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PARTISAN REVIEW
and national "properties" from afar. The Germans told us what was re–
ally cooking. We can ignore Wagner and his racist rages. But even the
reasonable, fair-minded Goethe wrote, in
Wilhelm Meisters
Book
III ,
"We do not tolerate any Jew among us, for how can we grant him a
share in the highest culture, the origin and tradition of which he de–
nies?" And here is Nietzsche, certainly no enemy to the Jews, who
wrote: "I have not yet met a German who is favorably disposed toward
the Jews." He did not mean this as a compliment to the Germans. And
then in 1953, Heidegger, considered by many to be the greatest philoso–
pher of this century, spoke of "the inner truth and greatness of National
Socialism." In asserting this "greatness," he was evidently associating
German high culture with the crimes of Hitler. A bold man. Nothing in
the world could force him to retreat from the philosophic conclusions
he had reached. And he was prepared, if necessary,
to
sail through an
ocean of blood. This is a subject which cannot be avoided in a discussion
of the Jewish writer.
Lionel Abel tells us in his memoirs that in 1946 he took his mother
to the movies, and there in a newsreel they watched the arrival of the
American troops in the Buchenwald concentration camp. They saw on
the screen mounds of dead bodies, emaciated survivors, gas chambers, and
gallows; altogether an unforgettable sight. But as remarkable was what
Abel's mother said to him when they left the theater. She said, "I don 't
think the Jews can ever get over the disgrace of this." She said nothing
about the mora] disgrace to the German nation, only about a more than
moral disgrace incurred by the Jews: how would they ever get over it?
I cite this not because I admire Lionel Abel, but because I admire his
mother. I too had seen newsreels of the camps. In one of them,
American bulldozers pushed naked corpses toward a mass grave ditch.
Limbs fell away and heads dropped from disintegrating bodies. My reac–
tion to this was similar
to
that of Mrs. Abel: a deeply troubling sense of
disgrace or human demotion, as if by such affiictions the Jews had lost
the respect of humankind; as if they might now be regarded as hopeless
victims, incapable of honorable self-defense; and, arising from this, prob–
ably the common, instinctive revulsion or loathing of the extremities of
suffering, a sense of personal contamination and aversion. The world
would see these degraded dead with a pity that placed them at the mar–
gins of humanity. In part, the founders of Israel restored the respect of
the Jews by their manliness. They removed the curse of the Holocaust, of
the abasement of victimization from them; and for this the Jews of the
Diaspora were grateful and repaid Israel with their loyal support.
Still, the disgrace felt by Mrs. Abel hovers over us.
It
must be dealt
with. It is not merely "something" in history, but a spiritual ordeal for
