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Books

Faustian Bargain

The singular horror of the Holocaust is being lost in exchange for enshrining rare moments of inspiration and universal narratives of suffering

By Ron Rosenbaum|October 10, 2011 7:00 AM|22comments
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The U.S. Holocaust Memorial in Washington. (Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)

Alvin Rosenfeld is a brave man, and his new work is courageous. The book is called The End of the Holocaust, and it is not reluctant to take on the unexamined pieties that have grown up around the slaughter, and the sentimentalization that threatens to smother it in meretricious uplift.

The real “end of the Holocaust,” he argues, is the transformation of it into a lesson about the “triumph of the human spirit” or some such affirmation. Rosenfeld, the founder and former director of the Jewish studies program at Indiana University, which has made itself a major center of Jewish publishing and learning, is a mainstream scholar who has seen the flaw in mainstream Holocaust discourse. He has made it his mission to rescue the Holocaust from the Faustian bargain Jews have made with history and memory, the Faustian bargain that results when we trade the specifics of memory, the Jewishness of the Holocaust, and the Jew-hatred that gave it its rationale and identity, for the weepy universalism of such phrases as “the long record of man’s inhumanity to man.”

The impulse to find the silver lining is relentless, though. Suffering and grief must be transformed into affirmation, and the bleak irrecoverable fate of the victims must be given a redemptive aspect for those of us alive. In fact it’s an insult to the dead to rob their graves to make ourselves feel better. One recent manifestation Rosenfeld has shrewdly noticed is the way there has been a subtle shift in the popular representation of the Holocaust—a shift in the attention once given to the murdered victims to comparatively uplifting stories of survivors, of the “righteous gentiles,” of the scarce “rescuers,” and the even scarcer “avengers,” e.g., Quentin Tarantino’s fake-glorious fictional crew.

Rosenfeld is not afraid to contend with the fact that, as he writes, “with new atrocities filling the news each day and only so much sympathy to go around, there are people who simply do not want to hear any more about the Jews and their sorrows. There are other dead to be buried, they say.” The sad, deplorable, but, he says, “unavoidable” consequence of what may be the necessary limits of human sympathy is that “the more successfully [the Holocaust] enters the cultural mainstream, the more commonplace it becomes. A less taxing version of a tragic history begins to emerge, still full of suffering, to be sure, but a suffering relieved of many of its weightiest moral and intellectual demands and, consequently easier to be … normalized.”

Normalized? The Holocaust as one more instance in the long chronicle of “man’s inhumanity to man”? Rosenfeld’s book offers a welcome contrarian take on the trend. Yes, we’ve had enough, as Rosenfeld points out, of museums that cumulatively obscure memory in a fog of well-meaning but misleading inspirational brotherhood-of-man rhetoric. We’ve had enough of films like the execrable Oscar-winning Life Is Beautiful and the well-intentioned but misguided Schindler’s List, with its sad lack of self-awareness that a happy ending, celebrating a Christian rescuer and some lucky Jewish survivors, is woefully off base. We’ve had enough of phony-memoir love stories, and we’ve had enough of the way a genuine tragic heroine and victim of Nazi death camps like Anne Frank is mendaciously turned into a spokeswoman for the “goodnesss of man.”

What we haven’t had enough of is a careful consideration of the implications of the Holocaust for the nature of human nature. As George Steiner told me (for my book, Explaining Hitler), “the Holocaust removed the re-insurance from human hope”—the psychic safety net we imagine marked the absolute depth of human nature. The Holocaust tore through that net heading for hell. Human nature could be—at the promptings of a charismatic and evil demagogue, religious hate, and so-called “scientific racism”—even worse than we imagined. No one wants to hear that. We want to hear uplifting stories about that nice Mr. Schindler. We want affirmations!

And the fact that it was not just one man but an entire continent that enthusiastically pitched in or stood by while 6 million were murdered: Doesn’t that call for us to spend a little time re-thinking what we still reverently speak of as “European civilization”? Or to investigate the roots of that European hatred? How much weight do the Holocaust museums give to the two millennia of Christian Jew-hatred, murderous pogroms, blood libels, and other degradations? Or do they prefer to focus on “righteous gentiles” in order to avoid offending their gentile hosts?

And for all their “reaching out” and “teachable moments,” how much do the Holocaust museums and Holocaust curricula connect the hatred of the recent past with contemporary exterminationist Jew-hatred, the vast numbers of people who deny the first, but hunger for a second, Holocaust? It’s a threat some fear even to contemplate—the potential destruction of the 5 million Jews of Israel with a single well-placed nuclear blast—a nightmarish but not unforseeable possibility to which Rosenfeld is unafraid to devote the final section of his book.

