The memory of the Holocaust has been constructed as an elusive, unstable entity by both Germans and Jews. Shortly after the war, Hannah Arendt wrote that the past had become a matter of opinion, rather than fact, for many Germans. Other observers were aware of the larger context of such views. It has been noted, for instance, that George Orwell
regarded with alarm, even despair, the suggestion that we should accept the limits of our language as the limits of our world (hence the invention of Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four); and so far from seeing anything “liberating” in the belief that all truths are “socially constructed,” he regarded it as an inherently totalitarian notion. It was the Nazis, he pointed out, who spoke of “Jewish science” when confronted by facts they did not like; ditto, of course, the Stalinists, who damned any truth and value that stood in their way as “bourgeois.”
Ironically, an updated version of this view of the world has become common currency in some contemporary intellectual and scholarly circles. Most depressingly, perhaps, Holocaust deniers in several countries have adopted to their own purposes relativist and postmodern assertions regarding the instability or nonexistence of facts about the past, said to be as elusive as memory itself. Interviewed by Claude Lanzmann in his film Shoah (1985), the former Nazi Party member and head of the Reich Railways Department 33, Walter Stier, admits that Hitler’s dislike of the Jews “was well known. . . . But as to their extermination, that was news to us. I mean, even today some people deny it. They say there couldn’t have been so many Jews. Is it true? I don’t know. That’s what they say.” Indeed, the very nature and unprecedented scale of the destruction has tended to put into question the capacity to remember, represent, and reconstruct it. Even while it was happening, many of the victims, the bystanders, the Allies, or potential victims in countries not yet occupied by the Germans, not least of which was the Jewish community in Palestine, found it impossible to believe and comprehend the evidence about the Holocaust.
Atrocity thus becomes elusive precisely because it is ubiquitous, inconceivable because it is fantastic, faceless because it is protean. Jean-Franjois Lyotard has written:
Suppose that an earthquake destroys not only lives, buildings, and objects but also the instruments used to measure earthquakes directly and indirectly. The impossibility of quantitatively measuring it does not prohibit, but rather inspires in the minds of the survivors the idea of a very great seismic force. The scholar claims to know nothing about it, but the common person has a complex feeling, the one aroused by the negative presentation of the indeterminate.
But devastation of such proportions not only destroys the very mechanisms capable of measuring its scale, it annihilates the ability to imagine it. It must therefore be reduced to a more manageable size and more conventional nature, so that the mind can take it in rather than totally blot it out. Paradoxically, those who want to keep the memory of atrocity and those who wish to deny it are both engaged in a similar attempt to force the event into an acceptable imaginary mold. If their goals are radically opposed to each other, their means are much less so: for both denial and remembrance begin by diminishing the event. Denial starts off by casting doubt on the minutiae of destruction, undermining thereby our acceptance of the whole; reconstruction similarly begins from the details, because the scale of the enormity is so vast that it denies its own existence and vanishes from the mind. Having created a reality beyond its wildest fantasies, humanity cannot imagine what it created. In this context human agency remains tenuous, the disaster being ascribed either to insane genius or to anonymous forces. Language, too, disintegrates; hence the resort, either to medieval imagery of hell and metaphysical speculation or to radical skepticism about reality and a perception of the world as text—complex and elusive but purged of the inarticulate screams of the millions, inscribed into every word pronounced since the Holocaust.
