When Memory Comes

by Saul Friedlander

  At the end of the war, British authorities did not allow Heinrich Mohn to stay as owner and head of the company; his son Reinhard took over, and Bertelsmann expanded as never before, in part by launching its “readers’ circles” (Leserkreise). Referring to the company’s Pietist beginnings in the 1830s, Norbert Frei described Bertelsmann’s evolution in a perfect formula: “From the Bible reading groups to the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft [racial community] and from the racial community to the readers’ circles.” In short, Bertelsmann knew how to adopt and use the traditional need for “togetherness” of an important segment of German society, particularly in the postwar years. In 2003, two heavy volumes summed up our research; unlike what happened with the Swiss report, there was no significant controversy.

  4

  At the end of 1995 my friend Amos Funkenstein died. He had remarried in 1987. We didn’t spend much time together at UCLA, as he moved to Stanford just when I arrived for good and then to Berkeley. I used to visit him and his wife Esti in one place after the other, as frequently as possible once he fell ill. And we met in L.A. and in Tel Aviv, where he went on teaching almost to the end.

  I witnessed Amos’s struggle with lung cancer during two years at least, which meant following the course of physical deterioration step by step. The only thing you can do is to assure the friend you are manifestly losing that his looks are improving and that, without any doubt, the chemotherapy will work and he will soon be healthy again. I don’t know what Amos really believed, but he did make plans for the future, and shortly before his passing he told me of the courses he intended to teach in Tel Aviv during the coming academic year. He still managed to travel to Jerusalem to receive the Israel Prize, but then he had to return to Berkeley for further treatment. His heart suddenly gave way.

  From the mid-nineties to the turn of the century, everyday life followed its course with its teaching chores, the added load of the two commissions, and constant work on The Years of Extermination. My frequent trips to Munich allowed me to see more of my German publisher Wolfgang Beck and his wife Mahrokh: we established a warm relationship. I had an excellent Lektor and chief editor for the German edition of the first volume, Peter Wieckenberg; after his retirement, I came under the “supervision” of his successor, Detlef Felken, a brilliant chief editor if there ever was one. Over the years, we not only worked together but Detlef also became a close friend of mine and of Orna’s.

  In 1997 or 1998, I retired from Tel Aviv University. From the outset, as I told, I had liked the Tel Aviv campus and, apart from my close friends Uriel Tal and Amos Funkenstein, I was lucky to have had some great colleagues: Zwi Yawetz, the historian of Rome, cofounder of the university, and permanent chair of the Department of History, whose exuberant personality and foul language barely hid an utterly generous core; and Shulamit Volkov, the highly respected historian of modern Germany and of German anti-Semitism, but, to me, a font of ever good advice and of decades-long friendship. I could mention other names, also those of some wonderfully talented students, who all add to my warm memory of the university. Let me just mention that some very special bonds still keep me close to it: my son Eli has, until recently, chaired its Department of Philosophy, and his wife Michal is professor of musicology in its Academy of Music.

  Unfortunately, the conviviality that existed in Geneva and in Tel Aviv didn’t characterize UCLA’s Department of History in the early 2000s and later, as far as I experienced it, mainly after Carlo chose to return to Italy, with the exception of our friendship with Sanjay Subrahmanyam and his wife, Caroline Ford. It could well be that I myself partly chose to keep my distance, as I noticed the growing anti-Israel drift among those to whom I had felt close at the outset, or because, increasingly, I was otherwise engaged. UCLA had now become my only academic home, but I felt less and less part of the department’s life, if there was any left. I retired in 2011, without regret.

  On September 11, 2001, I was still living in my small Bel Air house when “it” happened. It must have been about 6 a.m. L.A. time when I got up and, still half asleep, switched on the TV morning news, I was so taken aback by what I saw that, now as then, everything remains a blur. I am almost certain, though, that I saw the destruction of the second tower: the plane, the cloud of smoke, the collapse of the building. I was horrified. Orna was sitting beside me on the sofa facing the television. I remember that we practically didn’t exchange a word; like hundreds of millions of people all over the world, we were in shock.

