Essays on Hitler's Europe

Preliminary Notes

Writing reviews for the New York Review of Books and the New Republic means writing about books that the editors have assigned to you. Bunched together more or less to fit the reviewer’s fields of interest, these works have some common themes; still, this is a rather haphazard process, dictated by what is new and what attracts the editor’s attention in the mountains of books that rise in every nook and corner of his office. From time to time I was assigned only a single book to review; in the most demanding assignment, I had to review sixteen volumes within a single essay and in addition was asked to refer, either in the text or in the footnotes, to several other new works. An unexpected offer recently came my way when the director of the University of Nebraska Press presented me with the opportunity of publishing a selection of my essays that had appeared up to then. Now, I was confronted with the dilemma of how to organize and to systematize a collection of work that, by its very nature, defies organization. A major rearrangement would have amounted to writing a new book; also, the original flavor of the essays would have been lost. I therefore compromised by shifting—but only in a few instances —segments of a review from one essay to another when it seemed absolutely necessary. Because it is always the journal editor and not the author who decides on the title of an essay and because editors like to use splashy titles for very obvious reasons, I found it impossible to keep some of the original essay titles. Otherwise, several articles would have had nearly identical titles, generously spiced with such words as “Hell”,“Hero,”“Horror,” and “Survivor.” The beginning of each essay in the book indicates precisely when, where, and under what title the original essay was printed. Needless to say, I was tempted to rewrite some of the articles, especially where historical hindsight has proven me wrong. I resisted the temptation and P R E L I M I N A R Y N O T E S ix rewrote only a handful of sentences where omissions made this absolutely necessary . I also took the liberty of correcting a handful of small factual errors (I see no reason why errors should be perpetuated). Journal essays, especially in the New York Review of Books, often lead to exchanges between the readers and the author. In one case, that of “The Incomprehensible Holocaust,” the exchanges lasted for one and a half years. I wish I could have included at least some samples of these letters here but space did not allow it. At the beginning of some of the articles, I have indicated in a few sentences the nature of the controversies between reviewer and reader. Mostly these arose because readers found my judgment either too harsh or not harsh enough; others complained that I neglected to include yet another aspect of the subject under review. But responses to the reviews also elicited many, many fascinating letters from which I profited enormously. It seems to be only right to express my thanks here to my friend and colleague , Robert Scott, and to my wife, Gloria Deák, both of whom read, corrected , and edited my essays. My wife, who is an art historian, was able to assist me while writing and publishing several books, the most recent being the lively Picturing New York: The City from Its Beginnings to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Finally, I can only think with gratitude and enthusiasm of Robert Silvers of the New York Review of Books and Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic, both of whom presented welcome challenges to me in my writing career. x Preliminary Notes ...