For the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, it would seem, there was nothing elusive about the identity of either the perpetrators or the victims. Yet both the event of the Holocaust itself and the identity of its human agents and victims have remained highly elusive in what has become by now a substantial body of Jewish ruminations on and representations of the event. By this I do not mean to accept the specious distinction between the so-called mythical memory of the Holocaust among the Jews and the scholarly(wissenschaftlich) analysis of the event by a less involved younger generation of German historians. Rather, this has to do with the inherent nature of the event and the fact that its Jewish representation depends to a large extent on the ideological, national, and religious affiliations of the survivors, their offspring, and those who have been spared direct or family-related contact with the event. To be sure, the manner and extent of Jewish preoccupation with the Holocaust, more evident perhaps at present than at any other time in the past, seems tragically both to recapitulate and to invert the urging of the Haggadah (read during Passover) to tell the story of the liberation from slavery in Egypt as if they themselves had experienced it. For the Holocaust is not a story of liberation but of annihilation. In this sense, due to the scope of the destruction and the exterminationist aspirations of the Nazis, every Jew is a survivor by dint of having been a potential victim, including those born after the event, who would not have seen life had Hitler had his way. But precisely because the Holocaust poses the most profound existential questions to Jewish life since the Exile, any interpretation of it cannot be isolated from its implications for the present. And because the event as a whole defies the imaginative capacities of the human mind, it is open to an array of interpretations and ascribed meanings, whose single common element is that they all agree on their incapacity to “save” it completely from its inherently inexplicable nature. Hence the Holocaust can both serve to legitimize contradictory choices of various Jewish communities in the postwar era and simultaneously to cast doubt on each and every one of them, exposing them as precariously founded on a reading of an event that is perceived to be beyond comprehension. In this sense the Holocaust is both at the root of the extraordinary revival of Jewish life after the genocide and the cause of the deep anxiety and bewilderment that characterizes much of postwar Jewish thought and creativity.
In the years immediately following the Holocaust, the two most influential and articulate Jewish communities left in the world, American Jewry and the State of Israel, largely kept silent about the event. While Soviet Jewry, the other major survivor of the Holocaust, found itself under political circumstances that made public, or even private, discussion of the Holocaust almost impossible, American Jews and Israelis, with some important exceptions, largely accepted the very different official state perception in their respective lands. To be sure, both narratives were constructed as a tale of ultimate triumph, either of American democracy and values or of Zionist ideology and Jewish statehood, and both claimed to have discovered the best remedy to the condition of Jewish Diaspora in Europe. Indeed, while American Jews were convinced that their country of choice had led the eventual victory over Nazism, Israelis believed that the very existence of their newly founded state constituted a defeat for Nazi aspirations to destroy the Jewish people. These narratives were not wholly consistent with historical reality. The United States did not fight Germany to save the Jews and could hardly be said to have pursued opportunities to hamper the killing process during the war with any conviction. Moreover, during the 1930s, the U.S. government permitted the entry into the United States of even fewer European refugees—the majority of whom would have been Jews escaping persecution—than the highly restrictive quotas it had already set actually allowed, a decision that proved to have had fatal consequences. Nevertheless, there was little doubt that the United States did play a major role in destroying the Third Reich, thereby putting an end to the extermination of the Jews (by which time, of course, the vast majority of European Jewry had already been murdered). What was just as important for Jewish perceptions of the United States was the fact that, following the war, many survivors were allowed to immigrate here and to begin a new and at least materially successful life.
The Zionist-Israeli narrative similarly contained some baffling contradictions. After all, the minuscule Yishuv, or pre-state Jewish community in Palestine, which numbered just over half a million people during the war, was hardly in a condition to fight Nazism. While the Zionist rhetoric subsequently claimed that unlike the Diaspora, the “new” Jews of Palestine would not have gone as “sheep to the slaughter,” the fact of the matter is that had General Erwin Rommel broken through at El Alamein and reached Palestine, the Yishuv would have probably ended up just like any other major ghetto in Europe. What saved the Jews of Palestine was not Zionism but the same factor that saved British Jewry, namely, the British armed forces. No less disturbing for subsequent reconstructions of the period was the knowledge that, while the Holocaust was happening in Europe, the Yishuv was preoccupied mainly with ensuring its own survival and prosperity, building the economic and political infrastructure for the establishment of the future state, and preparing for the anticipated military confrontation with the Palestinian Arab population and the surrounding states. Similarly, American Jewry was extremely slow to acknowledge the reality of the genocide in Europe and was greatly troubled by the prospect that putting too much pressure on the American government to act on behalf of European Jews might have a detrimental effect on the still not fully established position of Jews in the United States. In this sense the same mechanism of repression functioned in the Yishuv and American Jewry during the Holocaust. Both communities found it difficult to believe the horror tales coming from Europe, and they blotted out for as long as they could the growing amount of information indicating that a whole Jewish world, including the families and towns from which so many American and Palestinian Jews had originated, was being systematically annihilated. Both communities also shared a certain level of complacency and self-satisfaction in view of the fact that their respective choices of residence had been justified by the plight of their brethren in Nazi-occupied Europe.
