BOOKS
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become world art. But this does not change the truth of Bloom's con–
cluding assertion: "What Shakespeare shared with his era can explain
everything about Shakespeare except what made him so different in degree
from his fellows that at last it renders him different in kind."
JOHN BAYLEY
Excavating the Roots of Evil
ETHICS AND EXTERMINATION: REFLECTIONS ON NAZI GENOCIDE.
By
Michael Burleigh.
Cambridge University Press. $54.95.
Following the much publicized dispute over Daniel Goldhagen's
Hitler's
Willing Executioners
and the continuing, seemingly endless flood of books
on the Holocaust, some readers may wonder how many more volumes the
proper treatment of the Holocaust requires. But it would be a mistake to
ignore
Ethics and Extermination,
a powerful and informative volume on a
topic that continues to exert morbid fascination for academic specialists
and the public alike.
If there is any consensus in our morally relativistic times about the
nature of evil, it is to be found in the designation of the Holocaust and the
Nazi poEtical system as its most authentic embodiment. In spite of many
other "competing" and sometimes quantitatively greater mass murders in
this century (as in Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China) the Holocaust
retains a uniqueness which explains the stream of books examining its
every aspect. What compels this attention, I think, is its extraordinarily
deliberate nature and efficiency combined with the vision behind it: that a
world purged of a particular group of people (perceived as exceptionally
evil and poisonous) will be a vastly better one. The Soviet, Chinese, and
Cambodian campaigns of mass murder did not possess the same degree of
ideological clarity; a wide range of people were killed for a variety of rea–
sons and under different circumstances-many perished due to the living
conditions in the camps, not as a result of a poEcy of extermination. Future
studies of communist mass murders may yet throw new light on the degree
of premeditation in these outrages.
Michael Burleigh, an English historian, has written before on topics
pertaining to modern Germany and the Nazi policy of euthanasia.
Particularly welcome for the American reader is his familiarity, demon–
strated in this volume, with the large German literature on the Holocaust
