The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (review)

Straightforwardly described by its publisher as a work of history, Carolyn Dean's The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust is really four loosely-connected essays of cultural criticism that survey a range of Holocaust "representations"—works of history, memoir literature, and art—in order to explore the larger question of whether the exposure to such representations ultimately puts "our impulse to empathize ... at risk" by making us "numb to horror" (back jacket). This question is important at a time when scholars and other critics increasingly question the centrality of the Holocaust in Western consciousness. Yet readers expecting a clear answer as to whether Holocaust imagery is doing more harm than good may come away somewhat frustrated by a study that, while provocative and thoughtful, promises somewhat more than it delivers.

Part of the problem is that Dean's primary object is never clearly defined. In the volume's introduction she initially seems to declare that her main goal is to evaluate the validity of claims that Western society has become desensitized to atrocity and has developed a kind of "empathy fatigue" partly as a result of "the central role [that] American and European intellectuals accorded the Holocaust ... in shattering the once secure meaning of 'humanity' in the West" (p. 2). She further implies this is her central focus when she describes "recent rhetoric about numbness and indifference to human suffering" as part of "an important cultural narrative that has yet to be ... examined" (p. 4). Dean seems to backtrack from tackling this question herself, however, in declaring that the question of "whether or not there has been a real failure of empathy is not my subject," adding that "I don't address why numbness has emerged as a ... pervasive cultural narrative" (pp. 4-5). Instead of pursuing these lines of inquiry, she leaves the reader to ponder what her approach to the new discourse on numbness really is.

Other introductory statements of analytical intent are quite abstract. Thus, she notes that her goal is to "investigate presumptions about how empathy sustains collective identity rather than the historical constitution and alteration of emotional states" (p. 5), while she later adds that her essays "take apart self-evident presumptions in ... aesthetic and historical debates about Holocaust representation to demonstrate how these representations are pervasive and diffuse ways of using rhetoric to control despair, powerlessness, and ambivalence" (p. 15).

It soon becomes clear that the central focus of Dean's study is discourse analysis. The first and strongest chapter offers an interesting look at the rhetorical usage of the term "pornography" by scholars to describe representations of Nazism and the Holocaust that they regard as lacking a properly empathetic attitude. Dean performs a useful service in assembling a wide range of examples, identifying charges of "pornography" as far back as the mid-1960s, tracing them through the 1970s (they frequently appeared after the airing of the NBC docudrama Holocaust), and following them into the present, most notably as they were voiced by angry critics of the Mirroring Evil exhibition at New York City's Jewish Museum in 2002. Dean does not attempt to determine whether such representations are, in fact, pornographic, however, arguing that the word "pornography" has been used imprecisely as a catch-all term of opprobrium whose very popularity is explained by its vagueness. As a scholar who has written extensively on pornography (in a monograph on interwar France), she is understandably irked by the blithe and uninformed usage of the term, noting that "references to pornography pass themselves off for thought and make it easier not to think" (p. 38). Still, her own concluding assertion that the spread of this discourse reflects "post-Holocaust anxieties about the failure of empathy" remains speculative and would benefit from further elaboration (p. 42).

Dean's concern with the subject of pornography leads her into the book's second chapter, which deals with the controversy over Daniel Goldhagen's 1996...