultimate evil to prevail, a million children to be slaughtered virtually in front of their parents’ eyes, without intervening, he might as well be Satan. Which leads us to the second element of the syllogism: If God is just, he can’t be very powerful, because if he’s just, he would have wanted to intervene but just wasn’t powerful enough to make a difference—he’s a well-meaning but not very awesome God.
“A nebbish?” I asked.
“Well, you know, a poor chap who has to be supported, a God who needs to draw his strength from us, this is [theologian] Irving Greenberg’s idea”—and that of When Bad Things Happen to Good People author Rabbi Kushner.
It doesn’t work for Bauer.
“I don’t need a God like that. What kind of God is that, you know, he’s not an all-powerful being, he’s all-present?”
That latter remark about an “all-present” God was a reference to Emil Fackenheim’s tortured rationale for the absence of what Fackenheim called “The Commanding Voice of God” at Auschwitz, to Fackenheim’s desire to find some presence of God in the death camps, even a silent witnessing presence. Bauer has no patience for a God who merely suffers silently with the victims: “When he’s there, he cries—that’s very nice of him, but it doesn’t help me much. He’s totally superfluous. There’s no one to pray to in that concept.”
God as Satan. Or an impotent nebbish. Are these the only alternatives open to us in the aftermath of the Holocaust? In fact, there is a strain of theodicy that attempts to argue that God is neither all-powerful nor impotent but has limited his own power to the extent necessary to give man free will, the freedom to choose good and evil. The most powerful argument for this—a contemporary symbolic-logic version of G. W. Leibniz’s argument that this is the best of all possible worlds consistent with individual freedom (as opposed to determinism or predestination)—is the one made by the Notre Dame philosopher Alvin Plantinga, who insists that without God permitting the possibility of evil, of man choosing wrong, of what Plantinga calls “transworld depravity” (that in any world in which there is freedom some will choose evil), there can be no possible world in which free will or moral choice is meaningful.
But to many, the Holocaust is a challenge to the notion of the best-of-all-possible-worlds-consistent-with-free-will theodicy. Why couldn’t God have created a slightly less depraved human nature? Does the necessity for transworld depravity require a human nature so depraved that hundreds of thousands would collaborate in the murder of millions of children too young to be paying for any imagined sins? Can Auschwitz be reconciled with any best-of-all-possible-worlds theodicy that doesn’t require us to question the character of God’s creation, the character of God’s creative impulse? Or must we resort to what is known generally as an irenic (or “soul-making”) theodicy—that catastrophic evils such as Auschwitz are painful moral lessons that God intends will lead ultimately to a less-depraved human nature? Must we then say, in effect, “Thank you, God, we needed that”?
Bauer is not satisfied with the alternatives to his syllogism, which merely make explicit the dramatic implications of the indictment of God that Fackenheim and other troubled believers and theologians have been wrestling with in the aftermath of Hitler. Believers like Fackenheim have been acting in effect as defense investigators for a silent, absent client, groping for the explanation of their client’s conduct that he won’t provide himself.
The use of legal rhetoric, the language of trial courts, to describe this ongoing investigation is not my invention. In a survey of the debate over “The Holocaust as a Challenge to Belief” that appeared in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion in 1989, we find the terms “indictment,” “liability,” “perpetrator,” “complicity,” “aiding and abetting” used in regard to God’s role—as well as a remarkable line about “the spectator defense of God.” The spectator defense, the legal strategy used by “good Germans” who said they didn’t participate, they only stood by while the crimes were being perpetrated, has been attacked by Elie Wiesel and others who believe those who watched passively were just as guilty of murder as those who pulled the triggers. Therefore, the spectator defense, the Academy of Religion analyst remarks, “does not remove God from the dock” (emphasis added).
God in the dock: On trial is not God’s existence—this is, for the most part, a more interesting controversy than the old one about whether God is “dead”—but his character, potency, and responsibility for the malignancy, the “radical evil” of Adolf Hitler.
What Emil Fackenheim does is attempt to vindicate a continued if altered Jewish relationship to God in the light of the indictment against him framed by Yehuda Bauer. Fackenheim concedes the validity of the indictment by attacking the adequacy of any other Hitler explanation, other than one that places responsibility on God’s doorstep. But he does not concede the verdict.
“How do you explain a person anyway?” Fackenheim asked me after we’d settled ourselves into the patio chairs on the veranda of the small apartment in Jerusalem he shares with his second wife and their eleven-year-old son.
It was a hot June afternoon and Fackenheim, then an energetic sixty-seven, was dressed in Bermuda shorts, polo shirt, and sandals, looking a bit like an American grandfather at a kosher bungalow colony. He was speaking about the attempt to explain Hitler. But in revealing bits and pieces over the course of the afternoon, Fackenheim explained his explanation by explaining some things about himself.
