Holocaust Scholarship

Personal Trajectories and Professional Interpretations

Michael R. Marrus, Milton Shain, Christopher R. Browning, Susannah Heschel, Michael R. Marrus, Milton Shain, Christopher R. Browning, Susannah Heschel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137514196
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

Leading international Holocaust scholars reflect upon their personal experiences and professional trajectories over many decades of immersion in the field. Changes are examined within the context of individual odysseys, including shifting cultural milieus and robust academic conflicts.

1

Autobiography, Experience and the Writing of History

Steven E. Aschheim

I suppose I should begin with a caveat. This volume is about ‘Holocaust Scholarship’, but I am not strictly speaking a Holocaust scholar. My field is much more concentrated on European – especially German and Jewish – cultural and intellectual history. Still, in many explicit but also subtly implicit ways, the Shoah has impinged deeply both on my ‘personal trajectory and professional interpretations’ – just as its ideological exploitation has increasingly become a source of disturbance and, at times, even anger. But this will become clearer only in terms of relating the larger story and context of the link between biography and work.

Before I do so, however, a word of apology and potential exculpation is necessary. Upon telling friends and colleagues the title and subject of this volume – on the link between the personal and the professional – most have looked aghast. ‘How egoistic, self-important, can one get?’ they ask disdainfully. They do have a point; there is a clear and present solipsistic danger in such a self-centred presentation. I hope though that ‘there is an important difference between a serious and conscious engagement in one’s own experience, and an interest in oneself as an engrossing phenomenon’.¹ But, I am, in any case, convinced that the vocation of history is always an engaged, even an ethical, pursuit and activity. To be sure, one must exercise the critical (and, perhaps more importantly, the self-critical) faculty at all times and relate as scrupulously as possible to the evidence and documents. But the old-fashioned positivist ‘objectivity’ is a chimera; rather, what is required is a form of ‘Passionate Detachment’.² This is so because modern, and especially contemporary, history will almost inevitably tend to be autobiographical and deal with issues of immediate moral and existential concern.

This is a rather pretentious claim, so let me invoke the authority of those wiser than me to support it. The formidable Lionel Trilling declared that ‘the more a writer takes pain with his work to remove from it the personal and subjective, the more … he will express his true unconscious’.³ And as Martin Jay persuasively argues:

However much we may disavow our own voice in the construction of allegedly impersonal, objective narratives, it returns to haunt our texts. Whom we choose to study, what stories we decide to tell, and the modes of emplotment, analysis and judgment we apply to them are determined at least in part by psychological prejudices that we only dimly perceive, if at all. Despite all of our efforts to bracket current prejudices and allow the past to reveal itself to us, we cannot entirely escape the effect of our identifications, idealizations and demonizations. Indeed, it is precisely because we can become so invested in figures, movements and events in the past that they invite our interest in the first place; the exigency to remember someone else’s things past can only come from somewhere deep within ourselves.⁴

In the same sense, I have no doubt that my life experiences are inextricably intertwined with my scholarly career and that my ‘personal trajectories and professional interpretations’ are deeply linked. It is as a South African-born historian, child of German-Jewish refugees, deeply – if osmotically – affected by the gross inhumanity of the Holocaust, and as a citizen of Israel, beset by the seemingly intractable, dehumanizing Israeli–Palestinian conflict that my work and sensibilities have been shaped.

Let us begin then with childhood.⁵ It was my parents’ German accent, at once comfortingly familiar yet clearly foreign, which first alerted me to the ‘alienness’ of my background. I suppose it was this that in intuitive fashion first sensitized me to the complicated dynamics, the plight, pains, rewards and occasional narcissism of ‘outsiderdom’. Certainly in the modern period, it is never easy to fix its always fluid boundaries.⁶ As my brother-in-law once said to me: ‘Steven, as an outsider, what do you think of the human race?’ This sense of partial marginality no doubt helped to provide the first necessary key to the historian’s vocation: a certain critical perspective upon one’s own situation.

It was also tied to a burgeoning consciousness of Jewishness and, I think, to a later, more mature interest in the always complex deployments of selfhood and interconnections of Jews within Western culture. In all my writings I have been less interested in Judaism than in Jewishness as a psychological, sociological and, especially, intellectual predicament.⁷ Jews in the modern period have constantly had to navigate the tensions between formal ‘respectability’ and unguarded intimacy, conformity and difference, expressiveness and restraint, outsiderdom and the mainstream.⁸ The post-emancipation boundary situation of Jews thus generated a modicum of friction, confusion and anxiety, at times even murderousness, but also produced new alliances, some astonishingly creative intellectual and cultural projects and novel fusions and formations of identity. Working out these contours remains a major professional – and existential – concern.

