One of the unusual features of the modern New Republic has been the depth of its writing about Judaism. That is the handiwork of literary editor Leon Wieseltier, with his scholarly intimacy with Jewish history, theology, and a sprawling, almost comprehensive, set of Jewish texts. But his gift as an editor has been to take this particular knowledge and to universalize its teachings, to carefully work it over and, in his own writings, elevate it to philosophy.
—Franklin Foer, former TNR editor, Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America
Dear God, let us exchange our memories—
I will recall the beginning, you will remember the end.—A. Sutzkever
Once upon a time the past was the danger. It stifled, with all its dictates and demands, all its presumptions upon the present; and so it came to be identified as a “burden” that had to be resisted. We are still living in the culture of that resistance. The instruments of resistance to the “burden” were many. There were fantasies of the past’s destruction, which became plans, which became revolutions. (Which became the past, which inspired fantasies of the past’s destruction, which became plans, which became revolutions.) Perhaps the unlikeliest method of beating back the past, however, was the study of history. The critical scrutiny of sacred texts that began in earnest in the seventeenth century and flourished in the nineteenth century taught a powerful lesson: that knowledge is a form of mastery. Objectivity, the principled dissociation from one’s circumstances that history took from the sciences, seemed to give the knower power over the known; or at least it stole from the past some of the mystery to which it owed its authority. The detachment that originated as an ideal of science was swiftly promoted into an ideal of life. And so for a while the terror went out of the past.
But almost immediately the costs of detachment were plain. The shiny, secular, unhaunted contemporaneity that was to have remained in the wake of “the burden of the past” turned out not to inspire or to incite in quite the strenuous old way. And the deposing of the sacred in the name of history ended in the sacralization of history. History became God, the nineteenth and twentieth century’s paltry contribution to the ranks of the divine; but this was a God that did not address, that could not be addressed, that was trapped in time, that never intervened except as “development,” that seemed to justify any conceivable human outcome. Historical awareness became merely a modern kind of dogma; and the scholarly study of history came to seem like a desiccating activity, a means for depleting the primal energies of individuals and peoples. History seemed to lack the vitality of memory. Historiography seemed unable to nourish, to transmit the traditions that it studied to the generations that awaited them. Suddenly the past was not the danger, the past was itself in danger. And the “burden of the past” was not the problem; the real problem was the burden of the burden of the past: the dourness and the duress of the historical attitude, the sense that all that remains for the heirs of the past is to recover and to record, to be grateful mad custodial.
And so there arose, in reaction to the transports of historical consciousness, the modern romance of memory. Memory would battle history, for the prize of a living past. Of course, this was ironic, insofar as historiography had developed precisely as a response to the inadequacies of annals and chronicles based substantially on memory, or as a response to the fear that memories were being lost. The modern discovery of memory as a superior avenue of access to the past was made first in philosophy and literature and psychology, in Bergson and Proust and Freud, and came later to professional historians; but in recent decades it has thrown the historians, too, into a condition of crisis. Pierre Nora has nicely described the contradiction between memory and history:
Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past. Memory, insofar as it is affective and magical only accommodates those facts that suit it.... History calls for analysis and criticism.... Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images and objects; history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and relations between things. Memory is absolute, while history can only conceive the relative. At the heart of history is a critical discourse that is antithetical to spontaneous memory. History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress mad destroy it.
Nora is a historian who takes the side of memory. It is, as I say, a romantic view, even an elegiac one, which longs for organic communities with seamless traditions that retain their meanings in practices and settings that sufficiently approximate the original practices and the original settings to make genuine continuity possible. There is a mystical quality to such a view of memory. About collective memory, certainly, there will always be a mystical quality, since it consists in the unaccountable capacity to remember—not to know, but to remember—things that happened to others. The Jews in particular pioneered these refreshing abolitions of time and space: it may be said that memory, in its ritual and legal and liturgical expressions, protected the Jews from history. (And from historiography, too: it was not until the spectacular dislocations of the sixteenth century that the Jewish obsession with the past issued in a methodologically strict and secularizing study of it.) A generation ago the Jew was the alienated one. Now the Jew is the one who remembers. Thus Nora, in a typical simplification: “In [the Jewish] tradition, which has no other history than its own memory, to be Jewish is to remember that one is such.” Of course, there is something brackish and circular (and historically incorrect) about such a characterization of Jewish identity; but the contemporary prestige of memory appears to carry all before it. In the view of many historians and critics, it was the interference with memory, by means of the critical study of history and the reform of the ritual and liturgical carriers of memory, that left modern Judaism with a rupture that has not yet healed.
