Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Lanzmann’s position in insisting that people ingest only raw information without digesting it is, to continue the metaphor, a kind of intellectual bulimia. Although he prefers a different sense-metaphor for his method: willed blindness. “When I was making Shoah I was like a horse with [blinders],” he told me. “I did not look to the side, neither my right side nor my left side. I was trying to look straight into this black sun which is the Holocaust. And this blindness, this voluntary blindness was—is—a necessary requisite, the necessary condition for the creation. And this blindness was the contrary of blindness, it was like clairvoyance, it was to see, to see absolutely clearly, you know. And the only way to cope with this blinding reality is to blind one’s self to all kinds of explanation. To refuse the explanation. It is the only way. It was a moral attitude, an ethical touchstone.”

  Hearing Lanzmann rhapsodize in the eternal language of mystics (and French intellectuals) on blindness as insight and the ethical superiority of his position recalled to me another mystical formulation I’d seen him use: “Didn’t you once say that there should be a sacred flame around the Holocaust?” I asked him.

  “A circle of flame. Yes, one should not, should never try to cross this circle.”

  This seemed to me the very kind of language Yehuda Bauer was objecting to when he wrote his essay deploring the “mystification” of the Holocaust. If there’s a circle of flame around it, how does one know what’s inside the circle? Having spent considerable time with homicide detectives, I tried to imagine the reaction of those I’ve known if someone had said to them, “Don’t cross the circle around the body, don’t ask questions about the mind of the murderer.” And yet the Holocaust, while vastly different in scale, is still a homicide. Exempting the mind of the murderers from scrutiny, shielding the murderers with a circle of flame, is a policy that could please only the murderers and their would-be successors.

  “A circle of flame around Hitler’s psychology, too?” I asked Lanzmann. “Don’t try to cross? . . .”

  “No, there is no circle of flame around Hitler. I don’t look at psychology. I am not interested in it.”

  No circle of flame but still a willed circumscription of inquiry. “The SS men in your movie? Not interested in their psychology either?”

  “I was not interested in the psychology. I always said [to them], ‘I don’t talk about you, I am not interested in you.’ I wanted to ask them how it happened.”

  By “how” he means only how, mechanically, they accomplished it, not how they could have become inhuman enough to want to do it.

  “Yehuda Bauer says that there’s a danger of mystification if we set off the Holocaust and Hitler from the processes of history and psychology, there’s a sacralization, mystification—”

  “Mystification of . . . ”

  “Mystification of the Holocaust. If we say that it can’t be explained, that it’s a mystery beyond understanding.”

  “But I told you at the beginning that it is not a mystery beyond understanding,” he said.

  “But if we can’t get from the people who did it to the actual event, if there’s a gap as you’ve said, an abyss between the cause and effect—how did it happen?”

  “How did it happen?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have shown it, I think.”

  “You’ve shown that it did happen. But how did ordinary men come to this? Were they evil? Were they possessed by demonism?”

  “No, I never said this. No, you don’t understand me, that’s all.”

  I believe the problem is not that I don’t understand Lanzmann but that I do. That his position is philosophically inconsistent: Above all else, he insists it is wrong to try to explain the murders because inevitably that will excuse them, absolve them of responsibility. And yet, he insists that there is “no enigma” about why the Holocaust happened, he has the explanation, it is the product of “the whole story” of Western civilization. Which in effect does absolve individuals from responsibility: It is not the individual conscious—thus, culpable—decisions of the murderers that are responsible for the Holocaust; it is rather the machine, the engine of all of Western history that “produces” the crime.

  If one is forbidden from inquiring into the psychology of the decision to murder, there is no way to account for it happening aside from spontaneous generation or some vague notion of everything causing everything, an abstract historic inevitability that excuses the murderers from individual responsibility. I don’t believe Lanzmann wants to absolve or exculpate the murderers of responsibility—all the more reason for him to be cautious in ascribing exculpatory “Revisionist” motives to those who take different philosophical positions on explanation from his.

  Even Lanzmann’s professed devotion to the question “how” as opposed to why is called into question by his attack on a recent book that demolishes the no-gas-chamber arguments of the Holocaust deniers. The book, written by a former Revisionist, Jean Claude Pressac, is based upon documents Pressac found in the Soviet archives, documents described in a New York Times story on Pressac as “previously unpublished commercial correspondence and contracts linking Nazi officers at Auschwitz and the German engineering corporation that built the gas chambers, ventilation systems, elevators, crematories, and other devices that made murder possible.”

  The French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, the man who brought Klaus Barbie to justice, called the Pressac book “a major contribution to the literature” of the Holocaust. “A problem existed,” Klarsfeld told the Times. “Exactly how did the gas chambers and the crematoria work? How could that number of bodies be disposed of? It was a question of explaining and documenting a criminal technique, and Pressac has now provided the most authoritative account.”

  One would have thought that Lanzmann, who eternally urges that we should blind ourselves to everything but the how, the criminal technique, would have welcomed the production of these revealing documents, which revealed precisely “how.” Yes, the documents were discovered by a former Revisionist, but that does not make them less authentic. And in his film Lanzmann did not scruple to ask former SS men “how.”