  The collapsing buildings were the worst, but the street scenes were also terrifying: people running, fleeing in all directions, the blaring of sirens, firefighters, ambulances, police cars, pandemonium. I can’t distinguish now between what was shown at the moment and images that were broadcast later, for days and days. In that jumble of camera shots, I see people falling from the towers; they escape from the smoke, the fire, and the crumbling floors by jumping to their death!

  What did I think when President Bush finally emerged, slightly ridiculous in the midst of that tragedy? No, he wasn’t FDR addressing the nation after Pearl Harbor. And there wasn’t a Japan to fight, only terror groups, mostly in hiding. Yet Afghanistan under the Taliban was a sanctuary, so that invading Afghanistan made sense at the time. But did the invasion of Iraq, two years later, make sense? To me, it did, although some of my friends expressed outrage. I simply couldn’t believe that U.S. intelligence agencies would be so wrong about Saddam Hussein’s stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. The invasion was a terrible mistake, but that wasn’t apparent in 2003.

  I never felt “truly” American. How could I? I came here too late in life. The rules of baseball are a mystery to me, and I do not set up a barbecue on the Fourth of July or on any other day, for that matter. The main question, however, is different; it has little to do with national customs and relates, directly and simply, to the political and social texture of the country one has opted for.

  I like what the United States strives to be; I say “strives,” as it still is far from the goals that a majority of Americans hope to reach. It is easy to list America’s glaring failures: racism, everyday violence, the role of money in politics (a problem from hell), and so on. I could go on about what is so frequently bandied about, such as the country’s materialism and its so-called lack of culture; the failures are real, but much of the “cultural” criticism comes down to cartoonlike tags pretending to sum up major features of a huge and diverse country.

  That Denmark has established a model society is admirable but hardly astonishing: it is small and ethnically homogeneous. The United States is a fumbling colossus that, with all its deficiencies, is a working democracy where people are free, have, nowadays, access to the justice system and usually get a fair hearing, where nothing stops the media from the most iconoclastic inquiries, where gay marriage is being recognized now throughout the country, and where, notwithstanding the still widespread racism, a decisive majority of the electorate — and that should never be forgotten — twice voted for an African-American president.

  And one should not forget either that the United States has shown its readiness to defend countries that otherwise could not defend themselves. Of course such policies serve the American interest, as is true for the foreign policies of every other nation, but try to imagine the world today, with China’s might and Putin’s ambitions, without the United States’ active presence as a deterrent.

  I remember that some ten to twelve years ago, on the eve of Thanksgiving, I phoned a former student of mine from the time I started teaching in Tel Aviv, who had become a well-known historian and professor at Brown, Omer Bartov. At the end of the conversation, as one “exile” to the other, I wished him a happy Thanksgiving, to which he answered, “Yes, thank God for America!” I never forgot that unexpected answer, and, indeed, I often feel the same.

  5

  My major aim during the early years of the new century was to complete The Years of Extermination. Instead of dealing essentially with one country, as in the
first volume, I undertook the challenge of writing an integrated history that would encompass simultaneously Nazi policies and those of their collaborators in each and every occupied country, the attitudes of surrounding societies, and, above all, the reactions of the Jews. The measures taken by the Allies and the neutrals also had to be included.

  Showing the simultaneity of these diverse elements was the only way of conveying some of the dimensions of the events. It was obvious that no single conceptual framework could apply to such entirely diverse historical developments.

  Yet how could a narrative aiming at the integration of policies and reactions, at their simultaneity all over occupied Europe and beyond, be structured without turning into a chaotic presentation that would become incomprehensible to all but the most specialized readers? It took me some time to grasp that without a unified conceptual framework, without a unity of place (there was one in the first volume), and without a unity of agency (again, only one uncontested agency dominated the first volume), there remained a single possible solution: to create very tight units of time spreading over six months each, at most. It would allow the reader to tie together the events narrated in each sequence and thus from sequence to sequence. This, however, was but one of my main challenges.