The contest between memory and history becomes acute, even excruciating, when the subject of the backward look is catastrophe. One of the many ways in which the Nazi war against the Jews was unprecedented was that it occurred in the age of historical consciousness. The savage assaults on the Jewish communities in Ashkenaz, or the Rhineland, during the Crusades of 1096 and 1146 were the first significant attempt (there was a similar attempt at extermination in Visigothic Spain, about which little is known) to wipe out an entire Jewry physically; yet the Ashkenazic literature in the wake of the atrocities is stunning for its reticence about the events. Liturgical lamentations were written, and chronicles of the events were produced that were probably also intended for liturgical use; but otherwise Jewish literature in the aftermath of the trauma is remarkable for the absence from it of any extended expression of a documentary impulse.
The atrocities of 1933-45, by contrast, were perpetrated in a culture that was drenched in historicity. Indeed, the killers themselves, animated by a philosophy of history, had a pathologically documentary mentality; they left a great deal of paper and film. (The killers’ films of the killings, some of which may be seen at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, are a rape of the eye.) And lying in wait for the historical consciousness of the killers was the historical consciousness of the survivors and the scholars. They proceeded swiftly to produce a body of evidence of the genocide that is staggering in its size and its sophistication. The historiography of the Holocaust was an act of intellectual heroism, not least because it was the intention of the Nazis to make precisely such a historiography impossible. They weirdly believed that they could cover the traces of their crime, that the evidence of the death of the Jews would die with the Jews. “Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly,” Himmler told a group of S.S. officials in Poznan in 1943,
and yet we will never speak of it publicly.... Most of you must know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side or five hundred or a thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time--apart from exceptions caused by human weakness--to have remained decent men, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history, which has never been written and is never to be written.
But some of Himmler’s victims were, in their way, also hard. The historiographical labor was begun by the victims themselves, in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere. The page was written, though not quite as Himmler would have written it. In the war between History and history, history won.
In assembling the record of the Nazi war against the Jews, moreover, history and memory worked together. The survivors brought precise pain and the scholars brought painful precision. Without betraying its own methods, history approached memory’s proximity to its subject. It was, in Nora’s admiring term, “concrete.” To be sure, the rise of “Holocaust Studies” and its professionalization has had a certain anesthetizing effect; the chat of these experts can chill your bones. (In the historian of evil, however, intellectual poise is a spiritual accomplishment.) Yet soon the survivors will be gone, and only the scholars will remain. It is no longer true, as the ancient Indian saying has it, that an event lives only as long as the last person who remembers it; the historians have stalled oblivion. Still, it will not be long before we find ourselves in a more customary, more distant, more mediated, more indirect relationship to the Holocaust.
Will we mourn the loss of memory? Will the loss of memory mean the loss of the past? “We speak so much of memory,” Nora writes ruefully, “because there is so little of it.” Well, yes; the elders die. The slippage of immediacy is inevitable. (For the survivors of the catastrophe, of course, this slippage is an easing, a passing into peace.) Not least tot this reason, we had better be careful about the idealization of memory, and the disparagement of the historical attitude.
But there are other reasons, too. Remembering is the twin of forgetting. Memory is not retention, it is selection. (Memory is precisely what a computer does not have.) The memory of an event is an interpretation of an event; and the interpretation may be beautiful, or moving, or necessary for a certain end, but it leaves the mind with work to be done. The traffic between memory and history is a traffic between magic and doubt. Without magic, there is no continuity; without doubt, there is no contemporaneity. Traditions decay or disappear if they are not remembered, but they do not flourish in the hands of those wild live in the past. And memory, too, may cloud or clog one’s view of one’s time. Even when it is true, memory is demagogic. It compels; but the world is not suffering from too little compulsion. And so the brake of history is not a bad thing.
