by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
Still, no socialist movement, if it is to maintain the integrity of its persuasions, can forgo some effort to be both the voice of protest and the agency of reform. It’s not a matter of choosing between the roles of moral witness and political actor. It’s a matter of finding ways through which to link properly the utopian moralism of the protester with the political realism of the activist; to ensure that the voice of high rectitude will reinforce and give breadth to the daily murmur of the reformer; to adapt to the realities of the American political system without succumbing to a small-souled pragmatism or a hermetic moralism. In some large parties, loosely and democratically structured, this has sometimes been possible, as in the British Labour Party during its best years. In a small party, such as the American Socialist Party even during its best years, this has been almost impossible.
Whether some such alliance of forces or union of impulses might still be created in America is very much a question. I do not know, but think it a project worthy of serious people.
Henry James once said that being an American is a complex fate. We American socialists could add: He didn’t know the half of it.
Notes
1* August 7, 1851, Letters to Americans, 1848–1895 (1953), pp. 25–26.
2* March 5, 1852, Letters to Americans, pp. 44–45.
3† Quoted in R. Laurence Moore, European Socialists and the American Promised Land (1970), p. 9.
4‡ June 20, 1881, Letters to Americans, p. 129.
5* The Civil War in France, 1891 edition (1934), p. 24.
6† The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1887 edition.
7‡ December 2, 1893, Letters to Americans, p. 258.
8* One notable exception, at the opposite extreme from the American, is worth glancing at. Among the Russian radicals of the second half of the nineteenth century there was an intense and significant debate as to the possibility that socialist development in Russia might bypass capitalist and urban industrialization. Must Russia follow the familiar lines of Western development, or can it proceed along its own, “exceptional” path? The concrete issue was the mir, or traditional peasant commune. When the Russian Marxist Vera Zasulich wrote Marx in 1881 for his opinion, he devoted himself to this problem with much greater energy than to American problems—it may have seemed more important, or at least closer. After preparing four drafts of a reply, Marx sent the last one to his correspondent, writing that the account in Capital of the development of capitalism was “expressly limited to the countries of western Europe” and therefore provided “no reasons for or against the vitality of the rural community.” He added, however, that he had become convinced that “this community is the mainspring of Russia’s social regeneration.” (Quoted in Russell Jacoby, “Politics of the Crisis Theory,” Telos, Spring 1975, p. 7.) Later he and Engels wrote that the mir could pass on to a higher form of “communal ownership” and avoid the “dissolution which makes up the historical development of the west . . . if the Russian Revolution is the signal of proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complete each other. . . .” (Ibid., p. 8.)
Whether this judgment was correct need hardly concern us here. What matters is Marx’s evident readiness to grant that Russia might be an “exception” to the developmental scheme of Capital. There is no similar readiness in his writings with regard to the United States, not even to the limited extent one finds it in Engels’s letters; and one wonders why. An obvious reason is that Engels lived longer and, as the gray eminence of the movement, had to cope with the hopeless sectarianism of the German exiles who formed the Socialist Labor Party in America during the 1880s. More speculatively, I would say that it was easier for Marx to grant an “exception” to a precapitalist economy mired in absolutism than to an economy becoming quintessentially capitalist, and easier, as well, to acknowledge the political consequences of a “basic” socioeconomic institution like the mir in Russia than the political significance of a “superstructural” element like the national culture of America.
9* “Most of the attempted [Sombartian] answers,” writes Daniel Bell, “have discussed not causes but conditions. . . . An inquiry into the fate of a social movement has to be pinned to the specific questions of time, place, and opportunity. . . .” (Marxian Socialism in the United States [1967], p. 5.) Bell’s distinction between “condition” and “cause” is suggestive, but hard to maintain. He means, I suppose, that a condition is a relatively stable or latent circumstance that enables or disables a certain course of action—as when we say that the condition of prosperity in the 1920s made the growth of socialism unlikely. A cause is a closely operative, precipitating event—as when we say the Socialist Party’s decline during and after World War I was partly caused by governmental repression. Yet I can see the Sombartians replying that if a condition is sufficiently strong and enduring, it may, in its workings, be all but indistinguishable from a cause.
