Philosophical Witnessing

The Holocaust as Presence

Berel Lang

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781584658269
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In this volume, eminent scholar Berel Lang brings the perspective of philosophical analysis to bear on issues related to the Holocaust. Setting out from a conception of philosophical "witnessing" that expands and illuminates the standard view of the witness, he confronts the question of what philosophy can add to the views of the Holocaust provided in other disciplines. Drawing on the philosophical areas of political theory, ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history, he draws attention especially to the post-Holocaust emphasis on the concepts of genocide and "group rights." Lang's study, which emphasizes the moral choices that now face post-Holocaust thought, inspires the reader to think of the Holocaust in new ways, showing how its continued presence in contemporary consciousness affects areas of thought and practice not directly associated with that event.

I

The Holocaust at Philosophy’s Address

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Philosophical Witnessing

“… And only I have survived to tell you”

To consider the concept of philosophical witnessing in relation to the Holocaust and to genocide more generally, I set out from two classical texts. The first of these is the fragmented quotation from the Book of Job in this chapter’s title: “And only I have survived to tell you.” Job himself appears in that narrative as the victim of a series of afflictions he suffers after God has in effect made a bet with Satan. God is so confident of “his servant Job” that he boasts to Satan that no matter how much Job might be made to suffer, he would remain faithful; Satan disputes this prediction, appealing to a theory of human nature currently familiar as “rational self-interest”: “Of course, Job has been faithful,” Satan challenges God; “why shouldn’t he be? Look at the good life you’ve given him: family, prosperity, health. Change those, however, and see then how he acts.” God rises to the bait and allows Satan to test Job. That takes the form of a series of disasters, beginning with four separate attacks on Job’s possessions and family, each destroying more than the preceding one: property, herds, family members. From each attack, a lone surviving messenger arrives to report to Job his new losses. All four announcements (could it have been the same messenger each time? the narrator does not tell us) conclude with the same statement by the witness: “And only I have survived to tell you.”

This refrain identifies an archetypal motif of witnessing of cultural or collective witnessing, and more specifically, of individual testimonies transmitted from the Holocaust with the repeated statement of Job’s messenger conveying both a literal and a metaphoric reference. In its literal reference, it resembles accounts written from the Holocaust by people who believed that without their words, no record at all would remain of the events engulfing them; nobody would know how what happened happened, perhaps not even that it happened; in effect, they thought of their writing as if “only it alone would survive.” Some of these witnesses survived themselves, some did not. We recall the dramatic statement of Simcha Rotem from the Warsaw Ghetto, who, after having hidden in the ghetto’s sewers during its razing, came to the surface afterward, and reported that, “I said to myself, ‘I am the last Jew.’” Also in the Warsaw Ghetto, Immanuel Ringelblum, organizer of the Oneg Shabbas archives (unequaled as a record of collective witnessing), anticipated the same possibility when he buried in milk cans and other containers the collection of data his team of collectors had assembled, gathering side by side such varied “witness” information as the numbers of the ghetto’s daily death rate together with the programs of evening nightclub acts put on there.¹

Even witnesses aware of the existence of other survivors, however, might be inclined to say with Job’s herdsmen that “only I have survived,” and here we encounter that statement’s metaphorical cast. For it is a feature of witnessing that although variant accounts of the same event usually will have some common elements, differences frequently occur among them some of them evident contradictions, but also others that call attention to aspects of the event that simply have passed unnoticed in other accounts. The contradictions and other extreme differences in such accounts have raised suspicions about the reliability of eye-witness testimony as such, but discrepancies in witnesses’ accounts otherwise may add weight to the testimony they give by citing details that other witnesses had not noticed or had not thought worth the telling.² For two remarkable examples, we find Primo Levi and Thadeusz Borowski reporting aspects of their “survival in Auschwitz” that others who suffered there had not taken note of or at least did not write about (or not as fully): the role of chance in his survival that Levi elaborates and the anger toward the camp victims that Borowski experiences, with striking differences between them also in their reactions overall to what they had confronted.³ Undoubtedly, the motivations and abilities of Levi and Borowski as writers made a difference in their reports as witnesses, but it would be a mistake to analyze witness-narratives as if they had nothing to do with the act (or art) of seeing. A writer’s rhetorical skill would amount to little unless joined to an unusual sense of sight that singled out what was significant to write about. These two capacities in effect act on each other; certainly their connection seems crucial in the act of witnessing. The messenger(s) who brought news to Job had relatively simple events to report on, however distressing; industrial and state-killing on the scale of genocide imposes greater demands on its witnesses first, in order to survive, but also in order to report.

