Raul Hilberg Obituary

Raul Hilberg, one of the most eminent Holocaust historians, died a few days back. An obituary from the London Times and another report from sign and sight.

Only a few months back I read an abridged version of The Destruction of European Jews and also his short autobiography The Politics of Memory. I had written about the later on the blog some time back (link here, scroll down). The holocaust book is quite tough to read even in the short abridged version and not for the obvious reason. If anyone had any doubt about history being an empirical and scientific subject one should check this book. There are charts, figures, tables galore in the book. The victims and and the victimisers both remain hidden behind the numbers. Instead what we get is a detailed account of bureaucracy, who reported to him, who gave orders to whom, the numerous time tables, how the whole mind-bogglingly complex operation was executed in even more mind-bogglingly efficient fashion. (His academic background was not history but political theory and public administration. His area of specialisation before he embarked on the project was the structure and history of the Prussian bureaucracy). It was actually the whole point. It was precisely the way real human beings lost themselves in the maze of bureaucracy that made possible their transformation into both, (often willing) victims and also oppressors. If it sounds similar to the more famous thesis of Hannah Arendt it is because she used his book as a primary source for her reportage on the Eichmann trial.

I was very surprised (and slightly disappointed too) by his autobiography. I was expecting some cathartic account of how he came to devote his whole life on one subject but instead it is a bitter account of his struggle for academic recognition. He was extremely unpopular with the Jewish establishment mainly for insisting that there were no Jewish heroes in the Holocaust and extremely critical account of zionists and jewish political figures during the war. His own academic career remained less than stellar though he belatedly came to be recognized as one of the founders of the academic discipline of holocaust studies. I was also hoping to find out his views Germany and Austria (he was born in Vienna) in his autobiography but he doesn't really elaborate on the subject though he says that he respects most of the younger generation of German historians.

Wikipedia entry with more links here. And don't miss his interviews in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah too. One clip here.

Two Books About Holocaust

The Holocaust in American Life by Peter Novick

Novick's book is not a history of Holocaust, it is the history of reception of Holocaust, specially in America. It basically tries to answer the question, why is it that at the turn of the millennium, after more than fifty years of the historical event and thousands of miles from its site, the Holocaust has come to loom so large in the American national consciousness. How it has become the mainstay of Jewish collective consciousness and identity and how it shapes their and in turn American relationship to Israel. In the process it paints a damning picture of Jewish leaders and organizations and the whole rhetoric of Holocaust commemoration. He doubts if Holcoaust has any "useful" lessons and "whether the prominent role the Holocaust has come to play in both American Jewish and general American discourse is as desirable as most people seem to think it is." Not many people will agree initially with his statements but in the end he has amassed such a weighty mass of evidence in his support that his arguments look irrefutable. The book is also saved by its tone which is always scholarly and subservient to sober facts and arguments which saves it from becoming just another anti-Israel polemic. In fact he has little time for all the talk of "the Israel Lobby" and the "jewish neocons" and other conventional left wing objections related to the topic.

Novick starts with the immediate post war years and shows how holocaust was completely marginalised at that time. Jews didn't want themselves to be identified as victims and they were more eager to be assimilated into the mainstream American society. The most important reason however was the cold war which made American find common cause with Germany in order to denounce Russia. The cold war ideologues argued about the theories of totalitarianisms and claimed the communism and nazism were "basically the same." He also mentions the broadway and hollywood adaptation of Anne Frank's diary which expunged all the Jewish references from the original work and instead emphasised universal "message" of the book.

The turning point in the Holocaust reception came in the late sixties and early seventies when Israel was involved in wars with its Arab neighbours. Although the dangers to Israel were highly exaggerated, there was a general feeling among the jews that another Holocaust was just around the corner. The Jewish leaders also exploited the fact that Americans, both Jews and Gentiles, didn't do enough to save the Jews the last time. After that Holocaust vocabulary became inextricably linked to the unending travails of Israel and middle east conflicts.

He also discusses the establishment of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC in detail. In particular he points out how jewish leaders lobbied to turn it into an institution dedicated exclusively to Jewish suffering. Elie Wiesel comes across as a less than admirable figure in the end. Apparently he and other people involved with the museum lobbied against the inclusion of the Armenian genocide by claiming that "they want to steal our holocaust" to which Novick adds that "Jews are the permanent gold medalists in the Olympics of victimization."

Personally I completely agree with Novick when he shows his impatience with people who see Holocaust in some mystical religious sense. People like Elie Wiesel for example who thinks that the only proper response to holocaust is that of "awe" and any attempts at rational explanation and historical comparison and analysis is morally wrong, even blasphemous. This is just plain nonsense, even insulting to so many victims of other historical atrocities. Novick's other claim that it has no "useful" lesson for us, I find less palatable. Again there are people who will draw their banal lessons from the holocaust and even more reprehensible is the tendency of vicariously identifying with the victims and wallowing in the sentimentalism of it all. But having said that it still remains one of the most extreme events in human history and it deserves to be understood and remembered. For me personally, the main interest is in the way it negates the idea of moral and political progress, and even the very idea of European culture and civilization in the way slavery , imperialism and other atrocities do not.