He began with a phone call on Kristallnacht and an encounter with a playmate of Reinhard Heydrich’s. On November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, Fackenheim, then a twenty-two-year-old student of Old Testament studies and post-Kantian philosophy at the University of Berlin, called his parents’ home in the north German city of Halle. “My father had been taken,” he told me. “I told my mother I was coming. I came: I reasoned that the safest place was somewhere the Gestapo has already been. I forgot that they might have tapped the wire. They listened on the phone, and the next day they came for me.”
“What was that like?” I asked him. “A whole squad?”
“No, no,” he says, “just two fellows came and picked me up.”
They took him to Sachsenhausen, the newly constructed concentration camp outside Berlin. It was there, Fackenheim has written, the SS invented what he calls “the groundwork of Auschwitz,” the fictive “work battalions” that maintained a transparently false illusion that the camps were about work. Not that they succeeded in disguising the darker fate: “The fiction was still maintained even when the secret was out,” Fackenheim says, making it “a Kafkaesque system in which there appeared to be meaning [but] was none. . . . Thus, a clear line of development leads from . . . Sachsenhausen in 1938 to the incredible and unprecedented legend on the gate of Auschwitz”—Arbeit macht Frei (Work will make you free).
It is interesting he should single out as the essence of the cruelty of the camps the enforcement of meretricious meaning: false explanation. It was there in Sachsenhausen that his lifelong distrust of deceptive explanation was born. As an illustration of the easy explanatory truisms he detests, he cites the commonplace sentiment about “the Hitler within” he encountered not long after his escape from Germany.
In 1939, he’d been released from Sachsenhausen and obtained an exit visa to Canada before the doors slammed shut on the Jews in Germany. He completed rabbinical studies in Canada, and it was as a fledgling rabbi that he first encountered the “Hitler within” explanation. “I was asked to speak to an interfaith group about Hitler,” he told me. “To support the war effort. And the thing that struck me as being pretty terrible—here we are at war, and these nice Christian ladies would come and say, ‘There is a Hitler in all of us.’ They’d say, ‘Christians are bound to say this. When we see other people’s sins we look at our own sins.’ I wanted to avoid just this,” he says. “It just isn’t true.”
“It just isn’t true”: Fackenheim’s conviction, one that he elaborates on in his theory of “radical evil,” is that one cannot find an explanation for the horror perpetrated by Hitler on the familiar continuum of human nature. To say that Hitler was just a very, very, very bad man (or as Alan Bullock would have it, an incompletely good one) and that some version of that same badness, one that differs only in degree, is to be found in ourselves, diminishes the radical evil Hitler represented. Such evil cannot be explained, Fackenheim insists, by his having had a very, very, very mean father, or a very, very extreme manifestation of the same inclination to evil that is in all of us.
Fackenheim’s strong reaction to the “Hitler within” argument is at the heart of what has become a radical stance that has defined one pole of the debate over explaining Hitler: that there is a radical disjuncture between human nature and Hitler nature—a disjuncture with human nature akin to the one that Fackenheim and others later came to insist obtained between the Holocaust itself and the rest of human history.
Even more radical was a subsequent decision Fackenheim made: twenty years of silence. Shortly after the war, after the magnitude of the tragedy became apparent, Fackenheim decided that to speak or write about Hitler, even to mention his name, could only magnify him, give him a posthumous life. And so, for twenty years, while becoming a much-laureled professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, while publishing a much-admired synthesis of Hegelian philosophy and twentieth-century Jewish theology, he maintained a determined silence on the twentieth-century Jewish tragedy, believing that to discuss Hitler was somehow to perpetuate him, that to speak his name was to broadcast an incantation of radical evil.
Then, in 1967, in the tense run-up to the Six-Day War, Fackenheim changed his mind and changed his life. The specter the possible destruction of the state of Israel raised of a second Holocaust convinced Fackenheim he needed to break his silence on the meaning of the first—on the implications of the radical evil it had introduced to the world. It was that year that he formulated the now widely known “614th commandment,” the single sentence for which he has become most famous, the “post-Holocaust commandment” regarding Hitler, which Fackenheim felt compelled to add to the traditional 613 rules of worship and conduct in the Orthodox Jewish canon. He phrased it this way: “Jews are forbidden to grant posthumous victories to Hitler.”
Later in our conversation, he would disclose the deeper role this commandment plays in the trial of God. Back then, however, in 1967, he decided that one practical way to fulfill the mandate of the commandment was to uproot himself from his comfortable Canadian exile, move to Jerusalem, and begin to study Hitler.
The immediate cause of his decision was an exchange of letters with writer Terrence Des Pres. Des Pres is the author of The Survivor, about the experience of the death camps. “I wrote him a letter in which I said it’s a wonderful book,” Fackenheim tells me, “but it’s only half the story.”
