At the risk of turning my blog into all Germany all the time, I wanted to put this up primarily as a teaching reference. Last semester, when my Modern Europe class had begun to study the Holocaust, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo put up a post on how he and his wife had to reassess what they knew of her family’s experience of the Holocaust. She had thought that her great-grandfather had been shot by the Einsatzgruppen, when in fact he had died in Auschwitz. This moment occurred just as I was re-reading Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive, in which she describes precisely the same realization that her “mental furniture has to be rearranged” because while she had thought her father had died in Auschwitz, he had in fact had been transported to Lithuania and Estonia and “who knows how they were murdered” (40). That “these stories have no end,” as Klüger says is aptly demonstrated by Marshall’s update to the story, in which he shows his readers his wife’s great-grandfather’s death certificate:
The reason I’m sharing this with you is that the death certificate itself captures for me one of the paradoxes of the Holocaust. Why even keep death certificates? Auschwitz was after all a network of concentration and extermination camps. I’m not even talking about the fear of possible punishment after the war, though that’s another significant question. Just simply, why? These are people, a whole people, being sent into oblivion, to be erased from the earth and from memory. These were to be much less than ordinary deaths.
A student of mine sends along a link to Cass Sustein’s thoughts on a recent paper that shows a link between high participation within the Nazi Party and strong civic associations in 1920s and early 1930s Germany. I’ve downloaded the article itself and hope to get the chance to read it, but I thought it worth offering a few quick thoughts on Sustein’s presentation of this argument, especially since I see that a number of people have talked about it. First, its worth noting that although historians obviously continue to debate the rise of the Nazis, many have noted the link between political and civic organizations and the rise of the Nazi Party. Second, the examples Sustein provides simply show that people talk to one another about their beliefs and sometimes change their minds. And yes, that may even occur among extremists.
Third, and most importantly, Sustein simply emphasizes the coexistence of associations and high Nazi Party membership without underscoring why such a connection may have existed in the first place. Correlation is not causation. Historian Peter Fritzsche, for instance, once argued that the associations that flourished in Weimar Germany failed in their attempt to create the kind of social links Germans were seeking after World War I. In fact, it was the Nazi Party itself that managed to represent a form of community more attractive to a significant amount of Germans. In other words, the correlation between civic associations and Nazi Party membership may be an inverse one; the places where people most frequently encountered the failed promise of community by these groups, the more likely they were to turn to another option: the Nazis.
It’s worth underlining just how good the Nazis were at this type of thing. The above image is a fairly well-known picture of Goebbels and Hitler having a “one-pot meal.” These were encouraged during the winters of the 1930s all the way through the war as a way of reducing waste and expense; the extra money a family saved by having one was supposed to go to charity. The image demonstrates just one way the party strove to incorporate itself within the everyday life of communities. Hitler himself changed his mode of presentation depending on the audience, and Nazis did set up charitable, paramilitary, and, most famously, youth organizations themselves that all served to incorporate the party more fully into certain communities. All this is to say that the simple existence of civic associations and social networks can, in no sense, be said to be enough to explain the rise of the Nazi Party. To find a more convincing explanation you have to learn to ask better historical questions: How did the Nazis take advantage of this phenomenon to facilitate their rise to power? It did not just happen by accident after all.
I’m fortunate to have received some funding for a research trip to Paris this summer and decided to spend my first weekend in town at a special exhibition at the Louvre, “On Germany,” which promised ” une réflexion autour des grands thèmes structurant la pensée allemande de 1800 à 1939.” The exposition proceeds chronologically and is divided into three parts: ““Apollo and Dionysius”, “Nature” and “Ecce Homo.” We move from the neoclassicism of the late Enlightenment into Romanticism and onward to the First World War (there’s a rather large gap in there, yes) and then conclude with artists I’m more familiar with, those such as Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz, and George Grosz, who wrestled with the implications of a post-total war modernity and the rise of the National Socialism. To my eye, the exposition constructed a narrative that progressed from an emergent German nationalism during the Napoleonic era to a counter discourse questioning the foundations of that ideology. If the exposition begins, in other words, with a survey of what would gradually become a dominant nationalist discourse, it ends with a counter-discourse that not only emphasized the failure of nationalism to create a coherent community, but also questioned whether German cultural nationalism could ever do so.
