Thinking the unthinkable: Writing the Indescribable
Refusing to surrender

Over the years, it has become fashionable to express one's seemingly profound recognition of the immensity of the extreme suffering inflicted by genocidists on their victims in terms of the impotency of language to convey the reality of experience.  Thus, in the words of Jeshayahu Weinberg, the outgoing director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum: "What happened in Auschwitz is not understandable, no matter how many books we read, to how many survivors we listen, how many Holocaust museums we visit. . .  Though we try to learn and teach about the meaning of this horrible episode in human history, for all those who have not been there it will remain an abstract concept. . ."  This in response to Simone de Beauvoir's emphatic claim that the Holocaust is indeed within our mental grasp and, therefore, an event that can be re-experienced by those who make the effort to enter into the Holocaust kingdom.

Since Weinberg chooses his words carefully, it is incumbent on the skeptics to take his comments seriously and to weigh them carefully.

In essence, adopting his stance, accepting the thesis of the observer's inability either to  "possess" or to communicate adequately the horror of the Holocaust is either justifiable intellectual capitulation or a seriously flawed conclusion.  If true, then Weinberg's statement is, at best, a truism.  No experience of another can be completely absorbed and captured in words.  Any poet will admit that.  And yet, every poet ignores this  "truth" and attempts, nevertheless, to employ words to speak about the simplest of visual experiences — a butterfly landing on a blade of grass — and the most complex of experiences — Dante's extended voyage through purgatory, hell and heaven. Therefore, if true, Weinberg's conclusion is true for all experiences and is, therefore, not true at all because it states the obvious and leaves one totally unenlightened about anything.  In other words, if words are always inadequate, then what have we learned about Holocaust experiences other than that we mortals are stuck with fallible human imagination and language and must fend as best we can, which is where we started to begin with - a circular argument that has taken us nowhere, for it rests on the obvious. 

If Weinberg's claim is false, one must begin by pointing out the glaring contradiction contained within the claim of the inadequacy of language — namely, how does Weinberg know?  If the full scope of the Holocaust experience is unknowable, how can he claim to know that?  If he is a survivor, he is like all those who have undergone a special encounter with extreme reality — the combat veterans, the tortured, the kidnapped, the raped, the mountain climbers, the shipwrecked sailors, or the ecstatic lover — all claim the untranslatability of their experiences: you have to be one of them to know, they insist.

There is at once a childlike quality to this claim (as all parents are aware of), but it is also marked by two other less flattering characteristics: it is basically an expression of a hidden and, perhaps, unintended arrogance, a sense of superiority over other less-fortunate mortals lacking the specific experience; furthermore, philosophically, it is an adoption of a dangerous variety of anti-intellectualism, a rejection of language in favor of what?  Total silence?  Then why even say what one says at all?  Or is it said in behalf of non-verbal communication?  Photographs perhaps?  But we know pictures deceive, especially Holocaust photographs, unless they are accompanied by critical and accurate captions and caveats, in words.  So there we are again resorting to words in the quest for accuracy and completion.  But if words fail, why compound the problem?  But the pictures, we say, need verbal explanations; so we use words!  But words are unsatisfactory, etc.  We are on the merry-go-round of circular argument.

But even more dangerous: the abnegation of language is the conclusion that each person is a prisoner of his/her experiences, and no amount of words can unlock that cage.  I leave it to philosophers of despair to pursue that argument to its moral and logical end.  Let it suffice to say that if the discipline of genocide studies is to progress, then its practitioners ought not to swallow this poison pill.  To admit to verbal incapacity is to open the door to the irrational as well as to the Deniers.

Instead one ought to resist this temptation — and seductive it is indeed, for it certainly makes life easier, if language can be partially jettisoned — and argue forcefully in favor of the sufficiency of the word if skillfully, courageously (honestly and accurately) and imaginatively employed.  To be sure, the breadth and depth of the Holocaust experience represents an enormous challenge.  But it is surmountable!  If that is so, it will have to be demonstrated with words, with verbal arguments, free from emotive appeals and reliance on clichés that are little better than uncorroborated over-generalized claims and non-intellectual appeals to the emotional.

What is ironic is that this disingenuous rhetorical device as used by Weinberg is often resorted to by the more eloquent and articulate.  Invariably and without exception across the spectrum of "the speechless," these pronouncements of humble awe before the majesty of a subject are followed by brilliant passages that do precisely what was declared impossible: they introduce the reader to the innermost reality of the Holocaust experience, prefatory protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.  But we are dealing with more than literary conceit. 

For if truly "we cannot understand the Auschwitz experience," how can we learn it and teach it?  Perhaps, at first, "Auschwitz is inconceivable," but only at the beginning.  Those of us who time again mentally and, therefore, emotionally have undergone deportation to Auschwitz, walked through its gates, familiarized ourselves with its details, all the way to the crematoria, we can indeed make it conceivable to ourselves and to our students.  If the genocidists could conceive it we, the observers, also can, and it is our primary task to find the proper words. 