“Half the story?”
“The story of the survivors is half. But I told him now you have to write a book about the [something].”
“About the what?” I said, not making out his last word because of his still-pronounced Central European accent.
“About the criminals! The Nazis, the murderers!” he exclaimed, looking at me to see if I was deaf. “You know, Hitler!”
But really knowing Hitler was a kind of peril, Des Pres warned Fackenheim.
“He wrote me that the way to try to understand them is to identify with them. And the danger is you might like them—no, become like them. So he said he refused to write about the criminals as a lot of people have. And one particularly shocking case is that fellow David Irving, who wrote volumes about Hitler’s war because he sympathized. This is the danger, once you try to explain it.”
If there’s a peril to empathy, a danger of explanation, the counterpart, he told me, “is the danger of objectivity. If you try to explain it clinically like Hannah Arendt does . . . the more you detach yourself—you can collect all the objective facts you want and explain less and less.” He cited a “good German historian [Jäckel] who has a chapter which refers to ‘the biological insanity of the Nazis.’ That explains absolutely nothing! Insanity is the smallest explanation of what went on.”
How then does one—how then did Fackenheim—avoid this Scylla and Charybdis of empathy and objectivity?
“You have to make a double move,” he told me.
A double move?
Fackenheim then introduced a remarkable notion that reveals, if nothing else, how fraught the very idea of explaining Hitler is for him and for us. “There has to be an epistemological rejection, a resistance to explanation,” he insists.
The double move then: Use the technique of empathy to understand the processes that produce evil in Hitler but at the same time resist the idea that an explanation can explain away his personal responsibility for evil.
“I read people like the Auschwitz commandant [Rudolf] Höss,” he says by way of example (Höss is the author of memoirs called Death Dealer). “Höss is full of self-excuses, and all of them are lies, but I’m not sure whether he’s conscious of the fact they’re lies.”
But resisting the “sincerity” of Höss’s self-explanation was just a warm-up, he told me. “Then, finally, with a deep breath, I read Mein Kampf.”
In fact, Fackenheim does not sound as if he experienced much difficulty in finding reasons to resist empathy with the Hitler of Mein Kampf. He seems to have first seized on Hitler’s claim to be what Fackenheim really is, a philosopher in the grand tradition: Hitler’s assertion in Mein Kampf that he possessed what post-Kantian German philosophy exalts above all else—a weltanschauung, a comprehensive, philosophically consistent worldview.
“The book is all so self-inflating,” Fackenheim says contemptuously. But especially so “when he says he found his weltanschauung in Vienna. What does this mean? How did he find it? He became suddenly a philosopher in his own mind and a kind of philosopher that has a weltanschauung and everything fits. Never again would Hitler doubt.”
But Fackenheim’s certainty on this question is not shared by all Hitler explainers. The issue of whether Hitler did have a coherent worldview—an ideology if not a weltanschauung—has, like every other issue in Hitler studies, become a battleground. The seventies saw the emergence of two opposed schools of Hitler explanation. There was the “psychohistorical,” which explained Hitler’s actions as pathological irrationality, the product of mental disease if not madness. And there was the “ideological” school, which attempted to demonstrate that Hitler’s actions could be construed as “logical,” in the sense that they proceeded from a coherent structure of beliefs, a weltanschauung, and responded to a coherent if wicked analysis of actual German historical realities and an accurate assessment of the sentiments of the German populace.
Many of those who attempt to make this case are German Hitler explainers, but not all. J. P. Stern, for instance, the Czech-born British historian (who heard Hitler as a boy in Munich and escaped to England with his Jewish family in 1938) is one of those who took issue with Fackenheim’s dismissal of Hitler’s intellectual pretensions. In Hitler: The Führer and the People (1974), Stern contended, “the attempt to offer a fuller understanding of the Hitler myth does involve a new look at his intellectual equipment. With fuller evidence of his studies in Vienna and Munich it becomes clear that (to quote Bullock’s phrase) to speak of Hitler as a ‘moral and intellectual cretin’ is no longer justified.”
There is still a gulf, of course, between saying Hitler is not an intellectual cretin and crediting him with a coherent philosophical worldview, but Fackenheim has no doubt on that question: He calls the notion Hitler had a weltanschauung “a transparent lie.”
But the big lie in Mein Kampf, the biggest lie about Hitler, Fackenheim believes, is the one he told about himself and the Jews. Not the obvious lies about Jewish evil—no, this was one of those moments in my conversation with Fackenheim in which one of his observations pulled the rug out from under certain familiar ways of thinking about Hitler to reveal not a floor but an abyss of uncertainty beneath; it occurred to me that this is why people used to pay attention to philosophers.
