EDITH KURZWEIL
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atrocities around the world are in the offing, or being committed.
In
And the Sea
Is
Never Full: Memoirs,
1969
(2000), he tells of his life–
long involvement in high-level world politics, and how he has been
building bridges. Still, Lawrence Langer, in
Preempting the Holocaust
(1998) reminds us of the challenge the Holocaust poses when we try to
incorporate it into our moral or historical intuitions. For,"unlike
Dante, whose physical and spiritual journey changed a pilgrim into a
poet with a comprehensive epic that could portray and transcend the
corruption of his time, the student of the Holocaust has no comparable
hierarchic image to reflect its complexity."
As
MORE AND MORE
tangible information became available, academics
discussed whether, and if so when, Hitler had personally ordered the
extermination of the Jews (no written documents were found); when
and by whom instructions for the "final solution" had been handed
down (before, after, or at the then-secret Wannsee conference on Janu–
ary 20, 1942); how many Jews, Poles, and communists had been
worked and/or starved to death; and so on. Initially, the answers were
sought in the numbers, in fixing responsibilities on such leaders as
Goering or Gobbels, Heydrich or Himmler, and in questioning what
each of them actually had known, and at what point. (For some Ger–
mans, it has been argued, shifting the blame away from Hitler allowed
him to remain an idealized figure.) At the time, most of the investigators
were Americans. But soon, German, Israeli, and French historians
enlarged the framework, adding a sort of national style to the explo–
rations. This is not to say that these scholars were being chauvinistic, or
trying to put their own citizens' actions into the best light. But their
schooling and reading, and their or their parents' generation's personal
involvement inevitably influenced their approach.
By the late I960s, as American students were mostly attacking their
universities and political system, their German counterparts were trying
to find out what their elders were keeping from them, and what activi–
ties their fathers and grandfathers had been engaged in during the Third
Reich. At that point, they wondered why so few Germans had spoken
out against their countrymen's deeds. Among them were Alexander and
Margarete Mitscherlich, who in 1945 had denounced the Nazi doctors
for having performed death-inducing experiments on Jewish children,
homosexuals, and Germans with mental or physical impairments. But
these doctors had closed ranks and pretended that they had done
