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Not a Time to Be Quiet
Netty C. Gross
Yehuda Bauer, dean of Israel�s Holocaust scholars, refuses to be stifled by retirement. His latest book takes on Shoah �superstars� and scholars alike.
Yehuda Bauer, 75, sits in his office at Yad Vashem, where he held a variety of positions over the years, and even today continues as academic advisor and board member. The pounding noise of cranes and drills and the shouting of construction workers fills the room. Several years ago, officials at Israel�s Holocaust Memorial Authority, fearing their institution was being eclipsed in scale and importance by the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., pushed for an expansion; today, the building program is going full tilt.
Is Yad Vashem�s growth a parallel to what�s happened to the Holocaust itself? Bauer nods affirmatively. The Holocaust "has become an event of tremendous importance to both Jews and non-Jews. Imagine, there are two museums in Japan dedicated to Auschwitz, one in Hiroshima and the other in Tokyo."
Like Yad Vashem, Bauer may also have suffered fears of being eclipsed. The past decade has seen an explosion of books in his field. New archives opened up; important documents such as Heinrich Himmler�s appointment book, discovered in Moscow in the late 1990s, were shedding new light on Hitler�s personal role in the murder of the Jews. Scholars, social scientists and theologians were churning out new books. Some -- Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, in particular -- were attracting money, fame, controversy. "I felt," recalls Bauer, "this was the wrong time to be quiet, that I still had something to say."
The consequence of that feeling is "Rethinking the Holocaust." The book is Bauer�s response to the last decade�s ferment of scholarly activity, which left him both excited and troubled. Contemporary writers, were, he felt, in some cases, interpreting the Shoah as an evil event of such cosmic proportions that it was impossible to understand; the implications of this were that the Nazis, newly cast as mere agents of Satan, were not to blame. In other cases, scholars were wrongly assigning blame. The "new" guilty included God, the Jews themselves, the pre-state Zionists, "modernity," all German people.
For Bauer, the enormity of the crime is best conveyed with emotionless facts, and he�s most comfortable with the dry, dispassionate writings of historians such as Raul Hilberg and fellow Yad Vashem scholar Israel Gutman. "We have to stick, as much as we can, to the facts." (It was Bauer who debunked the longheld belief that Nazis made soap out of Jewish victims� flesh, a rumor he says the Germans allowed to circulate just to torment the Jews. "Not that the Nazis weren�t capable of it," he adds, noting that they did create lampshades out of Jewish inmates� skin from Buchenwald.)
After 50 years of research in the field, Bauer offers readers what, chuckling lightly, he calls his "final words -- for now" on the Holocaust. In fact, Bauer is not joking. He wants to leave his own "rationalist" stamp on research. "I have two agendas," he says. "One, to explain why the Shoah must be understood as both a Jewish and universal tragedy. And second, to explain that it can happen again."
To Bauer, the Holocaust was, in fact, a "unique and unprecedented" event in world history because of its scope and motive -- a "racist-anti-Semitic ideology ... a cancer-like mutation," of Christian anti-Semitism. It was the first time in history that members of an ethnic group "were condemned to death just for being born."
Moreover, genocidal murder is far from a uniquely German specialty. Since 1945, there have been state-sanctioned mass murders of civilians in Rwanda, Cambodia and former Yugoslavia. "The murder [of the Jews] was committed by humans for reasons whose sources are found in history and which therefore can be rationally analyzed," he writes in the introduction to his book.
Surprisingly, Bauer�s first target is Elie Wiesel, a "good friend," whose best-selling literary interpretations, however much Bauer says he admires them, send readers a "mixed message." On the one hand, Wiesel fears the Holocaust will be forgotten and demands that the stories be told and read. On the other hand, charges Bauer, Wiesel is perhaps the "chief mystifier" of the Holocaust, presenting it as something that "can never be fully grasped or understood." The result, Bauer goes on, is that Wiesel�s readers "see the Holocaust as shrouded in irrationality and mystification and consigned to the impenetrable mist -- from which they inevitably run away."
But it�s Goldhagen who brings out the lion in Bauer. In his 1996 bestseller, "Hitler�s Willing Executioners," Goldhagen argued that the Germans had long harbored a special, murderous type of Jew-hatred, which, whipped up by Nazi furor, transformed them into actual killers. It�s a thesis Bauer describes as absurdly simplistic. (How, for example, Bauer asks, does Goldhagen explain the sensational success of Jews in prewar Germany, if, in fact, the Germans were so intent on killing them?)
But, though withering in his criticism of Goldhagen ("He�s finished. Over. Out. His book is irrelevant. Nobody even relates to it today. He�s not even a historian." [Goldhagen is a political scientist by training.]), Bauer does, grudgingly, allow that Goldhagen�s "redirection of attention to anti-Semitism," as opposed to blaming it on "modernism," for example, as a prime cause behind the Nazi war against the Jews (one of Bauer�s own pet themes), has had a "salutary effect."
