Facing the Tremendum (I) The Shoah and Modern Jewish Thought SAMPLE. Introduction: the Holocaust as a Rupture of Thought and Theory

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1 1 Facing the Tremendum (I) The Shoah and Modern Jewish Thought Introduction: the Holocaust as a Rupture of Thought and Theory In 1981, the late Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim claimed that the Holocaust was an event of such extraordinary and unprecedented evil that it was no less than a decisive rupture of all epistemological and cultural categories, including history, philosophy and theology. 1 Neither the world, nor its organizing patterns of thought and discourse, could ever, argued Fackenheim, be the same after Auschwitz. Not everyone has found this claim for singularity compelling or persuasive. To make and then stand by this claim means, first, to imply a judgment about other events that may, at first glance, appear to fall within a similar category of event; and second, to risk mythologizing the Holocaust itself (and therefore its participants, both victims and perpetrators) into historical inaccessibility. Yet, as the Catholic ethicist John Pawlikowski has said, the face of Auschwitz has ushered in a significantly new era. 2 At the very outset it needs to be stated that, for reasons I hope will become clear, I believe both Fackenheim and Pawlikowski to be right. Notwithstanding that it posits a deeply problematic universal singularity for the Holocaust, Fackenheim s claim has not itself been unique. Indeed Fackenheim was not the first, nor has he been the last, to make such an epistemological claim for the Shoah. It has come to be recognized, in many circles at least, as the rupturing event of the modern era. This is, of, course, 1. Fackenheim, To Mend the World. 2. Pawlikowski, Christian Ethics and the Holocaust,

2 Reading Auschwitz with Barth an extraordinarily subjective claim to make. It is also a claim that is impossible to substantiate or quantify. It is, indeed, a statement of faith. How does one event get to stand out over against the ontological significance of any other? If it is a question of numbers, what about the Stalinist gulags? If it is a matter of brutality, what about the butchery of Rwanda? Whatever quantum is used to prove the Holocaust s uniqueness, counter-examples can be proposed to contradict the claim. All other examples of genocide, evil, even massive natural disasters in which countless millions have perished, are seemingly rendered unimportant by any claim of determining uniqueness for the Holocaust. And yet, the subjectivity of the claim notwithstanding, this is precisely what has been argued by many, across the disciplinary spectrum. While the claim itself may be a subjective claim of faith, it has been made in even the most rational of disciplines. German historiography during the s, for example, was largely dominated by the Historikerstreit, a debate chiefly amongst historians and philosophers of history about the legacy of Nazism in the overall evaluation of German history. Of particular focus was the question whether or not the Holocaust was illustrative of Germany s special historical evolution, its Sonderweg, or merely an aberration within an otherwise normal development towards nationhood. Distinct from but nonetheless embedded within this debate were arguments between the so-called intentionalists and the functionalists. On the one hand, historians such as Klaus Hildebrand, Lucy Dawidowicz and Andreas Hillgruber argued that the Holocaust was ingredient to Adolf Hitler s premeditated intent to kill as many Jews as possible. This, the intentionalists argued, was an impulse that had its origins in the early 1920s, and that can be identified at least in embryonic form in Mein Kampf. 3 Moreover, they argued, Hitler was in almost complete control of the Nazi machinery of power. What he wanted, he got. 4 On the other hand, scholars such as Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen argued that the dynamic of the Nazi genocide was far more fluid and reactive to the vagaries of wartime political circumstances, and moreover that Hitler s degree of control was piecemeal and erratic. The functionalist position did not intend to deny Hitler s involvement in the Holocaust, nor his pathological hatred of the Jews. His hand in the architecture of the Final Solution (Endlösung), 3. It is, hard, for example, to read the following without thinking at once of the ways in which Jews were systematically dehumanized by the Nazis and, in the end, gassed with rat poison: [Is] there any form of filth or profligacy... without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you [find], like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light, a Jew (Hitler, Mein Kampf, 53). 4. See for example, Dawidowicz, War Against the Jews; Holocaust and the Historians. 16

