The Future of the Past

Dimensions:
A Journal of Holocaust Studies

Volume 12, Number 1

The most common reason cited for teaching the Holocaust is that the event allows educators and students to explore a number of important lessons about morality and human rights. Indeed, unlike most other historical topics, the Holocaust is much, much more than a "text" for study and critical analysis. At least in the United States, classroom analysis of the subject provides a framework for clarifying ethical values, showing the profound consequences of destructive or heroic behavior, and reflecting on tyranny, moral indifference, democracy, responsibility and common decency.

Despite this powerful justification for Holocaust studies (and for museums, films, docudramas, historical fiction, et al., devoted to the event), underlying such studies are two arguable cultural assumptions. The first is that knowledge, by itself, promotes good behavior: merely knowing about the collapse of Germany’s democracy into Nazi intolerance and about the Third Reich’s brutality will, presumably, serve to inspire a devoted commitment to working for a civilized, democratic society. The second assumption is that the lessons of the Holocaust are the same for everyone. Our writers examine, and in various ways challenge, both points.

Lawrence L. Langer, author of the forthcoming book Preempting the Holocaust, takes a close look at two popular shibboleths associated with the Holocaust: the slogan "Never again!" and the American philosopher George Santayana’s admonition, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Both possess a redemptive vision based on an optimism that reason, persistence and good intentions will prevail. But if the Holocaust has taught us anything, Langer writes, it is the radical, tragic message that reason and good intentions are frequently unstable and easily eclipsed by brute power and ruthless force. Students must, in effect, "unlearn" these complacent statements by directly confronting the Holocaust’s unprecedented stark reality — and terror.

William Sheridan Allen, an expert on Nazism’s origins and ascendancy, examines the acquiescence of those responsible for encouraging or enforcing morality in the West — the clergy, legislators, jurists, journalists, cultural figures, educators — to the rise of Nazism. German schools and universities were particularly morally feeble, he asserts; they were rife with anti-Semitism and helped educate many of the top Nazi leaders. Allen believes moral principles must instill a "sense of identity with fellow human beings."

Omer Bartov, a Rutgers University historian and the author of the forthcoming Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity, believes that the Holocaust reveals the existence in Western civilization of a moral precariousness that demands constant scrutiny. Moreover, he writes, the "lessons" of the Holocaust have not always promoted better politics, more tolerance, or deeper humanitarianism. On the contrary, the study of Nazi genocide has sometimes, appallingly, led to prejudice, xenophobia, intolerance and violence.

In West Germany, historians who wrote about the Holocaust were engaged in a kind of culture war, writes Georg G. Iggers, author of The German Conception of History. Until the Sixties, postwar German historians, by and large, regarded Nazism as something alien to what they felt was their nation’s stable, conservative political heritage. Nazism was, rather, part of a tradition of democratic radicalism rooted in the French Revolution. Hence, these scholars argued that Germany needed to re-embrace political conservatism. Starting in the 1960s, a new generation of German historians reinterpreted the relationship between Nazism and German society and espoused a less conservative politics for their country than did many of their older colleagues

Father Robert F. Drinan, S.J., argues that lessons derived from the Holocaust are ultimately inadequate for preventing human-rights crimes. However, Father Drinan, a Georgetown University Law Center professor, former U.S. Congressman, and adviser to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, suggests that the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other such artifacts of international law could, eventually, deter wide-spread human-rights violations. But he feels the best chance for eliminating, or at least decreasing such mass violations is a genuine love for one’s fellow human beings, an "obedience to the unenforceable."

So where does all of this leave the educators in our schools? Are lessons derived from the Holocaust inevitably worthless, or even spurious? Should teachers eschew such lessons and simply describe "what happened" during the Holocaust era? Karen Friedman, Director of ADL’s Braun Holocaust Institute, explores these extremely complex issues in her essay.