It’s something I speculated about in the Tablet Magazine excerpt from my book How the End Begins. It’s something spoken of eloquently by Imre Kertész, one of the writers Rosenfeld wishes to rescue from the “end of the Holocaust.” (Only two novels by this Hungarian survivor of Nazism and Stalinist oppression, a 2002 Nobel Prize winner, have been translated, a situation I would like to formally petition some serious-minded publisher to remedy forthwith.)

“Before Auschwitz,” Kertesz writes, “Auschwitz was unimaginable. That is no longer so today. Because Auschwitz in fact occurred, it has now been established in our imaginations as a firm possibility. What we are able to imagine, especially because it once was, can be again.” I wonder what our dedicated affirmationists who once disdainfully mocked concerns about a second Holocaust would say to Kertesz.

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Ron Rosenbaum, a columnist for Slate, is the author, among other books, of Explaining Hitler and, most recently, How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III.
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  • Shalom Freedman

    Ron Rosenbaum is to be commended for this review. And Alvin Rosenfeld to be commended for the book he has written on this kind of misuse of the ‘Shoah’ by the ‘affirmationists.’ The hard truth of the Shoah’s horrors has been made into pablum including by those who would deny the dangers facing the Jewish people and especially Israel today.
    Rosenbaum should perhaps have made another point about the Shoah when talking about it in relation to other mass- murders and tragedies. One element of the uniqueness of the ‘Shoah’ is that the Nazis aimed to kill every Jew on earth, to completely eliminate the Jewish people. Listen today to some of the jihadists preaching from mosques in Gaza and throughout various parts of the Muslim world and one will hear of a similar genocidal preaching.
    Those leaders of Israel then including Begin ,in referring to the Shoah in connection with his destroying the Iraqi nuclear reactor, are not propagandists but hard- boiled realists who have to confront and deal with horrible threats. Consider today Ahmadinejad ,Nasrallah and others who single out the Jewish state and would destroy it.
    Certainly the lesson -that the worst kind of horror can happen in history- is one the Jewish people and especially its leaders, are justified in keeping foremost in their consideration.

  • Aaron

    Agreed about all that universalist holokitsch, but the author wants to eat his cake and have it, too. He wants the Shoah to be seen as particularly Jewish, and he also thinks the gentiles need to be educated about particularly Jewish suffering and vulnerability.

    But why should we even expect gentiles to care about our catastrophes, especially in America where they had nothing to do with them? No disrespect, but I don’t care all that much about the Armenian genocide, and I’d get pretty annoyed if Armenians were trying to shove their lessons down my throat. Let’s mourn our own loss ourselves and not push the goyim to join in.

  • Toni

    I just ordered the book on the basis of this review. However, I find it interesting that many of the same points about the manipulation of the Shoah are made by Norman Finkelstein in some of his work. Yet Finkelstein is vilified and Rosenfeld is not, at least not yet.

  • Regina Kessler

    I agree completely with the views expressed in this essay. In fifty years, thirty million Poles will believe that their great-grandparents rescued three million Polish Jews; the word “Jew” will disappear from the explanatory signage at the Auschwitz exhibits, and the state-sponsored Nazi genocide will be attributed to a global concept of ‘intolerance’ rather than to the insanity of militaristic anti-semitism.

  • http://veteranschildren.com Leila Levinson

    I am the daughter of a Jewish WWII GI who was among the liberators of Nordhausen Concentration Camp. I only learned my father had witnessed a camp after his death. Wanting to understand his silence and trauma, I found and interviewed over ninety other liberators. The great majority of those veterans were Jewish, because they were the ones who responded to my request.

    I discovered tremendous trauma that terrorizes them and reverberates through their families. I discovered among these Jewish veterans an utter loss of faith in God which explained a great deal about my own ambivalence towards my Judaism.

    Last January I published Gated Grief, a book about the trauma of the liberators. Jewish book fairs did not invite me, as “no one wants to hear about the Holocaust anymore.” I learned that most book fairs include only one book on the Holocaust. Only a handful of Holocaust museums have invited me to speak, and the ones that have are largely staffed by nonJews. Even this magazine showed no interest in the subject of my book, which, ultimately, is how, through the GI liberators, the Holocaust has disfigured American families.

    It is the attitude of American Jews towards the Holocaust, towards their responsibility for carrying its history forward, that troubles me more than the attitude of nonJews. Americans Jews seem determined to believe they stand outside of the horror and need not let it darken their lives.