At this point, of course, there was nothing particularly elusive about the self-declared enemy of the Jews. Yet, even while the Holocaust was still happening, the enemy was also being defined both more widely and more narrowly, closer to local concerns, on the one hand, and associated with traditional images, on the other. Moreover, the nature of the Holocaust itself made for a reluctance to concentrate on its details, producing instead an obsession with its implications and a preoccupation with the relationship between victim and perpetrator, complicity and resistance, individual and community, altruism and self-interest.
Many of these strands came together both in the United States and Israel during the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann (1961), the first major public confrontation with the Holocaust in either country. Until that point the murder of the Jews was presented in the United States as part and parcel of World War II, specifically of the political persecution that had characterized the Nazi regime and had therefore made the struggle against it into a just war. The genocide of the Jews was still not referred to as the Holocaust, and the symbols of Nazi oppression were Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Buchenwald, namely those concentration camps—and not death camps—that had been liberated by the Western Allies and that had indeed served during much of their existence for the incarceration of the real and imaginary political enemies, rather than “biological” enemies, of the regime. In Israel, the Shoah, or Catastrophe, as it was called there, was perceived as the most important event of the war, of course, as well as a major disaster for the Jewish people. But public discourse and education tended to emphasize such events as the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and other instances of Jewish resistance, on the one hand, and the eventual illegal immigration (Ha-apala) of the survivors to British-occupied Palestine, on the other. The mass slaughter of the Jews was acknowledged but with a distinct measure of embarrassment and discomfort, since, while it could be used to justify the Zionist argument about the urgent need to create a new Jewish “type” in an independent Jewish state willing and able to fight for its existence, it was also perceived as a case of national humiliation and highlighted the Yishuv’s own vulnerability as well as its inability to defend the vast majority of the Jewish people murdered in Europe by the Nazis. This combined sense of shame and anxiety made it appear all the more urgent during the early postwar years in Palestine and then Israel rapidly to convert the arriving survivors from Diaspora Jews into Zionist Israelis, that is, to erase those qualities in the new arrivals that had allegedly made the victims go “like sheep to the slaughter” and to remake them as patriotic citizens of the Jewish state, new types unburdened by the shadows and ghosts of the past, and capable of protecting the Jewish state from any more genocidal assaults. That the state was increasingly made up of survivors and that the Yishuv had been saved from the Holocaust due to circumstances wholly beyond its control was not, and perhaps could not, be acknowledged in those early and precarious years of Jewish statehood.
The Eichmann trial redefined many of the categories hitherto employed by the two communities in representing the Holocaust. Receiving wide media exposure in Israel and the United States, the trial greatly complicated previous perceptions of the event, both by providing the public with masses of the information that until then had been the domain of only a few specialists and by casting doubt on conventional narratives and interpretations that had been employed in confronting, or avoiding, the reality and implications of the Holocaust. This was also the reason for the furor with which Arendt’s controversial reports and subsequent book on the trial were greeted by both Jewish communities, posing (but also dodging) as she did some of the most crucial questions about the significance of the Holocaust for postwar society, issues that in large part have not been resolved to our own day. One major aspect of this controversy involved the nature and identity of both the enemy and the victim.
