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November 14, 2003
War-era myths are exploding
Kristallnacht lecture addresses the sentiments of guilt and innocence.
PAT JOHNSON SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
The innocent feel guilty and the guilty innocent. That is one of
the paradoxes of the Holocaust that still confounds academics and
observers who seek an understanding of the calamitous events of
the Nazi era, according to the keynote address of this year's annual
Kristallnacht commemorative program Sunday night at Beth Israel
Synagogue.
Dr. Michael Berenbaum, a world expert on the Holocaust and ethics,
said there is a raft of psychological literature dealing with survivors'
guilt among victims of Nazism who, unlike millions of others, lived
to tell their stories.
"There is no comparable literature of perpetrators' guilt,"
Berenbaum said.
The apparently inverted guilt response is part of a conflicted and
psychologically complex attitude to the Holocaust among individuals
and nations, said Berenbaum during the keynote address before a
packed sanctuary.
As an example, he said, it is the third generation of Germans –
those who were not even born when the Shoah occurred – who
are confronting the issue with their parents or, more likely, their
grandparents. The generation of Germans who lived through the Nazi
era has undergone extensive moral and intellectual justifications,
but has rarely expressed acknowledgement or guilt, according to
Berenbaum.
"Who is more innocent today than the third generation of Germans?"
asked Berenbaum, noting that younger Germans are demanding answers
to their families' roles during the Third Reich. "Their grandparents
feel innocent and untouched."
Yet while ordinary Germans and those who had military or party affiliation
during the Nazi era have not undergone a cathartic processing of
their history, Jewish and other victims of the Holocaust are racked
with questions and anxieties about their own actions and how it
is that they, of all the millions, survived the atrocities.
While guilt has seemed to rest incongruously on the innocent shoulders
of survivors, a massive reconsideration has occurred in the last
five to 10 years, said Berenbaum, the author or editor of a dozen
books. National myths have been shattered all over Europe about
behaviors during the war. Berenbaum went through a list of countries
whose self-identities have been challenged in recent years as new
scholarship has upended the placid myths that have been husbanded
for the past 60 years.
Switzerland may have been the first European country forced to deal
with the unreality of its national myth. Depicted as scrupulously
neutral, all evidence now points to a Swiss banking and insurance
system that worked with the Nazis and to the disadvantage of Jews
before, during and after the war.
Austria, said Berenbaum, liked to present itself as the first victim
of Nazism, yet Vienna provided pivotal influence and concrete complicity
with the Nazi program. There has been a phenomenon in Austria that
Berenbaum slyly terms "Waldheimer's Disease" in which
Austrians can't recall where they were or what they did between
1938 and 1945. It is a reference to former United Nations secretary-general
and former Austrian chancellor Kurt Waldheim, whose Nazi past was
successfully covered up for decades. This attitude was reflected
by the professor of a course in modern Austrian history that Berenbaum
took in which the professor announced that Austrian history ended
in 1938 and began again in 1945, effectively absolving all Austrians
of any complicity during the years that the country was occupied
by Germany. It is an attitude, Berenbaum said in a rare moment of
levity, that allows Austrians to believe that "Beethoven was
Austrian and Hitler was German."
Denmark is the flip side of Berenbaum's thesis. He recently represented
the United States government at commemorations marking the 60th
anniversary of the Danish rescue of Jews – a massive historical
achievement involving countless ordinary Danes and government and
church officials, whose concerted efforts protected most of the
country's Jews. About 95 per cent of Danish Jews survived the war,
a remarkable number.
Yet Danes today continue to struggle with the idea that they could
have done more, could have saved all the Jews. Berenbaum said Danish
actions toward the Jews demonstrate a history of innocence, but
a sense of overpowering guilt. Unlike some other countries in Europe,
Christians in Denmark were central to saving not only Jewish lives,
but Jewish heritage. One Danish priest, Berenbaum said, broke into
the synagogue after the Jews had fled, and "stole" the
Torah and the silver, storing it in a vault until the end of the
war, when they were returned to the Jewish community.
"In Germany, they burned the Torahs," said Berenbaum.
"In Denmark, the priest broke into the synagogue to save the
Torah."
Bulgaria, on the other hand, likes to think of itself as having
defended the Jews, despite evidence to the contrary, he added.
France has developed a complex intellectual justification for its
wartime actions, he went on. The French like to imagine that resistance
is a cornerstone of the French experience in the Second World War.
In fact, said Berenbaum, "The story of France is collaboration,
not resistance."
Historical revisionists have succeeded in painting the Free French
as the "real" French, and the collaborationist French
as an aberration. Berenbaum compares this to the contemporary situation
in France, where growing anti-Semitism is blamed on immigrants from
North Africa, not "real" French. Anti-Semitism, in this
construction is "in France, but not of France,"
he said.
The Vatican has had a more public reconsideration of its role, as
successive studies have indicated a startling degree of complicity
and ignorance during the Nazi reign, and beginning with Pope John
XXIII and continuing through the current pope, the Catholic Church
has made some amends and acknowledged the validity of Judaism. Previously,
including at the time of the war, the Catholic Church had a policy
of "supercessionism," which viewed Judaism as unnecessary
and invalid since the "coming" of Christ 2,000 years ago.
