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

Judaism, Fall, 1997 by Berel Lang

Literary theorists have come to view realism as itself a figurative and artful means of representation, and there is no doubt that this is the style that Hilberg has sought, in the form of a principle, as best, even uniquely suited to the subject of the Holocaust: all such writing aspiring to the condition of history. It is not only his own writing, furthermore, on which he imposes this standard, for he chastises here any writers - "imaginative" authors and historians alike - who use history for extra-historical goals. Perhaps Hilberg would not wish away all Holocaust art, but he mentions none of it approvingly and much of it critically. "The philistines in my field are everywhere. I am surrounded by the commonplace, platitudes, cliches. In sculpture, Jewish resistance fighters are memorialized in the center of Warsaw by a large heroic statue in Stalinist style [obviously, the Rappaport memorial]. In poetry I regularly encounter graves in the sky [undoubtedly a reference to Paul Celan's 'Todesfuge']. . . . The manipulation of history is a kind of spoilage, kitsch is debasement" (pp. 140-141).

What remains after such deformations are subtracted will be the representation of history without manipulation - which, Hilberg makes clear, no more entails neutrality than it does open partisanship. In this memoir/autobiography Hilberg describes his fascination with the figure of Adam Czerniakow, the Chairman of the Warsaw Judenrat (whose diary Hilberg co-edited, published in 1979): "The ghetto wall marked a sharp separation between perpetrator and victim, but Czerniakow was like a bridge. With him I crossed the boundary, as he went out to hold his official conversations with the Germans and as he returned dejected to the Jewish world. I dwelled with him to grasp his struggle with problems of housing, food, starvation, dues, taxes, and police" (pp. 185-186).

Here, beyond personal affinity or identification, Hilberg represents the writing of history as an act of moral agency, with the historian as fully implicated and accountable in his writing as the initiators of the events themselves were for them. To be sure, there is also in this self-narrative evidence of pettiness and humorlessness, a lack of empathy for many of the people to whom Hilberg introduces his readers which evokes William James's notable title "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings." But such faults do not diminish the general contrast of which they are part. Hilberg's topic is evil incarnate - but the vision he has provided of it is grand, his accomplishment great. Even when he provokes dissent, the impress of his work, viewed as a whole, remains unmistakable and formidable. His autobiography, together with the book that turns out to be its subject, provides the evidence.

NOTES

1. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961).

2. Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victim, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1345 (New York: Aaron Asher Books, 1992).

3. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, p. 18.