FROM HOLOCAUST TO "HOLOCAUST"

...Obviously, there are reasons and explanations for the destruction of six million Jews: Adolf Hitler's character, his relationship to the Jew perceived as the "evil father," the German defeat in 1918, unemployment, inflation, the religious roots of anti-Semitism, the role of Jews in society, the image of the Jew, the indoctrination of German youth, the seduction of the whole German nation by the "charming rapist" Hitler, the Jewish spirit seen as the absolute opposite of the German spirit, and so forth...

...people are exterminated in the East, people are deported from West to East (cf...

...From the magnitude of the massacre the human species took the staggering measure of its capacity to commit crimes against itself...

...To pretend that one has done so is to commit the gravest of transgressions...

...One should begin with the ending, with the night of December 7, 1941, in the forest of Ruszow, when the nine hundred Jews of the little town of Kolo, in the District of Konin (northwest of Lodz), had the privilege of being the first to be gassed in the Final Solution...

...It can only be an investigation into the present of the Holocaust or at least into a past whose scars are still so freshly and vividly inscribed in certain places and in the consciences of some people that it reveals itself in a hallucinating timelessness...

...The East was not only the great reservoir of Jewry...

...Today the aberration theory of the Holocaust also allows for a new appraisal, a reevaluation of Nazism, and at last permits Germany to restore the missing link in its history...

...does it lie in anti-Semitism or in an "excess" of antiSemitism...

...The Holocaust is pushed far into the background...

...we'll take them," the Holocaust would not have taken place or, at least, would never have reached such dimensions...

...It is not the doing of a group of irresponsible, atypical criminals, but, on the contrary, must be viewed as the expression of deep-seated tendencies in Western civilization...

...The "honeymoon" between the Jewish people and the world has definitely come to an end and we can take the measure of our illusion: like the indestructible phoenix, anti-Semitism is arising virtually everywhere from its own ashes, wearing its ancient disguises or the more modern, "democratic" mask of anti-Zionism...

...Things had gone too far: if anti-Semitism had led to Auschwitz, if anti-Jewish passion had resulted in Auschwitz, then anti-Semitism must be irrevocably banished...

...the Holocaust has lost its unique particularity, it has been conjured away...

...The full impact of the Evian scandal will not be felt unless the gas trucks are already in action and the spectator has been gripped by the mindboggling acceleration of history: between Evian and the first gassing of the Jews of Wartheland only three years passed...

...The annihilation of six million Jews was an extremely difficult and complicated task, which posed numerous and vast problems for the murderers: in order to carry it out, the active, patient participation of the whole administrative machinery of a large modern state was required...

...In order to make the "humanity" of these Jews obvious, to insure that it would be recognized and felt, every trait that could have distinguished them was effaced, every trace of otherness was erased, and one was presented with an "assimilated" family...

...And the Sultan, too—in this a forerunner of Adolf Hitler—had established a coherent, universally applicable doctrine to justify the annihilation of the Armenians...

...they had neither the leisure nor the composure to die nobly...

...This is the reason, then, why a film on the Holocaust has to set out from the principle of the rejection of memory, the refusal to commemorate...

...For thirty years Germany was unable to face up to the Holocaust, and took the tack of pretending that Nazism had never existed...

...of Hitler the man and his accomplishment...

...No matter how brave certain groups and individuals were, the European Jews as a whole were condemned in advance because, being deprived of a political status, being turned into stateless persons by a bureaucratic definition, they had become "superfluous," "redundant," living-dead...

...The sudden discovery of the martyrdom of the Jews, and the compassion it evoked among an immense TV audience is, perhaps, the latest ruse of a kind of history that disposes of the Holocaust's singularity even as it claims 189 to be portraying it...

...What gave rise to this horrified wordlessness was not the fact that, once again, the Jews had been the appointed victims: the European nations were not unaccustomed to such practices...

...For the most part, the Holocaust has not been assimilated as a specific historical event, and one may doubt that it ever will be...

