A few months later, the same Guri organized a large reception in his home to celebrate the publication of a new volume of his poems. To our astonishment, we were invited. We crossed the street, climbed the stairs, entered the apartment, and followed the chatter to the living room. Lo and behold, dozens of the best and brightest of the Palmach generation stood there. We were entrapped … Nobody seemed to pay attention; nobody talked to us.
Guri was “introduced” and started speaking. He sat on the floor and the guests sat around him. Slowly, almost languidly, he pointed to one after the other among his attending friends and reminisced about how they met, what they did over the years, and so on. Some forty minutes into this, Guri stopped. Silence. Then, turning toward me, hand outstretched, finger pointed, he literally yelled: “As for Friedländer, we will settle accounts with him!” It was an exorcism: Vade retro, Satana! (Get thee behind me, Satan!) We didn’t wait. Out we went, down the stairs, across the street, back to the safety of our house.
I couldn’t remain indifferent to the catastrophic evolution of the political situation in Israel during the 1980s. Itzhak Shamir had replaced a Menachem Begin exhausted by the disastrous evolution of the Lebanon War. An older saying could have perfectly applied to the diminutive Shamir: “He is even smaller than he looks.” Shamir was a dangerous fanatic, opposed to all compromise and to the tiniest move toward peace. One couldn’t keep silent.
For the first and last time of my life, I addressed a mass demonstration of Peace Now, in front of the prime minister’s (Shamir’s) office, organized in the memory of Emil Grunzweig, a Peace Now activist murdered on that spot by a right-wing fanatic. I hurled (not my style) Cromwell’s words to the Rump Parliament into the Jerusalem night: “You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing … In the name of God, go!” It didn’t unseat Shamir.
At the end of the 1980s, during Shamir’s last year in office, I summed up my view of the situation in Israel in a letter to Leon Wieseltier:
Unfortunately, articles, petitions, speeches do not help anymore and, as you see, nothing will sway Shamir, as long as the US won’t move. No need to add, the US won’t move. The elections in Israel will, as you know, lead more or less to the present division of the country into equal camps with a possible shift to the right. So, what should be done? You may know that some years ago, I spoke of the possibility of civil disobedience and, believe me, I studied my Rawls very well. The trouble is that in the present situation this may legitimize the argument of Gush Emunim and others that they too act according to the dictates of their conscience. I am really at a loss and, I must admit, terribly depressed by what I see and even more by what I foresee. Needless to say, all that Peace Now does is fine but, to me, this has become something of a ritual which alleviates our conscience without leading anywhere.
The elections of 1992 did bring a change but the hope that did arise was brutally smashed. I will return to it.
5
Nahum Goldmann died in Europe in August 1982 and was buried in Jerusalem, on Mount Herzl, along with all major Zionist leaders. The decision had encountered strong initial opposition. Begin’s government resisted having Goldmann buried on that hallowed spot and, even worse, the leadership of the Jewish Agency (the institution that Goldmann chaired for years and to which some of its leaders at the time of his death owed their careers) supported the government’s position. As a former Goldmann secretary, I was asked to express my opinion on the evening news. I didn’t hesitate to call it a shame — one more — for the government of Israel and mainly for the leaders of the Jewish Agency. Even as I write about this, so long after the events, I still feel some of the anger of those days.
I don’t know what brought about the official change of decision, but a Mount Herzl burial was finally allowed. Very few Israelis were present at the funeral; neither the government nor the Jewish Agency sent any representatives. Most of those who came belonged to the diplomatic corps and to a delegation that arrived specially from West Germany. Goldmann’s widow Alice and his two sons, Michael and Guido, attended, as did Michael’s son, Goldmann’s grandson.
Michael, who lived in Paris, had married an African-American woman; they divorced a few years later. The boy — who must have been ten or eleven at the time of the funeral — suddenly stood there alone, as everybody was leaving, and looked utterly lost (an aide arrived shortly afterward to lead him away). That moment of “abandonment” of the little black grandson, standing in dismay on the dusty path of the cemetery, looked like a Fellini ending to Nahum Goldmann’s saga.