But let me return to my childhood. The fact of German foreignness was especially unforgivable in the years following the Second World War. In primary school, when asked where my parents came from, I murmured ‘Australia’. How could a child, even around 1950, acknowledge German origins, admit that in some way he had been the mortal enemy? Of course, already at that age, one grasped the difference well enough, but it was well-nigh impossible to articulate that, no, one’s parents were not the enemy but the victims (although incidentally they never presented themselves as such – self-pity was entirely absent from their emotional vocabulary) and that defining them as archetypal Germans was a kind of indecent irony. At other times, the antisemitic intent was less veiled and the anti-German, anti-Jewish thrust explicitly fused. One day, in the middle of a science class(!), the teacher settled his gaze directly at me and asked why I believed the Second World War had been fought. Without waiting for a reply, he himself provided the enlightening answer: ‘Because of the Jews, Aschheim, because of the Jews.’

These kinds of incidents pushed me ever deeper into the Zionist youth movement, which at that time functioned as a kind of all-embracing counter-cultural institution, and which produced a curious combination of ecstatic idealism, deep friendships – that persist to this day – and a certain self-righteous dogmatism. At the same time, it encouraged an increasingly critical stance towards the overall system of racial injustice in South Africa.

Still, the particular German-Jewish background played a major role in the larger sensitizing process and thus in my later vocational choice. In the first place, the imprint, brutality and mystery (which endures until the present) of Nazism and the Holocaust have been with me ever since I can remember. These were topics that were never really analytically confronted at home, but were, nevertheless, somehow omnipresent, palpably transmitted through my parents’ occasional comments about Germany and Germans (my father adamantly refused reparation money), their very infrequent, throwaway references to their previous lives in Kassel and Berlin and the move to South Africa, and an unstated (but quite unambivalent) message about the fragility of the Jewish condition. Nevertheless, their overwhelming emotion regarding the country that had given them shelter (and later financial success) was one of gratitude. These factors limited any inclination to generalize from their own experience of racial injustice in Germany and protest what was happening in South Africa. But unlike my parents, I was not beholden to South Africa as a refugee and I could therefore translate this sense of vulnerability into quite different personal and professional terms.

The personal and the ironic mode characterized the background to my very first work, Brothers and Strangers, an examination of the protean, highly charged image that the East European Jew played within modern German and German-Jewish consciousness.⁹ I had always taken my father’s ‘Germanness’ for granted. True, his great warmth and humour seemed to point to the fundamental inaccuracy of the stiff Prussian or ‘Yekke’ stereotype. It was only years after his death that I discovered he was born an ‘Ostjude’, a Galizianer who had come to Kassel as a small boy and, like so many others, elegantly combined these two inheritances! It is true that many immigrant parents were loath to talk about their past (and were not sufficiently pressed by their children to do so). Still, the fact that he had chosen never to reveal these origins was made even more poignant by the fact that I learned all this as I was completing my dissertation on the convolutions of, and problematic interdependencies between, Eastern and Western Jewish identity!

The influence of this background of course went beyond this irony. My receptivity to larger issues of German and German-Jewish history clearly springs from these domestic roots. With all their distaste for Germany, my parents carried Europe with them in a way that the Litvak majority of the South African Jewish never did. This cultural inheritance was transmitted to a child and adolescent in a variety of ways. For instance, my father would, effortless and quite unself-consciously, reel off reams of (to me rather incomprehensible, yet strangely attractive) poetry and sayings from the inevitable Goethe and Heine. Our house rang with the songs of Joseph Schmidt, Richard Tauber and Marcel Wittrisch, marvelous tenors whose 78 rpm records we possessed in abundance and which set the foundations, no doubt, for a later enduring passion for German classical music. Clearly, then, the impulse to study the German world and its culture flowed from the dual desire to comprehend (and perhaps commemorate) the lost reality from which my parents came, and at the same time to grasp what had made Nazism, its atrocities and the Holocaust possible.

