REVIEW BY EDWARD ALEXANDER: END OF THE HOLOCAUST?
http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=8127.
“I am in Norway on business for my product and written on a wall I read, ‘Down with Israel.’ I think, ‘What did Israel ever do to Norway?’ I know Israel is a terrible country, but after all, there are countries even more terrible. There are so many terrible countries-why is this country the most terrible? Why don’t you read on Norwegian walls, ‘Down with Russia,’ ‘Down with Chile,’ ‘Down with Libya’? Because Hitler didn’t murder six million Libyans? I am walking in Norway and I am thinking, ‘If only he had.’ Because then they would write on Norwegian walls, ‘Down with Libya’ and leave Israel alone.” -Philip Roth, The Counterlife (1986)
Alvin Rosenfeld, professor of English and Jewish Studies at Indiana University, member of the Executive Committee of the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, author or editor of several important books about the Holocaust and its literature, has now added to his list of achievements a book that fills one with gloom and rage, in nearly equal measure. The End of the Holocaust [1] is not a history book (like Jon Bridgman’s of the same title [2] about the liberation of the camps), but a critical survey of the vast array of assaults on Holocaust memory. Nearly all brazenly and flagrantly violate Cynthia Ozick’s famous rule that “Jews are not metaphors–not for poets, not for novelists, not for theologians, not for murderers, and never for antisemites….” [3] She warned that the liberal habit of turning Jews in general and Auschwitz in particular into metaphors, was both pernicious in itself and would result in mischief of every sort. Rosenfeld’s book surveys the ideological and political wreckage Ozick predicted thirty-six years ago. The heart sinks, the mind reels, in contemplating the perversions that Rosenfeld describes, analyzes, and seeks to throw back. They come from minor poets likening their divorce proceedings to Auschwitz, or Sylvia Plath her recurrent suicide attempts to the Holocaust; from scribblers of “the Holocaust and me” school like Anne Roiphe, for whom “ God became the God of the Holocaust” in “the year of my puberty”; from venomous “progressives” like Philip Lopate (author of Portrait of My Body), who thinks the Holocaust a Jewish conspiracy whereby “one ethnic group tries to compel the rest of the world” to follow its political program and monopolizes all that beautiful Holocaust suffering which other groups would very much like, ex post facto, to share. (Ever short of sympathy in the Jewish direction-he even alleges that his own [Jewish] mother became “erotically excited” by the blue numbers on the arms of survivors-Lopate praised President Reagan’s ill-conceived laying of a wreath at the Waffen-SS cemetery in Bitburg in 1985 as a gesture of “old-fashioned Homeric nobility.” [4] )
The “end of the Holocaust” was foretold by survivor-writers like Jean Amery, Elie Wiesel, Imre Kertesz, and Primo Levi. It has also received the attention of scholars like Lucy Dawidowicz, Yehuda Bauer, Emil Fackenheim, and the author of this essay. [5] They feared that forgetting, inevitable with time, would be exacerbated by deliberate distortions, flabby sentimentality, the wheedling voice of “common sense” that Hannah Arendt found lurking inside the “liberal” cells of every mind, [6] ruthless politicization, and do-gooderism, i.e., confusing doing good with feeling good about what you are doing. Survivors themselves are now the targets of polemical desperadoes like Norman Finkelstein, Peter Novick, David Stannard, Marc Ellis, Karen Armstrong, and Avishai Margalit. They castigate Holocaust memory and scholarship as instruments of a vast diabolical plot, and allege that Jews grieve over their dead only for political purposes. They demand, in the words of Ellis, “ending Auschwitz” (261). Indeed, they speak of the Jews murdered in the twelve-year war against them in a way that fully justifies Rosenfeld in remarking that “in an age of resurgent antisemitism, respect for even the Jewish dead has become a dwindling commodity” (154). [7] Margalit, an Israeli whose motto appears to be “the other country, right or wrong,” alleged in a November 1988 piece called “The Kitsch of Israel” that “Against the weapons of the Holocaust, the Palestinians are amateurs….as soon as operation ‘Holocaust Memory’ is put into high gear…the Palestinians cannot compete” (261). Still, Margalit