The second text invoked here is the Passover Haggadah, specifically the brief paragraph in it that mandates within the text, for those reading the account of the Exodus at the Seder, that they should recite the narrative as if they themselves had been present at the events re-told, as though the experience described had been their own. This imperative is intensified by the Haggadah’s status as a performance-text: It is not a script being read to an audience by an authority or representative, nor one to be read in silent unison, as certain prayers are in the Jewish liturgy. Rather, its historical account for it is represented as history if not only that is to be read aloud and collectively, the participants speaking it as a means of making it their own; thus also, as recollecting, as themselves remembering the events recounted. The history ostensibly fixed in the distant past, we understand, is the history of the present-day reciter, with the difference between reading collectively and aloud and reading singly and silently emphasizing the former process as a medium of group autobiography. (When else does an informal group read a lengthy text aloud and collectively?)

But this manner of witnessing is also literal and not only imaginative and here, too, is a dramatic connection to the Holocaust. For it is a matter of fact that the Exodus from Egypt and its consummation at Sinai, whether one understands that account as theology or politics or myth, concluded in the shaping of a people or nation. The group that arrived at Sinai had a common language and a leader; they acquired there also a system of law and the promise of a land. These elements, welded together in the peril of their escape the danger together with the overcoming reiterate conditions formulated in numerous studies of nationalism as characteristic of the formation of a people or nation.⁴ And, surely, without the events retold there (or analogous ones), the group-identity that emerged would not have been possible. Still more decisively but less often considered the present-day reciters of the Haggadah not only would not be doing that, but arguably would not be, certainly not in their current identities. In this sense, for reciters of the Haggadah to identify with the people spoken of in the text in effect, to re-witness that event has literal and not only figurative force: The re-tellers are what they are only because those whom they “tell” about were what they were.

Here a connection also emerges to writing about the Holocaust, with a special relation to Holocaust-witnessing, and with a similarly broad reach. The Nazi goal in the Holocaust, in what their coded language named the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” was the destruction not only of the Jews of Europe, but of the Jews as a people (in chapter 9, I trace more systematically the history of the concept, the term, and the fact of “genocide”). Hitler’s designs were directed primarily against the Jews of mainland Europe and Western Asia, but they extended southward (with concentration camps in North Africa) and westward as in the concentration camps planted on the small Channel Isles, the one part of Great Britain that the Nazis occupied with plans for persecuting England’s Jews in the principal island once that was conquered and with threats, beyond that, for the Jews of the Americas. (The latter plans were epitomized in the working title of the “New York Bomber,” a warplane, the Junker 390, designed to bring the United States within bombing range and at least two prototypes of which were flown.)⁵

More simply: Hitler’s intentions were directed against Jews every place they lived, the more deliberately so because of his view of them as a unified group, plotting the limitless spread of their designs. It was the latter, allegedly cosmopolitan impulse, emanating from its particularist source, that the Nazis construed as threatening German national and racial purity. That the Nazis failed to realize their intention to destroy this source should not obscure the intention itself, and here also we see the parallel implication for Holocaust-witnessing in the Haggadah’s stipulation that its readers should read it as if they, too, had been present at the Exodus. For as certainly as any extrapolation from history can be, it follows that if Hitler’s design had succeeded, people living now as Jews would not be either Jews or alive. Both the group and its individual members would have been destroyed, with the consequence that those born since Hitler’s defeat would remain unborn, adding their numbers to the millions murdered. Understandably, we think first of the actual victims of genocide those physically destroyed but what was lost with them also must include those who would have come to life in their vanished futures.

Thus, witnessing becomes a current imperative for Jews alive now who were not in the Holocaust or even born at the time. It is, after all, sheer chance geographical distance, the vagaries of emigration and immigration, Hitler’s own tactical blunders that they were not caught up in the sweep of the destruction; the intention underlying that effort certainly would not have exempted them. It is as if they too may ought to count themselves as survivors: not as having suffered the physical wounds, but as having escaped an ominous near-miss. Such witnessing is more immediate and personal and historical than the projective identification associated with the vivid, larger-than-life characters of literary fictions, for example, intense as these associations often are. The identification involved in this witnessing is not only imaginative, but factual: the life, or more precisely the death, that might have been.

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These general comments on witnessing in relation to the Holocaust and genocide do not yet address the promise in this chapter’s title of “philosophical witnessing” ”philosophical” appearing there not in its colloquial usage (as in “keeping a stiff upper lip”) but referring to “professional” philosophers (and philosophy in its profession) as they have been or might be witnesses. For surely one might expect the “lovers of wisdom,” as their title nominates them, in their constant search for ethical and political foundations, to confront the moral enormity of the Holocaust and of genocide more generally. If not unique in their twentieth-century appearances, these came center-stage during that time and with great intensity: sufficient warrant, it would seem, to hold the attention of anyone thinking seriously about the human condition.