And sometimes memory alienates more powerfully than history or rather, it is too inalienable to be of any use. Memory is not always, or only, an instrument of knowledge: it is also a confinement, an irreversible sentence of individuation. Listen to a survivor, say, at a kitchen table in Brooklyn recall her experiences of Poland, 1943. If you grasp the meaning, you will grasp the distance. You are being addressed across a gulf, through a thick wall of glass, from the farthest corner of a banished heart. You listen carefully, but an approximation of her experience is the best you can hope for. And the love that you feel for this woman makes the sense of impassability even harder to bear. You begin to understand that there are situations in which memory is not a privilege, in which history is preferable to memory: if history is your only source of knowledge about the darkness, then you were one of the lucky ones. You look at this woman in the work of recollection and you no longer remark on the beauty of memory, or on its utility for the perpetuation of the knowledge of the disaster, you wish only that memory would falter and die, and you bless the moments of forgetfulness and all the divagations of ordinary life after the end of the world.
Memory, in sum, is not only authentic, and radiant, and poetic. It is also hurtful, and fragile (“who, after all,” asked Hitler, “speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”), and, in a strict sense, untransmittable. Therefore it needs the fortifyings of history: the corrections, the comparisons, the conclusions. (Memory is color, history is line.) The first of the many accomplishments of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opens this week on the Mall in Washington, is the paradox of its name: a memorial museum, a house of memory and history. Here the vividness of recollection joins the sturdiness of research. The stinging subjectivity of the testimonies of the survivors is met in these galleries by the tart objectivity of photographs, films, maps, statistics and objects.
In the creation of a memorial, moreover, there is another reason that memory must be accompanied by history, and feeling must be annotated by fact; and that is the fickleness of memorials themselves. These things shed their meanings with almost cynical alacrity. The public spaces of modern cities are littered with figures and markers that are more or less illegible. Their opacity is itself a kind of release from the particulars of the past. Instead of history, they give a warm sensation of historicity. They say only: Once there was someone who wanted something remembered here. Before these figures and markers nobody any longer stops, or thinks, or shudders. They are bulwarks against thought, devices for the prevention of may intrusion of the past into the present. “There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument,” wrote Robert Musil: “They are no doubt erected to be seen—indeed, to attract attention. But at the same time they are impregnated with something that repels attention, causing the glance to roll right off, like water droplets off an oilcloth, without even pausing for a moment.... This can no doubt be explained. Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression. Anything that constitutes the walls of our life, the backdrop of our consciousness, so to speak, forfeits its capacity to play a role in that consciousness.”
The proliferation of Holocaust memorials in the United States poses the problem starkly. The banality of the memory of evil, you might call it. According to James E. Young, in an interesting survey of Holocaust memorials called The Texture of Memory, just published by Yale University Press, “Today, nearly every major American city is home to at least one, and often several, memorials commemorating aspects of the Holocaust.” This is affecting, and this is revolting. It certainly makes the fear that the Holocaust will be forgotten seem faintly ridiculous. And worse, it ensures that if the Holocaust is forgotten, or if it is pushed to the peripheries of consciousness and culture, then it will be partly owing to the memorials themselves, which will have made the horror familiar and thereby robbed it of its power to shock and to disrupt. Of the memorial in Tucson, Young writes that “the monument now functions as the architectural entryway visitors pass through on their way into a stunning complex of auditoriums, cavernous gymnasiums, weight rooms, swimming pools and tennis courts. Built as it is into the wall and the plaza, the memorial houses and thus lends a certain cast to all file activities that take place in the center.” The Raoul Wallenberg Tennis Classic?
Remembering saves; but it also salves. Too little memory dishonors the catastrophe; but so does too much memory. In the contemplation of the death camps, we must be strangers: and if we are not strangers, if the names of the killers and the places of the killing and the numbers of the killed fall easily from our tongues, then we are not remembering to remember, but remembering to forget. Of course, the banalization of the memory serves many purposes. It suits the poverty of American Jewishness. “It’s a sad fact,” said the principal philanthropist of the grotesque Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, “that Israel and Jewish education and all the other familiar buzzwords no longer seem to rally Jews behind the community. The Holocaust, though, works every time.” His candor was refreshing, even if it was obscene. On the subject of the extermination of the Jews of Europe, the Jews of America are altogether too noisy. They need the subject too much. Those Jews of the Rhineland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries who omitted their experience of atrocity from so many of their liturgical verses and legal rulings and pietistic sermons and mystical speculations had not forgotten it. Indeed, they were, in their commemorations of their martyrs, the inventors of Jewish morbidity in the Diaspora. But their Jewishness was too great for their morbidity to overwhelm.