He broached the subject of the biggest lie by recalling something once said about Hitler’s final words, his deathbed testament, which Fackenheim believes was actually his final, defining lie. “You know Robert Waite’s book?” he says, referring to Waite’s psychohistorical study, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. “It’s a very good book,” Fackenheim told me, “but I think he made a few mistakes. One thing Waite says is, ‘Nobody goes to his death with a lie.’”
“Nobody goes to his death with what? . . .”
“With a lie!” (What Waite actually wrote is that the deathbed testament is the “quintessential Hitler.”)
Waite, Fackenheim explains, makes this remark in discussing Hitler’s famous final testament, the one he wrote in the bunker before his suicide, the one in which, even in the midst of the destruction he’d brought upon his own people with his war against the Jews, Hitler enjoins them and their successors to continue the war to the death with the “eternal poisoners of the world,” the Jews.
“So, therefore, since Hitler went to his death with his famous testament of hating Jews, that must have been the true Hitler. But it’s completely false! . . . I mean, it may be the case . . . [But] it may have been that Hitler, who posed all his life, who could never believe anything until he had the crowd before him to cheer him, went to his death like an actor. For posterity.”
In other words, Hitler’s deathbed testament was a big lie to maintain his pose of authenticity, the pose as a crusader who died for a passion he believed in, rather than a failed opportunist who believed in nothing but his own ambition and used Jew-hatred to advance it.
Hitler as actor. Actor as in liar/cynic/mountebank, whose biggest lie was that the apparent utter authenticity of his passion, which J. P. Stern calls the source of his appeal, was never real, only calculated. Hitler as an Iago whose “motiveless malignancy” was all cynically manipulative sleight of hand, not even faintly “redeemed” by a sincerity, however pathological.
“Look at his marriage,” Fackenheim continues. “His wedding half an hour before his death. What does that mean? It was all a performance,” says Fackenheim, who later told me he “had no doubt” Hitler was “a strange sexual pervert.” The deathbed marriage was then also a lie, “theatrical from beginning to end.”
I asked the implicit question: “Are you saying he didn’t even believe in his anti-Semitism?”
“I don’t think he knew the difference between acting and believing.”
He goes on to recall a detail from one of the Hitler-crony memoirs, the fact that “Hitler would pose before a mirror before his speeches.” He cites footage of an early rally in which “Hitler started out with a questioning look, and then he gets sincere approval, and then relaxes and smiles. Here was a man who was considered a nobody when he was with private people, especially women. And became a big god in front of the masses.”
The public Hitler, he maintains, was a joint creation of actor and audience. “Of course,” Fackenheim adds in a devastating fillip, “it’s a shocking thing to consider that six million Jews were murdered because of an actor.”
What I found particularly shocking coming from Fackenheim was not just his belief that Hitler’s hatred of the Jews wasn’t sincere but his almost casual dismissal of any certainty on the question. The deathbed testament is “completely false,” he said first, and then added, “It may be the case.” In other words, we have no basis for knowing one way or the other. For the foremost post-Holocaust Jewish philosopher and theologian to assert that after a half century we still can’t come even to this basic conclusion about Hitler’s thought-world was stunning enough when I first heard it that afternoon in Jerusalem. But it was only a year later, after a third reading of the transcript of my talk with Fackenheim, that I began to understand what was really behind the black-humored irony of that remark about six million “murdered because of an actor.”
It was Fackenheim’s ultimate effort to rescue Hitler from explanation, to preserve him for evil.
By characterizing Hitler’s apparently implacable hatred of Jews as merely an actor’s trick, by thus denying him the “virtue” of passionate sincerity (or the pity perhaps due to a victim of a pathological mental disease), Fackenheim deflects, even derails one entire project of Hitler explanation—the focus on finding the psychological source of the white-hot virulence of Hitler’s hatred of the Jews—by contending that the passion was not white-hot but pure, cold, calculated invention.
And, thus, all the more evil. Evil for evil’s sake, evil inexplicable by pathology or ideology and all the more inexcusable. “Radical evil”: a term Fackenheim uses to define a phenomenon that goes beyond the quantity of the victims, a new category of evil.
While it might seem at first glance not terribly controversial to call Adolf Hitler evil, Fackenheim was the first to make me aware of a fault line in the Hitler literature: the surprising reluctance of those who have written about him to consider Hitler himself as consciously evil. The argument against explaining away evil in Hitler is central to Fackenheim. His notion of radical evil (which is not the same as Arendt’s or Martin Buber’s use of the term) differs from the traditional Jewish conception of evil, which postulates not an absolute principle but an “evil inclination” within that can be overcome. It differs from the traditional Christian conceptions of evil, which vary from defining it as nonbeing (the absence of good), to personifying evil in a demonic personage, as the prince of darkness struggling for the possession of the soul.