But this has not been the case, and my discussion here turns to the likely reasons for that omission and what might be done to repair it. One preliminary issue, however, arises before those more substantive ones are considered. “Philosophical witnessing?” Is that what philosophers expect or are expected to do? Well, yes, this is the question although even before responding to it, a related, still more rudimentary question occurs about exactly who is being examined here. There is an evident difference between professors of philosophy and philosophers, and this, from both directions: the very idea of “professional” philosophy would have been unrecognizable (arguably unintelligible) to Plato or Aristotle, for example, who were indisputably philosophers, but no less indisputably not professors. But a group of people now by training and certification “do” philosophy in teaching and writing, and often as a livelihood dedicated ostensibly to philosophy’s traditional ideal of a search for understanding (if with various understandings of what that understanding is). It is about this group that the question of the role of the philosopher as witness appears here: partly as a general question, but more immediately in considering the philosopher as witness, actual or potential, to the particular historical event of the Holocaust, with its large moral and political and (as I elaborate in chapter 2) epistemic implications. How, in the face of the Holocaust and the generic phenomenon of genocide, have philosophers served as witnesses there? This is a question that quickly evokes a corollary: What witness could or should philosophers have provided that they did not? And then, also, what might they yet aim at?

Different groups of philosophers warrant consideration here, including some who had direct contact with the Holocaust and others much the largest (and younger) group who did not. A relatively small group that is nonetheless notable in this connection includes those philosophers who were natives of Germany and Austria or of countries occupied by the Nazis, but who succeeded in emigrating prior to the worst ravages of the “Final Solution” and who thus, although experiencing the hardship of dislocation and in some instances family losses, did not themselves undergo the brutalities later suffered by others. Some of the names that might be mentioned here are well-known, some not; the group as a whole is formidable, although quite noticeably it is rarely cited as a group (why this should be echoes the issue being raised). The United States was the principal destination of this emigrant wave of philosophers that includes Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Hans Jonas, Leo Strauss, Herbert Feigl, Marvin Farber, Aron Gurwitsch, Carl Hempel, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and perhaps most widely known (although she herself objected to the designation of “philosopher”), Hannah Arendt. A number of others, including Martin Buber and Ernst Simon, left Germany for then-Palestine (later joined there, after a detour through Canada, by Emil Fackenheim); a number of émigrés arrived, sometimes by a circuitous route, in Great Britain, including Karl Popper and Friedrich Waismann. For many of these figures, their own sense of Jewish identity had been marginal; some recognized that identity as though for the first time when they were forced to flee. But one might anticipate that as a consequence of this personal dislocation and the enormity that then transformed their native grounds, the Holocaust would have become a preoccupation of these philosophers in their subsequent thought and writing. This proved true, however, for only a small number of them; for most, it either did not appear explicitly in their later work at all or affected it in such subtle ways below the surface as to be difficult to trace. Of the figures mentioned, Arendt is arguably the best known for work related to then-current history for The Origins of Totalitarianism; and then, specifically in relation to the Holocaust, through Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (more about this below). Adorno, together with Horkheimer, wrote The Dialectic of Enlightenment, a sustained attempt to trace the origins of the Holocaust to the Enlightenment; in other writings (for example, Minima Moralia and The Authoritarian Personality), the shadow of Nazism is strongly evident. Fackenheim, after a delay, turned from his principal interest in Hegel and nineteenth-century philosophy to a sustained, albeit quasi-theological focus on the Holocaust.

From these several figures outward, however, the emphasis diminishes sharply. Leo Strauss was deeply engaged personally with the Holocaust, but this expressed itself professionally more in occasional essays and his correspondence than in his systematic works (as in his books on Maimonides, Spinoza, and Machiavelli). Buber wrote extensively about issues in Jewish history and thought, but comparatively little specifically about the Holocaust; Popper wrote a sweeping critique of totalitarianism (initiated, as he saw it, in Plato), but as a general concept remote from the events that took him from Vienna to years in New Zealand before reaching England. Emmanuel Levinas does not quite fit in this group, since he was held captive as a French soldier in a German prisoner-of-war camp, thus escaping the brutalities of the other “camps.” But the family he had left behind in Lithuania suffered sharp losses. Although the turn to ethics as prior to ontology and thus as fundamental intensifies after that, the Holocaust as such never becomes a sustained historical subject of his analysis.⁶ For the other members of this group mentioned, their philosophical (i.e., professional) work proceeded as if the decade between 1935 and 1945 had not differed significantly from the one preceeding it. (A statement epitomizing this detachment appears in A. J. Ayer’s 1946 introduction to that year’s new edition of his Language, Truth and Logic: “In the ten years since Language, Truth and Logic was first published, I have come to see that the questions with which it deals are not in all respects so simple as it makes them appear; but I still believe that the point of view which it expresses is substantially correct” a notably subdued reaction to a decade that had been anything but subdued.⁷ Ayer, when he first published his book in 1936, introducing...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• « I » The Holocaust at Philosophy’s Address
• « II » Vs. the Unspeakable, The Unshowable, and the Unthinkable
• « III » The Presence as Future
• Afterword: Wound and Scar
• Appendix: Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
• Notes
• Index