Otto Dix, Verwundeter (Herbst 1916, Bapaume) (1924)
A look online, however, revealed a different interpretation raging within the German press, who have accused the Louvre of reinscribing a teleological view of German history where the origins of the Nazis lay in the foundations of German nationalism. The Sonderweg, or special path of German history, moved from the cultural nationalism of Herder and Fichte to that of Hitler. As Adam Soboczynski put it in Die Zeit (translation into French is from Le Monde): “Que l’exposition s’achève avec la césure de 1939 ne doit rien au hasard. L’horreur est inscrite dans l’art allemand depuis Goethe. Les paysages nostalgiques d’Italie et de Grèce, la méditation sur le gothique, l’enthousiasme allemand pour le Moyen Age, l’accent mis sur la vie quotidienne, la dépréciation de la “profondeur” allemande ne sont, dans l’interprétation ainsi proposée, que des étapes qui mènent à la catastrophe allemande” (That the exhibition finishes with the turning point of 1939 was not by chance. Horror is inscribed on German art from Goethe on. The nostalgic landscapes of Italy and Greece, the meditation on the Gothic, the German enthusiasm for the Middle Ages, the emphasis put on everyday life, the depreciation of German “depth” are only, in the interpretation thus proposed, steps which lead to the German catastrophe). According to Soboczynski, simply arranging the chronology of the exhibition in a way that begins with the emergence of German nationalism and ends with World War II constitutes a reaffirmation of the Sonderweg. After all, the various themes of German art history that he points to would have been present under any circumstances; its thus the accent placed on them through the construction of chronology that enforces a narrative of inevitability onto German history.
I find it fascinating, however, that this particular critique points to the endpoint of 1939 as prima facie evidence that the organizers of the exhibition sought to enforce the Sonderweg. However, did the catastrophe not begin with Hitler’s rise to power in 1933? Does the choice to continue to the onset of World War II, while ignoring — with the exception of a short clip from Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938) — the dominant art of the period, that of the Nazis, not in fact deemphasize that aspect of German History? Why was there no mention of the Degenerate Art Exhibit, where one had to go in order to see the work of Dix and Grosz in the 1930s?
Artur Kampf, 30 Januar 1933
To speak of German art in the 1930s, one must speak of Nazi art because, like it or not, Nazi art was German Art. It seems to me, in other words, that the Louvre went out of its way to avoid the obvious narrative of German history. The exhibit instead contributed to an historical excision, indicating that the Nazis were simply an aberration and not wholly part of the German story. The exhibit presented a narrative that was essentially angular, not linear, by beginning with a dominant expression of German culture and ending with those expressions that were most thoroughly repressed at the very moment of their enunciation. That story would have been more convincing had they decided to end in 1933, when political power could be effectively exercised in a way that would mold German cultural expression into forms that corresponded with the virulent nationalism of the Nazis. The presence of Olympia, almost hidden within a middle room that stands within the very last part of the exhibition, indeed reveals the exhibitors own awareness of the problematic history they decided to present.
Such a narrative, however, too fails to truly avoid teleology. The more nuanced solution would have been to ask which Germany we’re referring to when we speak of “On Germany.” After all, Germany was only barely an idea at the beginning of the exhibition and only came into political existence in 1870. As Donald Lee says in The Art Newspaper, “The main problem with presenting art made in Germany (not including the Austrian Empire) between 1800 and 1939 (1933 would have made an historically more meaningful closure) is that it is very hard to create a coherent story that is made of so many disparate, divergent, contradictory, local, regional and confessional segments. It is a struggle to make the sum of the parts add up to a whole.” An attempt to acknowledge that complexity, a refusal to reduce the variety of German cultural expression into one “Germany” would have also highlighted the contingency of Germany itself. And in so doing, have revealed the contingency of the Nazis as well.