Abandoning the supercessionist policy represents a major breakthrough,
but as the world awaits the next pope, Berenbaum warns the selection
could have profound impacts for Jews worldwide. There remains a
strain in the church that does not accept the modern interpretation
of Catholicism's relationship with Judaism.
"We must watch that enormously, cautiously," he said.
The national myths of innocence or guilt do not end at the Atlantic.
Berenbaum, an American, cited his own government's actions during
and after the war as having a significant impact on current events.
Historians have debated whether the Allies could have and should
have bombed the rail tracks leading to Auschwitz. Regardless of
the historical circumstances of the time, guilt over not doing more
to prevent deaths in the Holocaust may have made America trigger-happy
since, when it sees inhumanity occuring.
"Because Auschwitz was not bombed, we bombed Kosovo,"
he said.
Destroying the carefully conceived self-identity of European and
other nations has caused serious upheavals, Berenbaum acknowledged.
"We do not disrupt national myths without consequences,"
said Berenbaum. As nations and their people have been forced to
confront their collective or individual guilt, some have responded
by projecting the guilt outward. For example, Berenbaum suggested,
there has been an effort to paint Jews – in the form of Israel
or more broadly in a more visible anti-Semitism – as guilty
of precisely the crimes that were perpetrated against them.
In addition to the guilt felt or not felt, another paradox, according
to Berenbaum, is that the Holocaust, unlike other historical events,
increases in significance the farther we get from it. Berenbaum
noted that there were more front-page references to the Holocaust
in the New York Times in the first three months of 2000 than
in the entire period when the Holocaust was actually taking place.
Each decade has raised the Shoah in the western consciousness, from
the almost complete ignorance of the late 1940s, to the Eichmann
trial and Six Day War of the 1960s, to the television miniseries
on the Holocaust that opened up a whole new range of popular culture
depictions of the events, to the more recent reconsiderations of
new scholarship.
Not all of the new scholarship represents progress, however. Kristallnacht,
Berenbaum said, is now referred to by some historians as the "November
pogroms," a term that shifts responsibility by implying that
Kristallnacht was a spontaneous attack, as pogroms tended to be,
despite every piece of evidence that suggests the events of Nov.
9-10, 1938, were deliberately orchestrated by the Nazi regime.
Even Anne Frank's diary does not escape Berenbaum's critique. The
diary gained popularity in the 1950s in part, he claimed, because
it ends with a positive observation by the young girl who would
die in a concentration camp in 1945, that she still believes man
is good at heart.
"With all due respect to Anne Frank," Berenbaum said.
"You may believe that man is good at heart, but the Holocaust
gives no evidence."
Yet, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Berenbaum sees something
of biblical proportions emerging. Just as the revelation at Sinai
tied the Jewish people permanently to the concept of chosenness
and ethical monotheism, the Holocaust has made the Jewish people,
willingly or otherwise, a living testimony to the need for human
dignity, respect and decency.
"Holocaust survivors have used the memory of the Shoah to deepen
human dignity and to plead for human rights. Further, it has become
a commandment of sorts, a mitzvah to stand up against injustice
and human indignity, he said.
"This is the essence of the journey to a new vision,"
he said.
Berenbaum is an adjunct professor of theology at the University
of Judaism in Los Angeles, and director of the Sigi Ziering Institute
for the Study of the Ethical Implications of the Holocaust.
The Annual Kristallnacht Commemorative Program occurred on the 65th
anniversary of the "Night of Broken Glass," when Nazis
escalated their program of anti-Jewish policies into unprecedented
levels of violence and oppression that culminated in the death of
six million Jews.
Six candles were lit to commemorate the Six Million, by witnesses
and survivors, including Bronia Sonnenschein, Izzy Fraeme, Leonore
Freiman, Lola Apfelbaum, David Schaffer and Shoshana Fidelman. They
were assisted by members of the second and third generations, including
Dan Sonnenschein, Judith Cneac, Elan Mastai, Gordon Brandt, Sarah
Foster and Revital Fidelman.
The event was sponsored by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre
Society, with assistance from the Gottfried Family Kristallnacht
Fund, Congregation Beth Israel and the Jewish Federation of Greater
Vancouver Endowment Fund.
Rabbi Charles Feinberg of Beth Israel opened the evening and Rabbi
Andrew Rosenblatt, the new spiritual leader of Schara Tzedeck, offered
closing remarks. Cantor Steve Levin sang the prayer for the martyrs,
El Moleh Rachamim.
Felicia Folk, Beth Israel's board president, introduced Vancouver
city councillor Tim Stevenson, who read a proclamation from Mayor
Larry Campbell. Stevenson called on Jews and non-Jews to mark the
solemn importance of Kristallnacht.
As a religious studies instructor at Langara College, Stevenson
said he has encountered many young people who know little or nothing
of the Holocaust.
"It is crucial that our young people be educated," said
the politician, who is also a United Church minister.
Pat Johnson is a native Vancouverite, a journalist and
commentator.
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