Fackenheim’s notion of radical evil differs in that it is not contingent on, not the result of, a struggle within the human soul, but the kind of evil “that can never be overcome,” evil that is “transcendent, unsurpassable, absolute,” as one commentator on Fackenheim describes it, evil that cannot be explained away, even atoned for, but can only be “resisted” by its victims, however hopelessly.
One problem with Fackenheim’s argument—the problem with others who, like him, strenuously argue that the evil of Auschwitz is absolutely unique, never before committed or experienced—is that it can seem to issue from a kind of inverse narcissism: My evil, the evil I suffered from, is worse than your evil, worse than his evil, any other evil. This can lead to tortuous ratiocination devoted to proving that, for instance, the Armenian genocide falls short or the Stalin-inflicted famine and slaughter is less worthy of uniqueness—a preoccupation with comparative demonology that divides rather than unites victims of evil—and can absolve the actual perpetrators of responsibility. “The insistence on the Holocaust’s uniqueness and inexplicability,” Elizabeth Domansky wrote of this position in the journal History and Memory, “allowed the West Germans to see the Holocaust as something that could not be explained even in the context of the Third Reich. The Holocaust thus [is] transferred to the realm of the a-historical and [thus] renders the question of responsibility obsolete.”
Still, Fackenheim’s insistence on the absoluteness of Hitler’s evil defines one pole of the debate; it helps explain Fackenheim’s resistance to the very idea of explanation. Explanation, in Fackenheim’s view, if not evil itself, nonetheless can verge on ameliorating, excusing, even colluding with evil.
Which brings us to Fackenheim’s point of attack on the Hitler-explanation enterprise: the “Jewish blood” crux. That was the next firecracker this contentious philosopher threw across my path that afternoon in Jerusalem: his peculiar take on this disturbing strain of Hitler lore—the attempt to explain Hitler’s hatred of Jews as a form of self-hatred, as a product of the maddening doubt he had about his own “racial identity.”
While more sophisticated versions of this long-standing but still outré and disturbing notion have been gathering adherents since the seventies—particularly among psychoanalytically oriented Hitler explainers—I was surprised to find Fackenheim not resisting but almost embracing it as an explanation. Until I saw how he turned it into the spear point of his attack on explanation itself.
The subject arose when I asked him about Milton Himmelfarb, and he responded with a story about a playmate of Heydrich.
“What is your view of the statement, ‘No Hitler, No Holocaust?’” I asked him, in regard to Himmelfarb’s insistence that Hitler’s personal will alone, rather than abstract historical forces, was the necessary if not sufficient factor in making the Holocaust happen.
“Is that Milton Himmelfarb? Yeah, I think he’s probably quite right. Although I recently wrote there might have been one exception—Heydrich could have done it. And that strikes very close to home. I came from the German town of Halle, and when I had to write my memoirs, which aren’t complete yet, I entitled the first section about Halle ‘From George Frideric Handel to Heydrich.’ And did you know that for three weeks my mother lived under the same roof where Heydrich played?”
“Really?”
“Because when Kristallnacht happened and I was at school, my brother and my father were [taken] away, my mother was all alone, our best friends asked her to move in with them, the Levines—their daughter Ilse was just visiting me—well, Kurt Levine was the only Jew in the whole city who wasn’t taken. Because he was protected by his neighbor Heydrich. So I just asked Ilse Levine recently, ‘Did you know Heydrich when you were younger?’ She said, ‘Oh, sure, he came to our house all the time. When his sister was in trouble with her parents, we used to look after her.’
“And it shocks you absolutely. Because Heydrich was reputed to be the only man who could have followed Hitler. Incidentally, about Heydrich, they also say that he had a Jewish ancestor.”
More than incidentally: Many accounts of the life of Reinhard Heydrich, “the evil young god of death,” portray him as a kind of double doppelgänger of Hitler. He was a twin in the fanatical single-mindedness of his drive to exterminate the Jews—he was, after all, the man to whom Hitler entrusted the planning and execution of the Final Solution (until Heydrich’s assassination by Czech partisans in 1942). But, also like Hitler, Heydrich was rumored to have had a special Jewish doppelgänger haunting him: a shadowy alleged Jewish ancestor, rumors of whose existence gave rise to the widespread reports that Heydrich felt personally plagued by a putative Hebraic shadow.
To some, then, Heydrich was not only a potential successor to Hitler, he might be a possible explanation—in the sense that his struggle with this Jewish-blood shadow might be a clue to a similar dynamic in Hitler’s psyche. Rumors about “Jewish blood” pursued Heydrich from Halle to the Naval Academy at Kiel, where fellow midshipmen are reported to have taunted him as “Izzy Süss” (Süss being a derisive surname of caricatured Jews), followed him even into the SS, when Himmler put him in command of its intelligence division, the SD, in 1932, a post that would later lead to his being given command of the Gestapo in 1934.