...In real life, things were different...

...The aberration lies at the very core of their history, it lays the foundation of that history, and they may be forgiven for wanting to find out its meaning...

...No, in creating a work of art, one deals with another logic, another way of telling the story...

...To show what really happened would have been unendurable...

...Furthermore, Germany relied on the existence of an aggressively anti-Semitic world: Poland, Hungary, Rumania, the U.S.S.R.not to mention others—were anti-Semitic...

...The suspense of the investigation itself—the difficulties and risks it entailed, which are an integral part of the film—will be intensified by yet another suspense that I have called "historic" and that will invariably arise from the juxtaposition of the exact moment of extermination with an incident, remote in time or space, in which a person desperately in need of help at that moment is denied it...

...Ruthmund, the Swiss chief of police, was the first person responsible, as early as 1938, for the requirement that Jewish German refugees have their passports stamped with the letter "J...

...it assassinates memory...

...In a word, to weaken it...

...Claude Lanzmann is making a film on the Holocaust, and this article represents his statement on the making of that film...

...Their extermination is a crime of a different nature, of a different quality...

...from naked women running in rows of five to the gas chambers in Treblinka, terrified by the whips of the Ukranian guards, to the heroism of the Jewish soldiers of modern Israel, not forgetting the desperate rebellion in the extermination camp of Sobibor or the Warsaw ghetto, the reappropriation of violence by Jews is a central problem...

...the protocols of the Wannsee conference: "Von Westen nach Osten durchkammen" (sweep from West to East...

...In Holocaust, people await death gravely and with dignity, as good form prescribes...

...nor from the series of anti-Jewish laws that, beginning in 1933, gradually made life for German Jews impossible...

...The Holocaust today is legendary on several scores and has attained the dimensions of a mythical tale: knowledge of the unknowable, fuzzy, vague, stereotyped...

...but "How is it possible, thirty years after the Holocaust, that we should be where we are...

...most of the actors were not Jewish...

...Nor from the Kristallnacht...

...Death must be present at the very outset of the story, it must mark every episode, be the sole measure of the words, silences, actions, refusals to act, and the blindness that made that death possible...

...All these psychoanalytical, sociological, economic, religious, etc...

...For indeed it was mankind itself that was challenged by the monstrous crime perpetrated against the Jewish people...

...In fact, and this is the essential point, the Jewish victims in the TV film are in no way distinguishable from the spectators or, for that matter, from their executioners...

...none of those who entered ever returned to tell us about it...

...Only a cast-iron disposition would dare represent what went on there...

...The cry that will rise into the skies of Auschwitz and Treblinka until the end of time testifies to the unsurpassable limits of inhumanity of which mankind is capable...

...and finally and above all, the State of Israel exists and, in its turn, engages in violence...

...My film means to deal with this crucial aspect in the utmost detail and precision...

...Could the world's television viewers have identified as readily with the Jewish men and women of Poland, of the Ukraine, or of Belorussia, with their different clothing, their traditions, their particular mannerisms, their strangeness...

...Raul Hilberg has summed this up in a splendid terse formula...

...One simply did not mention Nazism...

...However, essentially what the aberration theory aims to accomplish today is to get rid of the idea that any historical responsibility lies with Germany and the other nations...

...The destruction of Europe's Jews cannot be logically deduced from any such system of presuppositions...

...One must start with the naked violence and not, as is usually done, with the bonfires, the singing, and the blond heads of the Hitler Jugend...

...But the responsibility and guilt of most nations are too grave, their remorse and shame are too great, the crime is too burdensome: the Holocaust encumbers the conscience of the modern world like an indigestible patrimony...

...no debate, no protest, no denial was possible...

...In any case, one has come full circle: anti-Semitism, which had previously been banished and condemned to an underground existence, can now surface in broad daylight, based on and justified by reason of the very being of the Jew, with all the Jew's traditional characteristics...

...Between the conditions that permitted extermination and the extermination itself—the fact of the extermination—there is a break in continuity, a hiatus, an abyss...