Between 14th Street and 15th Street in Washington, the memorial will be saved from the fate of memorials by the museum, and the museum will be saved from the fate of museums by the memorial. The designers of this institution have made a provision for shock. One of the achievements of the Holocaust Memorial Museum is that it leads its visitors directly from history to silence. Its exhibition ends in a Hall of Remembrance, a six-sided, classically proportioned chamber of limestone, a chaste vacancy, seventy feet high, unencumbered by iconography, washed in a kind of halting light, in a light that seems anxious about its own appropriateness. There are steps all around the cold marble floor that will most likely serve as seats. The least that you can do, after seeing what you have just seen, is sit down and be still.
The Hall of Remembrance is a temple of ineffability. This, then, is the plot, the historical and spiritual sequence got right, of the infernal display on the Mall: memory, stiffened by history, then struck dumb.
The museum is a pedagogical masterpiece. It begins at the beginning and it ends at the end. It illustrates the sufferings of all who suffered. It resists the rhetoric about Shoah v’Gvurah, Holocaust and Heroism, as if there was as much heroism as there was holocaust. It does not prettify or protect the visitor from the worst. (Nazi footage of killings in the pits, and of medical experiments in the camps, is shown on monitors behind walls that are too high for children to see over. Adults may wish that the walls were higher still.) And it does not conclude its narrative in triumph. There was no triumph, at least for the Jews. There was a narrow escape, that is all. The Nazis did not win their war against the Jews. But they did not lose it, either.
The building itself teaches. It seems to have been distilled, but not abstracted, from its subject. Its principal materials are brick and steel and brick bolted with steel. The exhibits are located in eight towers, each topped by a kind of sentry box, which surround a huge atrium, into which you enter. The impression is elegant and oppressive. The industrial atmosphere is ominous. This is an atrium without air; it holds the opposite of air, the end of air. A staircase that looks like it railroad track rises into a wall of black marble, into which a doorway has been cut and set in brick in the shape of the entrance to Birkenau, which was the killing center at Auschwitz. The skylight, too, puts you in mind of a train station, until you begin to notice that this gigantic frame of steel is warped, twisted, a derangement of rational design. Above the skylight, from one of the glass bridges that connect the towers, the deformity is truly terrifying. The building seems to be held together by what is tearing it apart. Like survivors; like Jews.
A large part of the instruction that this museum imparts is tactile. Alongside the maps and the charts and the films and the photographs, there are the objects, the stuff, the things of the persecutions and the murders. The museum is a kind of reliquary. The relics are sacred and profane; and while there are things in the world more sacred, there surely are none more profane. Here is the blackened metal chassis on which corpses were burned at Mauthausen when the ovens were too full to receive them, and here are the canisters and the crystals of Zyklon-B gas. Here is a pile of umbrellas and tea strainers and can openers and toothbrushes that Jews brought to Auschwitz. Here is the wooden frame of the ark that held the Torah scrolls in the synagogue at Essen, stabbed and scratched and scarred across the words that warned the worshiper to remember before Whom he stood, provoking now an almost Christian desire to touch the wound. Here is a madly detailed model of the Lodz Ghetto sculpted out of a suitcase by a Jew in hiding. Here is what remains of a Mauser rifle and a Steyn pistol used by Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto. Here is a Danish fishing boat that carried hundreds of Jews to safety. (Here you smile. It is the only spot in the building where you do.)