Victor Hugo was no Karl Marx, but he did believe in progress through revolution — a fact that viewres of Tom Hooper’s new film Les Misérables, would never guess. Adapted from the immensely popular musical version of Hugo’s classic (first performed in Paris in 1980), Hooper’s cinematic rendering is stunningly staged and brilliantly performed, but it cuts the author in half: it gives us the religious Hugo, not the revolutionary one. It tells the story of individual redemption through an odyssey of Catholic conscience, not of France’s collective redemption through political violence.
I think this may actually give the film a bit too much credit. Sitting in the theater with a group of students, I couldn’t help think what a missed opportunity the film was as I considered another recent book adaptation: Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit. In a way, the two mirror one another. While the original version of The Hobbit is a plot-driven children’s novel of about two-hundred pages, the film, once complete, will be an epic exposition of an entire mythology over the course of about six hours. The original version of Les Misérables, on the other hand, is a 1,500 page meandering rumination on the relationship between progress and revolution (among other things), while the film is a two and a half hour love story that overshadows, rather than works through, its major social themes. Indeed, while the film puts on display the social miseries of early nineteenth-century France, it only does so in order to maneuver the audience back to the individual characters as exemplary, rather than normative, representations of those problems. Social discontent propels individual characters towards their various ends — for better or worse — but fails to justify, or even represent, the revolutionary impulse as a social phenomenon.
In Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, we get the themes without the crisp plot, in Les Miserables we get the plot without the themes.
Two of my courses are in the midst of World War II, a moment I mostly hate teaching, but will almost certainly find myself doing so for the rest of my life. I hate teaching it not simply because of the morbid fascination it always seems to evoke in people — and certainly not just in undergraduates — but because it’s so often cited as the reason to study history in the first place. Learn from the past, so we never repeat it. The Holocaust has come to stand in for the lessons of the past as a whole.
This conviction, propagated by memorials and memoirs, is one I try to challenge as I lecture and as we talk about the Holocaust. And it’s why I’ve assigned Ruth Kluger’s absolutely brutal Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001), rather than, say, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz. Her account refuses to shy away from what the Holocaust actually was: a time of degradation, if in its most modern form. It tore people apart and rarely brought them together. Those who survived often did despite the failures of their neighbors and family, rather than through their righteous support:
When I tell people…that I feel no compunction about citing examples of my mother’s petty cruelties towards me, my hearers act surprised, assume a stance of virtuous indignation, and tell me that, given the hardships we had to endure during the Hitler period, the victims should have come closer together and formed strong bonds. Particularly young people should have done so, say the elderly. But this is sentimental rubbish and depends on a false concept of suffering as a source of moral education (52).
I hate teaching the Holocaust because every time I return to this beautifully, scandalously, brutal book, I can’t help but agree. Primo Levi depicted Auschwitz as a giant laboratory in which one could see how men and women functioned when placed in the most dire of situations. In doing so, he assumes that there is something, however, horrible to learn there. Kluger implies, as Lore Segal’s wonderful introduction notes, that in fact Levi “died of his knowledge” (10). I don’t think that the student of the Holocaust should come away with a newfound appreciation of the resiliency of the human spirit because doing so simply fits the event into a preconceived narrative that allows us to forget what the Holocaust actually was. Instead, the study of the Holocaust is an opportunity to question received ideas and ask whether we’ve been listening effectively to the voices of the past in the first place.
![image: Otto Dix 'Verwundeter (Herbst 1916, Bapaume) [Wounded soldier - Autumn 1916, Bapaume]' etching, aquatint, Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, The Poynton Bequest 2003](https://cs.nga.gov.au/IMAGES/MED/128588.JPG)
(2001), rather than, say, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz. Her account refuses to shy away from what the Holocaust actually was: a time of degradation, if in its most modern form. It tore people apart and rarely brought them together. Those who survived often did despite the failures of their neighbors and family, rather than through their righteous support: