Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust (review)

Dan Diner is a historian who lives in several academic cultures. Raised and trained in West Germany, he now teaches at the University of Leipzig, as well as at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and is a frequent visitor at academic institutions in the United States. Some of the strengths—and some of the weaknesses, perhaps—of this collection of essays first published between 1984 and 1997 may be traced to the multiple perspectives that he brings to bear on "the Holocaust, its prehistory, and its historiography," as well as the relationship between history and memory.

First, a word about the book's weaknesses. Diner frequently uses abstract jargon from a variety of disciplines, and his translators compound the difficulties of the prose with sometimes awkward translations. That is a pity, because although Diner writes badly, he thinks well. The essays contain many key insights; though not all of these insights are new, many have the by no means negligible advantage of being true.

Diner's first theme is the unpredictability of the Holocaust, a theme tied to its contingency. That theme is powerfully demonstrated in Diner's examination of the analyses of the situation of German Jewry in 1938 in the writings of the Freudian- Marxist Max Horkheimer and the Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion, as well as in the responses of various German Jewish leaders for whom the situation in Germany on the eve of Kristallnacht looked similar to that of Poland or Rumania, where states were also attempting to extrude Jews from the polity and society. For these Jewish subjects, Diner shows, the extermination of the Jews that was soon to follow remained unimaginable.

Diner's second theme is that of particularity versus universality. He contends, rightly I think, that because Christianity is a universalistic religion, historical particularity is suspect to those raised in a Christian culture. That is why, in the Christian and post-Christian narrative of history, the notion that the significance of the Holocaust lies in the fact that it happened to the Jews is uncomfortable, not to say scandalous. Judaism, by contrast, is not a universalistic religion, and the notion that historical significance lies in particularity is almost taken for granted. This is reflected, Diner indicates, in how non-Jewish Germans on the one hand, and Jews on the other, locate the Holocaust in history and collective memory.

Diner's third theme concerns the limits of materialist and utilitarian modes of explanation, especially when it comes to the Holocaust. Here his primary target is the novel explanations offered by Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, who see economic interests as leading directly to the Final Solution, arguing that the liquidation of the Jews was part of a larger plan by social scientific experts of economic modernization. For Aly and Heim, the Holocaust is best understood as a downsizing of the workforce and a solution to food shortages by eliminating some consumers. Diner credits these historians for uncovering new documentation, but argues that they largely misinterpret what they have found. They confuse the economic justifications for mass killings offered in some documents with the ultimate motives for the murder of the Jews. Diner regards their explanation not only as fallacious but also as instrumentalizing the Holocaust by subordinating it to an overarching critique of modern civilization and its rationality, a late effort of the long-standing Marxist struggle to portray the Final Solution as "an innate, albeit certainly extreme, manifestation of bourgeois capitalist society" (p. 149).

In fact, Diner argues, Aly and Heim's interpretations are only a radical version of a wider problem: the difficulty of explaining the Holocaust through the usual lenses of social historical explanation. Because social history typically stresses long- term trends and the continuities between past and future, it has difficulty coming to terms with the massive discontinuity represented by the systematic murder of the Jews. For a long time, social historians who wrote about the Third...