Heinz Höhne, the historian of the SS, cites a communication from a local Gauleiter (regional party leader) in Halle who wrote to party headquarters in 1932: “It has come to my ears that in the Reich Leadership, there is a member named Heydrich. . . . There are grounds for suspecting that Bruno Heydrich of Halle, said to be the father, is a Jew.”
Höhne reports that although no solid evidence was found in a subsequent investigation, “the higher Reinhard Heydrich . . . climbed on the National-Socialist ladder, the more persistent became the rumour that [he] . . . was of Jewish origin.”
In a memoir, a League of Nations official who came to know Heydrich reported a probably apocryphal but nonetheless representative story: Heydrich had become so tormented by the fear of the “Jew within” that one night, in a drunken fit, he stared into a mirror, thought he actually glimpsed the shadowy Jew within somehow emerge in his reflection, and promptly fired his pistol into the mirror image, hoping to extinguish it. Unable to extinguish the doubt about a Jew within, the logic of this theory goes, Heydrich had to prove his purity by engineering the extermination of the Jews of Europe.
One reputed source of this theory was none other than Heydrich’s boss Himmler. Fackenheim cites Himmler’s belief that Heydrich’s devotion to the Final Solution came from the “fact” that he had “overcome the Jew in himself . . . and had swung over to the other side. He was convinced that the Jewish elements in his blood were damnable; he hated the blood which played him so false. The Führer could really have picked no better man than Heydrich for the campaign against the Jews.”
Despite the fact that these “thoughts” of Himmler come to us from his only-sometimes-reliable confidant, the masseur Felix Kersten, Fackenheim believes their essential truth. “You know Ilse said this, too,” he told me, referring to Ilse Levine, whose home was spared Kristallnacht because the young Heydrich had frolicked there as a child. “She thinks [the Jewish blood rumor] is true. She knew, of course, Heydrich’s father very well. He looked very Jewish and he ran a conservatory of music.”
In fact, both Heydrich and his father were highly accomplished violinists, but according to my own analysis of the multiple, overlapping, and conflicting accounts of the Heydrich Jewish-blood question, the truth might be more absurd and ironic than even the presence of “actual” Jewish blood in this architect of the Final Solution.
It seems Bruno Heydrich had a stepfather who, although impeccably Aryan, bore the stereotypically Jewish surname Süss. A perhaps malicious music-world rival, compiling an entry for Bruno in a directory of Germany’s musical elite, went out of his way to make it appear that Bruno’s last name was Süss, as it apparently had been for a time when growing up in his stepfather’s house (much as Hitler’s father’s surname for the first forty years of his life was Schicklgruber, after his unmarried mother’s surname; Adolf’s never was).
And it also seems that Bruno’s strategy for deflecting the whispers about his heritage proved to be a self-defeating one. He was known to do a mean comic Yiddish accent at parties, perhaps to demonstrate he had nothing to fear or hide. If so, this penchant of his for playacting the Jew backfired: The more he did his Jewish impressions, the more he fostered the impression he really was a Jew.
The irony is that Reinhard, Bruno’s son, fit every criterion Nazi “racial science” had established for pure Nordic appearance but was shadowed, plagued (perhaps even turned into a mass murderer) by a rumor based on his father’s comic impressions. Of course, “irony” is an inadequate term for the idea that such horror could grow from such origins. In discussing this and the idea that a similar spectral struggle with a phantom Jew underlay Hitler’s obsessive hatred, we have gone beyond conventional irony. We are really in Kafka territory again.
Fackenheim’s take (his double take, it might be called) on the Jewish-blood explanation of Hitler and Heydrich is a concession to Kafka as description but a resistance to Kafka as explanation.
Fackenheim first addressed the question in his 1982 work To Mend the World, where he took up Robert Waite’s formulation of the Jewish-blood theory. Waite’s thesis (Hitler needed to exterminate the Jews to exterminate his doubts about a Jew within himself) “supplies solutions of sorts to problems which otherwise would seem totally intractable,” Fackenheim writes. “Why did Hitler attack Russia, thereby wilfully creating the long-dreaded, unnecessary two-front war? Why did the plan to ‘remove’ the Jews turn into a vast system of murder, more important than victory . . . To such questions psycho history gives more plausible answers than either psychology without history or history without psychology.”
Having thus set up Waite’s theory as the best of all possible explanations, Fackenheim then subverts any complacency about its having really “explained” Hitler. “It gives its answers, however, only at the price of raising still more intractable questions.” Quoting Herbert Luethy’s 1954 Commentary essay, he asks, “How shall one ‘reconcile the gravity, the catastrophic magnitude of the event with the vulgar mediocrity of the individual who initiated them?’”
These questions, Fackenheim goes on to declare, “assume a dimension of utter absurdity. . . . Were six million actual ‘non-Aryans’ and many additional honorary ones butchered and gassed because the Führer hated his father and thought of him as a half-Jew?”
