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2 HOLOCAUST: Moral Indifference as the Form of Modern Evil Rainer C. Baum that the destruction of the Jews would one day pose a threat to himself and the existence of his "thousand-year Reich" was evidently not a possibility foreseen by Hitler-otherwise he would have avoided it. Krausnick and WilhelmJ Bayard: You're an intelligent man, Prince. Are you seriously telling me that five, ten, a thousand, ten thousand decent people of integrity are all that stand between us and the end of everything ? You mean this whole world is going to hang on that thread? Arthur Miller (1966) Two voices address us here. The first is that of social science, the second that of poetry. The former sounds assertive, the latter interrogative. The first contributes to explanation, the second to moral meaning. The former is a quotation from the definitive history of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile extermination squads), the latter one from the play Incident at Vichy. Yet these differences notwithstanding, they seem to suggest the same idea: that a little more thoughtfulness among the principal perpetrators and a little less moral indifference among the bystanders were all that stood between life and death for millions of victims in the crime of our time. Could it be true? What of it? But how does one deal with such questions? One answer, as strikingly honest as it is deceptively simple, is: "One doesn't; not well, not finally. No degree of scope or care can equal the enormity of such events or suffice for the sorrow they encompass."2 Two issues confront us in this concern with how one can cope with such questions. One derives from the recency of these events. Some of the survivors are still alive and through them we, the readers and writers of Holocaust Copyrighted Material 53 54 I PART TWO: ASSAULT ON MORALITY history and philosophy, are still tied to the dead. That bond demands, insistently, some language of profound respect. This is not merely a question of taste, however much that too is involved. This is, above all else, a question of faith, of remembering in order to commemorate in that universal religious sense that seeks to transpose suffering injustice into sources of life. Yet I have no such language. The other and related issue concerns historical truth itself. If all historical work tries to describe and explain a past reality, the issue here is to find a mode of representation that adequately captures it. And on this point the impact of the television series "Holocaust" proved highly instructive. In West Germany it was cathartic. The network had set up phone-in centers. There, historians stood ready to provide a little extra education. But in fact, priests and therapists were in far higher demand. Phone lines were jammed until all hours of the morning and not with learned explanations but with descriptive realization , stammering, voices that broke, weeping. The reality of the past had dawned, and, very evidently for the first time, for many thousands of callers.3 This constitutes a serious indictment of the failure of academic scholarship as well as newspaper reporting. After all, an enormous amount of historical writing, stretching over decades, had preceded the broadcast. Similarly, many trial proceedings had filled the pages of newspapers. Yet it was a movie, and so not the pursuit of truth but that of profit, that brought home the truth, or rather the morally compelling aspect of the truth. Thus we know how this aspect can be captured from the past and brought forward into the present. It is by selecting characters the viewer can identify with and by depicting the nature of suffering. Certainly, movies simplify. But it is not complexity that turns historical scholarship or newspaper reportage into failure. It is rather the relative inability of the historian and the reporter to portray what concrete historical subjects felt. It is a matter of the medium. The language of the historian and the reporter tends to repress emotion, the movie does not. In the name of a far too simplistic understanding of the requirements of objectivity, both academic scholarship and professional reporting have adopted styles that systematically hide from us the emotional reality of past experience. And since we experience moral relevance through our emotional attachment to standards of judgment, an emotionally sanitized rendition of past events excludes that part of history from what has moral relevance in the present. Where Clio has been left behind, Minerva's vision has been...

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