The Gorgon Effect

...In fact, this book is exemplary for the author's willingness to look at the Holocaust anew and not remain arrested at the point of cognitive impasse...

...it was a mode of conduct that offered significant emotional rewards to the participants, affirming their roles as overlords within a ritualized theater of brutal behavior...

...Her analysis of the performative dimensions of Nazi behavior, and her situating such behavior within a symbolic theater of enacted violence, provide useful new insights into some of the most bizarre actions of the perpetrators...

...Clendirrnen's view of the killers is certainly suggestive and may help to explain aspects of the Nazi camp system that have not been fully understood until now...

...More than anything else, Clendinnen wants to know what the Nazis were actually up to in treating the Jews in such relentlessly brutal ways...

...Bafflement, bewilderment, perplexity—such stunned reflections of an incomprehensible horror are familiar to all who write, read and think about the Nazi terror...

...Such affinities are notoriously much harder to strike in thinking and writing about the killers...

...In some cases,notably her treatment of the higher echelon of Nazi leaders, her work is entirely derivative and hardly moves beyond small snapshot portraits of key figures that others have provided with fuller authority...

...She is a gifted reader and a graceful, discerning writer...

...By looking closely at their dress, speech patterns, body language, home life, and overall social comportment, the author is able to illuminate an SS "style" that defined a significant part of the camp's "culture...

...Nevertheless, she is clearly onto something important in the final chapters of her book...

...The impetus for Clendinnen's reflections is clear and laudable: "Attention ought be paid to extreme human suffering," she tells us, "and we must do what we can to make some human sense out of it...

...Clendinnen explains that she has not attempted to work with original sources and is not writing as a specialist for other specialists...

...It is her conviction that the Holocaust need not be indecipherable and, indeed, must not be: "In the face of a catastrophe on this scale so deliberately inflicted, perplexity is an indulgence we cannot afford...

...one learns from her commentaries on the sizable body of Holocaust literature she has subjected herself to...

...As this suggests, her integrity as a respectful yet stringent student of her subject is everywhere apparent...

...Since she has chosen not to do archival research, she is necessarily reliant on the writings of other scholars and writers (especially Christopher R. Browning, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Saul Friedländer, Raul Hilberg, and Gitta Sereny) plus the words of Nazi leaders (Adolf Eichmann, Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolph Hoess, Albert Speer, and Franz Stangl...

...The major part of Reading the Holocaust, though, is focused not on the experiences of the victims but the actions of their tormentors, and it is here that Clendinnen rises to her full height as a reader and interpreter of her subject...

...She devotes her early chapters to deciphering witness testimony, and what distinguishes her observations about such figures as Filip Müller, Charlotte Delbo, Primo Levi, Kitty Hart, and Elie Wiesel is her insistence that we can best understand their testimony if we approach them without piety...

...In Reading the Holocaust, she is quite literally registering her responses to what others have produced— novelists andhistorians, diarists andmemoirists, poets and filmmakers...

...Here, she sets out to bring the people who did the killing into clear view...

...Her deeply felt, admirably intelligent book seeks to confront and, if possible, to overcome the impenetrable strangeness Auschwitz inevitably evokes...

...Reviewed by Alvin H. Rosenfeld Professor of English and director of the Borens Jewish Studies Program, Indiana University Incredulity has accompanied knowledge of the Holocaust from the very start...

...This "style," she then demonstrates, helped to create and sustain an elaborate scenario of omnipresent violence: "Hatred of Jews cannot adequately explain the smiling affability of the SS up to the moment of entry into the gas chambers...

...Confronting the Holocaust by concentrating on the victims can be wrenchingly difficult, but it is generally still possible to make the human connection...

...She sees Auschwitz, rather, as if it were "a newly encountered 'exotic' society...

...As with her interpretations of the victims' experiences, her approach to the perpetrators eschews grand narratives and prefers to focus an anthropologist's scrutiny on human behavior at the level of individuals...

...Thus, "the manic theatricality imposed on camp inmates was primarily addressed not to its cowering audience, but to its SS impresarios...

...In a search for answers, she sets aside such familiar formulations as Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" and Robert Jay Lifton's "Auschwitz self...

...What Clendirrnen discovers is that the violence on the part of the SS and their helpers was not merely meant to enforce discipline...

...For these and other reasons, Holocaust literature is overwhelmingly by and about the victims...

...Inga Clendinnen, an Australian scholar, calls this sense of being confounded the "'Gorgon effect'—the sickening of imagination and curiosity and the draining of the will that afflicts so many of us when we try to look squarely at the persons and processes implicated in the Holocaust...

...Even Levi, who in many ways helped to shape Clendinnen's understanding of the Holocaust, is occasionally called short for his unwillingness to move beyond perplexity to fuller insight...

...And she becomes a bit rhetorical in writing about Levi's probable suicide...

...Only the gratifications attending successful playacting will do that...

...Attentive to the tonal as well as verbal nuances of survivor accounts, she admirably avoids reading them uncritically...

...Clendinnen's answer is to forgo the temptation to think within large, encompassing theories of historical causation and instead look closely at the people and events that make up the Holocaust...

...Given the disorienting world he had been thrown into, Levi's sense of the uncanny nature of his own experiences is not surprising...

...In this respect, Clendinnen helps to weaken, if not fully dispel, the "Gorgon effect" that has troubled her and almost everyone else who has pondered the Nazi crimes against the Jews...

...Indeed, Levi and others explicitly warn us away from trying to understand the people who built and ran the Nazi camps out of a concern that to understand them may be, however unwillingly, to exculpate them...

...These few criticisms aside, her pages on the writings of the victims and, in particular, her extensive commentary on the Auschwitz Sonderkommandos, are finely drawn and full of appreciative insight...

...Her determination to read ever more deeply into the heart of those crimes is admirable, and it wouldbe a fine thing if her success at doing so encouraged others to follow suit...

...Clendinnen, the author of two previous books—one on the Aztecs, the other on the Mayans—is no stranger to the history of human cruelty...

...What enabled these otherwise "normal" men to do what they did...

...But how does one proceed from the "ought" to the "human sense...

...Writing about his time in a Nazi concentration camp, Primo Levi, as lucid and articulate a guide as we have, at one point interrupts his first book, Survival in Auschwitz, and confesses: "Today, at this very moment as I sit writing at a table, I myself am not convinced that these things really happened...

...The killers have largely gone unimagined...

...She puts too much stress on the celebratory aspects of Levi's writings and does not always detect his more subtle notes of despair...

...A sober scholar who recognizes that historical understanding is always somewhat tentative, she does not seek to reduce the entire Nazi system to an extravagant, macabre script...

...There are instances, however, where Clendinnen does not measure up to her own highest standards: She is generally blind to how certain authors draw out the religious implications of the Holocaust, and unfairly discounts the importance of Wiesel's Night...

...When she turns to the killers in the field, she probes more deeply and develops her inquiry in ways that are both novel and challenging...