PART III
Germany
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Inability to Mourn*
In The Tin Drum, novelist Günter Grass tells of clubs in West Germany in the 1950s in which people ate onions to be capable of shedding tears. The metaphor was not wrong. Most Germans in those years wanted first and foremost to forget how much they had felt, each in his or her own way, part and parcel of the Third Reich, at least until the last year of the war. They constructed a mythic story of the past and desperately wanted to believe in it.
I remember stopping over in Hamburg, on my way to Sweden in 1956; the railway station bookstores were filled with the cheap productions of one Heinz Konsalik singing the praise of the Wehrmacht soldiers fighting heroically on the Eastern Front, without ever mentioning the criminal side of the coin. As I indicated previously, change occurred during the sixties, but it was followed by ups and downs that didn’t find some sort of resolution before the late eighties. I tried to understand that moving scene from Geneva or Jerusalem and on the occasion of brief visits to Germany.
1
In the early 1970s, I caught a glimpse of weird mutations in the representation of the Nazi years, both in Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe. A strange sort of countermemory of the Third Reich was appearing: in Germany it was dubbed the Hitler Wave (die Hitlerwelle), in France the retro fashion (la mode rétro), in Italy something else. It was the strangeness of it all that caught my attention and led me to write, almost as an afterthought, a book-length essay published in French in 1983 as Reflets du Nazisme; it became Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death in its English version. I mentioned it in the previous chapter.
Grasping what was going on was not easy: the Hitler years had become an object of public fascination expressed with utter moral relativism and some playful, postmodern aesthetics. Remember Albert Speer’s wildly successful memoirs, Joachim Fest’s unusually eloquent and best-selling biography of Hitler and the ensuing film, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s aesthetic reworking of history in his film Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland (Our Hitler in the States). The death camps inspired Liliana Cavani’s sadomasochistic film The Night Porter; French collaboration found its noncommital interpretation in Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien, and so on.
In my Reflections, I attempted to grasp the essence of that mood and of that fascination. I perceived the new representation as a playful free-for-all, beyond good and evil. More specifically, I recognized in the new productions the very use of some of the components that so effectively ensured Nazism’s hold on millions of Germans and other Europeans: syrupy sentimentality (kitsch) mixed with the exaltation triggered by total destruction and mass death. The German edition of my essay put the emphasis on this insight by changing the title to Kitsch und Tod. Der Widerschein des Nazismus (Kitsch and Death: The Reflection of Nazism).
The book didn’t find much echo in France. The time of such questions hadn’t yet arrived. Le Roi des Aulnes (The Ogre), a novel by Michel Tournier, one of the icons of French literature in his day, illustrated my argument with its eroticization and mythification of Nazi young boys in one of their leadership schools; it didn’t seem to bother anybody and, in 1970, Tournier’s novel received the Goncourt Prize, the highest literary prize in France. My book led to interesting, at times tense debates in Germany and garnered a warm reception in Israel. As for the American world, the Hitler Wave had not reached its shores in any
significant manner.
I never thought of applying the concepts I used to analyze the Hitler Wave and its antecedents to renditions of the Shoah during the sixties and seventies. It simply didn’t occur to me. It so happened, however, that just before I started working on Reflections, NBC produced the miniseries Holocaust in 1977, which could be perceived as a mixture of kitsch and death. Despite its worthlessness in artistic terms, that Hollywood production revolutionized Western awareness of the Holocaust: millions in the United States and in Europe — particularly in Germany — became aware of the extermination for the first time. Kitsch and death, or in other words, cheap sentimentality and extreme violence, penetrated as never before the imagination of vast Western audiences.