3 Facing the Tremendum (I) however, was indirect, with mid-level bureaucrats and SS field officers playing just as important a role in the enactment of Hitler s presumed wishes. Nonetheless, and regardless of which side one took in this debate, there was one point on which agreement was reached, one fundamental historiographical truth that could not be escaped the Holocaust was and is, for Germany at least, an unmasterable history. It is a Vergangenheitsbewältigung; it is a past that will not go away. 5 This sort of ontological determination that arose out of the so-called Historians Debate inevitably raised the status of the Holocaust to an event of more than mere history. However, Michael Marrus has contended that in more recent years the Holocaust has become historicized and, in the process, has entered into the mainstream of historical understanding. 6 This, he believes, is a necessary step in the right historiographical direction. Similarly, Marvin Prosono has argued with some concern against the sacralizing of the Holocaust. Instead of it being regarded and studied simply as a series of discrete events, the Holocaust has become a metaphysical conceptualization... which [has come] to stand for something more. We must, he argues, be wary of interpreting the Holocaust as a sacred text. 7 Prosono, Marrus and Dan Michman represent those scholars who are deeply convinced that the Shoah is only history, must be interpreted as such, and that in the inevitability of historical progress will eventually be interpreted only in this way. It will, in other words, not always be unmasterable. And yet, I find that these arguments are not ultimately compelling. For all his insistence that the Holocaust not be universalized and thus vacated of particular meaning, I believe that Yehuda Bauer is more correct to say that, far from entering the mainstream, the Shoah has become a cultural code. 8 It is a paradigmatic event, a symbol, that stands for more than itself. By its very nature, the Holocaust stands apart from the normative sweep of history, and disrupts the routine categories of explanation. To return to Fackenheim s diagnosis, I (and others) would argue that there is something fundamentally different about the Holocaust that irretrievably disturbs its historical connectedness. Jewish Scriptures and the Midrashim are full of rupturing events that temporarily shatter the bond between God and God s people. But a remnant, says Fackenheim, has 5. See Nolte, Die Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will. 6. Marrus, Holocaust: Where We Are, Where We Need to Go A Comment, Prosono, Holocaust as a Sacred Text, Bauer, Past That Will Not Go Away,

4 Reading Auschwitz with Barth always turned and returned, and so a healing (Tikkun) is always present even in the midst of the rupture. With the Holocaust, however, the assumption of historical continuity between past and present is decisively broken apart. Historical continuity is shattered because at Auschwitz not only man [sic] died, but also the idea of man... We need a new departure and a new category because the Holocaust is not a relapse into barbarism, a phase in an historical dialectic... [but] a total rupture. 9 The completeness of the rupture is mirrored by the complete absence of the possibility of Tikkun. 10 The rupturing effect of the Holocaust has been felt, not only in the field of historical studies, but in all manner of disparate disciplines. As Franklin Littell has put it, Anyone who has thought deeply about the lessons of the bitter years , epitomized in the Holocaust, knows that students in every discipline need to be confronted in Theology, in Law, in Medicine, in Business, in Anthropology and Psychology. 11 All these systems and discourses failed within the madness of the Third Reich. Each of these disciplines represents a profession that was, in its own way, coordinated (gleichgeschaltet) into synchronicity with Nazi ideology. Therefore, any serious study of the Holocaust must interrogate each of them from within their own epistemologies and paradigms, conscious that none can remain unchanged in the process. Robert J. Lifton s seminal study into the role of Nazi physicians in the enactment of genocide, for example, has raised significant questions about the formulation of medical ethics, and has done so in the context of a broader questioning of the human condition itself. Because, as Uriel Tal has suggested, the Shoah aimed at ushering in a complete transformation of human values, no comprehension of what humanity is and is capable of can now remain untainted by it. 12 In Lifton s words, [a]fter Auschwitz, the ordinary rhythms and appearances of life, however innocuous or pleasant, [are] far from the truth of human existence. Underneath those rhythms and appearances [lie] darkness and menace... [T]o permit one s imagination 9. Fackenheim, To Mend the World, , 253, Note that Fackenheim argues for both the impossibility of a post-holocaust Tikkun and also for its necessity. It is true that because a Tikkun of that rupture is impossible, we cannot live, after the Holocaust, as men and women have lived before. However, if the impossible Tikkun were not also necessary, and hence possible, we could not live at all (ibid., 254). 11. Littell, German Church Struggle and the Holocaust ( ), Tal, Forms of Pseudo-Religion in the German Kulturbereich Prior to the Holocaust, 69; cited in Pawlikowski, Christian Ethics and the Holocaust,

