The Morass Of Meaning

Peter Novick’s book challenged the conventional meanings attached to the Holocaust.

Peter Novick’s book challenged the conventional meanings attached to the Holocaust.

by Eric Herschthal
Staff Writer

When Misha Defonseca, a 71-year-old Holocaust memoirist, admitted in late February to being a fraud, the few lines she offered in her defense may have proven more provocative than the sorry fact of the lie itself. Defonseca, through her lawyer, told the Associated Press: “The story is mine. It is not actual reality, but my reality, my way of surviving.”
Which is to say, her fabricated Holocaust story — as a Jewish child, she claimed, she hid from the Nazis in the Belgian forest, protected by a pack of wolves — was a metaphor for her personal suffering. She may never have experienced Nazi persecution firsthand, but she felt she knew the trauma and pain it might inflict. She understood the Holocaust’s meaning, to say nothing of its facts.
This point — the distinction between the Holocaust’s meanings and its facts — may only be hinted at by the Defonseca affair, but it highlights a central issue in the broader debate about what it is we remember on Holocaust Remembrance Day, officially commemorated on May 1 this year. Holocaust scholars have only recently begun addressing the gap between the two — with the debates perhaps most fierce among themselves — but the implications, they argue, have relevance for everyone. If we remember too much, or in the wrong way, are we in a sense forgetting the victims, not honoring the dead? It is often said that Hitler wins if we forget, but does he also win if we let his genocide define Jewish identity?
Perhaps no one did more to bring these questions to a broader public than the historian Peter Novick, whose book “The Holocaust in American Life,” won the National Jewish Book Award in 2000. Rather than focus on the history of the Holocaust itself — how and why it happened — he focused on how the event has been remembered ever since. He argued that the public discourse of the Holocaust, which often focuses on the tragedy’s meanings and lessons, have been manipulated by Jewish communal leaders to advance their own agendas. In so doing, he wrote: “Over the course of a generation, the Holocaust has moved from the margins to the center of American Jewish consciousness.”
His thesis has been hotly debated ever since. It is hard to find a recent academic paper or book on the subject that does not at least mention Novick’s work. And even for those who haven’t read it, the core themes are continually reflected in more recent Holocaust debates: while Novick argues that too much attention is paid to Holocaust deniers, it has become commonplace for Holocaust deniers and those who greatly downplay the scope of the Holocaust — like Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — to use their arguments as a way of undermining the Shoah’s significance in the founding of the State of Israel, and thus question Israel’s legitimacy and right to exist. There is the Defonseca forgery, which suggests a severe abuse of the universalized message of suffering given to the Holocaust. Then there is the growing body of satirical Holocaust literature — “My Holocaust” by Tova Reich, a key scene in Gary Shteyngart’s “Absurdistan” — with their sharp critiques of Holocaust-message overload.
Novick’s book was a fierce challenge to the conventional meanings attached to the Holocaust. Some criticized him for the implication that he was some kind of moral authority, judging which way the Holocaust should and should not be remembered. Others strongly contested the centrality Novick placed on the Holocaust to American Jewish identity. And even if he had a point that the Holocaust loomed too largely in Jewish consciousness, Novick’s “readers are meant to understand that the Holocaust was substantially less than it had been touted to be,” wrote Berel Lang, a Holocaust scholar, in his book “Post-Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation and the Claims of History” (2005).
Still, scholars continue to bemoan the clichés and platitudes — the meanings — attached to the Holocaust, even if they might not, as Novick claimed, be tainted mainly by the agendas of the people pushing them. Lawrence L. Langer, an emeritus English professor at Simmons College in Boston who studies Holocaust literature, swiftly dismissed a few common themes. Never again? “We’ve had Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur happen again,” he said in an interview. The triumph of the human spirit, the theme of Viktor Frankl’s international best-seller “Man’s Search For Meaning”? “Be skeptical of stories of spiritual triumph. Mass murder only leads to death,” he said. And of the Holocaust hastening Israel’s foundation: “That’s a terrible thing to say. Israel itself would give back its protections if it could save six million Jews.”
But while some scholars argue that there are lessons to be learned, they are short on what they might be. In an interview, Novick, a professor at the University of Chicago, suggested there were some, but that it was not his responsibility to deduce them. “I don’t think there’s a right meaning or a wrong meaning in the Holocaust,” he said, “and the hell if I can say that one is used properly and one isn’t.” His book offers few discernible lessons either. Langer said that if there was any lesson at all, “We’ve learned that it’s a terrible thing to die that way.” All we can do to remember, he said, is “accept the obligation to know what happened in the Holocaust.”
Which brings us to the problems with that. Despite Holocaust deniers claiming the contrary, the factual evidence documenting the Holocaust is immense. But so is the scholarship, with its very own rigorous debates over how and why the Holocaust happened. In essence, when scholars ask the public to “understand” the Holocaust, they invite readers into a thicket of contested interpretations, albeit based on solid facts.
The past year’s standout history books on the Holocaust — Saul Friedländer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945,” and “Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State,” by Götz Aly — highlight the point. Both books are very much counterweights to the scholarship spawned by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” (1996), which argued that the Holocaust would not have been possible without the endemic anti-Semitism of ordinary Germans who supported it. Friedländer argues that the onus of the Holocaust falls squarely on Hitler’s shoulders. Aly argues that Germans were complicit only because they were the financial recipients of plundered Jewish property.
Then, there is the sheer intensity of the facts of the Holocaust. A commonly held view is that the Holocaust itself — the extermination of six million Jews — defies understanding; it is beyond comprehension. The idea stems from Hannah Arendt’s notion of “radical evil,” which, as the eminent historian Irving Howe wrote years later is “a phrase that strongly implies the impossibility of coping with the problem.” It was a discomfiting notion, Howe argued, but it was all the meaning he could find. As he wrote, “We cannot ‘understand’ the Holocaust, we can only live with it, in a state of numb agitation.”
That is one way to remember the Holocaust — to simply live with it — but it has certainly been contested, too. In a review of Novick’s book, the scholar Eva Hoffman said the “sheer reiteration” of the Holocaust’s incomprehensibility “has by now become ... an encouragement to the sort of automatic response that is itself a kind of forgetting.” If she opted out of suggesting a meaning herself, she wrote, whatever one there may be, readers must never forget that the meanings can only come from a reckoning with the facts themselves. As she put it: “The Holocaust in American Life is so concerned with the manipulations of a symbol that the reader may forget that the symbol has ties to the thing itself.”

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization