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PARTISAN REVIEW
avoided, that knowing something may not be better than knowing noth–
ing.
In his essay on fonner President Reagan's visit to the Bitburg ceme–
tery, to pay tribute (together with Chancellor Kohl) to Gennan soldiers
who died in World War II, for instance, Hartman addresses the impor–
tance of symbols. By commemorating Gennany's "liberation" from Nazi
rule, Reagan intended to show American solidarity with the new Ger–
many, but by callously forgetting distinctions between fallen Gennan
soldiers and murdered Jews, Hartman demonstrates that Reagan inadver–
tently shifted the blame onto Hitler and his intimate circle alone - thereby
implicitly exonerating the many perpetrators. Hartman brilliantly shows
that in spite of the attention the Holocaust has received - in schools and
the media - this discussion does not appear to have arrested the prevalent,
and pervasive, desensitizing trend; that true empathy is becoming ever
more of a rarity now that individual suffering has become the meat of
television news. Human indifference, I would add, seems to grow as we
are exposed to our daily ration of violence and, as Hartman notes, as the
media adds its own spin to it.
Like Ostow, Hartman delves into the ubiquitous roots of anti–
Semitism. But unlike him, he focuses on its expression in art, literature
and film, on for instance, the representation and conceptualization of
Claude Lanzmann's
Shoah :
Lanzmann himself will not probe the Why in his
film,
only and relentlessly the
How - the how of technique, how exactly it was done, how many were proc–
essed, how long it took. .. His questions avoid the one question that haunts us:
Wh
?"
y.
Also, he elaborates on the ways in which intellectuals such as Jean–
Franr;:ois Lyotard in his post-Holocaust aesthetics, and Emmanuel Levinas
in his attempt to retrieve humanism, grapple with the enormity of the
Holocaust, and yet have not truly been able to comprehend it. The
all
u–
sive novels by Primo Levi, Aharon Appelfeld, and Nonnan Manea, I
would argue, come closest.
In order to preserve the authentic voices of the survivors, Hartman
has initiated the Yale Testimony Project, which militates against
"collectivizing" these experiences. For us who were not there, he wants
to restore the human quality that gets lost in theoretical treatments -
whether of anti-Semitism, of victims, of perpetrators, of bystanders. To–
gether, these oral histories depict the collective fate of "a single event
unparalleled in its murderous scope and with continuing far-reaching
