I remember vividly the
heated argument that German historians and philosophers were having in the late
1980s, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Bonn, over the question
whether the Holocaust committed by the Nazis was a “unique” event or rather comparable
to other mass murders committed by other regimes throughout the 20th
century. The so-called Historikerstreit
was started off by the conservative historian Ernst Nolte, who tried to explain
the Holocaust as a defensive reaction to the forced labour camps of Soviet
Russia. In response, the liberal philosopher Jürgen Habermas accused Nolte of
downplaying the enormity of the event and trying to shift blame away from the
Germans and onto the Russians - as if the Germans had been driven to it, and in fact had no choice or at least excellent
reasons for acting the way they did. Habermas insisted, as did many others, that
the Holocaust was “unique”, could not be compared with any other crime, and
could, and should, never be “understood”. I, for my part, didn’t think that Nolte
intended to justify what the Nazis
did, and I couldn’t quite see why any attempt to understand what happened
should be in itself morally wrong and blameworthy. Clearly an explanation is
not necessarily a justification. It seemed to me that to insist on the Holocaust’s
radical uniqueness and the impossibility to understand it was not only silly,
but in fact highly dangerous: if something is “unique”, we don’t have to fear
that it might happen again. The unique only happens once. If something cannot
be understood, then we don’t have to bother trying to prevent it from happening
again, because even if it could happen again its very inexplicability would make
it impossible for us to do anything about it. If we cannot determine its
causes, then we cannot fight them. Therefore, I thought, we had a moral duty to
understand what had happened and why it had happened.
Now, I’m not so sure
anymore, and the reason is that I have just read Primo Levi’s account of his
time in Auschwitz (If this Is a Man,
1947), and of his long journey home to his native Turin after the war had ended
(The Truce, 1963). In an afterword to
the Everyman edition of these two books, Levi gives answers to his readers’
questions. Asked about how the Nazis’ fanatical hatred of the Jews could be
explained, he emphasises the importance of not
explaining and not trying to
understand that hatred:
“Perhaps one cannot,
what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is
almost to justify. Let me explain: ‘understanding’ a proposal or human
behaviour means to ‘contain’ it, contain its author, put oneself in his place,
identify with him. Now, no normal human being will ever be able to identify
with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and endless others. This dismays us,
and at the same time gives us a sense of relief, because perhaps it is
desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) cannot be
comprehensible to us. They are non-human words and deeds, really counter-human,
without historic precedents, with difficulty comparable to the cruellest events
of the biological struggle for existence. The war can be related to this
struggle, but Auschwitz has nothing to do with war; it is neither an episode in
it nor an extreme form of it. War is always a terrible fact, to be deprecated,
but it is in us, it has its rationality we ‘understand’ it. But there is no
rationality in the Nazi hatred: it is a hate that is not in us; it is outside
man, it is a poison fruit sprung from the deadly trunk of Fascism, but it is
outside and beyond Fascism itself. We cannot understand it, but we can and must
understand from where it springs, and we must be on our guard. If understanding
is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again.
Conscience can be seduced and obscured again – even our consciences. For this
reason, it is everyone’s duty to reflect on what happened.”
Levi contrasts
understanding with knowing. The latter is a duty, which includes knowing the
causes of what happened to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. But
understanding is more intimate, it bridges the reflective distance between the
subject and the object of understanding. By “understanding” the Holocaust we
would acknowledge it as a real human possibility, as something that is
understandable for humans to do. But it is important to reject this possibility,
to preserve an image of the human that positively excludes it. Humans ought
never to be able to do such things. Whoever shows himself capable of it (and
this may very well include us) has given up their humanity, and they have given
it up precisely because they have ceased to see and treat the other as human. We
become (or stay) human by treating other humans as humans.
How did he survive
Auschwitz, Levi is asked, and he replies: lots of luck, a desire to bear
witness to the events, and finally “the determination, which I stubbornly
preserved, to recognize always, even in the darkest days, in my companions and
in myself, men, not things, and thus to avoid that total humiliation and
demoralization which led so many to spiritual shipwreck.”