Jewish interpretations of the Holocaust conventionally assumed that the Nazi genocide was motivated mainly by a particularly virulent strain of antisemitism, perceived more generally as inherent to European Christian civilization. Arendt’s argument—that the genocide of the Jews was carried out by loyal, law-abiding, and opportunistic bureaucrats, who cared little about ideology and a great deal about their own status and reputation as civil servants capable of executing their allotted tasks flawlessly and efficiently—introduced a highly disturbing element to the debate. Moreover, if previously the Jews had perceived themselves as the main victims of the war, Arendt claimed that Jewish traditions of compliance and accommodation in the face of adversity, and the inability of community leaders to recognize the true genocidal intent of the Nazis, led to fateful complicity of the victims in their own annihilation. While infuriating her critics, Arendt’s assertion also indicated the need for more subtle analyses of victimhood and complicity. Conversely, while American public opinion had previously subsumed the murder of the Jews under the regime’s persecution of its political enemies, the Eichmann trial heralded the emergence of the Holocaust in the United States and subsequently also in Western Europe as the paradigm of evil and the fate of the Jews as the epitome of victimhood. We tend to forget that this was not always the case and may overlook the effects this had on the offspring of victims. For while the children of war veterans could say proudly that their father had been a soldier, those of Holocaust survivors tended to hide the fact that their own parents were victims; there was nothing heroic or satisfying about that status, quite apart from the fact of growing up in a traumatized family environment. Jeremy Adler recently wrote about his experience in Britain:
In my childhood, there were no secrets at home about this period simply called “the wicked age” (“die bose Zeit”) or “the camp years” (“die Lagerjahre”) ... ; yet outside the home a taboo occluded discussion of what, later, was debated as avidly as it had been repressed in terms of “Auschwitz,” “the Holocaust” and “the Shoah." My friends could boast of how dad had fought with Monty in the desert. My own father’s experiences were unmentionable. They had no place, until recently. The public cycle from repression to obsession in Britain took about fifty years.
It should be noted that much of the historical evidence for Arendt’s essay was taken from Raul Hilberg’s magisterial study on the Holocaust. Interestingly, Hilberg’s own study was rejected by the Research Institute of Yad Vashem when he asked for assistance in publishing it, mainly because, in the view of the institute’s staff, Hilberg had failed to pay due attention to Jewish fate and resistance and had instead focused primarily on the perpetrators. In a letter from Yad Vashem, dated August 24, 1958, he was told that since his “book rests almost entirely on the authority of German sources,” and because of “reservations concerning” his “appraisal of the Jewish resistance (active and passive) during the Nazi occupation,” the institute “cannot appear as one of the publishers.” Indeed, neither Hilberg’s work nor Arendt’s most important contributions to the debate, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), have been translated into Hebrew (the latter is finally about to be published in Israel). However, Arendt’s borrowing evidence from Hilberg should not create the impression that they were in agreement with each other. Not only has Hilberg voiced strong criticism of Arendt in his 1996 memoir and in a public lecture given at a conference on Arendt in Berlin during the summer of 1997, there is little doubt that these two scholars were of a very different cast of mind and were motivated by very different agendas.
While Hilberg’s focus on the perpetrators was based on his assumption that this was the only way to explain the genocide of the Jews, Arendt’s intention was overtly to diminish the centrality of antisemitism in explaining the Holocaust and to show the inherent genocidal potential of the modern state. As other studies have since demonstrated, her dismissal of antisemitism as a motivating factor among the perpetrators and within German society more generally can no longer be supported, but her insistence on the pernicious traits of the modern bureaucratic state greatly contributed to our understanding of the twentieth century and makes her work into a cardinal text of postwar scholarship. Conversely, Hilberg’s analysis of the Third Reich has had a tremendous influence on all subsequent studies of the period, yet its limited focus has encouraged the views that the Holocaust can be explained with the victims more or less left out and that Nazi Germany can be analyzed in isolation from other totalitarian and genocidal systems. At the same time, while Arendt took a much wider and less precise view and Hilberg a narrower and more detailed one, both scholars have implied that the Jews were somehow complicit in their murder and did little to prevent it. They ignored, or did not know about, the numerous instances of Jewish resistance (fig. 7), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, failed to acknowledge the more or less unresisting annihilation by the Nazis and other regimes of many groups not normally charged with “having gone like sheep to the slaughter,” such as, most prominently perhaps, the millions of Soviet prisoners of war murdered by the Nazi regime and its associates, but also the genocide of Armenians by Turks. (Today, we would add Cambodians by Cambodians, Tutsis by Hutus, and “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia). Both Hilberg and Arendt tried to steer away from the monocausal interpretation of the Holocaust as motivated only by antisemitism and, in the process, minimized its impact more than the evidence warrants. Yet Arendt was apologetic for German cultural traditions, Hilberg accusatory of German bureaucratic mentality. Both works threatened to replace one monocausality with another. But Hilberg was interested mainly in the mechanism of genocide, Arendt in its moral and philosophical implications.