Perhaps the most startling passage in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah was its reconstruction of the trajectory of a killing van in Chelmno, because it was filmed in real time: nothing was abridged or abbreviated, the van was filmed along the local roads for exactly as long as it would have taken for the gas in the van to kill the people inside it. In the Holocaust Memorial Museum, there is real space. Here is a railway car, of the Karlsruhe kind, number 31599-G, and in this railway car Jews were carried to the death camps. The freight car weighs fifteen tons; its ceiling is mean and low, with four small slatted windows and iron bolts on its doors. It carried about a hundred Jews every time it traveled. Now, in the semidarkness of an exhibition hall in America, you stand inside it, and are defeated. Its wooden walls are thoroughly scratched and splintered, and to every, scratch and splinter you ascribe a panicked band. Though it is empty, it feels crowded and cramped. You wish that you could smell a human smell, but there is only the smell of old wood, and a general stench of technocratic efficiency. It occurs to you that you are standing in a coffin. It also occurs to you that there are survivors visiting this museum who may find themselves in this coffin for the second time.
And here are barracks from Auschwitz. More real space. More old wood. The living quarters of the dying. The prisoners slept, whatever that means, six in a row, on three levels. You realize, looking at these structures, that they may have given respite, but they never gave rest. The wood is hard, and unexpectedly smooth to the touch; it appears to have been polished by all the flesh that passed over it. There is no room to sit up or to stretch out. Here men, or what was left of men, were merely stored in rows for the night. You try to imagine the desolation of returning in the evening to these planks. And yon keep running your hands over them, because their materiality wakens you. It reminds you that all this dying was lived.
But lived by whom? The conventional answer is: by Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and so on. But those appellations describe groups, not individuals; and when, in the remembrance of the catastrophe, the victims are seen as individuals, it is usually in the period between the completion of their life and the completion of their death, in the purgatory between the ramp and the oven, as starved, naked, shaved, numbered, emaciated men and women whose physical extremity, and its fearful inscription in their faces, makes you stop before the photographs and consider them one by one. By that time, however, these people were already gone; they were just not yet dead. The victims of the Holocaust are known too much by the manner of their death.
In the museum on the Mall, however, there is a tower of photographs, three stories high. They are photographs of the Jews of Ejszyszki, a town in Lithuania. Jews lived in Ejszyszki for 900 years, until 1941, when the Jewish community of Ejszyszki was shot to death in two days. (There were more than 4,950 cities, towns, villages, and hamlets in which the Nazis and their Polish, Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian. Estonian. Slovakian, Hungarian, and Croatian accomplices destroyed the Jewish population.) In the years before the war, four local photographers set out to produce a pictorial record of the Jews of Ejszyszki; and now their pictures rise high into the tranquil brick tower, rows and rows of them, all around you, in black and white and sepia, and finally you see who died.
There are gymnasts and teachers and merchants and rabbis and nannies and writers and carpenters. There are preening male bathers by the sea; humorless Zionist activists of the right and the left; families in gloomy, paneled interiors, gathered around tables heavy with cutlery and cakes; cantors, looking silly in the cantorial way, assembled for their graduation: a girl and a boy lazing on a hammock in the woods; a rabbi in wrinkled gabardine strolling up a hill, his hands behind his back and his text in his head; a man in a Mickey Mouse suit on bended knee before a slightly startled girl in a park; a group of young women smartly turned out to ski; a father propping his son up on his shiny new car.
One picture crushed me. A girl sits, her legs crossed, on a sofa. She wears a woolen cap and a plaid shirt and a long skirt pulled tightly over her thighs and (in Ejszyszki!) cowboy boots. She is in her teens. In her hand is a cigarette. On the wall above her hangs a picture of a dashing, medieval-looking cavalier. And close to her, very close to her, sits a young man in a rocking chair. He looks nothing like the cavalier. He seems a little bookish, in glasses and jacket and tie. She bends toward him confidently and confidently he lights her cigarette. They do not look like they are lovers, though they might be lovers. They do not look like they are going to die, though they are going to die.
That is what is missing from so many accounts of the end of Jewish life in Europe: the eros of Jewish life in Europe before the end. These slaughtered Jews loved the world. They were at home in it, exile or no exile. The melancholy in the tradition that they inherited seems not to have sapped them. Their piety and their impiety were equally robust. Around the thousands of people in these hundreds of photographs there is not a trace of the angel of death. Only the contemporary viewer sees it hovering, impatiently, in every frame. And for that reason there is no room in this great and grisly building that you visit more bitterly. In the other rooms, the ones that show death, you learn the lesson of finality. In this room, the one that shows life, you learn the lesson of perishability. I am not sure which lesson is the harder one. How do you choose between sorrow and fear?
