Conflicting Perspectives on Timothy Snyder's Black Earth

Reviewed by Michael Berenbaum, American Jewish University

Timothy Snyder's much-acclaimed book Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, published by Basic Books in 2010, aroused serious concern among many Holocaust historians. They feared that his emphasis on double genocide—German and Soviet—was a backdoor attempt to diminish the uniqueness and singularity of the Holocaust. In Black Earth Snyder's emphasis on the Holocaust and its lessons should assuage these critics. Early in the book he writes: "The History of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal and its lessons have not yet been learned. … The Holocaust is not only history but warning." He makes good on this promise, perhaps too good. He treats the Holocaust as the axial event of modern history, thus giving testimony to its centrality.

Jews are central to the history he narrates. He begins the same way many histories of the Holocaust must begin—with Adolf Hitler (no Hitler, no Holocaust) and what he considers to be the two defining elements of Hitler's world-view. Hitler's quest for Lebensraum, defined not only as living space but as space to live well, makes the Ukraine a natural German target, for it is the breadbasket of Europe. For Hitler, the Volga was Germany's Mississippi, and he admired the U.S. doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

According to Snyder's understanding of Hitler, Jews were opposed for the values they brought into the world. Compassionate justice and assistance to the weak stood in the way of what Hitler saw as the natural order. In nature, he believed, the powerful exercise their power without restraint, and he advocated social Darwinism in it most extreme form. Jewish values were held not only by Jews, however. Christians who revered Jesus spread those values widely, but nowhere does Snyder explain why Christian churches did not see Hitler's attack on the Jews as a masked attack on them. Nor does he indicate why the churches offered their formal and often enthusiastic support for the regime. An emphasis on Hitler is warranted up to a point, but in overemphasizing him Snyder seems to ignore the legions who supported him, enabled him, and carried out his vision.

Black Earth is also a Zionist book, insofar as Snyder explores the cooperation between right-wing Zionism and right-wing Polish nationalism in the post-Pilsudski age. Both movements wanted the Jews to leave Poland, the former by "ascent to the land" and the latter by self-deportation. Neither could imagine how the Nazi regime would ultimately get Jews off Polish soil, and a reader of Black Earth who was unfamiliar with the history of Zionism would not know of the more important efforts of David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann (compared to Avraham Stern and Yitzhak Shamir) to establish the Jewish state. But in the deepest sense of the term, this is a Zionist work. Snyder describes the vulnerability of those who were stateless and concurs with Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer's judgment that "the murder of the European Jews seemed to vindicate the Zionist argument that there was no future for Jews in Europe." The future of the Jews could take one of two forms: an end to landlessness and powerless in a state of their own or a secure place in pluralistic, democratic states that valued their participation as citizens.

There is much to admire in this book. Snyder writes clearly and compellingly about complex subjects. He personalizes the story and thus gives it a human voice even as he writes of massive depersonalizing violence. He probes the perpetrators, their victims, the bystanders and rescuers, the resistance fighters and the diverse native population.

Not surprisingly, Snyder centers this history on the badlands of Eastern Europe and returns to his consideration of double occupation, double destruction, and double genocide, here adding the notion of double collaboration, the participation of the local population first in the Soviet enterprise of state destruction and then...