  The other major challenge was to write as precise a historical rendition as possible, and at the same time re-create for the reader a momentary sense of disbelief that history has a tendency to eliminate in the case of extreme events. In fact, I had considered this problem for several years, well before conceiving of my project. How could such contradictory aims be reconciled? It was only after mulling over a number of solutions, each one as unconvincing as the next, that the most obvious, and the simplest, answer occurred to me: to introduce into the historical narrative not only the Jewish dimension as such but the “raw voices” of the victims. In other words, not only would I narrate collective Jewish reactions to the events in order to illustrate the vast array of Jewish attitudes, the multiple facets of the Jewish dimension, but, at various moments, I would introduce extracts from diaries or letters that, mostly without the intermediary of postwar memory, carried the incomprehension or the fear, the despair or the hopes of the trapped victims. These cries and whispers would puncture, so to say, the normalizing pace of the historical narrative, and jolt, albeit briefly, the distanced intellectual understanding conveyed by historical narration as such.

  Once I assimilated these various answers, work progressed rapidly, and in the spring of 2006 I completed volume two. Detlef managed to organize a swift (and excellent) translation, so that the German edition was ready for the Frankfurt Book Fair in October and for the Leipzig Book Fair later on. The American edition, the original, came out later, in 2007. This second volume was very well received by reviewers and was translated into many languages. It brought some major recognition: the award for nonfiction at the Leipzig Book Fair, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade Association (Frankfurt, 2007), and the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction (Columbia University, 2008).

  The German Peace Prize (Friedenspreis), established in the early 1950s, was a very official accolade, awarded in the St. Paul Church in Frankfurt (the seat of the short-lived liberal parliament of 1848/49) in the presence of some thousand guests and of the German president or, alternatively, the chancellor. The laureate had to make a speech (broadcast live on television) of about half an hour, which on occasion could be an explicit political statement.

  Ten years or so before I was awarded the prize, the German novelist Martin Walser received the award and used the occasion to launch an assault against the constant (according to him) reference to the Holocaust in the German public sphere, as “a moral cudgel” in his words. The remarkable aspect of that ceremony was not what Walser declared so openly, but rather the standing ovation that greeted his words. Only the chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Ignatz Bubis, remained seated and did not applaud.

  It occurred to me that, among other reasons, I had been awarded the Peace Prize as a kind of indirect counterweight to the Walser accolade. Whatever the reason may have been, my address had to be a statement about the Shoah that would carry some significance and some resonance. I decided to read — in the original German — with as few comments as possible, family letters not published previously (with two exceptions), including a letter from my aunt Martha, who had remained in Prague, working at the local Jewish Community office. In early 1943, Martha wrote to my grandmother in Sweden, telling her that all community employees had been slated for deportation. She was happy, she wrote, to depart for the East as she would be closer to Elli and Hans (my parents) and could eventually meet them …

  My work on the Holocaust had come to an end.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Time That Remains

  In 2005 I sold the house in Bel Air. Orna and I moved to a cozy and very quiet house in the hills of West Hollywood, off Laurel Canyon (even those who do not know L.A. may have heard of Laurel Canyon, the home of the Doors, the Mamas and the Papas, and sundry other rock bands). When you went to buy a thing or two at the local store, you met veterans of the 1960s; they did not seem to have outgrown those magic years, and Laurel Canyon was a good place for dreams to linger in their original habitat.

  To reach the entrance of our house, however, you had to climb quite a number of double-height steps. Over the years, I was becoming increasingly breathless during such climbings, and I could easily foresee the moment I would have to give up. So, in 2014, we regretfully moved again.