In the weeks leading up to the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Germany was nervous. According to Marc Fisher in The Washington Post, the German government offered the museum “millions of dollars” to include an exhibit on postwar Germany and its decades of democracy. The government’s press spokesman immediately denied that such an offer was made, but he added that “the federal government would have welcomed it if the museum had included information on German resistance to National Socialism [it does] as well as on the successful construction of a state based on the rule of law and of a liberal democracy in postwar Germany.” A historian in Munich who acts as an informal adviser to Helmut Kohl observed that “it would have been good for educational reasons to show that Germany has changed since 1945. It was a mistake for the museum not to include other cases of genocide.” A writer in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung observed that the museum’s emphasis on gas chambers and death camps “has less to do with the German past than with the American present”; and the paper’s Washington correspondent wondered whether “half a century after war’s end it is advisable to lead millions of visitors through a museum that ends in 1945 and thereby may leave the lasting impression [that] these are the Germans and this is Germany.”
There is something comic about the Germans asking the Jews to help them with the image of what the Germans did to the Jews. Finally, though, the comedy is thin. This complaint, that a true depiction of the German war against the Jews is an expression of hostility to Germany, has been heard before. When Shoah appeared, it was attacked for its uncomplicated attitude toward the killers, for its unembarrassed hatred of the Germans it filmed. Now, in the dark halls of the museum on the Mall, as you file by these pictures of German doctors in their laboratory coats posing over their fascinating corpses, and German soldiers politely escorting women into the woods, and German officers smiling as they put a bullet into the head of a Jew perched at the edge of a pit, the problem of hatred will be posed again. And so I would like to say a few things in defense of hatred.
First, that hatred is not always the enemy of, or the obstacle to, understanding. Sometimes, and certainly in the instance of radical evil, hatred may be evidence that a state of affairs has been properly understood. I will give, as an example, the report of an atrocity that broached this problem for me many years ago. When I was a boy, I was told of a Nazi satrap in Galicia, in Poland, in the early 1940s, who picked up a Jewish baby by its legs and tore it apart. My sense of the world has not yet recovered from that anecdote. I remember vividly my response. It was hatred: hatred of the man, hatred of the deed, hatred of the circumstances in which the deed could have been committed.
I was, as I say, a boy; but when I reflect now upon that man, and that deed, and those circumstances, I do not conclude that my hatred was something that I must overcome, for the purpose of a more accurate or a more humane analysis. Quite the contrary. Were I not to hate that man, and that deed, and those circumstances, or were I felt in confusion about whether or not I should hate them, there would be reason to wonder whether I had understood what I had been told, I mean the plain meaning of the story, or worse, whether I had understood what we mean by understanding, that is, the axioms by which our civilization orders and evaluates human experience. There would have been reason to wonder, in short, whether I was what we call a moral idiot.
That epithet quite properly links judgement to intelligence. Not to recognize moral idiocy, however, is itself a form of moral idiocy. If, by hatred, we mean an attitude of condemnation accompanied by an intensity of feeling, then the absence of hatred in the face of radical evil would not have understood them. The relations between knowing and judging are complicated; the empirical and the moral cannot be easily disentangled. It is not always true that tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner. Comprehension does not always lead to forgiveness. In certain cases, indeed, forgiveness may signify the absence of comprehension. The hatred of the Jew for the Nazi was not just a feeling, it was the emotional expression of a correct analysis of the position of the Jew in the Nazi world.
Nor is all hatred like all other hatred. There is, I suppose, a similarity of the surface--a man who hates is more like a man who hates than a man who loves--just as there is a similarity of the surface between the Nazi who killed a Jew and the Jew who killed a Nazi. They were, both of them, killers. But distinctions must be made. There was a difference between the hatred of the Nazi for the Jew and the hatred of the Jew for the Nazi. The Nazi hated the Jew because he believed that the Jew was not human. The Jew hated the Nazi because he believed that the Nazi was human, but had betrayed his humanity. The Jewish hatred, Lanzmann’s hatred, the hatred that you feel in this museum before, say, the German film of the massacre at Libau in Lithuania, is premised finally on the assumption of a commonality between the oppressed and the oppressor, and it amounts to a defense of that commonality against those who would deny it.