In conclusion I think it is a brilliant and very provocative historical survey and a very courageous and admirable one, specially in the way he approaches such a sensitive topic without devolving into ready-made anti-semitic or chauvinistic arguments. Some very good articles about the book from The Nation, Village Voice and an excellent discussion on Slate.

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The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian by Raul Hilberg

Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of European Jews is considered to the be one of the foundational work of the academic discipline of the Holocaust studies. Hilberg was born in Vienna where he spent his childhood. His parents emigrated from Vienna just before the Anschluss, German annexation of Austria. Most of his relatives were not as lucky and they were killed in the Holocaust. This is his autobiography but those who, like me, are looking for personal reflections about why he chose this discipline and his thoughts on the subject will the disappointed. He seems to be like a model of a mono-maniacal and obsessed scholar and researcher whose entire life is sublimated into the subject or at least that's the impression one gets from reading the book.

After a brief matter of fact prelude about his childhood and family life in Vienna and his experiences as an American soldier in Germany he jumps directly to his main subject - how he came to write his Holocaust book. As discussed in detail in Peter Novick's book too, the fifties and sixties were not the ideal time for the book to the be published and he had to struggle for almost a decade before any publisher agreed to bring it out. The most controversial part of his thesis was the fact that he chose the German bureaucratic documents as the main primary sources for his history and as a result in his book jews remained faceless and anonymous victims. He was also extremely critical of the role of Jewish leaders and his conclusions that it was their accommodation and cooperation with the Nazi bureaucracy that made the whole murderous system so efficient, which was most unpalatable for the publishers and critics in general. In fact Hannah Arendt cites his book many times in her Eichmann in Jerusalem and comes at similar conclusions, which was again highly controversial.

The general tone of his book is sobering and very bitter. He was repeatedly accused of accusing Jews of having a "ghetto mentality", "a collective death wish" and that they "went to death chambers like sheep." He never really tackles any of these accusations in detail, just brushes all of them in exasperation. In the end I kind of agreed with the assessment of the reviewer who called it "that rarity of a contemporary autobiography that is too short." It is one of those books where you look for what is not said, what is absent. It is that reticent and reserved in tone. Readable and interesting but mostly inconsequential I think. By the way, there is an unforgettable interview of him in Claude Lanzmann's documentary Shoah. Here is a clip in which he talks about the diary of Adam Czerniakow who was the administrator of the Warsaw ghetto. Hilberg also edited his diaries about which he talks in this book too.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem is considered a classic work of reportage and political analysis and now having just read it I feel all the praise is entirely deserved. I had earlier read some articles about the book and formed at an entirely incorrect idea of what was there in it. Contrary to my perception, and also as the widespread usage of the famous phrase "Banality of Evil" would indicate, she doesn't trivialize or minimize the responsibility of those who committed the crimes. The feeling that we all must in some mysterious way share the guilt of the Nazis, just because they were human beings like the rest of us, is a sentimentality she explicitly deplores. In fact she is very critical of all those, both on the defence and on the prosecution side, with the tendency to "paint general pictures" (actual words of a judge which she approves of) in stead of concentrating on the nuts and bolts, the concrete matters of the case ("The purpose of the trial is to render justice, and nothing else; even the noblest of ulterior purposes[...]can only detract from the law's main business: to weigh the charges brought against the accused, to render judgment, and to mete out due punishment."). She is also very frank on the "I was a small fry" defence:

"We heard the protestations of the defense that Eichmann was after all only a 'tiny cog' in the machinery of the Final Solution, and of the prosecution, which believed it had discovered in Eichmann the actual motor. I myself attributed no more importance to both theories than did the Jerusalem court, since the whole cog theory is legally pointless and therefore it does not matter at all what order of magnitude is assigned to the 'cog' named Eichmann. In its judgment the court naturally conceded that such a crime could be committed only by a giant bureaucracy using the resources of government. But in so far as it remains a crime—and that, of course, is the premise for a trial—all the cogs in the machinery, no matter how insignificant, are in court transformed back into perpetrators, that is to say, into human beings."