The disproportion between absurd cause and catastrophic effect is unbearable: Waite’s thesis, then, is defective precisely because it pretends to the possibility of plausibility: “The more plausible psychohistory becomes the more it points to an ultimate absurdity.” Fackenheim writes, “The mystery remains.”
“Utter absurdity,” “ultimate absurdity”—the abyss between the horror of the tragedy and the near-comic absurdity of the explanation—in other words, the illogic of the Kafkaesque, the rationale of irrationalism. Fackenheim both accepts and resists the Kafkaesque as Hitler explanation. The absurdity might be true, but it is not enough. Fackenheim dismisses the best of Hitler explanations in the same way Theseus dismisses the absurd clowning of the Mechanicals’ play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “The best in this kind are but shadows”—all actors are bad actors if they aspire to give us the “truth” of the world; similarly, all explanations are bad explanations if they aspire to give us the truth of Hitler.
Any explanation, however plausible in human terms, that pretends to proceed logically from comically finite human psychological sources to the tragic infinitude of the horror of the camps is prima facie absurd, Fackenheim seems to be saying. Fackenheim’s almost visceral repugnance at the absurdity of explanation is a rejection of Kafka as the “author” of history, of the idea of God as Kafka. Still, Fackenheim recognizes that his unwillingness to see God as Kafka opens the way to the even more unthinkable notion Yehuda Bauer had broached: God as Satan.
“The mystery remains,” Fackenheim says. The usual suspects have been rounded up and found wanting. The unusual suspects—a spectral Jew here, a medical mesmerist or a billy goat there—have been arraigned and dismissed for lack of evidence, leaving only the prime suspect standing, the Prime Mover, God himself.
Fackenheim’s courage lies in following the logic of his attack on explanation, in following the logic of monotheism to frame an indictment of the God of monotheists. The refusal of God to speak in his own defense, his refusal to take the stand, so to speak, at his own trial, cannot be ignored by those who profess to believe in or worship him, Fackenheim insists. Caution rather than courage, however, is evident in how Fackenheim structures what might be called the jury-deliberation process in the trial of God.
Elie Wiesel is famous for a stunning image of what might be called the capital punishment of God. For having described in Night the horrific spectacle of a young boy hung from the gallows by the death-camp guards. And for having cried out that the hanged boy dying in the noose was, for him, God—God dying to him. (In a Yom Kippur 1997 essay, Wiesel wrote that, after half a century, he wanted to “make up” with the God he abandoned on the gallows, although “Auschwitz must and will forever remain a question mark” that no “theological answers” have yet explained.)
Fackenheim wants to get God down from those gallows. His vision of a God who was not a “commanding” presence in the death camps but a silent one is somewhat more complex than Yehuda Bauer had it when he caricatured it as “a God who is present and cries with you.” Rather, Fackenheim recuperates God’s presence in the acts of heroism, endurance, love, and faith the inmates of the camps manifested in the face of radical evil. He calls this the commanding voice of Auschwitz, the voice that forbids posthumous victories to Hitler.
But Fackenheim himself does not argue that this notion of a silent presence resolves the mystery of God’s shift to silence when those who prayed to him were most massively in peril. It’s just that the alternative is, to Fackenheim, intolerable. Intolerable not so much because it would mean acceding to Bauer’s syllogism in which God is either Satan or nebbish, but because that accession, that dismissal or rejection of God by Jews, will have, in effect, been dictated by Adolf Hitler. Giving Hitler, in death, the ultimate victory over the Jews he was denied in life. An extermination of belief more complete than the extermination of believers. For Fackenheim, I believe, to give in to the stark logic of Yehuda Bauer’s syllogism—if God is all-powerful, he permitted the Holocaust to happen, in effect caused it—is to make God Hitler or Hitler God.
It was Fackenheim’s revolt against this impossible dead-end choice, his revolt against letting Hitler dictate what Jews believe about God, that led him to conceive of his “614th commandment.” A dictum I hadn’t fully understood until that afternoon in Jerusalem when he gave me a dramatic description of the moment he confronted the unbearable gravamen of the evidence for the case against God—and how he came to formulate his famous 614th commandment about Hitler as a kind of “limiting instruction” to the jury.
It was April 1967, just after Purim, a holiday celebrating Jewish deliverance from slaughter, but one that found Fackenheim sickened both physically and spiritually by the sudden cloud shadowing the future of the Jewish state.
With Egyptian president Nasser about to blockade Israel’s ports, a growing threat of the three-front attack to come, with the world indifferent if not hostile, it looked to Fackenheim as if a second Holocaust was in the works.
“There was a symposium in New York on Purim, which coincided with Easter. And I was morally pressured by a friend of mine to participate. I had never written anything about the Holocaust before, because it was too frightening. And not only that, among the other participants was Elie Wiesel, and I held him in great awe. It was a real crisis moment and I knew it myself because I was sick before.”
