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4 Useless Experience Its Significance for Reconciliation after Auschwitz john k. roth I am convinced, beyond all personal experiences, that torture was not an accidental quality of this Third Reich, but its essence. —Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits a summer example of what I call Holocaust politics erupted in 2001.1 This flashpoint reignited touchy controversy about a decades-old problem : the Vatican’s reluctance, if not refusal, to open fully its archives pertaining to the Holocaust and Pope Pius XII, whose reign (1939–58) included the years of World War II and their immediate aftermath. Scarcely any post-Holocaust rift vexes Catholic-Jewish relationships more than the question of whether Pius XII did all in his power to resist the Holocaust, or even whether complicity pervaded Vatican policies toward Nazi Germany. With the Vatican’s plans to confer sainthood on the problematic pontiª already well along, the debate will not go away. So the episode I have in mind provides instructive support for this essay’s major claim: namely, that the Holocaust’s legacy includes a paradoxical predicament in which reconciliation is problematic but imperative, nearly impossible and yet still necessary.2 two features of reconciliation Before I describe the incident in greater but incomplete detail, notice that my assertion depends on two of reconciliation’s defining features. 85 First, reconciliation accents a person’s or a community’s reaching a point of acceptance. The Auschwitz survivor and philosopher Jean Améry illustrated the tension-filled reconciliation I want to identify when he said of the Holocaust, “What happened, happened. But that it happened cannot be so easily accepted.”3 Post-Holocaust consciousness must accept that the Holocaust happened—with all the devastation and darkness that admitting the Holocaust includes—but to accept that catastrophe without refusing its acceptability would give undeserved victories to indifference and denial, despair and death. In the first instance, then, relationships between the Holocaust, on the one hand, and the individuals and communities that confront its facticity, on the other, make reconciliation problematic but imperative, nearly impossible and yet still necessary. Second, reconciliation underscores settling or resolving disputes among people. Here the emphasis falls not simply on the links between an individual or a community and an event but on interpersonal or intercommunal relationships marked by two characteristics: first, those relationships , more or less positive at some time, have been harmed, broken, or shattered, or those relationships have been at odds so destructively and for so long that they have been marked deep down by little else than suspicion, hostility, loathing, or hate; second, those relationships are inextricably bound to destructive historical events—and to the memory and memorialization of these events—in which immense harm has been perpetrated, received, or witnessed without intervention that could and, ethically speaking, should have been forthcoming in response to them. The Holocaust makes the many variations on these themes far-reaching and persistent. Those realities indicate that reconciliation is imperative because broken and shattered relationships—to say nothing of those that are savaged by suspicion, hostility, loathing, or hate—have already taken an incalculable toll. Unless we invite more of the same and tolerate it repeatedly, reconciliation is necessary because people have to share the earth with one another, and it is better to do so when mutual understanding and respect prevail. Even those considerations, however, do not remove completely the ways in which post-Holocaust reconciliation is problematic and impossible. Again, Améry saw the point when he repudiated “hollow, thoughtless, utterly false conciliatoriness.” No way, he 86 Part Two: Reconciliation said. It would be better to let the Holocaust’s “moral chasm . . . remain wide open.”4 If it is not to be debased by the false conciliatoriness that Améry despised, post-Holocaust reconciliation can only be reached in spite of that chasm. Because the moral chasm cannot be closed—the Holocaust’s devastation is too immense for that—the quest for honest and respectful reconciliation becomes more important. Without those eªorts, too many wounds will fester in ways that are as undesirable as they are unnecessary. Some interpreters may say that the priorities for post-Holocaust reconciliation begin or remain with relationships between Germans and Jews, or, as their undeclared war raged in 2001 and beyond, between Israelis and Palestinians. The list, however, will not get very long before relationships between Christians and Jews come to the fore. That recognition leads back to Holocaust politics. acrimony and rupture...

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