10* “Reply,” in John H. M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds., Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism (1974), p. 421.
11† Letters to Americans, Appendix, p. 275.
12‡ February 8, 1890, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Selected Correspondence, 1846–1895 (1942), p. 467.
13§ Letters to Americans, Appendix, p. 287.
14* Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?, C. T. Husbands, ed. (1976), p. 18.
15* Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?, p. 18.
16* “Comment,” in Laslett and Lipset, eds., Failure of a Dream?, p. 528.
17† “Socialism and Social Mobility,” in Laslett and Lipset, eds., Failure of a Dream?, p. 519.
18* Working-Class Life (1982), pp. 225, 229.
19* “Trade Unionism in the British and U.S. Steel Industries, 1880–1914: A Comparative Study,” Labor History, 1977, p. 35.
20* Michael Harrington, Socialism (1972), p. 116.
21† Quoted in Introduction, Sombart, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?, p. xxiii.
22* “The Failure of American Socialism Reconsidered,” in Ralph Miliband and John Saville, eds., The Socialist Register, 1979 (1979), p. 216.
23* Quoted in Harrington, Socialism, p. 131.
24† “Socialism and American Trade Unionism,” in Laslett and Lipset, eds., Failure of a Dream?, p. 214.
25* “Why No Socialism in the United States?,” in Seweryn Bialer, ed., Sources of Contemporary Radicalism (1977), p. 128.
26† Quoted in Bialer, ed., Sources of Contemporary Radicalism, p. 62.
27* “The Rights of Assent: Rhetoric, Ritual and the Ideology of American Consciousness,” in Sam B. Girgus, ed., The American Self: Myth, Ideology and Popular Culture (1981), p. 21.
28† Quoted in Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (1948), pp. 139, 159.
29* Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971), pp. 21–22.
30* Toward a United Front (1935), pp. 16–17.
Writing and the Holocaust
{1986}
OUR SUBJECT RESISTS the usual capacities of mind. We may read the Holocaust as the central event of this century; we may register the pain of its unhealed wounds; but finally we must acknowledge that it leaves us intellectually disarmed, staring helplessly at the reality, or, if you prefer, the mystery, of mass extermination. There is little likelihood of finding a rational structure of explanation for the Holocaust: it forms a sequence of events without historical or moral precedent. To think about ways in which the literary imagination might “use” the Holocaust is to entangle ourselves with a multitude of problems for which no aesthetic can prepare us.
The Holocaust is continuous with, indeed forms a sequence of events within, Western history, and at the same time it is a unique historical enterprise. To study its genesis within Western history may help us discover its roots in traditional anti-Semitism, fed in turn by Christian myth, German romanticism, and the breakdown of capitalism in twentieth-century Europe between the wars. But it is a grave error to “elevate” the Holocaust
into an occurrence outside of history, a sort of diabolic visitation, for then we tacitly absolve its human agents of responsibility. To do this is a grave error even if, so far and perhaps forever, we lack adequate categories for comprehending how such a sequence of events could occur. The Holocaust was long prepared for in the history of Western civilization, though not all those who engaged in the preparation knew what they were doing or would have welcomed the outcome.
In the concentration camps set up by the Nazis, such as those at Dachau and Buchenwald, there was an endless quantity of sadism, some of it the spontaneous doings of psychopaths and thugs given total command by the Nazi government, and some of it the result of a calculated policy taking into cynical account the consequences of allowing psychopaths and thugs total command. Piles of corpses accumulated in these camps. Yet a thin continuity can be detected between earlier locales of brutality and the “concentrationary universe.” In some pitiable sense, the prisoners in these camps still lived—they were starved, broken, tormented, but they still lived. A faint margin of space could sometimes be carved out for the human need to maintain community and personality, even while both were being destroyed. Horrible these camps surely were; but even as they pointed toward, they did not yet constitute the “Final Solution.”
