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The Cunning of History Chapter One
Why should anyone bother to reflect once again on the extermination of Europe's Jews by the Germans thirty years ago? The event is over and done. The world has witnessed a plethora of new horrors since that time. And, given the global threat of overpopulation, it will probably witness the death of even greater numbers by famine in the near future. Why not consign the story to the dustbin of history and be done with it?
Part of the answer lies in the fact that the popular imagination will not let the Nazi period die. People still continue to be fascinated by Hitler, Himmler, and the SS. Books about the Nazis continue to appear. They are bought in large numbers by a curious public. The Nazi period also continues to be a subject of great interest for the movies and television. Much of the popular interest is undoubtedly perverse. Some people use the Nazi story as a vehicle to express their own fantasies of sadistic domination of their peers, a domination they could never achieve in real life. Others may have an unsettling need for total submission that can more safely be expressed in fantasy than reality.
Yet, in spite of the perverse fascination, there is a sound basis for the interest in the period. The passing of time has made it increasingly evident that a hitherto unbreachable moral and political barrier in the history of Western civilization was successfully overcome by the Nazis in World War Il and that henceforth the systematic, bureaucratically administered extermination of millions of citizens or subject peoples will forever be one of the capacities and temptations of government. Whether or not such atemptation is ever again exercised, the mere fact that every modern government possesses such power cannot but alter the relations between those who govern and those who are governed. This power must also alter the texture of foreign relations. According to Max Weber, "The state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory." I Auschwitz has enlarged our conception of the state's capacity to do violence. A barrier has been overcome in what for millennia had been regarded as the permissible limits of political action. The Nazi period serves as a warning of what we can all too easily become were we faced with a political or an economic crisis of overwhelming proportions. The public may he fascinated by the Nazis; hopefully, it is also warned by them.
In studying the Holocaust, the extermination of Europe's Jews, it is necessary to recognize that our feelings may be strongly aroused. Both the Nazis and their victims elicit some very complicated emotional responses from most people. These feelings are important but they can add to our difficulties in arriving at an understanding of what took place. In order to understand the Holocaust, it is necessary to adopt a mental attitude that excludes all feelings of sympathy or hostility towards both the victims and the perpetrators. This is a methodological procedure and, admittedly, an extremely difficult one. Nevertheless, this bracketing is necessary, not only because of the emotions aroused by the Nazis, but also because of the ambivalent reactions Jews inevitably arouse in Western culture. In view of the fact that (a) most Europeans and Americans are the spiritual and cultural heirs of a religious tradition in which both the incarnate deity and his betrayer are Jewish and that (b) the fate of the Jews has been a primary datum used to prove the truth of Christianity from its inception, it is difficult for even the most secularized non-Jew to be without a complex mixture of feelings when confronted with Jewish disaster. These feelings are likely to include both guilt and gratification.
Nor are Jews normally capable of greater objectivity in dealing with the Holocaust. The event has challenged the very foundations of Jewish religious faith. It has reinforced all of the millennia] distrust on the part of Jews for the non-Jewish world. It has also raised the exceedingly painful issue of the role of the Judenrate, the Jewish community councils which everywhere controlled the Jewish communities and which were used by the Germans as a principal instrument to facilitate the process of extermination.
Both Jews and non-Jews have good reasons for responding with emotion to the Holocaust. Were such a response conducive to insight concerning its political and moral consequences, there would be no reason to attempt the kind of bracketing which is here advised. However, some degree of objectivity is necessary in order to understand what took place. It is therefore necessary to withhold, insofar as it is possible, both sympathetic and hostile feelings as we attempt to arrive at some comprehension of the long-range significance of the process by which the Jews of Europe were destroyed.
It is, of course, somewhat easier to assess the meaning of the Holocaust today than it was a generation ago. During and immediately after World War 11, the shock of the experience was too great. As the camps were liberated, brutal media images of survivors who seemed hardly more than walking skeletons were mixed with images of mounds of unburied corpses. The pictures hinted at the frightfulness of what had taken place, but their very horror also tended to obscure comprehension. The moral and psychological categories under which such scenes could be comprehended were hatred, cruelty, and sadism. The past was searched to find parallels with which the event could be understood. Human history is filled with incidents of rapine, robbery, and massacre. It was to such categories that the mind was initially drawn.
The Cunning of History. Copyright © by Richard E. Rubenstein. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
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