The intention of the NBC production was essentially commercial (following the success of ABC’s Roots, a docudrama about slavery). The subtext of some of the productions of the Hitler Wave was different: it was ideological in the widest sense of the word, and here and there offered a muted echo of emotions from another era. At a loss for a more adequate term, I called this reinterpretation of Nazism a “new discourse,” and, in the introduction to Reflections, I tried to convey the gist of the underlying problem: “Is the attention fixated on this past only a gratuitous reverie, the attraction of spectacle, exorcism, or the result of a need to understand? Or is it, again and still, an expression of profound fears and, on the part of some, of mute yearnings as well?”
Although this “new discourse” was mainly a German and West European phenomenon (France and Italy), its ambiguous message also emerged in a puzzling novella, published in 1981, by the brilliant, world-renowned British and Jewish intellectual George Steiner under the title The Portage to San Cristobal of AH. Powerfully written, Steiner’s text tells of a ninety-year-old Hitler, alive and hidden in the Amazonian jungle, captured by a group of Israeli agents and transported toward the coast to be shipped to Israel to stand trial. Ultimately, AH’s trial takes place in the jungle: the prosecutor, the leader of the group, Lieber, presents with deep feeling Hitler’s quintessential crime, the extermination of the Jews. But it is Hitler who has the last word (literally: his answer ends in midsentence and with it the novella ends); it seems to turn the table on his Jewish accusers. Somehow, the satanic dimension was back and AH’s eloquence appeared overwhelming.
I knew Steiner well as, for years, he taught English and comparative literature at Geneva University and we often met either at the brasserie Candolle, opposite the main university building, where Lenin used to spend much time, or at our apartment. In August 1981, as he was home in Cambridge, I wrote to him about Portage:
Our discussion in Geneva may not have conveyed to you how puzzled and, in a way, ill at ease I was about some aspects of the book; ill at ease but also spellbound by the extraordinary brilliance and the uncanny power of the piece. My immediate problem is the following: I cannot avoid discussing your book in my forthcoming essay on the “Metamorphosis of Nazism” [the early title of Reflections], as I am trying to interpret, among other things, some new images of Hitler and a new discourse about the Jews. Doubtlessly, your final pages, that is the famous Hitler speech which you leave without any answer belongs to some of the major categories of arguments I wish to analyze …
Steiner wrote back:
A work of art is a work of art and must stand on its own feet. To this day many ask “whether Milton is of Satan’s party” and why Dostoevsky gave Christ no single word in reply to the Grand Inquisitor. God knows, I am not comparing myself with these titans, but I think such debates often misunderstand how art works, how fiction allows the anarchic play of ideas and metaphors. Lieber’s speech may be the most intense thing yet written on the Holocaust … AH’s speech is NO answer, no possible answer, but an explosion of language out of the Hell that Lieber recounts. Both texts, and whatever else is memorable in the story, are meant to force mind and soul to face the terrible mystery of the limitless potentials of human speech …
Was I becoming too much of a moralist?
No, I wasn’t too much of a moralist. In some cases, my comments may have been entirely wrong but in others, regarding Syberberg’s Our Hitler for example, I felt intuitively that exploiting to the hilt the aesthetics of Hitler’s pageants, creating quasi-mystical comments to accompany the Wagnerian sound track of Nazi ceremonies meant adding layers of “enchantment” intended to reevoke the fascination of yesteryear. I said this to Syberberg, whom I met several times, until, once in Hamburg, he snapped back at me, “Aber es war ja faszinierend!” (But it was truly fascinating!)
Syberberg was never too keen on hiding his anti-Semitism. Our first encounter took place at the cinematheque in Jerusalem where he came to present an extract of his Hitler film. Both the writer Amos Elon and I immediately criticized his aesthetic endeavors, and our critical comments went on during the dinner that followed until Syberberg exploded: “What I am presenting is art, while the Jews are making money with Auschwitz!” He was probably alluding to the NBC miniseries, but “the Jews are making money” rang a familiar bell.
