The End of the Holocaust (review)

Alvin Rosenfeld, the Irving M. Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies at Indiana University, has performed an invaluable service for the cause of memory and historical accuracy. In The End of the Holocaust, Rosenfeld swims against rising and menacing tides of ignorance and mendacity. While simultaneously documenting the mutilation inflicted on the history of the Shoah by contemporary culture and politics, he eloquently argues for the specificity of the Holocaust and its continuing impact on survivor writers. His book, which could well have been subtitled "Distortions of the Holocaust," chronicles what occurs when history is hijacked for cultural, ideological, and political reasons allowing for what the author rightly terms the "immorality of false analogy and 'memory' of the Shoah." Rosenfeld's perceptive study underscores a cruel irony: victims of the Shoah wanted the world to know about the Nazi crimes and viewed bearing witness as a solemn, even sacred, act. Would they have been so resolute if they had known what would become of their testimony?

This testimony was viewed as having great historical weight. The distinguished Jewish historian Dr. Isaac Schipper, murdered in Majdanek, contended that everything depended on who writes the history of the Holocaust. If the Nazis are victorious, either "our destruction will be presented as one of the most beautiful pages of world history . . . Or they may wipe out our memory altogether. Not even a dog will howl for us." If, however, the Jews write the "history of this period of blood and tears-and I firmly believe we will-who will believe us? We'll have the thankless job of proving to a reluctant world that we are Abel, the murdered brother . . . ."1 Schipper could not, however, foretell that distortion of the Holocaust would become an ineluctable part of the post-Holocaust narrative, despite the event being the most historically documented phenomenon in Jewish history.

Rosenfeld's study convincingly underscores the correctness of Schipper's observation while simultaneously extending the gravity of its implications. He relentlessly and with great erudition reveals the results of "normalizing" the Holocaust. Rosenfeld provides evidence of this domestication process in nine chapters, three of which discuss the impact of cultural distortion: "Popular Culture and the Politics of Memory;" "The Rhetoric of Victimization;" and "The Americanization of the Holocaust." Two additional chapters are devoted to the post-war fate of Anne Frank. Three chapters discuss survivor writers Jean Améry and Primo Levi who ultimately commit suicide, and Elie Wiesel and Imre Kertész who continue to bear witness. The penultimate chapter discusses "The End of the Holocaust" by which Rosenfeld means the end of any meaningful memory of the victims. Rosenfeld concludes his book with a chilling epilogue titled "A 'Second Holocaust'?"

Rosenfeld links the disparate paths of post-Holocaust distortions. "The Holocaust," he writes, "has become a volatile area of contending images, interpretations, historical claims and counter-claims." Examples of such historical distortion abound. They range from the "christianizing" [sanitizing] of Anne Frank's diary in the original Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett Broadway play, to Palestinian usurpation of the diary, to President Ronald Reagan's disastrous visit to the Bitburg cemetery among whose dead lay the remains of SS members whom the American president egregiously misidentified as victims. Beyond the specifics, however, lay the more comprehensive problem: that studying the Nazi crimes against the Jews within a specifically American context, argues Rosenfeld, "distorts" the histories of both the Holocaust and the American experience, "including that of racism." American optimism and impatience with history are, he maintains, ill suited to confront the evil which National Socialism inflicted on the Jews.

Rosenfeld is a careful and precise scholar. He documents both the relativizing and universalizing of the Holocaust. A statement such as: the Holocaust "reveals man's inhumanity to man" fails utterly to comprehend the Jewish specificity of the Shoah. National Socialism's Nuremberg Laws were not directed against mankind; they specifically targeted Jews as Jews. Further, Rosenfeld posits an uncomfortable truth for those wishing to draw lessons from the Holocaust. He...