In fact most of her book attempts to prove how crucial Eichmann's role was in the whole nitty-gritties of logistics required for the murder of such an industrial scale. Eichmann was no raving lunatic, but he was also an extremely focused, energetic and enthusiastic bureaucrat. Reading any account of the the Holocaust the first thing that strikes the reader is that how overwhelmingly complex the whole operation was and yet how streamlined and how efficient. Most of the book is about how Eichmann with his rather small team ran these transportation and logistics business. The book is divided into different chapters detailing the role Eichmann played in each part of Europe. It mostly reads like a straight-forward basic narrative, densely packed with facts and only occasionally laced with Eichmann's own statements in the court which sometime corroborate the historical facts she presents but most often they do not. She discusses why the deportation was successful in some places and why it failed (comparatively) in other parts -- specially in Scandinavian countries and most notably in Denmark and Bulgaria (the only "hopeful" part of the whole unimaginably grim narrative.) Reading the role he played in France and specially Hungary, where he managed to send more than fifty thousand Jews to Auschwitz in a little over a period of a month during the last stages of the war, leaves one in no doubt about his culpability.

Arendt also shows that Eichmann's own understanding of the ethical issues involved was remarkably perceptive. In one of the hearing sessions he startled everybody by quoting from Kant's Critique of Practical Reason. He said, "I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws." He later added that soon he understood that it was not possible to live according to this rule and he had to distort it to mean that the "general laws" in Kant's dictum become Fuhrer's whims and fancies. The Categorical Imperative of Hitler--a law binding for all his subjects! He also says that citizens of legal states are lucky and that he was not a lucky person in that regard. This is also the essence of totalitarianism. The state as the arbiter of good and evil...the snuffing of human individuality and spirit.

Incidentally the phrase with which the book is most associated with occurs only once. Throughout the hearing Arendt notes Eichmann's fondness for cliches, or "winged words" to use Eichmann's exact words, some kind of a meta-cliche. Even in the court he boasted himself with outlandish phrases and expressions. Describing his last words Arendt says:

"After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men." It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us -- the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.

This banality, that comes out in his use of empty words and phrases, was just a symptom. It was a lack of personality, an inner self, that snuffed the "moral law within" that Kant talks of. (In fact her usage of Eichmann's quotes are frequent sources of black humour in the book. In one of the episodes he talks about the "forest of difficulties" that he had to face!) Eichmann was a true product of a totalitarian state. Abuse of language and denial of any introspective and rational thought is one of the main tools of totalitarian state as anyone who has read Orwell would know. The Germans went way further in the direction, because German language in particular is very amenable to lofty abstractions and phrases. Many critics and thinkers like George Steiner and Theodor Adorno have commented on this aspect of how language was turned into an instrument of evil and a tool of dehumanisation by the Nazis and that after the Holocaust we can never use the language in the same way we did before, specially the German language. She doesn't dwell on this topic all that much. Rather disappointing because this is what her "banality of evil" thesis is about.

Apart from the "Banality of Evil" the other most controversial part of the book is her discussion of the role of Jewish leadership in the whole affair. She bitterly criticises the way they kept negotiating with the Nazi authorities, even doing most of the difficult work for them by identifying and numbering all the Jews under their jurisdiction. She doesn't accuse Jews of having a ghetto mentality or being weak of character or believing in hope against hope and going to the gas chambers "like a sheep." She actually criticises the prosecution lawyer who according to her dared to put forward such "heartless" questions to the witness, in a bid to promote the image of the "fighting jew" as opposed to the "victim jew." All in all, her indictment of the Jewish leaders is extremely damning. It is also now a widely held opinion among the scholars of the subject. Had there been anarchy among the Jews in the beginning itself, the scale of devastation would have been much less.

In the end she raises lots of small quibbles about the International law, about how legal it was try Eichmann in Jerusalem, about whether the charges should have been crimes against humanity or crimes against Jewish people. She also doubts the intentions of the Israeli government in the whole affair, she disapproves of the "pedagogic" turn the trial took over time, in general the way it was being "politicised" by various interested parties. In this way she is also remarkably prescient, specially now that it has become such a politically charged subject in international politics. It was in that trial that it first started. But after all the reservations about the manner in which the trial was conducted and the political aims the Israeli government wanted to achieve, she is remarkably clear about the final outcome. She ends the book with the following words of the judge:

For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations--as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world--we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

Holocaust Literature: A Brief Note

The Guardian reports about a discovery of a young Polish girl's diary who died in Auschwitz, calling her a "Polish Anne Frank." The book blog provides a necessary, if predictable, response.. warning that:

Much of the interest in Anne Frank was to do with the story of a young girl approaching womanhood and her experience of first love. The coverage of Rutka's diary has wasted no time getting to this aspect of the story: "She described her crush on a boy named Janek and the anticipation of a first kiss," runs the Associated Press story, which goes on to quote this passage: "I think my womanhood has awoken in me. That means, yesterday when I was taking a bath and the water stroked my body, I longed for someone's hands to stroke me... I didn't know what it was, I have never had such sensations until now." This is the Holocaust as chick-lit, bringing a disturbing element of sex and voyeurism.