  • http://www.4cft.com Rabbi Jonathan Gerard

    Without denying anything written in this heartfelt and important essay, I would like to add (I hope not defensively) that I have “taught” the holocaust to children through the lens of righteous gentiles–not to sugar coat the event, or to avert their gaze from the horror–but rather to give them a model in the event that they are ever faced with an opportunity to stand against anti-semitism. In fact, I don’t know any other way to teach the holocaust to children.

  • JamesPhiladelphia

    Grief is very personal. When I loose a deer person of mind my grief and pain is only mine. How can I expect somebody else to feel the way I feel? It is not natural. I lost my maternal grandfather my uncle his tween sister her husband two children in the horrors of German savagery. The people of Poland the Catholics the Pope of Rome all celebrated the extermination of the killers of Jesus, the Jewish carpenter.
    It is also true that the more you repeat a statement the less serious it becomes. It is a standard routine of humor.
    But let people know about the Holocaust and the horrors, and also the public trial of Adolf Eichman as it was, was to let Jews know that they have to be always prepared to defend themselves. The enemies of the Jews are always ready at any moment to kill Jews. There are many Gentiles that are our friends, but only the Jews can defend themselves.
    Thus grief is very personal and private. Danger is always present. I am hyper sensitized to anti-Jewish prejudice and ever ready to defend myself.
    Rationalizing about nazism like Hana Arendt did, and all the bunch of books do today about the Holocaust, and all the bunch of deniers are not in my league of attention and discourse. They are as enemies of mine and the Jews as nazi Germany was. as the Catholic Church was and is, as Jihadists and Islamo Fascists are. Only myself and extrapolating only Israel can defend and protect themselves.
    After all it is human nature, it is so simple, hate and violence seldom and rarely reason and peace.

  • JamesPhiladelphia

    To Leila I would confess that I avoid any dwellings on the Holocaust. It gives me pain outrage desperation , all that I do not need. I have seen the pictures of skeletons over skeletons of the concentration camps, of the thousands upon thousands of little empty shoes. What is there to read accounts of the barbarity savagery and inability to defend yourself that these books describe? This is masochism that I try to avoid.

  • Shalom Freedman

    I do not take exception to Ron Rosenbaum
    s words in the following paragraph.

    “Where was God during those years? And I repeat please don’t tell me—in the latest “sophisticated” rationalization theodicy, the one you hear from very modern rabbis—that “God was in the camps,” in every act of goodness and self-sacrifice by the inmates there. It’s a formulation that takes from the brave desperate inmates the credit they deserve for their acts and gives it to Someone who was not there. Wouldn’t it have been better if God had been in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, slitting the throats of Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich? What an inglorious bastard He would have been.”
    I do not take exception to the words, but I would not have written them. Why? First, because the tradition of questioning and challenging God, and the lack of justice in the world, and the fact that the innocent suffer and the evil often get away with it is asked throughout the Jewish religious tradition. The question and the challenge pervade Tehillim and of course the Book of Job.
    They are the question and the challenge many generations of Jews who were subject to horrible sufferings asked and asked again.
    This is not a satisfactory answer. But the answer of praying and trusting in God is the answer many Jews gave in the past and give now.
    I would strongly distinguish this answer from the formulaic ‘justifications’ of the kind Rosenbaum rightly condemns.
    However as one of those who prays to God and needs God and in some sense trusts God ( However irrational that Trust may seem in time, and no doubt will in one sense certainly be proven in time) I am reluctant to make the kind of wholehearted condemnation that Rosenbaum makes.
    I live then in that strange and contradictory situation of questioning and being even at times angry at God while at the same time hoping God will be as God has too also been in the past for the Jewish people a God of blessing and compassion.

  • Geduldig

    And what is the consequence of this attack on inconsequentialism? If you tie the anecdote about Begin with the dire mention of a nuclear attack on Israel then our memory of the horrifying exceptionalism of Jewish history–our sense that our fate has been different–means that we have to get the Iranians before they get us.

    Rosenbaum–and maybe Rosenfeld–is in danger of missing the difference between theological Jew-hatred and political anti-semitism, which is to say, to forget the political purposes and ends of anti-semitism. To miss this is to grant the Shoah a theological aura, one that it doesn’t deserve and one that is dangerous to maintain, because it begs the difference between what is secular (that is, historical) and what is not.