There were also decent and brave Germans who tried to resist the Nazis and to assist the Jews. The failure to acknowledge mad to honor those Germans amounts to a notion of collective guilt, which is a very Nazi notion. Contrary to its German critics, the Holocaust Memorial Museum acknowledges the German heroes and honors them. In this respect, moreover, Lanzmann’s critics were right: it was disgraceful that none of the dissenters mad the rescuers appeared in his film. But, I hasten to add, it was only a little disgraceful. There is the matter of proportions. The few, however admirable, were not the equal, or the exoneration, of the many. The historical truth is brutal. It may be simplistic, but it is not false, to describe these events in Europe between 1933 and 1945 as an attempt by a people called the Germans to destroy a people called the Jews. The assault on the Jews was, actively and passively, a collective assault. It is a distortion of the past to deny the dissenters and the rescuers a place in the history of the catastrophe; but it is also a distortion to give them a pride of place.
There is more. Just as hatred is not necessarily an intellectual failure, it is not necessarily a moral failure. In the debate about Shoah, it was suggested that Lanzmann’s hatred of the evildoers made him resemble them. He, too, it was said, was making absolute distinctions between human beings. As one of the critics wrote, “If one sees no resemblance between self and other, and believes all evil to be in the other and none in oneself, one is (tragically) condemned to imitating one’s enemy. If, on the other hand, one discovers one’s resemblance to the enemy, and recognizes the evil in oneself as well as the good in the other, then one is truly different from the enemy.” There is nobility in these words, and perversity: the executed had about as much in common with the executioners as the dead had in common with the living.
It is odd, this worry about the virtue of the victims. (“It would have been more lair and more open,” wrote the historian from Munich about the museum in Washington, “to show that Jews care about other acts of genocide.”) I wonder how many of those who preach this loftiness about the evil in all of us have considered the extent to which it would damage the capacity, for resistance to evil. What, exactly, does the evil of another time or another place have to do with the evil of this time and this place, except to inhibit the light against it? Can devils be opposed only by saints? The conclusion of such reasoning is fiat justitia pereant Judeii: let justice be done and the Jews perish. In 1943 such reasoning led Simone Well to the outrageous insistence that France’s colonies robbed it of the moral authority to fight Germany. Surely the difference between the man who points the gun and the man at whom the gun is pointed is greater, at least at the moment of their encounter, than the similarity between them. It is trivial at any moment, and it is grotesque at that moment, to point out that one day the relation may be reversed because there is evil in all of us. Of course there is evil in all of us; but not all of its act on our evil.
On April 13, 1943, in the Warsaw Ghetto, Emanuel Ringelblum entered these words in his diary:
Spent the two Passover nights at Schachna’s. There was an interesting discussion about vengeance. Mr. Isaac, who had been interned in a prison camp in Pomerania, demonstrated that vengeance would never solve anything. The vanquished would in turn plan their own vengeance, and so it would go on forever. There was talk that raising the moral level of humanity was the only solution.
Mr. Isaac’s idealism is heartbreaking. But Ringelblum was skeptical. His gloss on the discussion at the seder introduces a different moral voice. “The Jewish revenge [is] that the Jews are very forgiving. The Germans are only people after all”—and then he adds, “except for the Gestapo!” Do those final four words diminish Ringelblum ethically? Do they catch him in a resemblance to his enemy? I do not think so. For the Gestapo were not “only people.” His exclusion of them from his sense of humanity indicated only that he had understood them properly.
It also allowed him to act against them. If knowing did not run into judging, if critical thought did not make way for moral action, then the triumph of the Nazis over the Jews would have been total. But Ringelblum became one of the organizers of the revolt in the Warsaw Ghetto, which took place ten days later. And oil March 7, 1944, he was executed, with his wife and his son, in the ruins of the ghetto. The Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in Washington oil the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, and the milk call that hid Ringelblum’s archive of the ghetto may be found on the second floor. For its faithfulness, its color of rust has turned a color of gold.