The last line is slightly harsh I think but the point is well made. There will definitely be readers who will try to usurp Rutka's experiences for their own emotional needs in the process of "identification" with the story and the character. This is actually the danger with all narrativizing. Just that in case of Holocaust, and even in case of similar events of less magnitude, this style of reading becomes a grave moral problem. This is the reason why I don't think Anne Frank's diary should be on the reading lists of young people or people who read like young people do -- look for "story" and characters they can "identify" with. I am not denying the literary merits of these human documents but their role should be to complement historical reading -- reading about figures, processes, bureaucracies and other impersonal details -- so that these are rescued from meaningless abstractions back to emotional and real specifics. The purpose should be to commemorate and mourn the victims and not to find a cathartic outlet for one's own petty emotional grievances.

Also another Holocaust diary. This time a young boy....

Explaining Hitler

When asked if there was any meaning in the Holocaust, historian Raul Hilberg is said to have replied, "I hope not." This is from a man who has spent almost his entire life studying that single event in history! (He is the author of three volume The Destruction of European Jews which is considered a standard reference work on the subject.) This apparent paradox is also the main running theme of Ron Rosenbaum's excellent book Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. We have to search for answers and yet resist the false consolations that those answers may provide.

Holocaust can be a bewildering subject for a beginner (such as myself). And I am not just talking of its unavoidable lugubriousness of the subject which can take an emotional toll. Intellectually too there are just too many books, too many interpretations, too many theories. Even if one has time, energy and motivation, a serious and systematic study on one's own is impossible. In this respect Rosenbaum's book fits the need of a good overview and a work of synthesis very well. It is written in the form of an extended reportage, so Rosenbaum doesn't just recount all the theories but rather he goes to meet all the scholars and experts on the subject personally, he muses and speculates on their psychological motives, sometimes even spars with them, at other times expresses his doubts and then moves on to the next subject. Behind every theory and explanation he invariably sees some need to extract meaning or consolation and in this way he casts doubt on everything.

Modern trends in historiography have invariably minimized the role of individual agency in historical affairs, instead they are more interested in abstract socio-cultural-environmental forces which shape individual and collective destiny. In other words they are more interested in the "system" rather than specific human beings. Rosenbaum resists this school of thinking arguing that it minimizes Hitler's role and responsibility for what happened. In historian's terminology this is called the "functionalist" school. At the opposite side is the "intentionalist" school which says that the initiative for the Holocaust came from above, i.e. from Hitler. (Wikipedia has more details.)

Even within the two schools there are multitudes of theories. For example, what was the source of Hitler's anti-semitism? There are a host of wild speculations, all unverifiable of course. Most of them are popular only because they are sensational and prurient in nature. Unfortunately a major part of the book is concerned with these pseudo-historical and psychosexual nonsense. I won't get into all that here. The other question about when Hitler decided on the "final solution" is equally controversial. The dominant view is that he decided on the exact course of action late into the world war. Did he even give exact orders? Another controversial question because no document with Hitler's authorization of the program exists. Other Hitler questions are equally intractable. Was he consciously evil? Or was he convinced of his moral and intellectual rectitude? Again most historians and philosophers take the later view, in line with the thinking about evil in western philosophy.

Rosenbaum doesn't like it but most of the serious and important work on the subject has happened in the functionalist camp. No one really believes in the "No Hitler No Holocaust" theory anymore. And the debate there is considerably more bitter too. Was it the thousand years of Christian anti-semitism? Was there something specific about the German culture and history that turned ordinary anti-semitism into an "eliminationist anti-semitism," as Daniel Goldhagen, author of the controversial bestseller Hitler's Willing Executioners claims? Were bureaucrats like Adolf Eichmann just morally indifferent careerists or were they motivated by a specific hate? In other words was it a case of "the banality of evil" as Hannah Arendt claimed? Rosenbaum dismisses such glib pronouncements, justifiably so I think. Rather disappointingly he doesn't get into the famous "Historian's Dispute" -- the debate among the German historians about Holocast, spurred by right wing historians who claimed that Nazism was a response to Bolshevism, which was equally worse evil. (Wikipedia link here.)

There are many other questions like: was Holocaust unique or was it just another genocide? Again no consensus. Or what does holocaust say about the existence of God and the problem of evil? How do theologians respond to it? There is apparently an entire branch of theology dedicated to this topic called Holocaust theology. It is a fascinating topic and also very painful to read about how people of faith think about the event. There is also a bizarre section where George Steiner talks of the Jewish "invention of conscience" and "the blackmail of transcendence" by three of the most famous Jews in history -- Moses, Jesus and Karl Marx. All these ideas he gives to the fictional Hitler in his novel The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. Hitler in the book also says that jews invented the concept of "master race." Well in that sense every religion is a racist ideology, and indeed they invariably are.

There are also so many other things in the book which I didn't mention in the summary above. It is quite thick actually almost 700 pages. Though I would personally have preferred a more sober, academic and concise survey but his journalistic freewheeling style also makes this book somewhat a pageturner, though in the end also very depressing. Some more details in other reviews here and here.

