Advancing Holocaust Studies

Carol Rittner, John K. Roth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000091953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

The growing field of Holocaust studies confronts a world wracked by antisemitism, immigration and refugee crises, human rights abuses, mass atrocity crimes, threats of nuclear war, the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic, and environmental degradation. What does it mean to advance Holocaust studies—what are learning and teaching about the Holocaust for —in such dire straits? Vast resources support study and memorialization of the Holocaust. What assumptions govern that investment? What are its major successes and failures, challenges and prospects? Across thirteen chapters, Advancing Holocaust Studies shows how leading scholars grapple with those tough questions.

Part I

Journeys

Where are you going? That question leads in two directions. One involves travel and destinations. Another includes inquiry and explorations. The second direction does not require movement from one geographical place to another, but the first often entails research and investigations. The question’s dual directions are separable, but often they intersect. By mapping journeys the authors have taken—and are taking still—the chapters in Part I show how advancing Holocaust studies depends on the intersections—sometimes the collisions—that result when travel and inquiry mix and mingle.

The best of the versatile writing—novels, essays, plays—by the Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel includes the brief Holocaust-related dialogues that appear in his books from time to time. Spare and lean, they often consist of a few hundred words or less. These dialogues are distinctive not only for their minimalist quality but also because their apparent simplicity, unidentified settings, unnamed characters, abrupt beginnings, and open endings raise fundamental questions in moving ways. In Wiesel’s A Jew Today, one of those dialogues is called “A Mother and Her Daughter.”

“Where are we going?” it begins. “Tell me. Do you know?” The mother tells her daughter, “I don’t know,” but when the child asks again, “Where are we going?” her mother says, “To the end of the world, little girl. We are going to the end of the world.”¹ Personal and poignant, this dialogue is ominous and dark, reflecting, as it likely does, Wiesel’s attempt to retrieve a conversation that he could not have heard, if it took place, as his mother and little sister approached the gas chambers of Birkenau after he was separated from them there in May 1944.

Where are we going? A Jewish child’s wartime question is a reminder that the Holocaust comprised one journey after another. Roundups and deportations, treks to shooting sites, and trains—everywhere trains—to killing centers were at the Holocaust’s epicenters. Those intersections eventually became departure points for inquiry and explorations, for Holocaust studies, as efforts grew to find out how and why the Holocaust’s travel and destinations came to be and what those realities may portend for responses to the contemporary question, Where are we going?

Moved by Holocaust travel, scholars who study that disaster take one journey after another, often without maps to tell them where they will arrive or what they will find along the way. Odd intersections—sometimes collisions—happen. One of this book’s contributors spent a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary at Auschwitz. On another visit, a rainbow arched that place.

At every turn, study of the Holocaust begins and ends with questions. Those who seek to advance Holocaust studies rarely planned in advance to begin the work that became their passion. Most would say that the Holocaust found them more than they found the Holocaust. But once that intersection is established, the field of Holocaust studies grounds them. Far from putting the question to rest, however, that realization leaves “Where are you going?” unsettled and unsettling. Find out why, and explore where you are going, by traveling into the chapters that follow.

Note

1 Elie Wiesel, A Jew Today, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Random House, 1978), 144.

1
Places I have been

John K. Roth

An American Christian philosopher, I have studied, written, and taught about the Holocaust for half a century.¹ During that time, fundamental assumptions about such work have included the conviction that advancing Holocaust studies could reduce antisemitism, decrease crimes against humanity, limit genocide, and champion human rights. Those goals inspired the creation of magnificent Holocaust museums and research centers, mandates for Holocaust education, international courts of justice, impressive publications, web sites, and films, as well as academic careers, like mine, which depend on the belief that learning and teaching about the Holocaust are essential human activities.

It is scarcely possible to total the financial resources that have been dedicated to such causes and institutions, but the amount is huge. It is scarcely possible to know how much worse off humankind would be if those causes and institutions and the support behind them failed to exist and flourish. But it is also true that advances in Holocaust studies have not been nearly enough to curb antisemitism’s global resurgence, curtail the wrack and ruin of crimes against humanity, check the devastation of genocide, and cut short relentless assaults on human flourishing.

So, key issues loom large: How much ethical weight can Holocaust studies bear? If assumptions about Holocaust studies have been too optimistic, then how should one understand what learning and teaching about the Holocaust are for? What are—what should be—the purposes and aims of Holocaust studies? What difficulties and opportunities are embedded in them? Such questions are personal. As I confront the world’s dismal state during the third decade of the twenty-first century, which includes the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic that wreaks global havoc, I think about the degree to which my life’s investment in Holocaust studies has been ethically worthwhile. In the few productive years that may remain for me as my eightieth year comes and goes, should that commitment remain mine? Why should I encourage colleagues and students to advance Holocaust studies? Responses to those questions require revisiting places I have been.

The right questions

In 1972, when the philosopher Frederick Sontag, my teacher, friend, and colleague, encouraged me to read the writings of Elie Wiesel, I could not have imagined the places I would go and the persons I would meet by following his suggestion. During a sabbatical year in Norway, for example, I spent time in the city of Tromsø, which sits far above the Arctic Circle. Only a few Jews lived in that remote place during World War II, but for the Nazis’ “Final Solution” to be final, the seventeen Jews—mostly from three families—now named on a Tromsø memorial stone had to be identified and incarcerated, transported eventually to far-distant Oslo, and then by sea to the German port at Stettin (today, Szczecin, Poland) before rail shipment to Auschwitz, where all of them were killed. More than any other object I know, that modest memorial stone in Tromsø sums up for me what the “Final Solution” was all about.