5 Facing the Tremendum (I) to enter into the Nazi killing machine to begin to experience that killing machine is to alter one s relationship to the entire human project. 13 This recognition of medical culpability has had significant practical consequences. In 1969, a conference of German geneticists was convened in Marburg to deal publicly for the first time with the incriminated past of their discipline. This was followed twenty years later by a Doctors Conference in Berlin, at which a public confession of medical practitioners guilt under Nazism was issued by professor of medical history, Richard Toellner. It was acknowledged that the name of Josef Mengele forever inextricably links doctors with the Holocaust. As Hans-Peter Kröner has said of the medical profession, [W]e cannot step out of history or voluntarily draw a final line. What we can do, is accept the Holocaust as part of our history. 14 Kröner s implication is that, in accepting the presence of culpability within the profession, the practice of the profession itself must now also be modified, to guard against a similar failing ever occurring again. Much the same thing has happened, and possibly to an even greater and more public extent, in law. The Nuremberg Trials signaled a watershed moment in the evolution of international criminal law. As both John Roth and Elisabeth Maxwell have said, The Holocaust... tip[s] the scales of justice in ways that can never be balanced... The search for justice has brought the Holocaust and genocide into courts of law in ways that were scarcely imaginable a few years ago. 15 Holocaust historian Jonathan Steinberg has made the same point in a slightly different way. The Holocaust, he has argued, has had an enormous impact on the development of what... one has to increasingly call world conscience. The reaction of the outside world to Rwanda, Bosnia, the Killing Fields, to the Kurds, is very much due to the awareness that genocide is possible, that it is a crime against humanity... [That] there are now war crimes trials going on... is a direct consequence of the Holocaust. 16 This is not to claim that medicine, law and the various other professions and fields of thought are as deeply or as terminally ruptured by the Holocaust as theology (and possibly also philosophy). It is, however, to make the point that very little of human endeavor can remain entirely untouched by the legacy of the Shoah. To quote Steinberg again, There s absolutely no doubt you need the psychologists, the social psychologists, 13. Lifton, Nazi Doctors, Kröner, Ethics, Human Genetics and the Holocaust, Roth and Maxwell, Search for Justice, Steinberg, Conscience of History,

6 Reading Auschwitz with Barth and possibly even the anthropologists to explain certain very curious aspects of the Nazi state. 17 Or, in Littell s insightful metaphor, study of the Holocaust is like the study of pathology in medicine; it is a view from the underside, which helps clarify every aspect of social health or malaise. 18 Precisely because the Shoah impinged upon every part of political, cultural, professional and religious life, each of these areas of life and study must be used to try to understand it. The ethical and didactic reach of the Holocaust is thus as broad as the span of human thought and theory. George Kren and Leon Rappoport have stated that the Holocaust is one of those historical crises that so exceeds the quantum satis that the preexisting social consensus and shared cultural values are torn apart. 19 In the same vein, Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg remind us that a deep engagement with the events of the Shoah can, and indeed ought to, impinge upon the practice of... literary, cultural, and social theory. Yet insofar as the Holocaust impinges upon them, they do not remain the same. The depth of engagement necessitated by the Holocaust carries with it an imperative to rework conventional categories of understanding in the face of their limits, which the Holocaust uncovers. 20 The intent of this book is not to bring the Holocaust into an engagement with literary or social theories, or with any of the professions, in general. Rather more modestly, the presupposition and trajectory of this book is to undertake that reworking of conventional categories to which Levi and Rothberg refer, specifically within the realm of Christian discourse, as just one sphere of life that has been unarguably ruptured by Auschwitz s evil. Before considering Christianity, though, we need to look briefly at the legacy of the Holocaust upon Jewish thought. We need to do this first because, as I hope shall become clear, one of the essential lessons the church needs to learn from Shoah is her unbreakable ontological connectedness to Israel and to modern Judaism, and not just to the Old Testament Hebrews. 17. Ibid., 4. Of course, Littell argues that too few practitioners in these varied disciplines have been exposed to the lessons of the Holocaust. [H]ow many students of Medicine have confronted Josef Mengele, how many students of Law know Roland Freisler, how many Business students know the record of IG Farben in the use of slave labor? Littell, The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust ( ), Littell, Closing Address, 8, Kren and Rappoport, Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior, Levi and Rothberg, Holocaust: Theoretical Readings,