Re: Ignoring the Holocaust

Don Phillipson wrote:
British historian Tony Judt concluded the 2007 Hannah
Arendt lecture: "After 1945 our parents' generation set
side the problem of evil because -for them-it contained
too much meaning. The generation that will follow us is in
danger of setting the problem aside because it now contains
too little meaning." Full text at
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21031

Judt's specific thesis is that (for four listed reasons) the
Holocaust was generally ignored in Europe for roughly 25
years after 1945. But he cites only two items of evidence:
(1) Primo Levi's 1946 memoir of Auschwitz was declined by
most Italian publishers and, when printed, sold few copies;
(2) "As late as 1966, when I began to study modern history at
Cambridge University, I was taught French history-including
the history of Vichy France-with almost no reference to Jews
or anti-Semitism."

I suggest this is misleading -- omitting as it does those
books published 1945-1960 which narrated the Holocaust in as
much gruesome detail as was then known. Examples are
Judge Russell's The Scourge of the Swastika (1954), The Knights
of Bushido (1958), Miklos Nyiszli's Auschwitz (1946, published in
English 1946), Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews
(first edition 1961) and so on. British academics may indeed have
spurned in 1966 many of these early books as "atrocity literature,"
no more valuable to the scholar than I Flew for the Fuehrer or
The Great Escape: but even by 1966 not much war history of
lasting value had yet been written. Deciphering was still a state
secret, the economic and technical history of radar and other
hardware was unfinished, no serious second thought had
yet been give to major campaigns, like the bombing of Germany
or the last six months of the European war, and no one yet knew
exactly why and how Japan surrendered. I doubt the Holocaust
was ignored so much as merely shelved alongside so many
other aspects of WW2, until some investigator could produce
either new data or new narrative ideas -- as in the Eichmann
trial, when Hannah Arendt suggested "the banality of evil,"
Judt's topic in 2007. If it "now contains too little meaning"
it is no longer for lack of either ideas or data.

I saw Ralph Hochhuth's play, "The Deputy" in London. I don't recall the year, but the play was first staged in Germany in 1963, and I think I saw it soon after. The audience was stunned. When the curtain closed at the end, there was no applause. The audience just sat quietly, then people got up one by one and walked out. My wife was not with me, so when it opened in New York I saw it again with her. The audience reacted at the end as it would to any drama. By that time, I think most New Yorkers knew about the Holocaust. Perhaps the London audience was just hearing it vividly for the first time?

.

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