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5 How the Holocaust Didn’t Become Current Events In my experience as an average, reasonably well-informed teenager growing up in the United States after World War II—small-town, middleclass , Protestant, the son of college-educated parents in a house with a television, daily papers, and many of the popular news and photojournalistic magazines of the era—I submit that I qualify as a case study in post-1945 American ignorance of what we now call the Holocaust: the Nazi Murder of the Jews. I do recall having a certain awareness that, among Hitler’s evil deeds, a uniquely heinous crime had been carried out against the Jewish peoples of Europe and the conquered Eastern lands; yet even as I try to reconstruct such knowledge as I may have had, the attempt to fill in the blanks of both personal and cultural remembrance moves me to a retrospective emotion I can only describe as shame. Even now, more than half a century later, having received a privileged education amongst the nation’s elite, having survived combat in my own generation ’s savage war in Vietnam, having returned to enjoy a university career as a teacher and writer, and, most important, having come to know through marriage and parenthood the intensities of love and familial loyalty , I still feel whatever evolution I may have undergone in consciousness is conjoined with a conviction of utter urgency in my need to dispel a legacy of disregard. After all the decades, as regards this particular monstrous , evil thing—unarguably the central dark deed of my century— I still find, precisely at the meeting point of individual and collective imagination, a haunted, ignominious ignorance, against which I piece to- 80 / Chapter 5 gether some stopgap simulation of knowledge. Further, it is an ignorance that seems always some dreadful extension of the crime itself. What did I know? How or when did I come to know it? Through what evolving codes of information and cultural discourse did such an astonishing fact of history take shape for me over the years as a construct of memory? To what degree have such codings themselves now come to shape for me not only the forms of knowledge but also the terms of moral action, to condition not only what I know or think I know about the world, but also how I have ethically conducted myself as a person in history ? In sum, what is entailed in the process of cultural remembering whereby an American of my era goes back and tries to come to terms with such a visitation of human monstrosity—described by Niall Ferguson as “the first and only industrialized genocide” and by Simon Sebag Montefiore as “without parallel the most wicked act in history”?* As I look back to date my personal awareness, I now find it almost impossible, not surprisingly, to dissociate it from the forms of popular culture consciousness prevalent in the late 1940s and early 1950s golden age of what we used to call “current events”: the generalized public knowledge of national and world affairs common in a country saturated with the popular media of the times—newspapers, magazines, movies, radio, television—but perhaps most characteristically embodied at the time in the mass-circulation news and information magazines.There just seemed to be piles of them thrown about the reading tables in our house and the houses where we visited—Time, Life, Look, Collier’s, Reader’s Digest , the Saturday Evening Post. The public schools mounted yearly promotional campaigns to sell them. They even held current events contests for student readers. I know because I won one, receiving as my prize— naturally—a volume of essays from Time-Life. To this degree, then, I think I may say that as a young person of the postwar generation, I replicated the knowledge of my parents and the parents of my classmates: people belonging not just to what were once called the business and professional classes—educators, civic leaders, ministers, doctors, lawyers, *Simon Sebag Montefiore, “Century of Rubble,” review of The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson, New York Times, Sunday Book Review sec., Nov. 12, 2006. The Holocaust / 81 bankers, corporate managers—but also members of the relatively prosperous middle and working classes—farmers, factory workers, storekeepers , secretaries, and skilled tradesmen. Such was the condition of being well-informed: possessed at least of a certain illusion of cultural coherence and, thereby...

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