  But according to the Times, Lanzmann was “enraged by the book. ‘Mr. Pressac’s work,’ he wrote in the weekly Le Nouvelle Observateur, ‘is pernicious and marked by the bizarre reasoning of people . . . who deny the Holocaust. By insisting on documentary proof, by discounting the emotional testimony of survivors, the book legitimizes the arguments of revisionists, who become the point of reference for future debate. . . . I prefer the tears of the barber from Treblinka in Shoah to a Pressac documentary on gas detectors.’”

  He prefers then his own staged and crafted catharsis to documentary facts. But what about the importance of combating neo-Nazis’ lies, which are used to justify contemporary violence against the Jews? Hitler rose to power on the back of Revisionist history, the stab-in-the-back myth that Germany didn’t lose the war but was cheated out of victory by a conspiracy of Jews and Jewish-controlled “November Criminals.” If Pressac helps pull the rug out from under contemporary liars and deniers, “shouldn’t one try to combat neo-Nazi Revisionists in every way?” I asked Lanzmann.

  “First of all,” he says, “I didn’t say this.”

  “The Times was misquoting you?”

  “Yes,” he said, “it is a journalistic thing.” (The Times reporter told me he stood by his story when I read it back to him.)

  “Okay, so tell me what you do feel about the Pressac book.”

  “What is the Pressac book? Pressac is a former Revisionist. He’s convinced that the gas chambers did actually exist. And he’s not discovering anything new in this. Absolutely nothing. He opens the door of the gas chamber. Everybody knew they were there.”

  Everyone knew, but a powerful and insidious claque of deniers is having disturbing success in convincing an alarming number of people they might not have been there. Klarsfeld, who has been on the front line of the fight against real Nazis and neo-Nazis rather than the
battle over the aesthetics of filming them that Lanzmann is engaged in, believes the Pressac book is a useful weapon against the deniers.

  Lanzmann purports to be interested in describing how the crime was committed but sees no particular value in studying how to prevent it from being committed again. “Yehuda Bauer told me,” I mentioned to Lanzmann, “that if we don’t try to understand how it happened, then we learn nothing about preventing it from happening again.”

  Lanzmann refused to believe Bauer could have said this. “I [have known] Yehuda Bauer for a long time. And I am astonished he talks like this.” (In fact, in an essay entitled “On the Place of the Holocaust in History,” attacking “mystifiers,” Yehuda Bauer argued that “once [a catastrophe like the Holocaust] has happened, it can be repeated. . . . The Holocaust can be a precedent, or it can become a warning.” A warning, that is, against the possibility of repetition that Lanzmann is so unconcerned with.)

  “Don’t you believe,” I asked him, “that it’s worth investigating the process of history in order to—”

  “Okay, okay,” he said disgustedly. “We do this. We do this. I did it. As I told you, the Holocaust is not something which is out of history. So it is an historical event.”

  “But you seem to be saying it’s out of psychology—”

  “I tell you you can take psychology, you can take economic conditions, you can take whatever you want. All of this might be true. But this doesn’t give birth to the Holocaust. You cannot engender the Holocaust. As I told you, it’s an ethical position.”

  Lanzmann is quick to define whatever choice he’d made as the only ethical one, but his self-proclaimed ethical position leads him to strange kinds of passivity in the face of the neo-Nazi movement in contemporary Europe.

  “What about the neo-Nazis of Germany today?” I asked him. “One should not write about them? They want to kill Jews again.”

  “It is not complicated,” Lanzmann says, to understand them. “And I don’t think that history repeats itself. You can write about the neo-Nazis if you can convince them, and so on, yes,” he allows.

  “But can one do that without investigating the Nazis of the past?”

  “Listen. What kind of investigation do you need? It has been done,” he repeats. “I did it. I already did it.”

  It’s been done. I have done it. After Shoah, it is forbidden to speak of certain things. Because I have already said what needs to be said. The rest should be silence. If Lanzmann’s disciple can accuse Rudolph Binion of using “method as final solution,” one can almost say Lanzmann wants Shoah to be the final solution of Hitler explanation; further discussion must be terminated if not exterminated.

  Toward the close of our encounter, I asked him directly: “Is it all to be condemned—to write or even think about Hitler?”

  “I think it is to be condemned,” he said. “I think it is—all the way.”

  At this point, Lanzmann went to get some homework for me. He handed me a copy of a collection of essays on Shoah and instructed me to read the one he’d written, the one called “Hier Ist Kein Warum” (Here there is no why)—the locus classicus of his attack on explanation.

  I was familiar with that essay already. I was familiar with the story Lanzmann tells in that essay, the story about an incident in Auschwitz which Lanzmann makes the very heart and soul of his commandment against explanation—the why of his attack on Why. And I still find myself amazed by his use of it. It’s a story he takes from Primo Levi’s memoir, Survival in Auschwitz.

  Here is Levi’s story. It’s about his first disorienting day in the camp:

  The whole process of introduction to what was for us a new order took place in a grotesque and sarcastic manner. When the tattooing operation was finished, they shut us in a vacant hut. The bunks are made, but we are severely forbidden to touch or sit on them, so we wander around aimlessly . . . still tormented by the parching thirst of the journey. . . .

  Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand’s reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. “Warum?” I asked him in my poor German. “Hier ist kein warum” (there is no why here), he replied, pushing me inside with a shove.

  And here is what Lanzmann makes of this story in his essay:

  “It is enough to formulate the question in simplistic terms—Why have the Jews been killed?—for the question to reveal right away its obscenity. There is an absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding. Not to understand was my iron law during all eleven years of the production of Shoah. I had clung to this refusal of understanding as the only possible ethical attitude. ‘Hier ist kein warum’—Primo Levi narrates how the word ‘Auschwitz’ was taught to him by an SS guard. ‘Here there is no why,’ Primo Levi was abruptly told upon his arrival at the camp. This law is equally valid for whoever undertakes the responsibility of such a transmission. Because the act of transmitting [what happened in the Holocaust] is the only thing that matters and no intelligibility, that is to say, no true knowledge pre-exists the process of transmission” (emphasis added).

  A truly astonishing thing has happened here. Set aside the fact that he comes close to asserting the position that the Shoah did not exist until its “transmission” by Lanzmann in Shoah. Even more bizarrely, Lanzmann has taken an SS death-camp guard’s “grotesque and sarcastic” rebuke to a Jew asking why—and made that sneering mass murderer’s command into his own commandment. He’s made an insulting description (here there is no why) of a policy designed to keep the gas chambers running on time (without any troublesome Jewish questions harrying the murderers) into a moral injunction: Here there should be no why.

  The SS guard tells the thirsty Jew he must suffer his torments without asking why; Claude Lanzmann tells those thirsty for knowledge, for an explanation, that they must suffer in a silence imposed by him. Perhaps it might be different if Lanzmann had been content to impose what he proudly calls his “iron law” on himself and his own work, as a kind of discipline. But, in fact, he and his acolytes have become a kind of gang of intellectual enforcers who don’t merely disagree but seek to suppress those who break Lanzmann’s law: Thou shalt have no Holocaust discussion that violates my iron law.

  It’s important to distinguish skeptical, even scathing critiques of Hitler explanations—in part, this book is about the follies and fiascoes of certain explanatory attempts—from Lanzmann’s position. This ill-considered adaptation of the death-camp guard’s abusive remark to a thirsty Jewish prisoner as a motto with which to silence all inquiry suggests Lanzmann has lost his sense of proportion. That staring too long into “this black sun” has blinded him to the identity of the real enemy. Or so it would seem from his treatment of Dr. Louis Micheels.

  CHAPTER 15

  Dr. Louis Micheels: There Must Be a Why

  In which an Auschwitz survivor fights for the right to ask Why

  It all began, this memorable psychodrama, with a polite invitation Dr. Micheels sent to Claude Lanzmann. A softspoken gentleman, this survivor of a brutal hell is in every respect the soul of politeness. I began to get a sense of his extraordinary thoughtfulness in the very process of making arrangements to visit him to talk about his confrontation with Lanzmann.

  Dr. Micheels told me he’d pick me up at the Westport station and then went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that we would not miss each other when the train from New York pulled in. I’d told him that since I have red hair, I’d be easy to recognize in a crowd, but he proceeded to describe his car in great detail and even made me write down his license-plate number.

  It was, for one thing, an interesting contrast with Claude Lanzmann’s behavior in arranging our rendezvous—neglecting to give me the access code for his building and then insisting that he had, practically accusing me of lying in denying he had.

  But I also suspect there was more than mere politeness involved in Dr. Micheels going so far as to insist I write
down his license-plate number. It was, I believe, a touching reflection of the lifelong sense of the fragility of human contact a Holocaust survivor must have. That sense of fragility haunts Dr. Micheels’s profoundly moving and sad memoir of his experience, Doctor #117641: A Holocaust Memoir.

  In 1942, Micheels, a young Dutch medical student, and his fiancée, “Nora” (he doesn’t use her real name in his memoir), fled a Nazi roundup in Antwerp only to be arrested on the run and sent to the first of several concentration camps. He and Nora were separated for a time but finally in mid-1943 found themselves—and found each other again—at Auschwitz.

  Micheels’s account of their time at Auschwitz is one of horror, yes, but also a story of how their relationship, their fleeting contacts, their notes from cell block to cell block, their love, kept their sanity and their humanity alive amid conditions of inhuman savagery. It’s a story about the survival of humanity in hell, but it’s also an account of the degrees of evil in hell, particularly as manifested by the camp personnel Micheels came to know best—the doctors of Auschwitz, the medical men who partook in healing and killing at the same time.

  Men like Dr. Eduard Wirths, who personally sent tens of thousands to instant death by participating in the infamous “selections” at the railroad platform at Auschwitz, choosing which arriving Jews would be sent to be gassed immediately and which were fit enough to be “saved” for a brief living death as slave laborers. And Dr. Hans Munch, another doctor who played a more ambiguous role there, Micheels believes, refusing to participate in selections and, according to Micheels, demonstrating lifesaving “decency” to many of the prisoners under his medical care.