  In the meantime, though, in December 2008, we decided to give up living in sin and to get married. Where could we marry quickly and discreetly, if not in Las Vegas? From L.A. to Vegas, the drive took some five hours along Death Valley and through desert, most of the way. But Vegas was no desert. We left our suitcase at the Bellagio and went in search of a marriage office. We found one, stood in line (as at the post office), signed something, paid something, and were married. Not so fast, though: for the procedure to be complete, we had to undergo a “spiritual” introduction to married life. You had “chapels” all over town. We settled for the first we saw and, again, waited in line, signed something, and were ushered into a private room where a very young lady, dressed in a light blue “graduation” gown, explained to us that in married life there were summits and valleys … The insight cost us twenty dollars and, this time, we were married for good. The following day we were back in the Hollywood Hills.

  1

  Many questions have remained unanswered and it’s closing time.

  My own work on the history of the Shoah was done, although the decision had not been easy. Historians of my generation have contributed their share, each according to his/her specific approach, and, sometimes, under the impact of individual experience. Some of them are still wonderfully active, as agewise they are in between the old and the new groups, like Christopher Browning, for example, Hilberg’s outstanding disciple.

  The “young cohort” (historians between their forties and sixties) has already been on stage for some time. I admit that it is not always easy to keep hands off; occasionally, the new productions annoy me. I go on reading though (how could I otherwise?), and slowly get used to the fact that no history remains static and that, in any case, the memory of the Shoah is undergoing a major change: “the era of the witness” (Annette Wieviorka) is over. I also know that in due time, the pendulum of historiography will swing back, at least part of the way.

  Putting an end to my work on the Shoah didn’t mean to stop writing; that would have been impossible. I looked for a new but minor project, a brief essay on Kafka for example, as time was getting short. Actually, time could have been much shorter than I even thought. In 2012, my physician informed me that blood tests and the biopsy that followed showed high-risk prostate cancer. Weeks of radiation and hormone therapy became the unavoidable sequel: it worked, for now. Then, a few months ago (spring 2015), a ministroke added its contribution to the pleasures of old age …
Am I hearing a knock at the door? (No bells do toll in Los Angeles.)

  Why Kafka? I remember clearly my wish to write something on my revered compatriot during the stay in Paris in the spring of 1960, as I was organizing the conference on Soviet Jewry, that is, before I had written a single line about anything. Luckily, I didn’t reveal my idea to anybody. But it remained over the decades without my doing much about it, except reading all I could. This is how, in the 1990s, after I went through most of the German critical edition of Kafka’s novels, diaries, letters, fragments, and so forth, I became convinced that Max Brod, his lifelong friend and literary executor, had grievously censored his writings.

  Brod’s intention was clear and explicit: turn Kafka into a saint and, therefore, delete anything that smacked of sexuality from his autobiographical writings (the more so that Kafka was more attracted to men than to women and, at times, fantasized about children). In fact, much of Kafka’s sexual life — apart from his frequent visits to brothels — was more fantasy than reality. For Brod, there was no difference: K.’s expressions of desire or descriptions that were too explicit had to disappear. In short, Brod was robbing his friend of his humanity; he was also robbing all of us of an access — one of many — to Kafka’s texts. As my project became part of the Yale series of “Jewish Lives,” meant to present short biographies of important Jewish figures, I deemed it essential to reinstate the words, lines, or entire paragraphs that Brod had excised, and pursue a few themes that, to my mind, dominated Kafka’s life and, indirectly, his work.

  Although the slim volume got some strongly expressed support in its English, German, and French versions, the old guard of Kafka specialists was not amused. I had foreseen it and was hardly surprised.

  I was still very much entangled in Kafka matters when, sometime in 2013, I started fiddling with the first elements of this memoir. There was no compelling reason for starting it (except for the need to work on something) and there were actually a few good reasons for not undertaking it. I hesitated about the Berlin imbroglio, for example, but then got on my way. I was aware, as I wrote in the prologue, that my perspective on issues very close to many people’s passionate attention was both that of an insider of sorts but also of one sufficiently detached to be credible, or so I hope. The practical option was to write as much of a draft as possible and then take the advice of people I relied on, as my own judgment could have become a problem. And now, of course, as I plod ahead, the prospect of being unable to complete this text is never far from my mind. Starting projects should not mean taking for granted le temps qui reste (the time that remains).