EDITH KURZWEIL
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explanatory model for the entire world.
It
is the lasting injury to
European self-esteem, as much as to its obliterated Jewish popula–
tion, that is being mourned in abstruse formulations like Haber–
mas's...and it is as a notably European, rather than as a Jewish,
crisis of representation and understanding that the Shoah is so
readily accorded its position at the heart of our culture's self–
interrogation.
In fact, explanations for the Holocaust based on morals have taken as
many forms as those premised on the bureaucratization of the Nazi sys–
tem. And the further the Holocaust recedes into history, the fewer eye
witnesses remain, and the more investigators must rely on interpreta–
tions by historians, philosophers, and other scholars.
CONTEMPORARY FADDISH
methods, theorizing, and interpretations have
become the norm. Caroline Wiedmer, for instance, in
The Claims of
Memory: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Germany
and France
(1999)
had to "decide on which texts to discuss in a world
suffused with representations of the past." And Hilene Flanzbaum, in
her collection
The Americanization of the Holocaust
(1999),
notes that
we should not decry its Americanization, but must evaluate and inter–
pret it responsibly. These two books are indicative of the fact that we
have moved from analyses of eyewitness accounts to their representa–
tion, from trying to grasp a formerly unthinkable horror to its domesti–
cation by holding it up as a moral lesson. But by turning the Holocaust
into an example of evil, we are also making it a part of our world. What
had been unimaginable in the first third of the twentieth century had
become only too possible in the third one. Such books are emblematic
of academics filled with good intentions, postmodern zeal, and moral
messages. Wiedmer, who was born in Switzerland after World War II,
was "shocked" to learn of the major Swiss banks' complicity with the
Third Reich, and of their subsequent concealment of Jewish funds and
valuables. She chose to confront her country's tainted history by revis–
ing her own "subject-position" as she investigates "the evolution of a
nation's memorial politics; and that a nation's memory index, or the
'degree of its memory tolerance,' is expressed in a ratio between forget–
ting and remembering central national events."
In Franzbaum's volume of collected essays, Amy Hungerford, for
instance, finds that the equation between persons and representations is
