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

Judaism, Fall, 1997 by Berel Lang

National or group character or conduct is a highly-charged and also difficult ascription to make. Why then does Hilberg chance it? - and in a context where both the historical and historiographic, and then the moral stakes, impinging still on present memories of genocide, are so extraordinarily high? At one point in his autobiography, Hilberg describes himself as having an "allergy" to religion. Allergies are nobody's fault, of course; but with his recognition of this condition, a reader might be less surprised to discover that an allergic reaction had occluded a sector of his historical view than that Hilberg himself should fail to allow for the possibility. It seems to me difficult otherwise to account for such oddly atemporal (and offensive) statements that lay the groundwork in the Destruction as: ". . . The term 'Jewish reactions' refers only to ghetto Jews. This reaction was born in the ghetto and will die there. It is [sic] part and parcel of ghetto life. It applies to all ghetto Jews, assimilationists and Zionists, the capitalists and socialists, the unorthodox and the religious ones."(11)

That such statements have caused misgivings even among Hilberg's admirers should not obscure the fact that even here the more general issue raised - the nature of the Jewish reaction in the face of genocide - has proved important in Holocaust history (perhaps even more relevant to tracing the history of Jewish communities outside of Europe than in it). And again it represents but one thread running through a large and intricate fabric which - even granting what some critics have objected to as his focus on the Nazis and German sources - nonetheless identified and charged most of the issues that have preoccupied Holocaust historians ever since, whatever their conclusions.

Hilberg, in rehearsing many of these issues here as moments in his own journey, is consistent not only in the positions he takes but also in the passion and care he continues to demonstrate for his subject. Terms like "passion" and "care" may seem odd to attach to a writer who strives as hard as Hilberg does to project the voice of a writer that is, above all, disinterested and impersonal. Concise, minimalist, emotionless: it is difficult to imagine a sparer historical style than Hilberg's. Few Holocaust testimonies even come close to the effect, for example, of his unadorned summary of the German Railway's price-schedule for transporting "passengers" to the camps in the East: "The basic charge was third-class fare: 4 pfennig per track kilometer. Children under 10 were transported for half this amount; those under four went free. . . . For the deportees one-way fare was payable; for the guards a round-trip ticket had to be purchased."(12)

It should be no surprise, then, that some of his most intriguing recollections come as Hilberg analyzes the act of writing about the Holocaust (again, principally, in his writing of the Destruction). So he recalls his boyhood reading of Genesis in Hebrew with his father, who called attention to the power of that text's conciseness. Contrasting Beethoven's laborious process of musical construction with Mozart's effortless creations, he identifies his own work with the former, as he too built "an edifice, draft after draft, slowly, painfully" (p. 85).