In the autumn of 1976, Richard L. Rubenstein introduced me to Michael Berenbaum. Friendship grew, deepened through shared commitment to teaching and writing about the Holocaust. About ten years later, over dinner at the Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington, DC, Berenbaum and I outlined a book called Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications. Our outline emphasized writings frequently studied at the time, most of them authored by Holocaust survivors or pioneering scholars.

Holocaust appeared in 1989 and has been in print ever since. Its contents—most of them first published before 1987, all of them emerging from events that took place long ago—remain significant. In our extremely dangerous world, they may even be more relevant than ever—unless, of course, they aren’t. Consider that possibility by noting that when Wiesel died, at the age of eighty-seven on July 2, 2016, his passing was emblematic of the fact that few Holocaust survivors remain and that the Holocaust itself recedes into the past even as other disasters, real and probable, vie for attention and resources. When Holocaust first appeared, dates like 9/11 and acronyms like ISIS meant nothing. Ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, genocide in Rwanda and Darfur, an ongoing refugee crisis of immense proportions, to say nothing of devastating terrorism, resurgent antisemitism and racism, upsurges of xenophobic nationalism and political tribalism, burgeoning threats of climate change and thermonuclear war, and the global pandemic caused in 2020 by the novel and notorious coronavirus could not have been on computer screens, partly because the technology and communication revolution that now dominates and complicates the world—including “tweets” and “hacking,” “fake news,” and “cyberwarfare”—had barely begun.

In 1989, Berenbaum and I dedicated Holocaust to “our students.” Primarily we had in mind the young women and men who had recently been in our classrooms. Now, those learners are no longer young; like us, they have children and grandchildren. But the original dedication remains fitting because we continue to teach, and what we teach still emphasizes the book’s contents. Voiced from Holocaust testimony and reflection, they remain crucial for currently treacherous times, underscoring what Wiesel called “the right questions,” the most real ones, because they are so fundamental: Who are we? What is right and what is not? What is good and what is most important? Are we doing the best we can? What about God, or is that question absurd? How can we forestall despair and resist injustice? Where are we/should we be going, what are we/should we be doing? What must change to curb and heal the wasting of the world? Are our judgments true? Can our responses to such questions withstand scrutiny, or do they require further inquiry and evidence to support them? In my experience, no event has more power than the Holocaust to raise the right questions, the ones that we need to pursue to help make life worth living. Wrestling with those questions will not be enough to resist further disasters, but that struggle may be a necessary condition for doing so. Therefore, learning and teaching about the Holocaust remain imperative.

For as long as possible

Convened on May 8, 2018, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) as part of its twenty-fifth-anniversary observance, a symposium on “The Ethical and Moral Foundations of Holocaust Studies” was the prequel to this chapter. The day before the symposium, I toured the Museum’s David and Fela Shapell Family Collections, Conservation and Research Center, a $40 million storage and research facility—more than 100,000 square feet in size—that opened in 2017. The Center’s specialized laboratories, equipment, and climate-controlled environments house the Museum’s artifacts, large and small, including more than 100 million pages of documents, 110,000 photographs and images, 1,000 hours of film footage, and more than 16,000 oral testimonies of survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators. Travis Roxlau, the Center’s director, indicated that the Museum’s collection is likely to double during the next ten to fifteen years as aging Holocaust survivors die. Plans for the future project an additional 20,000 square feet of storage space.

One stop at the Center put me in what seemed like a medical operating room. There, a highly trained technician performed exacting “surgery” on a stuffed toy animal, one of the countless many ensnared in the Holocaust. The teddy bear’s repairs, I learned, were not to make it “as good as new” but to prevent more decay. Roxlau and the technician muted sentimentality about the once-cuddled companion. Like the other objects in the Center’s holdings, they said, the teddy bear must be preserved because it is evidence of a crime, an understated but accurate way to identify the Holocaust, for if the Holocaust was not a crime, nothing could be.

An artifact preservation project more impressive than the Shapell Center’s can scarcely be imagined. But, Roxlau stressed, preservation cannot be for eternity, just for as long as possible. No matter how careful the preservation, the Center’s holdings will eventually disintegrate. No matter how hard we try to salvage the material evidence of the Holocaust, Roxlau was saying, it will turn to dust and be no more. My friend Debórah Dwork, a superb historian and a contributor to Advancing Holocaust Studies, calls the Holocaust her compass. It works that way for me as well, orienting my attention, guiding my priorities, and directing my discernment about what’s right and wrong. But what about Holocaust studies and education? No matter how long and well I and my Holocaust-scholar colleagues work, will our efforts also turn to dust and be no more?

Confronting stupidity

Preparation for the 2018 USHMM symposium made me aware of Victoria Barnett’s recent edition of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s brief but powerful essay—written in December 1942—called “After Ten Years.”² His thoughts crafted in seventeen short reflections, Bonhoeffer shared them only with a small circle of friends. In the penultimate section, he wondered whether he and they were still of any use. Then and now, of course, their importance has been huge. The example of their resistance remains, and Bonhoeffer’s writings continue to be studied because they are timely, perceptive, and prophetic. “After Ten Years” fits that description and nowhere more so than in four paragraphs that he called “On Stupidity.” At least implicitly considering that the destruction of the European Jews could not have happened without well-educated people to launch, drive, and sustain it, Bonhoeffer’s observations epitomize the paradox that education does not preclude stupidity, at least not completely. His insights disclose the irony that mass murder not only depends on advanced learning but, stupidly, can thrive within it.

“Stupidity,” wrote Bonhoeffer, “is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.”³ Here’s why Bonhoeffer thought so. “There are human beings,” he observed, “who are of remarkably agile int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: What’s it for?
• Chronology: Events advancing Holocaust studies, 1945–2020
• PART I Journeys
• PART II Challenges
• PART III Prospects
• Index