On Tadeusz Borowski

This is a detail from Bird's Hell, a work by the German expressionist painter Max Beckmann. It is featured on the cover of Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski's This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman, a collection of stories, or rather fictional memoirs, set in Auschwitz. Neither the horror of the image nor the brutal title can prepare one for what is inside. Reading, writing and thinking about holocaust is always extremely difficult, but even by that standard this book presents something different altogether.

Borowski was a Polish gentile and a member of the Polish resistance against the Nazi occupation. In 1943, when he was 21, he was arrested along with his fiancee and was sent to Auschwitz. He survived because he was made a Kapo (a lower administrative official), one of the privileged cogs in the vast machine of extermination. Also by the time he arrived there, the gassing of non-Jews had ceased at Auschwitz. All the stories in the volume are narrated in first person, presumably based on himself. They read more like autobiographical fragments or snapshots of nightmare visions and less like full-fledged narrative. Often most of the story is just a snapshot of conversations that these privileged guards have between themselves and with other prisoners, both in the labour camp and those who are going to die. There is no psychology, no philosophy, no reflection, there are occasionally a few startling phrases but otherwise it is just brute facts, honest, lacerating and simple.

After the war Borowski returned to Poland, married his fiancee (who had also survived) and later joined the communist party and started writing political tracts for them. It soon proved too much for him and in a cruel twist of fate he took his own life by inhaling gas from the gas oven. He was only 29. Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet and Nobel laureate, wrote about Borowski in his book The Captive Mind. The character "Beta" was actually Borowski in real life. In his portrait Milosz points to Borowski's selling out for shallow ideological goals as the main reason for suicide which might well be the case. But after reading these stories it is not difficult to imagine the fate of whoever wrote them. They are all filled not really with Survivor's guilt but rather survivor's rage, and extreme rage at that. It is a rage against the fundamental "will to life", against hope and against so called human values. The stories seem to suggest that it is these which are at the root of the Hobbesian moral anarchy that he witnessed at Auschwitz, not among the victimizers (they are mostly in the background) but rather among the victims themselves. Holocaust is generally seen as presenting a "limit-case" (to use a mathematical terminology) for different aesthetic, ethical and philosophical theories... in other words it is place where theories break down and traditional categories collapse. These stories here do show how.

I didn't mention anything about the individual stories because I didn't know what to make of or even how to read them in particular terms.

Sign and Sight reprints a translation of a German review of his story collection. Wikipedia has more information, it also links to his translated poetry. One of them here:

Night Over Birkenau

Night again. Again the grim sky closes
circling like a vulture over the dead silence.
Like a crouching beast over the camp
the moon sets, pale as a corpse.

And like a shield abandoned in battle,
blue Orion- lost among the stars.
The transports growl in darkness
and the eyes of the crematorium blaze.

It's steamy, stifling. Sleep is a stone.
My breath rattles in my throat.
This lead foot crushing my chest
is the silence of three million dead.

Night, night without end. No dawn comes.
My eyes are poisoned from sleep.
Like God's judgement on the corpse of the earth,
fog descends over Birkenau.

The Author of Himself: Marcel Reich-Ranicki

An autobiography of a book reviewer sounds inconceivable but this is no ordinary autobiography. The back cover claims that more than half a million hardback copies of this book were sold in Germany and that it was "no. 1 bestseller for 53 consecutive weeks." Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the polish-jewish literary critic, is obviously a very popular figure in Germany. He is also loathed vigorously, mostly by resentful authors. He has the reputation (unjustified he says) of being a "literary executioner." One of his collection of book reviews is called "Nothing but Drubbings." His enemy list contains who's who of modern German literature. He once appeared on the cover (it was actually a montage) of the Speigel magazine literally tearing apart a Gunter Grass novel. Elsewhere the Austrian writer Peter Handke portrayed him as a "barking and slobbering 'leader of the pack' in whom 'there was something damned' and whose 'killer lust' had been further enhanced by the ghetto." Another writer Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, called for a machine gun to mow him down, and the poet Christa Reinig wrote fantasies about his death from cancer. There was also a book by Martin Walser called Death of a Critic, a satirical narrative about an author murdering a reviewer. It was highly controversial because of accusations of anti-semitism. He is also accused of being power-hungry, dogmatic, conservative and prone to exaggerations and simplifications in his reviews (he hosts a very popular TV show.) He relates all these charges and stories and tries to answer them with a remarkable good humour. It really makes for a very entertaining reading. And I am not even familiar with all the authors he talks about in the book. I have barely heard of names like Max Frisch, Wolfgang Koeppen, Walter Jens and many others.

