The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian. - book reviews

Judaism, Fall, 1997 by Berel Lang

Reviewed by BEREL LANG

The publication in 1961 of Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews(1) immediately established it as foundational in the writing of Holocaust history. Other comprehensive histories and many specialized studies have appeared since, but the categories Hilberg introduced for distinguishing both the Holocaust's principals - "perpetrators, victims, bystanders" - and its stages of development - "identification, expropriation, concentration, annihilation" have remained the basic angles of vision in Holocaust historiography. Those categories, furthermore, were anchored by Hilberg in an extraordinary assembly of evidence that reconstructed the mechanism - that is, the perpetration - of the "Destruction," a matching of idea and instrument that set an imposing standard for Holocaust (or any other) history. On a subject to which great energy and moral commitment - as well as considerable resources - have been devoted, Hilberg's book remains after thirty-five years and four editions a necessary text, whether the scholars writing in its shadow have liked it or (for some of them) not. It is, quite simply, monumental, both in its effect and in the effort that produced it.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Hilberg's own memoirs - something like an autobiography - turn out to be a history of his masterwork; if ever there has been a case where the man is the book (and also, we now see, the book the man), this is it. It might also be expected that this "journey" into uncharted territory would be beset by hazards, and the reader of his account hears much about these; moreover, Hilberg is not above using the occasion to settle scores with a number of scholars whom he holds accountable for those obstacles. To this day, then, the journey is viewed by Hilberg as a struggle; even recognition and honor seem to have brought him not satisfaction but only additional grist for the historian's (and now the autobiographer's) mill.

Hilberg writes sparingly about the personal details of life on which conventional autobiographies focus. His account starts on a bleak Sunday morning in Boston in 1992 as he finds his newly-published Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders(2) ignored by the local press and the only bookstore he finds open ("This is the end," he tells himself);(3) it then moves quickly back to his beginning in preWar Vienna, where he was born in 1926, to Cuba where he and his parents alighted briefly in 1939, and then to New York, through Abraham Lincoln High School and Brooklyn College. It was in the move to graduate school at Columbia after his army service that the longest stretch of his "journey" begins, with the dissertation he undertook that later became the Destruction.

Here his difficulties begin in earnest. Not only did the history he decided to write have no precedents, but the topic itself was suspect: looked askance by the academy as parochial, questioned even by those who had been inside as still too raw and menacing. And to these impediments was added the burden of one thesis of Hilberg's that has ever since been an item of contention even for many admirers - his claim that, beyond the primary role of the Nazis, the Jews themselves, mingling compliance and self-deception, "cooperated in their own destruction."(4)

Hilberg's principal advisor and supporter at Columbia was Franz Neumann, also the author of a major work(5) that then dominated his career. Hilberg here recalls both Neumann's mordant blessing of his dissertation proposal - "It's your funeral" - which followed his reaction to the claim of Jewish complicity: "This is too much to take-cut it out."(6) Only when the dissertation later became the book, then, was the latter theme asserted fully. In the meantime, the dissertation won a prize at Columbia, was rejected as a book manuscript by academic presses (Columbia and then Princeton and Oklahoma, as well as Yad Vashem), until finally, with the help of a subvention, a small Chicago publisher, Quadrangle Books, brought out the Destruction in an edition notable, as Hilberg now describes it, for its flimsy paper and double columns of printing.

The book's post-publication history afforded little respite. Corporate mergers sent the Destruction on its own journey from Quadrangle to several other (unenthusiastic) houses until finally the three-volume third edition appeared in 1985 with Holmes and Meier who still publish it but whom Hilberg, evidently piqued, avoids naming. The fourth edition (1988) was published by Fayard in French translation, and in 1990 S. Fisher Verlag issued a paperback German edition, which was commercially successful. (The contrast between what he takes to be the book's difficulties in the U.S. and its warmer reception in Europe is a continuing grudge-motif of Hilberg's.)

Such details may seem more relevant to the politics of publishing than to the "politics of memory"; this is not the case, however, for a number of disputes that Hilberg carries on in this volume with certain critics of his work. For here even the frequent personal slights he recalls evoke important substantive issues that Hilberg first raised in the Destruction and that still preoccupy writers on the Holocaust; in this sense his autobiography continues his history of the Holocaust by other means.