...See his comments after the Evian conference stalemate, or the Rublee-Schacht plan, or the entries in Goebbels's diary for 1942-43: "I am convinced that, deep down, the democracies are not dissatisfeed that we should rid them of the `Jewish trash' [`Jiidischen Riff-Raft...

...it is to wish to clothe the implacable nakedness of the violence, to disguise it and thereby refuse to confront it in all its bleak singularity...

...It was, literally, an unnameable crime...

...This is now the trend among even reputedly serious German historians, and this is the sense of the German films now being shown in Europe...

...In my film, the Final Solution could not be the culmination of the story, it 193 would be its point of departure...

...Until now, all films dealing with the Holocaust have tried to generate it by using the expedients of history and chronological development...

...he was "communicating," he was understood and he knew he was understood...

...In the world of nation states, where the only protection one may enjoy is that of the state, they stood no chance...

...it admitted that the destruction of the Jews had been the very core of Nazism, that the Holocaust had been the only issue of Nazism.' Everything now I I entirely subscribe to the idea that the war waged by Hitler was, fundamentally, "a war against the Jews...

...Everything seemed to suggest that the Holocaust had established forever that theoretically anti-Semitism had become impossible...

...The inflexibility of Israeli policy, so deplored and allegedly the root cause of its isolation, stems precisely from the fact that Israel knows it is the only—absolutely the only—guarantor of the sacred oath "Never Again," which we had believed all nations would subscribe to after Auschwitz...

...The flowery rhetoric of Latin-American delegates at the conference, the customary hypocrisy of the British and American representatives become murderous only when juxtaposed with the reality of extermination, extermination in the process of being carried out...

...The extermination was not "generated" and to wish to account for it thus is, in a way, to deny its reality, to shut one's eyes to the outbreak of violence...

...myth is more stubborn than facts...

...All discourse that speaks about the "engendering" of violence is an absurd dream of the nonviolent...

...The essence of myth—the knowing of the unknowable, the unknowing of the knowable —is its capacity for infinite adaptation, its susceptibility to distortion, and once distortion has occurred its resistance to efforts to reestablish reality...

...As for the Holocaust, the keynote seems to be "How do we get rid of it...

...No one can mistake it, no one is so obscenely impudent as to deny the Holocaust its specific character, its uniqueness, by attenuating it, by burying it in a thesis of universal evil, by subsuming it under generalities such as "the horrors of war" or "the victims of fascism...

...As if the extermination of six million men, women, and children, as if such a massacre could be "generated...

...Thus the film of R. W. Fassbinder and Daniel Schmidt The Shadow of Angels accepts with the most astounding innocence, as if it had reinvented them, all the stereotypes in the Nazi antiSemitic lexicon...

...The only way to do this is to resuscitate the past and make it present, invest it with a timeless immediacy...

...the millions of raised arms...

...at the least, they may balance out evenly...

...Does the aberration, then, lie in his own aversion or in the exaggeration of that aversion...

...For there to be tragedy, the end must be known...

...Anti-Semitism is much more than, and entirely different from, a particular instance of racism...

...It was, factually, literally, a crime against the human essence, a metaphysical crime committed on the person of each murdered Jew against the being of Man...

...The contrary would have been far more appropriate: the humanity of the victims should have been made all the more evident and profound for us by virtue of their seeming different from the outset...

...it is a nameless crime, which the Nazi assassins themselves dared not name, as if by doing so they would have made it impossible to enact...

...Lord Moyne, then the British high commissioner in Egypt, asked...

...Such are the historical responsibilities that one can follow, case by case, stage by stage, up to and including the shameful failure to rescue the Jews of Hungary: "What am I to do with one million Jews...

...The famous Madagascar plan began as a Polish idea (the 1936 Lepecki Commission), and M. Georges Bonnet, the French minister of foreign affairs, coolly talked the matter over with von Ribbentrop...

...There is and will be nothing with which Auschwitz and Treblinka can be compared...