  • Shalom Freedman

    One final comment on this article. Rosenbaum rightly indicts Western civilization and Europe for its evil actions and indifference during the Shoah. He quotes George Steiner to the effect that the Shoah shows us that human nature may in fact be beyond the pale of hope, may in fact be in essence ‘darkness’.
    Rosenbaum seems to imply that that lesson is somehow forgotten today. But Rosenbaum himself has written about the process of demonization and delegitimization which is happening in regard to the state of Israel. Consider the spectacle at the United Nations less than a month ago. The overwhelming majority of the world’s nations applauded the historical falsifications and omissions of one- time Shoah denier Abbas. The great majority of the nations have repeatedly wrongly condemned Israel. The folly, stupidity, indifference, ignorance, apathy, deceitfulness, dishonesty, cruelty of mankind are so broadly in evidence in the world that one wonders how anyone could be surprised by them. And Jewish history is filled with so many cruelties one wonders why it takes even something so vastly horrrific as the Shoah to bring someone to awareness of this truth.
    One more point. The Shoah does teach to my mind a simple basic truth. The Jews should have no illusions. A part of humanity or humanity as a whole even could do away with us. The lesson of defending ourselves which is one central justification for the state of Israel is thus it seems to me painfully obvious. That many in Israel have learned the lesson is to my mind admirable. That even Learning the Lesson may not prevent the next disaster is realism. What is shameful however to my mind is when our fellow Jews whether in Israel or in the Diaspora blame us for thinking this might happen , and blame us too for taking actions in our defense to prevent this.

  • http://warrenadler.com Warren Adler

    If I understand Mr. Rosenbaum’s thesis the Holocaust is just one horrific example of man’s inhumanity and should be remembered within a universal context. That, of course, is a noble aspiration, but as a Jew, I would prefer to remember it as something specific to Jews, about Jews, and as a horrendous crime against Jews. Man’s inhumanity to his fellow creatures is a given. History is full of stomach turning events. But the Holocaust as it has come to be known is a crime against Jews and should be remembered as a crime against Jews, however it is couched, in whatever form it takes, memorialized, sentimentalized, or whatever.It should never be generalized and absorbed into any other context. It should be burned into the historical memory forever and anon.

  • brynababy

    Mr. Adler, I believe that what you say, is exactly what Rosenbaum said.

  • frank

    What a tremendous essay.

  • Rocky

    If there had been fewer economic success stories among American Holocaust survivors and their children, there in all likelihood would be a much smaller Holocaust industry. But the fact is that there were people like Jack Tramiel, who started Commodore Business machines, among other endeavors, and gave the world the Commodore Pet computer, although he had little formal education himself. There were people like Sherry Lansing, who at one time was the head of Paramount Studios. Her mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany. They could afford to give generously and many did. Unfortunately, there have been no similar economic miracles on a grand scale in other refugee communities.

    I actually enjoy watching many of the Holocaust themed movies, with the righteous gentiles, the surviving heroes and all the kitschy themes. Many were based on true life stories, as unbelievable as Solomon Perel’s story was (“Europa, Europa”). Some like “La Rafle” and the short film “Spielzeugland” brought me to tears.

    I am not a religious Jew by any means and have not attended a High Holidays service in almost a decade. I guess my beliefs run closer to Shalom Auslander’s (the comment box on his latest essay “Sorry God” does not work), but I don’t eat bacon. There are enough healthier foods out there and I don’t mean kosher hot dogs. Both contain nitrates which are cancer causing agents. I guess the documentary “Trembling Before God” soured me on traditional Judaism. I’d rather take my chances with tolerant gentiles than with fundamentalist Jews who consider me an abomination.

  • http://eaazi.blogspot.com Joachim Martillo

    The article deserves scorn — in particular comments like

    >>“Before Auschwitz,” Kertesz writes, “Auschwitz was unimaginable. That is no longer so today. Because Auschwitz in fact occurred, it has now been established in our imaginations as a firm possibility. What we are able to imagine, especially because it once was, can be again.” I wonder what our dedicated affirmationists who once disdainfully mocked concerns about a second Holocaust would say to Kertesz.<<

    Not only were Soviets & in particularly Soviet Jewish leaders up to the eyeballs in mass murder, ethnic cleansing, & genocide by the time Hitler took power, but the Zionist leadership had already imagined the genocide of native Palestinians by the early 1880s.

    There is one simple truth that Holocaustniki fail to face & that renders programs such as headed by Rosenfeld pure intellectual dishonesty & academic garbage.

    Jews have been out of control since the 1850s.

    Not only did the Jewish policy of Nicholas I impel Russian Jews into criminality like smuggling, kidnapping, prostitution, & white slaving from the 1830s onward, but from the early 1850s they also become highly involved in sabotage, revolutionary violence, & targeted assassinations.