MRR was born in Poland to Jewish parents. The family emigrated to Berlin in the late twenties where he grew up and had his early education. The first section of the book where he describes his introduction to the "land of culture" are the best. He seems to remember every single book he read, every single play he attended and not just names, his detailed impressions of every single performance. He even remembers his school assignments (his essay on Georg Buchner ran to three pages)! It is a riveting account. Soon however dark clouds gather. He is first denied a place in the university because he was Jew and soon is deported back to Poland.

Soon after Germany invades Poland and all the Jews of Warsaw are sent to the ghetto. His account of the life in the Warsaw ghetto where he found work in the Jewish council as a german translator is equally riveting. There is also a moving portrait of Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Jewish coucil in the Ghetto in whose office he worked. (There is also a very moving account of Czerniakow's life in the documentary Shoah where Raul Hilberg comments on his diaries.) In the ghetto he also meets the woman who was to remain by his side for the rest of his life. They soon marry in haste because he had a job and as a result he gets the "life number" which meant that he wouldn't be the first to be sent to Treblinka. Soon the deportations start and his parents are sent to the gas chambers. The last words Tosia, his wife, hears from his mother were, "Look after Marcel." He himself alongwith his wife manages to escape after the ghetto uprising and finds himself sheltered by a working class family on the outskirts of Warsaw. The head of the family named Bolek is given to drunken ravings. In one of his Vodka induced ravings he says, ""Adolf Hitler, the most powerful man in Europe, has decreed: these two people here shall die. And I, a small typesetter from Warsaw, have decided: they shall live." They work for him in the basement which is actually a hole in the ground and MRR keeps him entertained by telling stories from literary classics of Shakespeare, Goethe and Kleist. Bolek remains indifferent to the plight of Hamlet or Werther but is moved by the stories of King Lear and Prince of Homburg. After almost two years the Red Army finally arrives on the Polish border and they are finally liberated. Sounds like the stuff for a novel? Well, Gunter Grass fictionalized this story in his novel Diary of a Snail (I haven't read it).

Times Literary Supplement called this book "an unforgettable work of Holocaust literature" which to me sounds like an over-praise. It is very well written but is also a very straight-forward narrative. He touches on the painful paradox of the coexistence of German barbarism and the sublime German culture but never really comes to term with it. He says his fatherland is nether Poland nor Germany, it is German Literature. He never really goes into the complex questions that historians of Germany have been grappling with. How far German culture is to be blamed for what happened? Was it just a work of a few criminal barbarians or was it a more organic result of German cultural history? He never really goes into these things. Which is a pity, because he is at such a vantage position to answer these questions.

There is a brief section in the middle about his life in post-war communist Poland where he worked as a spy, yes a Spy in the London Polish consulate, but is soon disillusioned by the restrictions imposed on him by the communist party and manages to escape to west Germany. His rise there from a lowly book reviewer to the literary editor of FAZ, the most powerful literary position in Germany, is meteoric. The long third section is virtually a parade of who's who of post-war German intellectual history. Gunter Grass, Adorno, Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard, Ingeborg Bachmann, Brecht, and so many others, they are all there. He relates anecdotes, shares his opinions and reflects on the relationships he had with all the writers, almost all of which eventually soured in the end. This section is an extremely fascinating guide to the history modern german literature, told from a very unique point of view.

Overall I was slightly disappointed with it because he mostly skirted things I was personally more interested it. One of these as I mentioned above is the issue of how far should one hold German culture to be culpable for anti-semitism and Nazism. Other issues like German-Jewish relations in post-war Germany or the questions of German guilt are also, if not completely absent, are almost always treated as an aside. He does mention these things but only in bits and pieces, here and there. He never tackles these head-on. In the last chapter he writes about the historikerstreit ("historian's dispute") but then just stops at expressing his disappointment at the whole affair and saying that he was particularly pained because of the involvement of Joachim Fest, an editor at FAZ and a personal friend for many years. He evidently disapproves of these right wing historians who played a major role in the dispute but doesn't discuss what kind of relationship should jews have with Germany, or what whould the new German nationalism look like or what Holocaust means for contemporary Germany.

Still I think these are minor quibbles. In short it is a marvellous account of a truly remarkable life. Must read for anyone interested in modern German history and literature. Some reviews I could find: The Observer and two reviews from TLS here and here.

Shoah

I have been watching the ten hour documentary Shoah directed by Claude Lanzmann for the last few days. I did complete it today and now I feel like hallucinating. It is a unique documentary in the sense that it doesn't have any real historical footage, no background music, seemingly straightforward editing and camera work. Actually it first gives the impression of being "unprofessional" and simplistic but over time it builds up its effects, mainly through the power of repetition of images. Most of the documentary is filled with first person testimonies of survivors, bystanders, perpetrators and historians (actually there is only one historian or expert on the subject interviewed -- Raul Hilberg, author of the three volume history of Holocaust The Destruction of European Jews.) All of these interviews are intercut with scenes of death camps as they exist today. Camera probing the surfaces to find some evidence, almost staring into a silence, a nothingness. There are shots of bleak, ghostly, desolate and ugly landscapes of polish hinterlands, the site of such enormous suffering not long ago. And yes, there are unending and endlessly repeating shots of trains standing or trundling on the railway tracks. It is like some vile, horrifying music which you want to get away from but can't because it has found a place in the subconscious. And all this time the camera always looking for something but finding only silence and absence.