...From the massacre of innocent people in Ponary, Sdolbunov, and Babi-Yar...

...Christian missionaries had indeed said, `You have no right to live among us as Jews...

...To say that the Holocaust is unique and can be compared with nothing else does not imply that it should be regarded as an aberrant phenomenon, which eludes intellectual or conceptual grasp, which occurred outside history or is to be denied the status of a historical event...

...Here are a few others: First of all—if indeed it is a question of an aberration—the Jews have been its victims...

...And then, too, the Jewish people have survived...

...How stale, how trivial the memories of survivors appear when compared with the nebulous inflexibility of myth...

...And it is not at all certain that the bad outweighs the good...

...194...

...the secular leaders who followed had proclaimed, `You have no right to live among us.' The German Nazis finally decreed, `You have no right to live...

...The prodigious will-tolife of the Jewish people accounts for the persistence and the escalation of anti-Semitic hatred, which reached its peak in the Holocaust...

...The feeling that prevailed Translated and reprinted with permission from Les Temps Modernes, and the author...

...The first question is not "How was the Holocaust possible...

...If the democracies had been actively opposed to the persecution, or—what amounts to the same—had they opened their doors to the Jews and said, "You don't want them, so be it...

...One must speak out and yet keep silent at the same time, knowing that in this case silence is the most authentic form of speech—maintaining, as in the eye of a hurricane, a protected, safe zone that is not to be entered...

...This demonstrable fact is wonderful, liberating ("and what if the Jews were Nazis themselves...

...Because a chronological account is no more than a succession of befores and afters, it is essentially anti-tragic, and when death comes, it always does so in its own good time, which is to say that it is nonviolent and nonshocking...

...The planned, methodical bureaucratic massacre of six million Jews was a long-term enterprise, carried out patiently and without passion in the name of ideological imperatives that were openly stated and explained...

...When Hitler condemned the Jews, he was not speaking an exotic foreign language...

...it has been necessary to resort to an entirely new juridical-metaphysical concept...

...Yet the Holocaust was not the work of a handful of madmen...

...The Nazi crime was both unprecedented and unsurpassable—unsurpassable because, as we shall see, it was an absolute crime...

...For example, if one wants the spectator to be moved by the scandalous Evian conference, the conference must not appear in the film where chronologically it belongs in the twelve-year-long history of Nazism...

...Infected to the marrow, as the European nations were, by the poison of antiSemitism—and nearly all knowing themselves to be guilty in varying degrees—they recognized and understood at once, with instant, lightning certainty, the unique and unconscionable nature of the crime...

...This means that they have begot us, that they beget us daily, that we are born of them and will forever be born and reborn of them...

...Once again— and one must hope, for the last time—the Jews performed their role of witness people...

...Generally, they begin in 1933, when the Nazis came to power—but sometimes earlier, presenting the various currents of German anti-Semitism in the 19th century (for instance, the Volk ideology, formation of the German national conscience) and seek to explain, year by year, step by step—one might say almost harmoniously—how these developments led to extermination...

...At the least, it would have precluded consciencesalving "identification...

...The countries of Eastern Europe, long familiar with anti-Semitism, were not exempt from this reaction...

...The Hollywood serial transgresses because it trivializes, destroying the unique nature of the Holocaust, the thing that removes it from any comparison, that makes it the worst of all crimes to have been or ever to be committed...

...This discreet silence on the part of the great majority of Germans had one merit at least: implicitly it acknowledged that the Jewish question was absolutely central to Nazi ideology and practice...

...Auschwitz is virtually obliterated...

...After all, what happened to the Jews is common enough, nothing to make a great fuss about...

...After the stunned acknowledgment of the brutal fact of the extermination in the years following the Second World War, after the recognition of the immeasurable nature of the crime, public response has steadily tended to reverse itself...

...The characters in the American documentary never lose their "humanity," even in the gas chambers...

