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PARTISAN REVIEW
(much of which remains to be translated) . Of the nine pieces in the book,
I found particularly enlightening the essay on the Soviet-German war, and
those on euthanasia and the current debates on the Holocaust.
Several themes in these essays may be identified. The first and most
obvious is the human capacity for evil, that perplexing pleasure human
beings sometimes take in inflicting pain, suffering, and death on other
humans, which is a matter deserving continued attention and quite distinct
from the political, social, economic, or structural conditions which make
brutalities and mass murders possible. The second topic, largely neglected
(at least in this country), is the involvement and responsibility of people
who might be considered intellectuals in the planning and execution of the
outrages we associate with Nazism. In this regard the euthanasia program
is especially noteworthy as it preceded the Holocaust and was part of "the
crucial chain of events which led to it." The third theme of great interest,
and one probably also unfamiliar to most American readers, is that of the
intellectual-philosophical battles fought over the proper interpretation of
the Holocaust-in particular, the recent efforts
to
assimilate it into a world–
view in which modernity and capitalism (or capitalist modernity) are the
ultimate sources of all evil and wrongdoing.
Regarding the first topic, the evil to be understood seems to have two
major components. The first, already alluded to, is the sadistic pleasure
reflected in the photographs taken by German soldiers "record[ing] mass
executions by hanging or shooting" with dead bodies "laid out as dead
game in front of the men who killed them....Judging from the way in
which the majori ty of these pictures were composed, few of the photog–
raphers seem to have been registering revulsion or shock....Rather, the
photographs reflect a prurient desire to record something that was initial–
ly not an everyday sight, while also capturing...moments of absolute
power over other human beings." Such photos may also be found in the
Holocaust Museum in Washington,
D.c.,
featuring the killers smiling
broadly into the camera, pictured next to their victims before or after their
deaths by shooting.
The second component of the evil here discussed pertains to those who
devise and popularize notions of particularly noxious groups of people who
must be destroyed. Such individuals have to become prominent and influ–
ential before"ordinary" men can be placed into the posi tions of power and
pleasure they may derive from mistreating the designated enemies.
Individuals like Hitler and Stalin did not hesitate to explain why means had
to be subordinated to ends and why human sacrifices were to be made both
in the conduct of war and in the political battles to be fought for a better
world, as they saw it. Discussing wartime losses with one of his generals,
Hitler told him: "You have been too deeply impressed by the suffering of