Lanzmann reportedly shot more than a hundred hours of footage over a decade but actually he uses only a handful of testimonies. They are all amazing interviews, whether it is of the survivors or the perpetrators, some of whom he films secretly. A railroad manager claims he never knew what the trains were for, for which he devised timetables. Another says he didn't know the conditions of life in the Warsaw ghetto where he was one of the deputy managers. Lanzmann patiently asks questions and listens and then again prods and asks counter questions.

I found the polish sequences of the documentary most interesting. Lanzmann is obviously hostile to the polish population who did nothing or at least didn't do enough to save the jews. He interviews many polish gentile witnesses some of whom are now living in the homes previously owned by the Jews. He doesn't always gets the "right" answer though--answers which would implicate the Polish population in a more straightforward manner. Though I have not read much about this but I gather that the subject of the Polish-Jewish relations is an extremely controversial one. How anti-semitic the Polish society was? How responsible the Poles were for what happened? This film doesn't answer these questions even though Lanzmann selects some stupid looking peasants and tries hard to make a case against Poland. An old woman for example says, she is now better off than she was then. "Because the Jews are gone, or because of socialism?" asks Lanzmann. No, because before the war she picked potatoes and now she sells eggs! Another one says that it would be nicer had they gone to Israel on their own. Yet another narrates the story of the crucifixion and blood libel that he claims he heard from a rabbi. There is an old train driver who drove thousands of victims to their death. It was terrible, he says, hearing the cries of children in the compartments in the back but he "got used to it" and then there are always the Germans. In the end Lanzmann withholds his judgment about the Poles. The train driver in the end comes across as a more sympathetic figure (comparatively) than the Nazi railway manager who merely gave orders and approved the plans sitting at his office desk.

Lanzmann sef-consciously eschews asking the big questions -- the whys? and what does it mean? In this he follows what Raul Hilberg says in his interview:

"In all my work I have never begun by asking the big questions, because I was always afraid that I would come up with small answers; and I have preferred to address these things which are minutiae or details in order that I might then be able to put together in a gestalt a picture which, if not an explanation, is at least a description,a more full description, of what transpired."

The focus for the entire film is to recreate the experience, not by artificially recreating the life in the camps or using footage, but through the memory of those who personally underwent the experience. I could understand the motivation of this approach but I still find it troubling. The big questions are also important, we have to ask and find answers to those questions, just that we need to resist the easy consolations of explanations. Shoah is not easy to watch, it demands a lot of time, patience and effort but it is a landmark and important work and deserves all of it. Here's a short write-up with some stills and a trailer of the film here.

Still Alive by Ruth Kluger

One major problem with Holocaust literature, or at least with the readers of holocaust literature, is the tendency to reach to conclusions before thinking through what it all means. It doesn't matter whether the conclusions are life-negating or life-affirming, it is the same thing. One wants to summarise the whole thing in some abstraction, like, say, human life has no meaning, or the ideas like the existence of a benevolent, all-powerful God or the idea of the historical progress are preposterous, even insulting and morally reprehensible. There are readers who find life-affirming lessons about how love or "human spirit" always triumphs in the end or how human beings are essentially good, just make them read a few poems and make them listen to a piece by Beethoven and then they will recover their conscience (as shown in the recent award winning film The Lives of Others). It is not that any of these conclusions are not valid or empirically wrong, but rather the whole process reveals this deep-rooted desire to externalise the horror and distance oneself from it. It is as if it were some horror film! One of the main running themes of Ruth Kluger's Holocaust memoir is I think about this. She deeply detests all short-cuts -- sentimentality, emotionalism, cliches, easy comparisons or analogies -- anything which "impedes the critical faculty," as she puts it. That's what sets this book apart from conventional memoirs or works of documentary history. It is a work of literature, and a very serious, provocative and powerful one at that.

Kluger was seven years old in 1938 when Hitler annexed Austria. Most of her early childhood memories are of the progressively increasing discrimination she and her family had to face in the viciously anti-semitic Vienna. Not that she understood what was really happening. One time when the school principal came to teach the kids in her class the Hitler salute which the Jewish children were not allowed to do, this is what she says:

The class dutifully imitated him, while we five or six Jewish kids got to sit in the back. Because the principal was friendly and the teacher visibly embarrassed, I was unsure at first—such is the touching optimism of the young— whether our special status was a privilege or an insult.