...It delivers one from the old feeling of guilt and makes it possible to rewrite the history of Germany, integrating Nazism in it and while not completely denying the Holocaust, turning it into a secondary phenomenon of little consequence...

...in no case is it a memory...

...In point of fact, a tragic parallel can be drawn between the forgetting and the rejection of the Holocaust, on the one hand, and, on the other, the conditions that made it possible...

...Either the Holocaust is legend or it is present...

...Just as the Jews were murdered in the most heartrending solitude—derelict ears did not hear their calls for help, because, after all, the death of the Jews was only an insignificant happening in the context of universal history—so to remember this crime against humanity (which the Holocaust was) will not be the duty, the mission, the sacred trust of all mankind but something for Jews to harp on...

...As for Sultan Abdul Hamid's Turkey, as everyone knows, it was the most developed and most modern nation in the Western world, the motherland of Goethe as well as of Kant and Schiller, the home of the Ruhr magnates, of Krupp and I. G. Farben...

...To those today who regard the Holocaust as an anomaly, as an aberration so perfect that it eludes any appraisal, any historical 190 interpretation, Hilberg's quotation would provide one response...

...In the East as well as in the West, on the right as well as on the left, people are trying in every way to be quit of it, to forget it without ever having understood it, to falsify it, to deny it...

...Let me also say—and this is essential—that in my view anti-Semitism has an absolute specificity that can in no way be reduced to political or racial conflicts as they are generally understood...

...not even with the fanaticized German masses, the shouts of"Heil Hitler...

...and, indeed, the Holocaust could not have taken place had not two thousand years of persecution and anti-Jewish hatred paved the way for it everywhere...

...The Holocaust is rejected by banalizing it, trivializing it, or excising it from history with the pretext that it was only an aberration...

...The chronological account that would begin with the boycott in April 1933 and culminate naturally in the gas chambers of Auschwitz or Treblinka would not be false, strictly speaking, but it would be miserably shallow and one-dimensional...

...Everything was now clear...

...Twelve years of systematic persecution, of a slow process of destruction, carried out with the knowledge and in full view of the world and resulting in the annihilation of one-third of the Jewish people, allow them at least to ask themselves what made this anomaly possible...

...If it is possible nowadays to write books on "the myth of the six million" or "the lie of Auschwitz," it is because the entire reality of the Holocaust is dissolving both in the reaches of time, and in the stereotypical recoining of a myth where truth has never really been communicated...

...As the philosopher Emil Fackenheim has admirably put it: "For us, the murdered Jews of Europe are not merely the past, they are 192 the presence of an absence...

...Everything is possible in the East...

...The Holocaust is unique because it created a circle of flame around itself, a boundary not to be crossed since horror in the absolute degree cannot be communicated...

...History is one long series of massacres, and their names come tumbling to our lips—the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, the genocide of the Armenians in 1915, the Gulag, the tortures in Algeria, segregationist violence in the U.S.A...

...If they were the necessary precondition for extermination, they were not a sufficient condition...

...2 The Jews also kill...

...The East is unsurpassed slaughter country...

...they are more alive than ever...

...The Holocaust was made possible in the first place because nations washed their hands of the Jewish persecution, and left the Nazis alone with the "problem...

...On the contrary, I consider the Holocaust an unqualifiedly historical event, the monstrous, yes, but legitimate product of the history of the Western World...

...The Jewish family with which millions of Americans and Germans are said to have identified was chosen precisely so that such an identification would be possible...

...In this connection, it is by no means sure that the success of the American TV serial that was entitled Holocaust should be taken as a sign of an awakening of conscience...

...Israelis and Diaspora Jews alike, we are anchored to (and in) the Holocaust, whose consequences and implications, far from disappearing with time, are continually and more deeply revealed to us...

...Through the instrument of their state, the Jews have provided themselves with the means to resort to institutionalized violence...

...at the time was that, this once, the Jewish people had paid the supreme price and for all time...

...The launching of the offensive in the East and the working up of the "Final Solution" were organically con191 has changed: time has done its work, new generations of Germans have come who have no reason not to wish to be linked to their history, a history that they have never been taught...

