BOOKS
The Holocaust: Bird's Eye and Close-Up
NAZI GERMANY AND THE JEWS. VOLUME
1.
THE YEARS OF
PERSECUTION,
1933-1939. By
Saul Friedlander.
Harper/Co llins.
$30.00.
SHTETL. THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A SMALL TOWN AND THE WORLD
OF POLISH JEWS.
By
Eva Hoffman.
Houghton Mifflin.
$25.00.
What else is there
to
know about the Holocaust, I asked myself as
picked up Friedlander's most recent book. What could he possibly add
to
our knowledge ;lbout the death camps, the motives of Hitler and his hench–
men , the pervasive ami-Semi tism and racial laws, the Nazi bureaucratic
machinery and its internal rivalries, the relationshi ps between victims and
perpetrators, the involvclllent of officials and ordinary people, and the philo–
sophical discu ssions on the ubiquity and banality of evil? Or to his own
substantial
(Jell/Ire
on the subject? Actually, Friedlander makes no startling dis–
coveries. 13ut he has wri tten the mos t comprehensive and mul ti-faceted
history of the Nazi era by taking accoullt
ot~
and synthesizing, what we know
about German ;l l1d other European nations' anti-Semitism and their behav–
ior toward their Jews, by bringing into play concerns of internal strife and
international politics- thereby tracing, stcp by step, Hitler's aims and options
as these evolved over the days, the weeks, and the long run. In sum, he does
not focus, for instance, on the illlporrance of the Wannsec meeting, the num–
ber of ordinary Germans who perpetrated atroci ties, and the other
acrimonious polemics among historians. Instead, he accepts what he deems
valid in each of their works and thus has produced the most clear-eyed
answer to the unanswerable question: "How could the descendants of
Goethe and Schill er h;lVe actively or passively allowed such heinous crimes
to
be carried out in their backyards?"
This volume begins with Hitler's accession to power on January
30,
1933, which imlllediately caused left-wing artists and intellectuals, such as
Walter 13enjamin, Otto Klemperer and 13runo Walter, to flee, and ends with
the preparations tor "Operation White" and the signing of the German–
Soviet Nonagression Pact of August 23, \939, which cleared the last obstacle
for the invasion of Poland and World War I
I.
The cancellation of Klemperer's and Wal ter's concerts, the public was
told, had been necessary to protect these Jews fi'om the "mood" of the
Germans who had been provoked by "Jewish artistic bankrupters." By pro–
viding step-by-step accounts of individual responses by Jews and their
German colleagues, in all their ambivalences and confusions, Friedlander-