    Although pogroms break out against Jews after Czar Alexander II's assassination, in which Russian Jewish women played a leading role, Jews continued to develop increasing wealth & to advance socially although not as fast as they wished.

    Despite such achievements Jewish disaffection grew maybe because Czarist law generally excluded Jews from the government bureaucracy. By the 1890s they had become even more prominent in revolutionary leadership & violence.

    When the Russian Revolution broke out, Ashkenazim were at the forefront of the Red Army & mass killing. Because Jews & especially Ashkenazim were a transnational group with transnational politics, Jewish criminality spread worldwide.

    Any Holocaust discussion ignoring the Jewish context is pure crap.

  • Brad

    Fascinating piece.

    Typo in third chunk in paragraph beginning “I first came across his work …” — “Hiter” for “Hitler.”

  • http://jacobscourage.wordpress.com Charles Weinblatt

    The Holocaust is the most researched genocide in history. Yet, no event in history is exempt from the misguided, if not mendacious efforts of historians, novelists, film-makers and teachers. Each has his or her own perfidious motivation. Even the well-meaning history teacher clouds the reality of the Shoah with imprudent intentions. Only documentaries submit a shadowy and grainy glimpse of the veracity of the Holocaust. My own novel about the Holocaust delivers an impossible conclusion, dealt to the kind reader with a dash of wishful thinking and a shadow of hope for Judaism’s future.

    The Holocaust was endless apprehension, incessant brutality, eternal damnation and absolute humiliation. As the words emptied themselves from my brain, they cascaded into oblivion, a pastel image of the bright and forceful terror of reality. Even the Primo Levy’s and Eli Wiesel’s vision gives us but a shadow of the terror.

    Are we forever diminishing the reality of the Holocaust with our books, films and classroom lesson plans? Or, did we ever capture the unimaginable terror of history in the first place? Is Holocaust fiction inappropriate? Are contemporary Holocaust films nothing more than a whitewash of reality? Are we unwitting accomplices in the destruction of our ancestor’s terrifying end?

    In an attempt to preserve the pure horror of the Shoah, have we done a grave disservice to history and our ancestors by offering any glimpse of hope? Can the recollection of survivors ring true today as anything more than a contemporary regurgitation of a reality unspoken and unwanted? And if so, how can we accurately preserve the events of the Shoah for our progeny? Will our best legacy remain those grainy black and white images of a gentle Jewish woman holding a child underneath the arm-length Lugar of an SS officer, gun pointed at her head? Is the little girl in a red overcoat from the black & white Shindler’s List the best explanation that we can produce? What happened

  • andrew r

    On the one hand, Rosenbaum’s essay is perfectly understandable. It’s also a trainwreck of incoherence. Two false dichotomies stand out as unbearable.

    For one, I do not accept “man’s inhumanity to man” as a commentary anymore than Rosenbaum. But my objection is from a different approach. Placing atrocity as a result of human nature, as if we are all potentially that bestial, ultimately covers up and absolves the perpetrators. Most people have never done anything like the German military and Nazi paramilitaries did between 1936-1945.

    That said, removing the Shoah from universalism into Jewish particularism is no less odious. Both narratives locate the cause of the industrial mass murder in the upward curve of persecution the Jews experienced in Europe. The other victims of the German extermination campaign disappear – and the lack of mention of the Romani who were also sent to the gas chambers is galling. Handicapped Germans were the first to be exterminated, which also doesn’t mesh with the memory of this being a singular crime against Jews.

    Which leads to the second false dichotomy, between ‘rationalizing’ and remembering mass murder. You can’t capture on paper the psychological process of Hitler, yet attempting to explain the social process doesn’t mean dignifying it with rationality.

    If you really want to prevent another perpetration of industrial mass murder, don’t place your faith in those who trade in it. Yes, the Jewish state of Israel is one (and just one) example, namely through its aerial bombing campaigns on Gaza and Lebanon.* The best hope is an alternative to the economic system of mass production itself.

    * Tough.

  • Jules
  • P. Sydney Herbert

    Leila Levinson: I used to be a social worker in a church funded counseling service. After a seminar on Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (then a fairly new concept)the chaplain approached me. He told me he had recurring nightmares after liberating a camp, and it was the deciding factor in his decision to become a priest.

  • http://www.herbsnitzer.com Herb Snitzer

    I can imagine 100 years from now a Broadway Musical on the Holocaust.
    If the liberation of France can be on Broadway, so can the Holocaust.
    Sad!!!
    HS

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Faustian Bargain

The singular horror of the Holocaust is being lost in exchange for enshrining rare moments of inspiration and universal narratives of suffering