It took some years to get the full picture, once Syberberg published his political diatribe Vom Unglück und Glück der Kunst in Deutschland nach dem letzten Kriege (On the Misfortune and Fortune of Art in Germany after the Last War), in 1990. Here is a tiny sample that Ian Buruma translated in an article published in the New York Review of Books on December 20, 1990: “The Jewish interpretation of the world,” Syberberg wrote,
followed upon the Christian, just as the Christian one followed Roman and Greek culture. So now Jewish analyses, images, definitions of art, science, sociology, literature, politics, the information media, dominate. Marx and Freud are the pillars that mark the road from East to West. Neither are imaginable without Jewishness. Their systems are defined by it. The axis USA-Israel guarantees the parameters. That is the way people think now, the way they feel, act and disseminate information. We live in the Jewish epoch of European cultural history. And we can only wait, at the pinnacle of our technological power, for our last judgment at the edge of the apocalypse … So, that’s the way it looks, for all of us, suffocating in unprecedented technological prosperity, without spirit, without meaning … Those who want to have good careers go along with Jews and Leftists [and] the race of superior men [Rasse der Herrenmenschen] has been seduced, the land of poets and thinkers has become the fat booty of corruption, of business, of lazy comfort.
I am about to plunge deeper into German issues and, during the 1980s, I spent much time in Germany. Thus, it may be the right place to say a word about “my German Question,” as the historian Peter Gay would have put it and as I remember it from that period.
In the first chapter of this book, I briefly mentioned the place of my German Jewish background in the emergence of a “polymorphous” identity. In my childhood memoir I referred to two contradictory and coexisting attitudes to Germany and a German environment: familiarity and fear. Both were still very much present in the years I am dealing with now and are easily understood: familiarity inherited from early childhood, fear from later years. In short, I felt simultaneously very much at ease and constantly on edge, not without good reason on occasion, as will become amply clear further on.
Throughout those years, I particularly hated the unavoidable contact with people old enough to have been active adults in Nazi Germany and about whom you knew that they had been “brown” to a degree; they now turned into syrupy do-gooders regarding Jews and Israel. My reticence led at times to the comment (naturally made behind my back): “Er ist ja schwer belastet” (He is quite heavily burdened).
It took years before I felt somewhat more at ease in Germany; yet eventually I almost did. My two Berlin grandchildren, Yonatan and Benjamin, could not imagine anything else.
2
Heightened public awareness of the Shoah was, as mentioned, a paradoxical result of the NBC miniseries; it led, almost immediately, to debates and to new historical work that marked the beginning of an exponential growth of
sustained scholarly attention to the subject. In 1983 the then president of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, François Furet, asked me to organize an international conference on the history of the Shoah in Paris. Soon thereafter, in May 1984, a much larger international historical conference — the first ever held in Germany on this theme — was convened in Stuttgart.
The mayor of Stuttgart, Manfred Rommel, formally opened the meeting. The academic conveners, the historians Eberhard Jäckel and Jürgen Rohwer, followed, and then came my turn with a lecture addressing the issue that at the time divided historians of Nazi Germany between “intentionalists” and “functionalists” (opposite categories formulated by the British historian Tim Mason to analyze the political dynamics of Nazi Germany). I later regretted having chosen such abstract concepts regarding the Shoah; over the years, these distinctions disappeared.
At the time, though, the opposition between the two approaches went much deeper than appeared at first glance. In my lecture, I criticized the functionalist position as strongly as I could and tried to argue for a moderate intentionalism that took into account the impact of circumstances, but nonetheless interpreted the extermination policy as the outcome of an extreme ideology of Jew hatred and of Hitler’s active role. In short, it considered the extermination the outcome of a willful policy, of an “intention.” To cross the threshold from persecution and even massacres into total extermination, Hilberg declared on that occasion, Hitler’s go-ahead was necessary.
When Memory Comes Page 17
