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PARTISAN REVIEW
rid . After all, if nobody is innocent, then who is to cast the first stone
against Hitler?
This is the burden of Hitler's speech in defense of all his ac–
tions. Arguing with the Israelis who have cornered him, he points to
the guilt of the Allied powers for the Holocaust; had he not offered to
send them the Jews of Europe? Did they not ignore his offer? He
mentions the Gulag of Stalin, which was in existence before his own
death camps. Then, too, he insists that he learned his notions of
racial superiority from the Jews themselves. And he contends that as
his victims have a share of the guilt for his own crimes against them,
he, Hitler, has to be approved for what was achieved as a result of
these crimes and could never have come about otherwise: the estab–
lishment of the state of Israel.
hjs important to note that this speech by Hitler is the most elo–
quent and intellectually interesting statement in Steiner's whole nar–
rative. And it goes unanswered.
Here I cannot but contrast Steiner's Holocaust narrative with
The Last Days of Mankind,
the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus's play
about the First World War. Now Kraus was much too savage a
moralist ever to be taken for a "good European." In
The Last Days of
Mankind,
he never tries to evade a clear and clearly one-sided moral
judgement of the major political entities represented on his stage:
France, England, the Austro-Hungarian and German empires. He
takes sides. He is for the Allies, and against the Central powers. He
is for France and England, and against the armies of the German
Kaiser and his own Emperor, Franz-Joseph. He is for the
Lusitania
and against the German U-boat campaign. He is for the cathedral of
Rheims, and against the German Big Berthas that bombarded it.
When one of the characters in the play argues against Kraus's
raison–
neur
and spokesman,
The Grumbler,
that cathedrals can be important
military positions, the brilliant reply comes: "Men are most certainly
important military positions. I wish the cathedrals could fire on them."
What is more, Hitler in
The Portage
makes all the interesting
and provocative moral judgements, which is why some critics have
taken him to be Steiner's spokesman.
The charge, as I indicated, cannot be maintained, but other
charges have been made by critics which are certainly justified, and
it is not at all the case that Robert Boyers, in his essay on Steiner in
Atrocity and Amnesia,
has made mincemeat of these critics, as a book
reviewer for
The New Republic
has recently claimed. One critic of
The