But why this museum, and this memorial, on the Mall?
The question is not a new one. In 1946, A.R. Lerner, a Viennese journalist who fled the Nazis and came to New York, where he tirelessly spread the news of what the Nazis had done to the Jews, proposed that a monument to the “Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Six Million Jews Slain by the Nazis” be established in New York. Mayor O’Dwyer and Parks Commissioner Moses agreed, and the sculptor Jo Davidson chose a spot in Riverside Park. (I take this tale from Young’s book.) On October 10, 1947, thousands of people came to Riverside Park to dedicate the site. The New York Times wrote the following day that “it is fitting that a memorial to 6 million victims of the most tragic mass crime in history, the Nazi genocide of Jews, should rise in this land of liberty.” But the monument was never raised, not least because the opinion of the Times was not shared by everyone. In 1964, when a design for the monument was submitted to the city’s Arts Commission, one of the commissioners, the sculptor Eleanor Platt, declared that it would “set a highly regrettable precedent. How would we answer other special groups who want to be similarly represented on public land?” And Newbold Morris, the city’s parks commissioner, further objected that “monuments in the parks should be limited to events of American history.”
The proposal to create a museum and a memorial to the Holocaust on the Mall in Washington, on the hallowed ground of the American republic, was similarly controversial. In 1987 the architecture critic of The Washington Post, in a churlish column called “In Search of a Delicate Balance,” repeated Morris’s objection, and worried about “the symbolic implications of the memorial’s placement—that the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews [could be considered] an integral part of the American story.” Of course, nobody ever suggested that the Holocaust was an event in American history. What the delicate balancer seems to have forgotten, however, is that this is a country of immigrants. The past of America is elsewhere. (Here the past is a foreign country.) The collective memory of this country will always include names and dates foreign and far away. Pluralism makes demands on the imagination.
And yet the objection is not hard to understand. This is a tolerant country, but it is not an innocent country. It is permanently stained with the fate of the Native Americans and the African Americans; and neither the memories nor the histories of those wretched Americans may be met on the Mall. And there are still other genocides that haunt still other Americans—the Armenians, for example—that are unacknowledged. (A home to all the peoples of the world is a home to all the scars of the world.) For a time there was talk of a separate wing in the Holocaust Memorial Museum that would document and commemorate all the catastrophes, but the wing was never built.
It is now clear that a Hall of Genocide would have been a ghastly mistake, a macabre multiculturalist insult to the memories of all. For the most lasting impression that the Holocaust Memorial Museum leaves is of human foulness. This building interferes not only with your opinion of Germany, or Europe, or Western civilization; it interferes with your opinion of the human world. A Jew who wanders through these galleries feels pity for his people turn into pity for his race. There occurs a general darkening of outlook. For there is a sickening sense in which a corpse is a human being that has been returned to its sheerest humanity; there is something truly universal about a corpse. Anybody who looks at these images of corpses and sees only images of Jews has a grave moral problem.
It is true, as Jewish historians and theologians have argued, that the Holocaust was in some way “unique”; but it was in no way so “unique” that it does not press upon the souls of all who learn of it. The story of the life and the death of the Jews in Europe is one of the great human stories (which, by the way, is also one of the reasons that Jews should study it). I am not sure that the memory of that story, or the history of it, will suffice to stay the hand of the malicious and the murderous, or that a museum and a memorial will stand much in the way of prejudice and its appetite for power. The world fifty years later does not seem especially restrained by the world fifty years before. Still, it is not just Jews who will be warned by what they see in this building on the Mall. All are warned. Here is the precedent. Just because it was the worst does not mean that it will be the last.
And so it is right that the first thing you notice, when you leave the Hall of Remembrance, is the figure of Thomas Jefferson. Across the calming waters of the Tidal Basin he presides perdurably over his own memorial, an architect of the only political system in the history of the world that made men free without thinking too highly of them. You think, in the light of what you have just seen, that it was no small achievement to found a democracy upon a pessimistic view of human nature. And you think, in the light of what yon have just seen, that it was just as well.