COMMENTS: A Footnote on Bitburg
Howe, Irving
Let me add a brief note to David Bromwich's trenchant article. The more public tumult about the Holocaust, the less likelihood that the memory of its terribleness will become a serious part of...
...They serve their boss...
...I suppose most of the people around the president are not evil...
...to end the demeaning supplications...
...For the people around President Reagan, the Bitburg affair was, as one of them put it, a "publicrelations fiasco...
...they looked for devices of publicity, in this case, "a concentration-camp opportunity" and a speech that the Great Communicator recited dutifully...
...Or as our friend Abraham Brumberg wrote in a letter to the Washington Post: Only one proper course of action remains: to make it crystal clear that neither the president nor his fellow politician, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, is the proper symbol of historical justice...
...If someone, even the president, cannot spontaneously do "the right thing" regarding a matter of such elementary moral character as to avoid a cemetery with SS men, might it not be more dignified and, finally, perhaps more effective simply to say—oh, as politely as you wish—Keep your medal, go your way, we will express our disapproval and disgust, and will mourn our dead in our own way...
...And the memory survives, we may be sure, among people who remember and mourn without so much as issuing a press release...
...269...
...By now, the Holocaust has barely any autonomous reality...
...Even the eloquence it can sometimes evoke has a streak of falsity and aggrandizement...
...and to treat the whole indecent spectacle with the only response it deserves— contemptuous silence...
...It survives in the books of the Italian writer Primo Levi, who simply remembers—quietly, modestly, without a touch of self-aggrandizement—what happened to him and the others...
...They did not stop honestly to admit error or confusion...
...It survives in the recently published Chronicles of the Lodz Ghetto, 268 1941-1944, edited by Lucjan Dobrowszycki, a record of the destruction of a major Jewish community in eastern Europe compiled by some of its members, a record all the more moving because of the dry factuality and restraint with which it was written...
...The more public tumult about the Holocaust, the less likelihood that the memory of its terribleness will become a serious part of human consciousness...
...What has been happening with the Holocaust is what seems all-but-inevitably to happen with everything in our culture—its appropriation by publicity, the vast machine of public relations and manufactured images that spreads like a thick oil across genuine thought and perception...
...The uncorrupted memory of the Holocaust survives through the voices of some men and women...
...to let Reagan go to Germany and do what he damn well pleases...
...Nothing seems to matter any more in its own right—not even the most terrible event of our time...
...An imprudent question: Given what the president had already revealed about his sentiments toward and understanding of the Holocaust, why was it so urgent for Jewish institutional leaders to plead that he do "the right thing...
...It was a tactical mistake for the president to visit a cemetery that harbors the graves of SS men, since the visit would make political trouble at home and perhaps—could anything be worse?—lower the president's rating in the polls...
...But the people who control the United States government today are of small imagination, small ethics, small consciousness, small memory...
...Suddenly, after many successes, they found themselves—but how the hell did this happen?, they must have wondered—entrapped in moral complications beyond their interest or grasp...
...Not a moral betrayal, not a sign of shameful ignorance, but a failure in mass manipulation...
...it has become a calculation of image, a corrupting photo opportunity...
...Nor are they anti-Semitic, though it's not hard to imagine some of them grumbling about "those Jews who always complain...
...They could respond only as they have always responded...
Vol. 32 • July 1985 • No. 3