FIGURE 7. Victims’ heroism. Statue commemorating the fighters of the Polish Bund (Jewish socialist party) killed in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Plaques only in Yiddish and Polish. Located in the vast and overgrown Jewish cemetery in Warsaw.
Arendt’s criticism of Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem and of Jewish behavior in the Holocaust, her unwillingness to condemn German culture as a whole, her impatience with the simplistic narrative of the Holocaust as the culmination of European antisemitism, and her association with and subsequent defense of Martin Heidegger cast her in the role of the proverbial self-hating Jew and critic of the newly established Jewish state. As the Hebrew University professor Shmuel Ettinger has written, Arendt
charged the Jews, their conduct, their leadership, and their actions with much of the responsibility for the crime of antisemitism and even with the extermination of the Jews. . . . At the basis of such arguments are concepts prevalent in German society (and to a large extent even the effects of antisemitic and even Nazi views). In the past, Jews who have sought the roots of antisemitism occasionally came to accept the approaches and modes of thinking of their environment ... and internalized the image of the Jew as seen by their environment. One might have expected that following the Holocaust this approach would change, but this did not happen to Hannah Arendt, and her attachment to the negative Jewish stereotype distinguishes her from other scholars.
Such so-called self-hating Jews were a social and psychological phenomenon related to the secularization and often only partially successful assimilation of European Jews beginning in the nineteenth century and were anathema to the Zionist and Orthodox establishments alike. Often seen as the enemy within, they reflected the profound crisis in Jewish identity that Zionism, along with other political movements, had sought to rectify.
Especially in its early years, Israeli society found it much easier to deal with the image of the Jew as resister and fighter, even if he or she ended up as a victim, than with the Jew as the victim of another’s perception, irrespective of his or her actions. In other words, while Jewish resisters were glorified, “passive” Jewish victims were treated with greater distance and discomfort. Conversely, the early tendency in the United States to view the Jews as a whole as political opponents of the Nazi regime, while it glorified them, did very little justice to their actual fate and arguably made for an integration into American society based on silence and repression. The Nazi regime, of course, ultimately differentiated only between part and full Jews, and occasionally (and temporarily) between Jews who could work and those who could not. Arendt, however, proposed yet another category of Jews, namely, those who in one way or another were complicit in their own genocide, whether (and most especially) as members of the Jewish councils (Judenrate) or as policemen and guards (Kapos) recruited to control the Jewish population in the ghettos and concentration camps. Unlike previous distinctions, then, between types of Jewish victimhood, Arendt’s notion of Jewish complicity blurred the boundaries between victims and perpetrators. Indeed, it is likely that precisely because there was a tremendous amount of resentment toward such Jewish “collaborators” among both the survivors and the Jewish communities that received them (especially in Palestine), Arendt’s emphasis on this phenomenon in a public (gentile) forum, well beyond the closed Jewish circles in which it was acknowledged, was perceived as a particularly pernicious type of treason.
In fact Israeli society was preoccupied with precisely these questions long before Eichmann was brought to justice there. During the 1950s, the country was shaken by the Kasztner Affair, in which Israel Kasztner, a Zionist activist in Hungary who tried to strike a deal with Eichmann to save the Jewish population there, was accused of collusion with the enemy and of saving only members of his own family. Even earlier, the reactions of Zionist agents, sent to European “displaced persons” camps to encourage and organize their immigration to Palestine, revealed the contradictory attitude of young members of the Yishuv toward the survivors. One of them wrote, “I believe that those who survived lived because they were selfish, and cared first and foremost for themselves.” Another insisted that “they became used to seeing death, they trampled on the living and on the dead and the will to help others was almost extinguished in them.” Yet a third agent asserted that “among the survivors there are people, whose souls were cleansed even by the crematorium and who speak with such Zionist fervor, that I cannot imagine any circumstance, or any individual who could surpass them.” The painful encounter with the survivors was also the subject of a popular novel published in Israel in 1965 and has remained a controversial issue in Israel to this day. Thus Idith Zertal’s recent study From Catastrophe to Power, which argues that the Yishuv’s political leadership organized illegal immigration primarily in order to enhance the demographic and military strength of the future state, has been the center of yet another public debate on the utilization and reception of the survivors