EDITH KURZWEIL
Facts and Fictions About the Holocaust
T
HE STUDIES AND DEBATES
about the Holocaust have become a
cottage industry. Films, such as
Life is Beautiful
and
Schindler's
List
have trivialized it, and turned it into kitsch. But the ques–
tion remains whether all this publicity has reduced, or augmented, anti–
Semitism in the Western world . In
1945,
when pictures of skeletal
survivors behind barbed wire, pits of cadavers, and the smoking chim–
neys of death camps were first shown, everyone sensed that the bound–
aries of human evil had scaled new heights, and would have to be
forcefully reined in . That there was relatively little public mention of
the Holocaust, and so few memoirs were published .
Since that time, commemorations, books, and television series have
kept the Holocaust in the public eye. More and more aged survivors
have been bearing witness, and have supplied ever more raw material
for historians and writers-who keep asking how such an unprece–
dented crime could have come about. But the focus differs from coun–
try to country, even though philosophers, psychoanalysts, and social
scientists at international meetings have delved into the conscious and
unconscious motives of Germans. While arguing about what Hannah
Arendt called the banality of evil, they keep searching for the Holo–
caust's ultimate meaning. Cliched truisms and monocausal theses
abound.
Still, what meaning could the systematic murder of six million Jews
possibly have? Did we need this mass killing
to
learn that "such an
event must never happen again?" Whether an accident or aberration
of German history, a natural culmination of inherent German anti–
Semitism, or the result of the fall-out of the Versailles treaty, every
inquiry, itself, rests on the researchers' underlying beliefs and politics.
Indeed, each country's discourse-German, French, American, and so
on- though internally differentiated, has its own rationale.
Some Germans still blame the atrocities on the relatively few extreme
anti-Semites who were condemned at the Nuremberg trials-which are
contradicted by the tales of countless individuals' acts of brutality and
needless cruelty. Testimonies by Hitler's victims, in turn, may have