The Nazis had an idea. To dehumanize systematically both guards and prisoners, torturers and tortured, meant to create a realm of subjugation no longer responsive to the common norms of human society; and from this process of dehumanization they had themselves set in motion, the Nazis could then “conclude” that, indeed, Jews were not human. This Nazi idea would lead to and draw upon sadism, but at least among the leaders and theoreticians, it was to be distinguished from mere sadism: it was an abstract rage, the most terrible of all rages. This Nazi idea formed a low parody of the messianism that declared that once mankind offered a warrant of faith and conduct, deliverance would come to earth in the shape of a savior bringing the good days—a notion corrupted by false messiahs into a “forcing of days” and by totalitarian movements into the physical elimination of “contaminating” races and classes. There was also in Nazi ideology a low parody of that mania for “completely” remaking societies and cultures that has marked modern political life.
When the Nazis established their realm of subjection in the concentration camps, they brought the impulse to nihilism, so strong in modern culture, to a point of completion no earlier advocate had supposed possible. The Italian-Jewish writer Primo Levi, soon after arriving at Auschwitz, was told by a Nazi guard: Hier ist kein warum, here there is no why, here nothing need be explained. This passing observation by a shrewd thug provides as good an insight into the world of the camps as anything found in the entire scholarly literature. What we may still find difficult to grasp is the peculiar blend of ideology and nihilism—the way these two elements of thought, seemingly in friction, were able to join harmoniously, thereby releasing the satanic energies of Nazism.
By now we have an enormous body of memoirs and studies describing the experience of the concentration camps. Inevitably, there are clashes of remembrance and opinion. For the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, held captive in Dachau and Buchenwald in 1939, it was apparently still possible to cope with life in the camps, if only through inner moral resistance, a struggle to “understand” that might “safeguard [one’s ego] in such a way that, if by any good luck he should regain liberty, [the prisoner] would be approximately the same person he was” before being deprived of liberty. Precisely this seemed impossible to Jean Améry, a gifted Austrian-Jewish writer who had been imprisoned in Auschwitz. No survivor, no one who had ever been tortured by the SS, he later wrote, could be “approximately the same person” as before.
Even to hope for survival meant, in Améry’s view, to “capitulate unconditionally in the face of reality,” and that reality was neither more nor less than the unlimited readiness of the SS to kill. The victim lived under “an absolute sovereign” whose mission—a mission of pleasure—was torture, “in an orgy of unchecked self-expansion.” Thereby “the transformation of the person into flesh became complete.” As for “the word”—which for Améry signified something akin to what “safeguarding the ego” meant for Bettelheim—it “always dies when the claim of some reality is total.” For then no space remains between thought and everything external to thought.
It would be impudent to choose between the testimonies of Bettelheim and Améry. A partial explanation for their differences of memory and understanding may be that Bettelheim was a prisoner in 1939 and Améry in 1943–45. Bettelheim’s ordeal predated slightly the “Final Solution,” while Améry was held captive in the Auschwitz that Hannah Arendt quite soberly called a “corpse factory.” It is also possible that these writers, in reflecting upon more or less similar experiences, were revealing “natural” differences in human response. We cannot be certain.
By the time the Nazis launched their “Final Solution” such differences of testimony had become relatively insignificant. The Holocaust reached its point of culmination as the systematic and impersonal extermination of millions of human beings, denied life, and even death as mankind had traditionally conceived it, simply because they fell under the abstract category of “Jew.” It became clear that the sadism before and during the “Final Solution” on the trains that brought the Jews to the camps and in the camps themselves was not just incidental or gratuitous; it was a carefully worked-out preparation for the gas chambers. But for the Nazi leaders, originating theoreticians of death, what mattered most was the program of extermination. No personal qualities or accomplishments of the victims, no features of character or appearance, mattered. The abstract perversity of categorization declaring Jews to be Untermenschen as determined by allegedly biological traits was unconditional.