in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Arendt’s case is related in yet another way to more subtle, albeit not always cautious, distinctions between and within categories of victims and perpetrators. Educated in Germany and steeped in the German philosophical tradition, Arendt was unwilling to condemn German culture per se or to speak of German collective guilt for the Holocaust. However critical she might have been of early postwar Germany’s failure to face up to its murderous past, its tendency to concentrate on its own victimhood and reconstruction, and its lack of empathy for the victims of the Nazi regime, she rejected interpretations that linked Hitler with earlier German history or assertions about the unique (or uniquely evil) German “character.” The product of that remarkable, if also deeply troubled, Jewish-German (negative) symbiosis of Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, Arendt was affiliated for a while with Zionism and retained a strong association for much of her adult life with Martin Heidegger, the great German philosopher who greeted the advent of the Nazi regime with so much enthusiasm. In this she had a great deal in common with many other German Jews in prestate Palestine and Israel, whose allegiance to and love for the culture from which they had been forced to flee was expressed in the libraries of German classics they had taken along with them on their way to exile in the Jewish homeland. These were not “self-hating Jews” but men and women who refused to condemn the world that had been part and parcel of their own identity and formation, even if they would never return to it. The survivors of German Jewry knew their enemies better than anyone else, since they had lived in their midst until they were finally driven out. Their ambivalence resulted from the fact that, while enemy and victim were so much alike, having largely shared the same educational and cultural background, they were also ultimately defined as stark opposites, so that their fellow citizens became their potential murderers, and they in turn were transformed from patriotic Germans into often ardent, even if at times somewhat schizophrenic, Zionists.
This was only part of the troubled relationship between enemies and victims within the Israeli discourse on national identity. Zionism had formed in Europe as a reaction to political antisemitism, the view that “the Jew” was European society’s most dangerous and yet elusive enemy. The Zionists, in turn, presented gentile European society as the greatest danger to Jewish existence and promoted the idea of a Jewish state, applying to it the very model of Central European nationalism that had increasingly viewed Jews as an alien race but combining it with traditional Jewish attitudes to their non-Jewish environment. Yet the new Jewish state was created in the Middle East, on the rim of an Arab and Islamic world, while the original vision of Zionism was to establish a political and social entity very much in line with liberal or socialist ideas brought over from Europe. This made for a great deal of ambivalence vis-a-vis Europe, seen as both the persecutor of the Jews and the model for an independent Jewish existence. Conversely, while Zionism aspired to create a “new Jew” closer to the ancient Israelites than to Diaspora ancestors, the only available example for this figure was the Arabs, who for their part increasingly resisted Jewish nationhood in Palestine. Hence the ambivalent attitude toward the Arab world, which was seen as both a model for a resurrected Hebrew culture and its worst enemy. Meanwhile, the arrival of large numbers of Sephardim from Arab countries to the newly established state was also greeted with mixed feelings. For while these “Orientals” appeared closer to the Hebraic precursors of the modern Jew, their traditional culture, social norms, and religious practices seemed positively alien and primitive to the largely secular Ashkenazim, even if it had the exotic appeal of Biblical times.
All this made for a complex process of inversion and denial, whereby antisemitic stereotypes were employed by Zionism both in order to mold a new type of Israeli Jew and to forge a negative image of the Arab, while the virtues of that very European civilization from which the Zionists had emigrated were both appropriated by the state and set against the “oriental” nature of its Arab environment. At the same time, and in apparent contradiction to this first image, the Arabs were presented as the local manifestation of European antisemitism, and fighting them as a continuation of, and this time victory over, the genocidal aspirations of gentile Europe. Thus the Israelis could see themselves both as an outpost of European civilization on the fringe of barbarism and as winning the war against the collaborators of Nazism that their European ancestors had lost. Ironically, if the Arabs saw the Jewish state as a modern reenactment of the Crusades, to be ultimately destroyed by a latter-day Saladin, the Jewish memory of the Crusaders pictured them as the precursors of Europe’s anti-Jewish pogroms, stretching from the Middle Ages all the way to Hitler; and if the Arabs saw the Jews as European colonizers, the Zionists claimed to have regained their ancestral homeland, whence they had been exiled into a two-thousand-year-long existence as the perennial victims of European civilization.