...The revival of anti-Semitism and the rejection of the Holocaust are dialectically interrelated...

...In this way, antiJewish hatred becomes merely a personal aberration of Hitler's: "It's true, he didn't like Jews and he went too far...

...No, stupefaction arose from the unbearable discovery that anti-Semitism, a patrimony and passion the nations shared, could reach such extremes, and end in a slaughter unparalleled in the history of mankind...

...The smashing success Joachim Fest's film Hitler, a Career has met with in Germany has no other explanation: in it are glorified—one is free at last to do this—the "positive aspects" joined...

...explications, taken alone or together, are both true and false, which is to say, totally inadequate...

...that is the bad aspect of the man and of a period that in other respects had its excellent sides...

...Basically, everyone agreed to the killing of those for whom there was no place...

...The destruction of six million of our people—an attempt to annihilate the entire people—has radically modified the Jewish universe, the Jews' perception of themselves, and their attitude toward others...

...One does not kill legends by opposing them with memories but by confronting them, if possible, in the inconceivable "present" in which they originated...

...After years of ghetto confinement, terror, humiliation, and hunger, the people who lined up in rows of five were driven by whips and bludgeons, and knocked against each other as they entered the death chambers...

...The six million massacred Jews did not die in their own good time and that is why any work that today intends to do the Holocaust justice must, as a matter of principle, break with chronology...

...One may make step-by-step comparisons among atrocities and point out the ideological flaws, absurdities, and perversities...

...And in this instance, because the reality defies the resources of any fiction, Holocaust perpetrates a lie, a moral crime...

...Despite the 188 millions of dead on both sides, despite the terror of Hiroshima or Dresden, we know that the six million murdered Jews were not victims like the others...

...Just as our people were left alone face to face with their exterminators, so will we remain alone to live with the gaping wound of a measureless crime...

...Here, to transgress or to trivialize are alike...

...therefore, the anti-Semite must deny that the extermination ever happened so as to regain the unhindered right to kill again...

...The true pursuit of anti-Semitism is the death of the Jew...

...Germany was fat and affluent, but it lacked a past, and her young men—those who are today between thirty and forty years old— were zombies presumably sprung up from nowhere...

...However, the film is a work of fiction...

...namely, that of a "crime against humanity...

...Indeed, only some thirty years after the catastrophe we are witnessing an extraordinary phenomenon of rejection...

...The treatment and the means used are highly suspect...

...This, then, is where we stand after thirty years...

...Thus Tell el Zatar has become the Warsaw ghetto (an identification coldly made by some French papers a year ago...

...In order to judge the Holocaust, to fully grasp it, no ordinary existing laws are adequate...

...Just as the destiny and the history of the Jewish people can be compared with no other, so also the cyclic character of anti-Jewish persecution and hatred (intense periods followed by remissions, wild hopes always shattered), the duration and the persistence of the persecution, the force and the extent of that hatred, with all the mythical and phantasmal spinoffs it constantly generates, make anti-Semitism a unique phenomenon and, sadly, make the periodic attempts to abate it ridiculous...

...or Tell el Zatar...

...With regard to Germany, the process of destruction could only have been carried through on the basis of a general consensus of the German nation...

...in the hallucinatory German Weltanschauung it was also the place of absolute indefiniteness, of the shapeless, the vague...

...We must hold fast to both ends of the chain: The Holocaust is unique but not aberrant...

...But the goal has been attained: after a while, people no longer know what anything is about, everything is indistinguishable...

...The worst moral and artistic crime that can be committed in producing a work dedicated to the Holocaust is to consider the Holocaust as past...

...2 Violence and Nonviolence, the relation between Jews and violence, this is another chapter—an essential one...

...As happens with all myths, increasing numbers of intelligent people who are not always necessarily illintentioned ask themselves whether, after all, these things really happened...

...A film devoted to the Holocaust can be only a counter-myth...