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

Judaism, Fall, 1997 by Berel Lang

So, for example, Hilberg gives a full chapter to his professional entanglement with three - as it happens (or is it?) - women-historians: Nora Levin, Lucy Dawidowicz, and Hannah Arendt. Levin, Hilberg claims, used material from the Destruction in her own book(7) without acknowledgment; Dawidowicz, in The War against the Jews,(8) mistakes crucial evidence about the origin of the Holocaust that Hilberg had carefully worked out, and then adds insult to error by omitting Hilberg in her subsequent study of Holocaust historiography;(9) Arendt, Hilberg discovered, was the reader for Princeton University Press whose recommendation against publishing the Destruction gave the Press grounds for returning the manuscript to him as "not a sufficiently important contribution" (p. 114) - a reaction that did not prevent her, however, from acknowledging some four years later a significant debt to Hilberg in her own Eichmann in Jerusalem.(10)

The personal element in this "Thirty Years War" (the title of another chapter on the Destruction's reception) is never far off, but, more importantly, neither are issues of Holocaust history and historiography, and Hilberg's "memoirs" about the latter illuminate both the detail and the evolution of his own thinking. So, for example, he challenges once again the claim (by Dawidowicz, among others) that Hitler had planned the "Final Solution" as early as the 1920s, even in 1918. The question of what the Nazis intended (and when) has been a central problem in Holocaust historiography, and Hilberg's position remains a corrective to the extremes of both the "intentionalist" and "functionalist" camps who would otherwise divide the territory between them. His conception of the "Final Solution" is, well, historical - claiming not a one-time decision but a progressive response to circumstances that at each stage required further decisions and only after a series of these culminated in genocide: "The decisions themselves were taken in steps. . . . Gradually laws gave way to decrees, and decrees to commitments, written orders, oral orders, and finally no orders. . . . The Germans did not know in 1933 what they were going to do in 1935. The ultimate goal of annihilation . . . was not even formulated until 1941" (p. 64).

Two additional historical theses appear in Hilberg's criticism of Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, the first directed against her view of the "banality" of Nazi (at least of Eichmann's) evil. Hilberg, who had analyzed the layers of Nazi bureaucracy much more methodically than had Arendt, draws a conclusion about the nature of its evil precisely opposite to hers. The mindless repetition of bureaucracy, its hierarchies and credo of "following orders," could not by itself, in his judgment, explain the animus that sustained the "Final Solution." Eichmann's initiatives in finding "pathways" (p. 150) through the bureaucracy were active and deliberate, and these built on "the all-encompassing readiness" (p. 124) of the bureaucrats themselves who in turn found the German people as a whole not unwilling. Taken together, these disclose a pointed malevolence in the policies and actions constituting the Holocaust that was not banal at all. (They also refute Daniel Goldhagen's recent assertion that earlier historians had failed to notice what he claimed to be the German will to genocide.)