Sickened by the prospect that God could permit a second Holocaust, he says, “that was the crisis where I first put forward the 614th commandment”: Jews are forbidden to grant posthumous victories to Hitler.
It’s a commandment whose power I’d long felt, but the implications of which I had questioned or (as I came to feel after listening to Fackenheim describe its genesis) misinterpreted. A commandment designed to deny Hitler a certain kind of power that I’d misinterpreted as in some perverse way restoring to him another kind of power.
Think about it: Its implications are obvious and nonproblematic if one takes it to mean one should resist and combat anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and other manifestations of Hitler-like hatred in order to deny Hitler and Hitlerism a posthumous resurrection and life. But, on the other hand, as a habit of thought for Jews, for anyone, it paradoxically could be seen giving Hitler a continuing life, a defining presence, a central presence if not a commanding one—although one could almost say a commanding one by negation. If one feels compelled to refer all one’s actions in relation to all significant post-Holocaust phenomena to Hitler—in the sense of how will such acts or stances affect Hitler’s legacy—one comes close to submitting oneself to a putative Hitler’s judgment: How would this or that act or stance make Hitler feel? Would Hitler consider it a posthumous victory if I chose x or y? Hitler becomes, if not the ruling principle, then the ultimate referent.
But, in fact, when Fackenheim places the genesis of the 614th commandment in the specific context of his 1967 crisis of faith, in the context of post-Holocaust theodicy, of the impulse to demand that God explain Hitler in the face of the potential advent of a second Holocaust, the commandment can be seen as an inspired gesture of defiance, a kind of Higher Stubbornness, a repudiation of Hitler as ultimate referent.
Higher stubbornness? I’d recast the impulse behind it this way: No, dammit, whatever I decide about the relationship between God and evil, between God and Jewish suffering, however unsatisfied I might be by other attempts to explain it, however much I might resent God’s apparent silence or absence in the death camps, however much I reject the notion of some “larger plan” in which God required the murder of millions of children to accomplish some inscrutable end, however much I reject all the consolations and rationalizations of theodicy’s attempt to explain Hitler, I refuse to allow Hitler the power, refuse to allow Hitler to be the catalyst, the defining issue over which I will reject the God my ancestors have lived with and died for, for better or worse, for three thousand years. Reject God for any other reason, for nonexistence, for silence, for death, but not for Hitler, don’t give Hitler that power, that posthumous victory.
I’d come to Jerusalem saturated with the unanswered and perhaps unanswerable question of post-Holocaust theodicy, the arguments that put God in the dock after Hitler and Auschwitz. I was drawn to Yehuda Bauer’s cleansing and logical syllogistic dismissal of God as Satan or nebbish because it offered at least a resolution of a tormentingly unresolved issue. But finally I found myself won over not by Fackenheim’s theodicy but by what I sensed, beneath the sophisticated Hegelian ratiocinations about radical evil, as a kind of sheer orneriness—the stubborn refusal to let Hitler be the judge in the trial of God.
The 614th commandment as an article of faith: “That was the only way for me . . . and still is,” Fackenheim told me, “to avoid the hopeless dilemma between not facing up to the Holocaust and having Judaism destroyed.” Not facing up to the Holocaust: that is, not exempting God from questions of ultimate responsibility left unresolved by attempts to explain Hitler in human terms. Not having Judaism destroyed: not finding God guilty, at least not in the first degree, not abandoning God or the Jewish way of worshiping him because of Hitler’s evil.
Fackenheim’s 614th commandment is then, if not a plea bargain, a limiting instruction to the jury: God can be found culpably negligent, but capital punishment is ruled out. “There has to be another possibility” than the death or execution of God, Fackenheim told me. “If you face up to the Holocaust and say, ‘Oh, it’s just another catastrophe’—that is a blasphemy to the victims.” The alternative, however, is blasphemy to the God so many of the victims worshiped: “If you face up to it and the result is that Judaism is destroyed”—because facing up to it might mean God is Satan—“then it’s a posthumous victory for Hitler.”
Some, like Rabbi Richard Rubenstein, suggest there is a third answer that combines continued love for the Jewish people, for Judaism in that sense, with rejection of the God who abandoned them to Hitler. But for Fackenheim, there was no middle way. “That was the first thing I said” at the 1967 symposium, Fackenheim told me. Before anything, he ruled out the ultimate guilty verdict on God, because it would make God Hitler’s final victim. Issuing that limiting instruction resolved a personal spiritual crisis for him: “The moment I said what I said—making that decision—the sickness left me,” he said.
Fackenheim stepped back from the brink, from where the logic of his critique of explanation was taking him. In George Steiner we see someone who, out of either intellectual courage or recklessness, steps over it.