does what he can to help. In this essay, recommended by the aforementioned Lopate as ultimate wisdom on memorializing the victims of the Holocaust, Margalit heaped scorn on the “children’s room” at Yad Vashem with its “tape-recorded voices of children crying out in Yiddish, ’Mame, Tate.’” It was promptly pointed out by Reuven Dafni of Yad Vashem that there was no “children’s room” and no tape of children’s voices at Yad Vashem. There was, and is (as anyone who actually visits the place would know) a memorial to the 1.5 million murdered children and a tape-recorded voice that reads out those names that are known, along with age and country of origin. Such palpable imposture as Margalit’s was perhaps not as audacious as the Mohammed al-Dura masquerade or the “Jeningrad” hoax or a dozen others generated in later years by Palestinophiles, but it was more than adequate to satisfy the appetite of readers of the New York Review of Books, which is the Women’s Wear Daily for literary leftists, including Lopate, who had read it there. [8]
Rosenfeld shows how a large number of the 250 organizations around the world that now conduct Holocaust-related programs are as likely to abet the theft of the Holocaust as to oppose it. Mark Steyn, similarly, observed that “The people who run liberal Jewish groups are too blinkered to have grasped a basic point, which is that the principal beneficiaries of the Holocaust have been Muslims. Our parents and grandparents’ generation, continental Europeans of the 1930s-they would never have entertained for a moment the erection of mosques in Brussels and Amsterdam and…all over the map it if hadn’t been for official Holocaust guilt post-1945. So we have a situation where the people who have most successfully leveraged Holocaust guilt are the Muslims.” [9] They have proved the most artful of the metaphor-makers against whom Ozick (prophetically) warned.
The nimbleness of apologists for Palestinian irredentism in latching onto the mournful coattails of Jewish history and exploiting Holocaust guilt by reinventing Palestinian Arabs as the shadow selves of Jews is by now an old story. In 1982, Conor Cruise O’Brien noticed that “If your interlocutor can’t keep Hitler out of the conversation…feverishly turning Jews into Nazis and Arabs into Jews-why then, I think you may well be talking to an anti-Jewist.” Twenty years later, Pierre-Andre Taguieff, in his admirable book on “the new Judeophobia,” observed: “No one thought it a sign of mental disorder when Farouk Kaddoumi, a high PLO official, stated that “Israeli practices against Palestinians exceed the Holocaust in horror.” [10] Neither had Edward Said’s sanity (or probity) been questioned when, in 1989, he alleged that Zionists “were in touch with the Nazis in hopes of emulating their Reich in Palestine”; that Israeli “soldiers and politicians …are now engaged in visiting upon non-Jews many of the same evil practices anti-Semites waged against Holocaust victims”; and that “Israel’s occupation increased in severity and outright cruelty, more than rivaling all other military occupations in modern history.” [11] Said also encouraged the now widely-accepted falsehood that Israel came into being because of Western guilt (expressed by the UN vote for partition on November 1947) over the Holocaust, asserting that it had served to “protect” Palestinian Jews “with the world’s compassion.” [12] Nothing could be farther from the truth, which is very nearly the exact opposite: Israel was created in spite, not because, of the Holocaust, which destroyed the most Zionist segment of the Jewish world-the Jews of Eastern Europe; and it was not the world’s “compassion” but their own will and heroism that gave the Jews a state of their own. [13] Rosenfeld traces the distortion and degradation of the Holocaust “story” since World War II ended. He shows how popular representations have usually worked to dull rather than sharpen moral sensibility about the Jewish debacle. He documents the baneful influence of the cult of victimization, especially the intense competition for the mantle of victimhood, and how it has diverted attention away from the actual victims of Nazism. The meaning of Raul Hilberg’s categories-Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders [14] -has been radically transformed by (mostly American) sentimentality and mindless optimism, by (mostly leftist) political machinations, and by (broadly ecumenical) religious obsessions.
