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Book Reviews lSI uncertainty and bitterness, characteristics often missing from interviews given fifty years later. For that reason alone, the book is worth reading. Monte S. Finkelstein Department ofHistory & Social Sciences Tallahassee Community College Preempting the Holocaust, by Lawrence Langer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. 207 pp. $22.50. Lawrence Langer deserves his contemporary reputation as one of the finest, most sensitive, and most profound readers ofand listeners to death camp survivors' texts and testimonies. His extraordinary books such as The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (1975), The Age ofAtrocity: Death in Modern Literature (1978), and especially Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (1991), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism that year, have taught us many things, especially that some experiences are beyond the reach of language, and that the death camps remain situated like distant black holes, spinningjustbeyond our understanding. In this collection of eleven essays, some which have been previously published elsewhere, Langer returns to his principal literary and philosophical themes concerning the limits oflanguage, but he also raises new questions and attempts to extend his reach beyond death camp memoirs and testimonies to historical and pedagogical materials concerning the Holocaust. And whenhe does so he sometimes overreaches. Insights that served him well in dealing with testimonies of death camp survivors limit his understanding ofhistorical and social scientific works dealing with the Holocaust. A central problem with Langer is his conflating the "Holocaust" with the death camp atrocity experience. This leads him, on the one hand, to view all Jewish survivors as victims of circumstances or of chances totally beyond their control. On the other hand, it also induces him to believe that certain acts are so heinous and beyond the moral ken that trying to "understand" them in sociological or psychological terms runs the risk ofpardoning the murderers and relativizing the Holocaust. Other scholars find Langer's focus too narrow. They view the Holocaust as a historical process moving through at least three phases: 1) the Nazi seizure and consolidation ofpower (1933-1939); 2) the Second World War and concentration and ghettoization of the Jews (1939-1941); 3) the attack on the Soviet Union and the implementation of the Final Solution (1941-1945). In the period of seizure and consolidation ofNazi power, German and Austrian Jews first tried to ride out the storm, and then, after Kristallnacht in 1938, most tried to flee. In the period of war and ghettoization, many Jews complied with Nazi directives and attempted to survive by making themselves useful in a strategy of "survival through work." In the period of extermination, most Jews were indeed caught completely unaware of the Nazis' final 152 SHOFAR Winter 2001 Vol. 19, No.2 aims or they denied-mostly to themselves-the terrible truth. They perished, some by shooting squads, some by starvation and mistreatment, most by gassing. At the risk ofstressing the obvious, it should be apparent from this briefsketch that all European Jews did not experience the Holocaust in the same way. Those who were in hiding on the "Aryan" side did not experience the death camp; those who were incarcerated in camps could not share in the partisan experience in the forests or the cities. Hence, to make the death camp canonical and have it stand for the Holocaust is to confuse the part with the whole. Langer is right to remind us that the concentration camp and death camp systems, as well as pure chance, largely determined who would live and who would die, and what they did. By the same token, however, the experience of living in hiding on false papers of identity on the "Aryan" side, or fighting in the forests, was less pre-ordained, less driven by chance and incomprehensible brutality, and more directed by choice and resistance to circumstances. Langer is also concerned that the Shoah notbe misused, even for apparently worthy ends, but his watchful eye sometimes misses the point. In the introduction to this set of essays he takes Browning to task for the latter's explanation concerning the motivations of ordinary German perpetrators during the Holocaust. He especially objects to Browning's concluding rhetorical question: "Ifthe men ofReserve Police Battalion...

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