Bauer�s impatience spreads to those who have argued that Jews didn�t do enough to save themselves. His chapters here on Jewish resistance are, in fact, among the most poignant. To illustrate why "it is wrong to demand that these tortured individuals and communities should have behaved like mythical heroes," Bauer sketches out what happened to the poor but valiant 600-year-old Jewish community of Brest-Litovsk, a town today situated in Belarus that was the birthplace of such Jewish luminaries as the Soloveitchik rabbinic dynasty and Menachem Begin.
In 1939, there were 30,000 Jews in the town; when the Soviets liberated it in 1944, 19 Jews emerged from hiding. Bauer dispassionately catalogs events, starting with the execution, over a three-day period in July 1941, of some 4,870 Jewish men and the ensuing ordeals of ghetto incarceration, starvation and betrayals by Christian neighbors. By the time he details the sole attempt at organized resistance by the town�s Jews, we understand why it was doomed to failure before it even started.
Theologians who have tried to grapple with the Holocaust do not escape Bauer�s attention. In the chapter entitled "Theology, or God the Surgeon," Bauer, a self-declared "flaming atheist" and longtime leader of Israel�s secular humanism movement, cannot help but shed the dry historian persona and reveal a bias. In responding to the different rabbinic attitudes toward theodicy, Bauer asks in wonderment how a God that "frees the world from his presence" and thus allows for millions to be murdered, worries about what Jews "eat for lunch." But the main focus here is on the Lubavitcher rebbe, the late Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who in his writings compared the Holocaust to a surgical operation in which God, the "specialist surgeon," had to amputate the sins of the Jews.
To Bauer, all theological attempts to understand the Holocaust are "very problematic, something of a dead-end," but Schneerson�s attempts, he says, are the most patently "absurd." Yet Bauer declares himself "sympathetic to the theological problems of the Orthodox. They are not solvable. The Orthodox cannot extricate themselves from the obvious internal contradictions." So why spotlight Schneerson�s radical view? "Are you kidding?" he asks, winking. "Because he�s the �messiah.�"
BAUER CAME TO PALESTINE from Czechoslovakia in 1939 at age 11, before the country�s invasion by Germany. His father was a Zionist who was "influenced by Jewish history, wanted to fight for the establishment of a Jewish state." His family were "peasants who were traditional in the cultural Jewish sense" but otherwise totally secular. "Even my grandmother was an atheist," says Bauer. Though his immediate family escaped, other Bauer relatives did not. His mother�s parents were murdered in Terezin and other relatives were hanged by the Nazis as Czech partisans. However, Bauer says his decision to become a Holocaust historian is unrelated to his family�s suffering. "I wanted to be a Jewish historian; in 1950, the Shoah was kind of staring me in the face." Bauer disputes the idea that until the Eichmann trial in 1961, Israelis blocked out the Holocaust. "Eichmann�s trial pushed things forward but public awareness of the Holocaust was very high here, always."
Bauer, author of 12 books (in English) and 80 scholarly papers (in both English and Hebrew) on the Holocaust, made his career at the Hebrew University, where he chaired the Institute for Contemporary Jewry from 1978 to 1995. He was also editor, from 1986 to 1995, of the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
He has also performed a number of prestigious, semi-public roles. He chaired the Israeli president�s "study circle" for 15 years, until 1995, and delivered a speech to the German Bundestag on Holocaust Memorial Day in 1998, the year he also won the Israel Prize.
And yet, despite his rarefied position in the Israeli academic world, Bauer, a friendly, accessible man, who speaks freely about most anything, frets about not having been able to find a Hebrew-language publisher, a problem he�s had with earlier books. He fears that his book is boring. "There hasn�t been any negative criticism. Not a good sign," he remarks.
These days, Bauer is throwing all his passion into a new project: writing the definitive history of the Polish shtetl Baranowice. "It is consuming my body and soul," he says, tapping on a thick file of original documents stacked on his desk. Baranowice was the home of Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman, a leading yeshivah head and violent anti-Zionist who was executed by the Nazis on July 6, 1941. "It�s an incredibly rich story," exclaims Bauer. In Baranowice, a traditional prewar shtetl struggling with modernity, Bauer finds a Jewish society grappling with issues that still resonate, he says, today. "There were at least three major yeshivahs there, with hundreds of students; rabbis losing the �street�; young people turning anti-religious and yet, there was still tremendous respect for parents and the traditions of their forefathers."
Does Bauer not think the Jews mad for living and dying for a religion built around a God, who, according to him, doesn�t exist? Bauer smiles and says, "I believe in Jews who believe in God."
(August 27, 2001)
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