Time’s Arrow

For a day or two, the Central American floods, whose initial under-assistance and under-reporting has given way to a lurching catch-up, were recounted as the stories of some of the 10,000 dead and their swept-away lives. Pretty soon--already, in fact--we will read of them in terms of relief efforts, environmental foolhardiness and Third World poverty and neglect. We will, as Lawrence L. Langer might put it, universalize them.

Langer, a Holocaust scholar, has been in the forefront of one of two opposite tendencies in dealing with the century’s hugest and most terrible atrocity. The first is to explain it, draw lessons from it, regard it as a fall that can in some way be used to help humanity ascend. The other is to fix upon the literal and particular remembrance of a unique horror and deny any particular hope, because forcing hope would deny the horror.

In these essays, dealing in various ways with the narratives, interpretations and art of the Holocaust, Langer battles for the literalists against the universalizers. He quotes Raul Hilberg, a scholar whom he regards as a literalist and who, when asked whether the Holocaust had any meaning, answered:

“I hope not.”

Not only our bodies but our minds have a biological tendency to grow over wounds, to heal them. Langer is not categorically against healing, but he is deeply suspicious of it. Healing can trivialize memory. Even a scar is not enough unless it is a scar that deforms our moral countenance; and aches. The irenic French dictum--Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner (To understand all is to forgive all)--would be a red flag for Langer. Without interrogation and a strip search, understanding is apt to smuggle in forgiveness along with its idiot brother, forgetting.

The thesis of “Preempting the Holocaust” is that many distinguished writers and thinkers, seeking to understand and universalize the 6-million massacre, have interpreted it so as to advance their own outlooks and philosophies. By doing so, however lofty their purposes and impressive their arguments, they have diluted the fact itself.

Langer tries to write fairly of the preemptors, though sometimes he will snip a four-word quote out of a sentence and brandish it to deteriorating effect. Several times he hurls at some theoretical argument the baby ripped in two by a SS guard, or a camp doctor who searched out two inmates with good teeth so he could decapitate them and boil their heads for matched paperweights. Intemperate, perhaps, but that is the point: Universalizers need to be reminded of such particularities.

Among his targets he includes Tzvetan Todorov, who argued that despite and even because of their profound evil, the camps asserted human hope through the heroism and nobility of some of the inmates. “Interpreting evil interests me less than understanding goodness,” Todorov wrote.

With Judy Chicago, who sought to link the Holocaust with the potentiality of evil in our own society, Langer makes an effort at patience, but it runs out when she wanders into feminism, environmental issues and animal rights (e.g., “I began to wonder about the ethical distinction between treating people as pigs and the way we process pigs”). Clearly it is time to hurl in a ripped-up baby.

The author disputes the “machinery” or “banality of evil” argument: that the Holocaust was implemented by unremarkable people caught up in a system that made atrocity routine. Langer takes issue with a recent study by Christopher Browning of a Nazi liquidation battalion whose members he found to be more or less ordinary.

Langer does not deal with the moral usefulness of such a view. If ordinary people can be brought to do such things, we must hold our consciences and institutions under strict vigilance. For him, general usefulness is not the question; specific truth is. It may be the hedgehog’s rather than the fox’s truth, but we will always need hedgehogs. Besides, their language is more pointed than fox language.

Langer’s phrase is remarkable: “The fact is that when ordinary men agree to mass murder, for whatever reason, they cease to be ordinary men like the rest of us and assume the role of killers.” Like many remarkable phrases, this one skirts tautology but does not fall in: Your identity is not the cause of what you do but the result.

One of the most interesting essays concerns a memoir written after the war by Simon Wiesenthal, known as an implacable war-criminal hunter. It includes an odd account of an SS guard, critically injured in battle, who entreats Wiesenthal’s forgiveness for the atrocities he has committed. Wiesenthal listens in silence, refusing an answer.

The memoir was followed by a series of comments by philosophers, writers and religious figures. To Langer’s dismay, some, particularly Christians, berated Wiesenthal for withholding forgiveness. When the memoir was reprinted 50 years later, the comments, including the Christian ones, were more rigorous and less sentimental. None was as apt as that of a rabbi who cited Jewish tradition to say that not even God can forgive a sin done by one man to another; only the victim can.

Langer devotes several essays to artists and writers whose work reaches for the particular horrors and their consequences and eschews redemptive generalizing. Anne Frank’s diary impresses him less than a Pole’s recollection of his father eating soup while the Germans took away his mother, who had grown dangerously weak. Weak, that is, because the father had been eating some of his wife’s rations.

He writes about Samuel Bak’s paintings of Sabbath candles fusing with crematorium chimneys and about the Tablets of the Law lying shattered on the slopes of Mt. Sinai. On the peak are two more tablets but they are blank; as if to say that after the Holocaust, the old divine compact no longer exists and must be rewritten.

He writes of Primo Levi’s immortal particulars, though I think he mistakes some of the artistry. What he calls Levi’s grayness is a pattern of uncompromising blackness and the glittering whites that allow it fully to be seen. Journalism, polemic and history can portray the atrocities done to human beings; art--Levi’s at least--requires that their humanity be seen as vividly. It is not that humans prevail, it is that their words or images do. As in Lear: “The worst is not, so long as we can say, This is the worst.”

Langer’s achievement is to insist obdurately that even the most terrible things said about the Holocaust do not plumb it. “Dantean,” for instance, does not do: In “Inferno” it was the guilty who were punished. For the comparison to work, Dante would have had to relocate his circles of Hell to Heaven, among the innocent.

Vociferously a literalist, Langer does not explore what lies behind the human need to find a generalizing framework for the particulars of even a uniquely terrible history. Germany, he notes, used most of its postwar energy to rebuild and much less of it to confront its past.

“The urgency to undo ruin has always outpaced the desire to confront it” is his comment--it is hard to tell whether in anger, irony or resignation--on what seems an inevitable consequence of humanity’s subjection to time and time’s passing. Inevitable, perhaps, yet how valuable is the protest he and his fellow literalists put up. Rage, rage against the dying of the dark.