Specifically American distortions include the need to teach cheerful and positive “lessons,” which become lessons in what the Holocaust does not teach because they blow out of all sane proportion the actions of rescuers, or “righteous Gentiles.” Forgotten in this orgy of Pollyannaism is Aharon Appelfeld’s sober reflection: “During the Holocaust there were brave Germans, Ukrainians, and Poles who risked their lives to save Jews. But the Holocaust is not epitomized by the greatness of these marvelous individuals’ hearts…I say this because survivors sometimes feel deep gratitude to their rescuers and forget that the saviors were few, and those who betrayed Jews to the Nazis were many and evil.” [15]
Rosenfeld tells in detail the shocking story of how Anne Frank’s diary was first travestied by Broadway and Hollywood, and then bowdlerized by German translators. In America, the spiritual anemia of Broadway and the rank dishonesty of people like director Garson Kanin created a bogus image of a young woman who was cheerfully optimistic, believed above all that “people are good at heart,” was “happy” in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen (where in fact she died a horrible death). The manipulations of the Anne Frank story also obliterated her Jewish identity and gave Germans in particular a convenient “formula for easy forgiveness” of the crimes of their countrymen. Rosenfeld has been following this sorry tale, as it unfolded in America and Europe, especially Germany, for decades; and he has produced a searing indictment of its principal charlatans. He predicts that “If these trends continue unchecked, the Holocaust’s most famous victim will still be remembered, but in ways that may put at risk an historically accurate and morally responsible memory of the Holocaust itself.” (158).
Later chapters of the book deal with survivors of the Holocaust who became major literary figures permanently bound to their horrific experience of the camps. Some of them, most notably Amery and Levi, became victims of Auschwitz long after they appeared to have survived it: they took their own lives. Perhaps they had concluded that the full truth of Auschwitz might never be known (maybe because they themselves had failed as witnesses); or, if half-known, would be distorted. They were particularly disappointed by the refusal of Germans to confront their past honestly, and they despaired over the resurgence of Jew-hatred in Europe, especially on the political Left, which turned Holocaust images into the tool-kit of the “new” antisemitism, the pariah people into the pariah state. They knew there would be virtually no retribution; they feared there would be no memory; but only a few foresaw the possibility of a second Holocaust. One was the Hungarian Kertesz: “The antisemite of our age no longer loathes Jews; he wants Auschwitz” (278-79). Another was the Israeli poet Abba Kovner, who thought only Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons could prevent it happening again. By now, however, a decade into the twenty-first century, that possibility is what Goethe would have called an open secret: visible to all, yet recognized by few, like the courageous German scholar Matthias Kuentzel. An astute observer of Holocaust deniers and their genocidal rhetoric, in Europe as well as Iran, Kuentzel insists that “Every denial of the Holocaust contains an appeal to repeat it”(243).
Rosenfeld’s culminating chapter engages in combat with the ever-expanding divisions of warriors against Holocaust memory-almost in its entirety. Such people find Holocaust memory among Jews to blame for everything they deem inimical to the furtherance of their own (usually progressive) agendas; no matter the social or religious or ethnic problem, they accuse Holocaust memory of responsibility for it. Although they have no qualms about university scholars offering courses on American slavery or the fate of “Native” Americans that exclude comparative reference to the Jewish catastrophe, they stridently oppose courses that deal exclusively with the destruction of European Jewry. Their all-consuming political obsession is with tightening the noose around Israel’s throat. Therefore, Rosenfeld charges, they link their appeal to Jews “to disengage from the Holocaust with an appeal for Jews to disengage from the exercise of political power by disconnecting from the state of Israel” (260) and abandoning it to its fate. That most of these enemies of memory are professors will surprise nobody who recalls Victor Klemperer’s acerbic remark, in a 1936 diary entry about Hitler’s professors: “If one day the situation were reversed and the fate of the vanquished lay in my hands, then I would let all the ordinary folk go…but I would have all the intellectuals strung up, and the professors three feet higher than the rest; they would be left hanging from the lampposts for as long as was compatible with hygiene.” [16]
Rosenfeld is never shrill and often eloquent. But his book, now the indispensable study of its subject, cannot be read with pleasure, even by people who believe that “in the destruction of the wicked, there is joy.” [17] Rather, one is tempted to apply to it the words Rosenfeld uses about Amery: “”There is, it is true, a price to be paid for reading a book like At the Mind’s Limits, which is nothing if not distressing, but there is a far higher price to be paid by foregoing [such] an author, and that is the diminution of historical and moral consciousness itself.”
Edward Alexander is the co-author, with Paul Bogdanor, of The Jewish Divide over Israel: Accusers and Defenders (Transaction Publishers).
[1] The End of the Holocaust (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011). Subsequent references to the book will be included in parentheses in the text.
[2] Jon Bridgman, The End of the Holocaust: The Liberation of the Camps (Portland, Oregon: Areopagitica Press, 1990).
[3] “A Liberal’s Auschwitz,” Confrontation (Spring 1975), 128.
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