Recognized today as an event of momentous scale and implications, the Nazi-attempted genocide of the Jews has elicited a wide range of responses and interpretations. Having traumatized a vast number of individuals, the Holocaust was also the occasion of a collective historical trauma. Hence, while coming to terms with its reality and ramifications was initially delayed, it can now be said to have projected its impact both forward and backward in time, an explosion of destructive energy at the heart of Western civilization that compels us to rethink our assumptions about the nature of humanity and culture, history and progress, politics and morality.
Accepting the centrality of atrocity for our time, however, does not mean unanimity about its implications for our view of the world. Indeed, the urge to discover the lessons of the event is often accompanied by a desire to relegate it to a no-longer-relevant past. Both the insistence on applicable lessons and the refusal to integrate genocide into our self-perception derive from and serve to legitimize a variety of contending ideological, philosophical, and political stances. Yet neither the Final Solution, nor its subsequent analysis, can be understood without taking into account the wider historical framework, in which reactions to the first collective trauma of the century, World War I, are of paramount importance. In trying to make sense of that initial instance of mass industrial killing in Europe, some viewed it, during the interwar period, as a mere aberration and hoped against hope to return to what Stefan Zweig called the “world of yesterday.” Among those who recognized immediately after the war that it embodied the terrifying destructive potential of modern society, some sought shelter in militant pacifism, others rushed to endorse a utopian (and increasingly violent) revolutionary communism, and others still embraced the nihilistic rhetoric of fascism or Nazism, which glorified and aestheticized war, death, and destruction. The origins of the Holocaust cannot be grasped without understanding Europe’s first attempts to draw lessons from the butchery of 1914—18.
Launched with the technological violence of World War I, the twentieth century has come to a close filled with echoes of the Holocaust, reverberating with seemingly growing intensity in museums and lecture halls, cinemas and television documentaries, scholarly works and fiction. In part this has to do with the urgency felt by the witnesses of the event to establish the Holocaust’s veracity before they finally leave the scene and can no longer transmit the unmediated memory of an atrocity all too often described as unimaginable. But repeated cases of genocide and atrocity since 1945—even if Western observers are reluctant to associate them with our own civilization—have also intensified public interest in the causes and nature of that undeniably Western product, the Nazi death factories. Indeed, the Holocaust increasingly appears as the core event of a century whose promise of moral and material progress so often ended up in carnage, disillusionment, and despair. What Eric Hobsbawm has called “the age of extremes” combined improvements in living standards and concentration camps, mass production and industrialized murder, totalitarianism and moral relativism, boundless optimism and radical evil.
Some might argue that all we can learn from Auschwitz is that it was and remains possible to annihilate millions of people rapidly and efficiently, with little protest and resistance. Others would counter that in the end, Nazism was crushed, Communism collapsed, and a relatively humane democracy has emerged as an ideal—if not a reality—in much of the world. One could also claim that rather than evaluating the lessons of the Holocaust, what deserves scrutiny is the very need for such lessons, and especially the urge to derive a message of hope and affirmation, courage and dignity, from one of history’s darkest periods. But whatever is one’s position, the Holocaust has come to play an important role in people’s views of the past, understanding of the present, and expectations of the future. This can be seen by examining some attempts to draw lessons from the Holocaust, in the areas of politics and ideology, religion and morality, psychology and sociology, history and education. If there is room to criticize the use of atrocity to justify ideological agendas, it is nevertheless true that studying the Holocaust is the best means to prevent its mystification. At the same time, while those who study the past hope to learn from it, history has taught us that its lessons are precariously tenuous guides for the future. Hence the central tension in this undertaking is between the historical decontextualization of the Holocaust, on the one hand, and the ideological and self-serving biases that may inform its study, on the other.