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8. Epistemologies
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234 8 Epistemologies ERICH BRUSCHKE HAD been a member of the local socialist resistance. In a quasi-autobiographical report to the criminal police in Hildesheim on 23 May 1947 (BA-K Z42 VII/1851), he described the brutality of a particular Gestapo agent, Wenzel, who had been active in the anti-Marxist unit. Bruschke then warned the police against any attempt on Wenzel’s part to whitewash his past. “If Wenzel claims that he did not know anything about the deportation of Jews, then I would like to point out that every child in Hildesheim knew about these procedures, even if Mr. Wenzel in the Gestapo House itself insists that he did not see anything of it.” Heinrich Bode drew much the same conclusion in the autobiographical memoirs that he wrote shortly before he died in May 1972 (VVNH, NL Hans Teich, p. 5): In the May days of 1945, I arrived back in Hildesheim and one by one also other surviving comrades. And then we experienced a wonder: there were no more NSDAP (Nazis), they knew nothing about the crimes that were committed and could no longer recall the burning of the synagogue, the boycott of Jewish businesses, and the murders on the marketplace in Hildesheim—in which a well-known Hildesheim businessmen was supposed to have taken part as hangman and yet is still a free man today. They also did not know anything about what happened to the sick people at the sanatorium in Hildesheim when they were put on transports. Even today, one does not speak willingly about this past and consciously protects the guilty. In the wake of the Second World War, Holocaust denial enabled Hildesheimers to rebuild and re-establish a sense of normalcy. They seemed neither aware of, nor responsible for, the tragic events of world history. Yet as Bode suggested, this kind of selective knowledge dated as far back as the very first years of the Third Reich. “Already in 1933,” he wrote, “the simple, lower functionaries of that era’s resistance movement [like us] knew what [others] did not see or did not wish to see.” Holocaust denial is still alive and well in our global public sphere (Evans 2001; Lipstadt 1993; Petropoulos 1998b; Schermer and Grobman 2000). Epistemologies 235 In its extreme version, this neo-fascist litany denies that the Holocaust ever existed as such. In its subtle version, it argues simply that ordinary people did not know about the crimes of the Third Reich and therefore cannot be held responsible for them. At the core of the latter claim stands an ambiguous admixture of antisemitism on the one hand and an unwillingness to face the prospect of industrial-bureaucratic mass murder on the other. The latter claim is also epistemological (Kren and Rappoport 1980) in two ways. It not only posits the existence, during the Third Reich, of a specific regime of knowledge and ignorance about the Holocaust. But our academic analysis of the Third Reich also rests on the myth, part and parcel of a modern culture of normalcy, that such regimes of knowledge and ignorance are imposed on ordinary people by exogenous forces. Challenging Holocaust denial, therefore, is not simply a matter of documenting who knew what and when in response to those murders, but also the contemporary task of reflecting critically on our analytic models, with the goal of more lucidly understanding how the epistemology of an ordinary existence anticipated and helped facilitate those murders in the first place. This study of ordinary Germans in extraordinary times cannot conclude without considering this latter aspect of Holocaust denial: the persistent and pernicious attitude of incredulity in the face of Nazi crimes against humanity , then and now. This chapter suggests two alternate epistemologies of the Holocaust. It argues that those open secrets were culturally constructed in a typically modern way by ordinary people, who were cultivating a self and society that corresponded to their fantasies of niveau. It also defends the use of narrative interviews to reconstruct everyday life in the shadow of the Third Reich. It shows that my interview partners did not invent the trope of normalcy out of whole cloth after the fall of the Third Reich, but rather elaborated on a dynamic culture of normalcy that preceded national socialism—and helped promote it in the first place. People in the Neighborhood Most historians who study the issue of popular knowledge of the Holocaust in its own era tend to limit their investigation to objective...