To a young mind (perhaps even to an ageing one!), part of the fascination of and attraction to German culture lay in its compelling concern with, and combination of, the profound and the demonic. (I only discovered much later Thomas Mann’s exploration of the necessary connection between the two in his Dr. Faustus). Not yet able to penetrate the esoteric language in which they wrote, to my uninitiated ears names like Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche possessed a kind of magic, an alluring and almost evil ring, resonant with the promise of both enlightenment and dark and dangerous brilliance. I tried to deal explicitly with the myriad and ambiguous connections between culture and catastrophe in a 1995 volume of that name, documenting, amongst other things, the manifold novelties of interpretation and philosophical difficulties to which it gave rise as well as the ideological dangers in wait once the Holocaust was unleashed into the political minefield of competitive and reparative victimization.¹⁰ Before that, I sought to wrestle with the manifold adventures of infinitely adaptable Nietzschean impulses as they penetrated virtually every cranny of German political culture.¹¹

There is still another pertinent, related level. It betrays a certain chauvinist parochialism, which I consciously try to resist in my scholarship but which is undoubtedly there. Since my student days I had, quite unconsciously, equated what I most valued in German thought with what I later understood to be a peculiar form of German-Jewish humanism. Even if one had not really read them, the giants who, in my mind at least, I associated with this legacy – Marx, Freud, Einstein and, in a rather different idiom, Franz Kafka – were heroic precisely because they were makers of modern secular thought, universal and radical in their outlook, and yet, in their different ways, quintessentially (or at least socio-psychologically) Jewish, embodiments of an always humanizing and moral impulse. Much the same can be said regarding the galaxy, the almost endless examples of Jewish intellectual and cultural creativity that was released as the ghetto walls fell beginning with the Enlightenment. If we just take the period of the Weimar Republic, astonishingly, we find names that remain iconic to Western intellectual life into the twenty-first century: a by no means exhaustive list would include Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, Gershom Scholem and Leo Strauss.¹²

Similarly, it was also the work of other exiled post-Second World War Central European intellectuals that has acted as magnets, my emulative models: Jean Amery (Hans Meyer), Walter Laqueur, Raul Hilberg, George Steiner, Peter Gay and, of course, my great friend and mentor, George Mosse.¹³ In the post-Holocaust era they were as much the incarnation of that Central European Jewish sensibility as they were chroniclers of its achievements, disaster and disappearance. I suppose that at a certain level, my work (however dwarfed in comparison to these giants) is animated by a desire to preserve this fragile, humanizing sensibility against the manifold totalitarian, racist and illiberal threats besetting it.

Clearly, this sensibility went hand in hand with a post-adolescent awakening to the fact that one’s own society was based upon an all-encompassing victimization of its non-white inhabitants. This realization of the plight of the other was to have a later double effect upon both the personal and professional sides. Could it be that behind the decision to become an historian lies not only the drive to critically interrogate one’s own narrative, but also a kind of empathetic compulsion to place oneself sympathetically in the position of other selves – what J.M. Coetzee in his novel Summertime calls meegevoel, feeling with.¹⁴ The autobiographical moment does enter here. For all their radical differences, common to apartheid, the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the Israeli–Palestinian imbroglio, one finds either the incapacity or perhaps more pointedly the structured unwillingness of those in power to place oneself both cognitively and affectively in the position of the subjugated, to recognize their humanity and humiliation. Revealingly, the subject of Hendrik Verwoerd’s doctoral dissertation in psychology was on the theme of ‘The Blunting of the Emotions’. The political economy of empathy and its organized blunting, the fact that, as Michael Ignatieff perceptively notes, ethics typically follows ethnicity, that empathy typically takes root and is li...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Autobiography, Experience and the Writing of History
• 2. From Johannesburg to Warsaw: An Ideological Journey
• 3. The Personal Contexts of a Holocaust Historian: War, Politics, Trials and Professional Rivalry
• 4. Autobiographical Reflections on Writing History, the Holocaust and Hairdressing
• 5. On the Holocaust and Comparative History
• 6. Historiosophy as a Response to Catastrophe: Studying Nazi Christians as a Jew
• 7. Pastors and Professors: Assessing Complicity and Unfolding Complexity
• 8. Protestants, Catholics, Mennonites and Jews: Identities and Institutions in Holocaust Studies
• 9. My Wrestling with the Holocaust
• 10. ‘Lessons’ of the Holocaust and the Ceaseless, Discordant Search for Meaning
• 11. Apartheid and the Herrenvolk Idea
• 12. Echoes of Nazi Antisemitism in South Africa during the 1930s and 1940s
• Index