Philosophical Witnessing: The Holocaust as Presence

7. Applied Ethics, Post-Holocaust

« 7 » Applied Ethics, Post-Holocaust the rhetoric of profits Odd as it may seem, the analysis of ethical issues in relation to the Holocaust has not gone very far or struck very deeply. Why this should be the case warrants scrutiny in its own right, and I do not attempt that here, although certain contributory reasons seem obvious. The most striking of these appears in the line between perpetrators and victims of the Holo- Applied Ethics, Post-Holocaust 113 caust, a line at its basis so clear and decisive that to speak of “analyzing” or “discussing” it would seem blatantly beside the point, certainly beside the main point: What, in ethical terms, is there to discuss? And then, too, related to this first response, there is the ready distinction between those historical discoveries that seem continually to come to the surface of Holocaust studies and warrant scrutiny as straightforward matters of fact and, on the other hand, the stumbling forays of ethics that, when their conclusions are not simply obvious, seem undecidable and relentlessy vague. And then, too, even beyond these, we hear the conventional nostrum: that for the many difficult or problematic decisions and acts that figured in the Holocaust (on all sides: among the victims as well as the bystanders, at various levels and degrees even for the perpetrators), the conditions of the time were so fraught and complex that nobody reviewing them now could possibly be in a position to judge actions or decisions taken then. Only those who were there at the time have that authority. And then, finally, still rising in pitch and with specific reference to Jewish conduct or reactions in the camps and the ghettoes: Since at the end of those days, millions were killed, and killed irrespective of whether they had acted nobly or not, selflessly or selfishly, the very effort now to judge or analyze what they did and how, to weigh against that what they might have done that they didn’t do (or might not have done that they did do), seems itself a violation. What more could anyone have then asked of them that would justify asking more of them now? All these reasons singly and the more so together have considerable weight, even if one argues in response (as I would) that even this weight does not justify the conclusion that analysis of ethical issues within the context of the Holocaust is either self-evident or, if murkier than that, itself a moral violation. (That such objections are typically raised selectively is a secondary reason for skepticism about them). To be sure, many of the ethical issues that warrant reflection are complex and difficult in the abstract as well as in their immediate settings. So, for example, the analysis above, in chapter 4, of Jaspers’ attempt to consider the collective responsibility of the Germans in the history of Nazi Germany pointed to the continuing force of that question for the Germany of 2008 as well as for his own, then-contemporary German readers. Jaspers’ response to that question seemed caught between contradictory principles: on the one hand, recognition that a country and culture (so also, its citizenry) bear a con- 114 vs. the unspeakable tinuing responsibility for the heritage from the past incorporated in them: It was Germany and the Germans, after all, who stood behind Hitler. On the other hand, it also seems reasonable�just�that at some point, there should (on moral as well as practical grounds) be closure, an application here too of the “statute of limitations,” the more so, since most of the individuals bearing the burden at present of any alleged responsibility had themselves no direct part in the policies or actions stigmatized; they were not alive at the time. The range of such issues in ethical theory and practice extends broadly, over the multiplicity of events and acts that constituted the Holocaust. For example, the concept of the “righteous Gentiles,” or as that category has at times been designated less invidiously, the “heroic rescuers”: Is the implication here, in examining the role during the Holocaust of the hundreds of millions of “bystanders” not directly threatened by the Nazis and not now included in the select group of the “righteous,” that it had been their duty to act as those others had�also risking their lives? And that no analogous assessment is relevant for judging Jewish (that is, nonGentile ) conduct...