No absolute division of kind existed between concentration and death camps, and some, like the grouping of camps at Auschwitz, contained quarters for both slave laborers and gas chambers, with recurrent “selections” from the former feeding the latter. Still, the distinction between the two varieties of camps has some descriptive and analytic value: it enables us to distinguish between what was and was not historically unique about the Holocaust.
Whatever was unique took place in the death camps, forming a sequence of events radically different from all previous butcheries in the history of mankind. Revenge, enslavement, dispersion, large-scale slaughter of enemies, all are a commonplace of the past; but the physical elimination of a categorized segment of mankind was, both as idea and fact, new. “The destruction of Europe’s Jews,” Claude Lanzmann has written, “cannot be logically deduced from any . . . system of presuppositions. . . . Between the conditions that permitted extermination and the extermination itself—the fact of the extermination—there is a break in continuity, a hiatus, an abyss.” That abyss forms the essence of the Holocaust.
2
I cannot think of another area of literary discourse in which a single writer has exerted so strong, if diffused, an influence as Theodore Adorno has on discussions of literature and the Holocaust. What Adorno offered in the early 1950s was not a complete text or even a fully developed argument. Yet his few scattered remarks had an immediate impact, evidently because they brought out feelings held by many people.
“After Auschwitz,” wrote Adorno, “to write a poem is barbaric.” It means to “squeeze aesthetic pleasure out of artistic representation of the naked bodily pain of those who have been knocked down by rifle butts. . . . Through aesthetic principles or stylization . . . the unimaginable ordeal still appears as if it had some ulterior purpose. It is transfigured and stripped of some of its horror, and with this, injustice is already done to the victims.”
Adorno was by no means alone in expressing such sentiments, nor in recognizing that his sentiments, no matter how solemnly approved, were not likely to keep anyone from trying to represent through fictions or evoke through poetic symbols the concentration and death camps. A Yiddish poet, Aaron Tsaytlin, wrote
in a similar vein after the Holocaust: “Were Jeremiah to sit by the ashes of Israel today, he would not cry out a lamentation. . . . The Almighty Himself would be powerless to open his well of tears. He would maintain a deep silence. For even an outcry is now a lie, even tears are mere literature, even prayers are false.”
Tsaytlin’s concluding sentence anticipated the frequently asserted but as frequently ignored claim that all responses to the Holocaust are inadequate, including, and perhaps especially, those made with the most exalted sentiments and language. Here, for instance, is Piotr Rawicz, a Jewish writer born in the Ukraine who after his release from the camps wrote in French. In his novel Blood from the Sky, Rawicz put down certain precepts that the very existence of his book seems to violate: “The ‘literary manner’ is an obscenity. . . . Literature [is] the art, occasionally remunerative, of rummaging in vomit. And yet, it would appear, one has to write. So as to trick loneliness, so as to trick other people.”
Looking back at such remarks, we may wonder what these writers were struggling to express, what half-formed or hidden feelings prompted their outcries. I will offer a few speculations, confining myself to Adorno.
Adorno was not so naive as to prescribe for writers a line of conduct that would threaten their very future as writers. Through a dramatic outburst he probably meant to focus upon the sheer difficulty—the literary risk, the moral peril—of dealing with the Holocaust in literature. It was as if he were saying: Given the absence of usable norms through which to grasp the meaning (if there is one) of the scientific extermination of millions, given the intolerable gap between the aesthetic conventions and the loathsome realities of the Holocaust, and given the improbability of coming up with images and symbols that might serve as “objective correlatives” for events that the imagination can hardly take in, writers in the post-Holocaust era might be wise to be silent. Silent, at least, about the Holocaust.