Soon after her father, who was a practicing gynaecologist, was arrested by the Nazis on some charges. On returning he fled to Italy and then to France, never to be heard of again. He was believed to have died in the concentration camp, only later did Kluger and her mother came to know that he was instead shot somewhere in the Baltics. Her elder step-brother, who was Czech and who she was very devoted to, met a similar same fate. In 1942 she and her mother were deported to Theresienstadt—-neither a work camp nor a concentration camp, she explains, but a prison ghetto, "the stable that supplied the slaughterhouse." She describes her daily life in the camp in matter-of-fact style interspersed with musings about how she feels about that time from the perspective of her later life.

Two years later they were moved to the Auschwitz-Birkenau which was a real extermination camp with gas chambers and chimneys. After witnessing the horror there her mother suggested that they should commit suicide by running into the electrified fence. She refused without understanding why and her mother accepted it "nonchalantly" as if it was just another proposal in day-to-day life. Then came the selection for life and death. Women between the ages of fifteen and forty-five were chosen for slave labour in a different camp. She had to fudge her age by three years in order to escape the gas chambers. She was initially reluctant and rejected at the first roll call but then after her mother's persistence and the benevolence of a female SS clerk she managed to escape from Auschwitz.

The rest of the memoir is about her life in a slave labour camp in Silesia (in Poland) where soon the Russians arrived and they had to flee again. After the war they spent some time in Germany and then immigrated to US where after lots of initial struggle she pursued a career in studying and teaching literature and retired as a professor of German studies at the University of California at Berkeley.

There are lots of events that she writes about which I haven't mentioned in my summary. Almost everywhere her descriptions are padded with her acerbic and sharp comments from the present perspective. The tone throughout is very aggressive. In fact she writes about how she was reprimanded many times because of her "manners" and herself says that she is very hard to satisfy. She has problems with both left and right, both zionists and anti-zionists. One of the consistent theme of the book is her questioning of these categories and labels again things which shortcut the critical thinking process.

I think there are three main threads in her narrative which stand out however. The first is the holocaust and its legacy. She is bitterly critical of the museum culture which has grown up around the camps. She also deeply resents all easy comparisons and analogies, naive and sentimental symbolisms. She also writes about her relationship with Germany and how the present day Germans are coming to terms with their past. She generally writes approvingly about it with occasional misgivings. She herself was a visiting professor at the University of Gottingen. There is no doubt about Vienna though -- she still hates it. She says it is still highly anti-semitic and deeply fascistic. The second thread and perhaps the most alarming and differentiating feature of the book is how she talks about her mother. She is full of bitterness, anger and rage towards her mother and her feelings are well-reciprocated too (or at least that's what she says)! In fact she mentions in the afterword that the reason why this English edition was written after more than a decade of the publishing of the original German book was that her mother was furious when she read, from a copy someone sent to her from Europe, what her daughter had written about her in the book. After a lot of mutual recrimination she promised her mother that she won't allow any translation to appear in English so nobody around her will know what she had written about her. The rewritten (not translated) version appeared one year after her mother died at the age of 97 in 2000. The book is dedicated to her.

The third important theme of the book is her feminism. She is very conscious and alert about the discrimination she continued to feel even in the so-called free world and not surprisingly she sees this as an extension of the same fascism that she experienced in the camps. At one place she says:

While Germans had to revise their judgment of Jews, however reluctantly and sporadically, they didn't even try to revise their Nazi-bred contempt for women.

Her tone is also remarkably aggressive and straight-forward when she talks about these things. I was reminded of other Austrian women writers like Ingeborg Bachmann and Elfriede Jelinek who have a similar confrontational and strident style and who also see women's oppression as fascism continued via other means. It was in this regard that I found this review in the new york times strange. It is somewhat negative, which can only be explained if the reviewer had some personal grudge with Kluger (Which wouldn't be surprising, she is not of the pleasing type). The reviewer says:

Yet interspersed throughout are strange, sometimes incoherent remarks on feminism. For example, Kluger's bizarre defense of the female guards at Christianstadt on feminist grounds -- she says that ''Nazi evil was male, not female'' and that ''the SS was strictly a men's club'' -- is a wild distortion. This reflexive, outdated feminism, which regards anything male as suspect and all women, even Nazi women, as essentially powerless sisters, seriously mars the book and threatens to undermine its credibility.

I haven't read enough history or sociology but I think it is a well-established fact that all fascist systems have this cult of "masculinity" (so-called) and contempt for "femininity", which they see as a sign of degeneracy, in common. Nazism was no different. Also I don't know what this "outdated" and "reflexive" feminism is that she talks about.

Surprisingly I couldn't find much, reviews or otherwise, about the book on the Internet. This doesn't seem to be a very popular book which is a great shame. It is undeniably a major literary achievement and deserves much wider renown. Very highly recommended!