I must, therefore, side with Simone de Beauvoir and declare Weinberg to be fundamentally mistaken.  To contradict Weinberg: For us, for all those who have not been there, Auschwitz can and will become "our experience" as de Beauvoir insightfully insisted.  She, the rationalist par excellence, the defender of the potency of language, is necessarily right.  Otherwise, we are doomed to despair.  Weinberg needs to be corrected: "Auschwitz is" not "beyond our cognitive capability."  It is high time to reject this abject advice. Reduced ad absurdum, it goes as follows:

In order to cut that Gordian's Knot one need not possess King Arthur's Excalibur.  All that is required is to start with another premise, namely:

In this fashion the Hell of Auschwitz will be demystified and returned within the boundaries of human comprehension thanks to an infinitely creative capacity, the vicarious imagination.

Henry R. Huttenbach

Auschwitz
A Holocaust Theme Park? (A Personal Chronicle)

To visit or not to visit?  The question still troubles me.  To leave undisturbed an Auschwitz of images, of impressions, constructed from countless encounters with survivors' testimonies, with photographs, with archival documents, including detailed maps, and with hundreds of scholarly articles and monographs; or to stand in that place, the Holocaust epicenter, and engage in another sort of encounter with "reality."  One inner voice urged, "Go!"; another urgently warned, "Stay away!"

On a recent professional trip to Poland, the question became imminent leading to a reluctant decision to visit Auschwitz, despite more than nagging doubts.  The following is a response to that decision.

The story begins in Warsaw.  In all hotels, tourist flyers advertise overnight tours of historic Cracow with a side trip  to Auschwitz as "an option."  These side tours last about three hours, two hours for the bus trip from and to Cracow, and one  hour for the Auschwitz visit.  This is a "blitz" tour of the "highlights" that includes a 15 minute film shown in a comfortable theater near the main entrance, a quick look into three or four barracks converted into exhibit halls, and a ten to fifteen minute visit to Auschwitz souvenir stands, before returning to the bus and lunch (or dinner) in Cracow.  The tour does not include Birkenau, the heartland of the extermination program.  I did not attach myself to these Auschwitz quickies.

On arrival in Cracow, the advertisements for Auschwitz tours go well beyond hotels: announcements are prominently posted on placards, on walls, and in windows throughout the old city.  As added incentives, there is an option that includes a tour of "Schindler's Cracow."  It is clearly big business as far as Krakow's touristic industry is concerned.

The ride to Auschwitz by bus is uneventful, except for passing through the village of Oswiecin and the railroad spur that leads from it to the camp complex; but this remains unremarked.  As one approaches Auschwitz, two impressions shatter the mood:

1. The crowded bus parking lot with at least twenty to thirty tour buses: throngs of tourists are either disgorging or boarding, causing loud confusion amid the shouts of guides holding up identifications flags to minimize stragglers who might hold up the precious timetable (since each bus is schedule to make two — a morning and an afternoon-

trip).  The mood is by no means somber, almost festive.  Children are as children want to be among children- loud and playful- and adults nervously busy with cameras, and refreshments.

2. The line of fast food and souvenir stands at the very threshold of Auschwitz: the sight, indeed the thought of food, associated with a pilgrimage to Auschwitz, needs little comment, except that it marks the beginning of a bizarre happening — Auschwitz as quasi Theme Park.

At the gate, tours of various lengths can be negotiated if one is alone.  Group tours are immediately ushered in and attached to a guide who is trained to follow a strictly timed route through the camp and its refurbished military barracks.  Much time and energy is spent dodging exiting groups as one's own group tries to enter and move through narrow corridors and catch five-second glimpses of exhibits or cells, all the while trying to hear what the guide has to say.  Some guides are sensitive, serious and well-prepared; most are routined, bored by repeating themselves, and defensive in the face of searching questions.

There are tours for Americans (mostly Jews), for Poles (non-Jews), and for half a dozen other countries and languages.  None of these tours are the same.   The English language tours are Jewish centered; the Polish one stresses Auschwitz as a place of Polish incarceration and barely mentions Jews.  The tour for Germans or German speakers is a classic contretemps of avoidance and obfuscation.

Tour groups rush from barracks to barracks, about five minutes to each, no matter the subject.  Always with an eye on the watch, guides steer their charges past barracks of importance, mentioning them cursorily en passant as if they were of little consequence in comparison to what lies ahead: visitors fall victim to the tyranny of the agenda and the clock.  And always the streams of tourists filling the "streets" of Auschwitz drowning out the ghosts of victims past.  The tense voices of guides mix with the banter of tourists (recollections of the hordes of tourists compressed into the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican).  Photographers obstruct the way, many complaining, as one hurries by, for spoiling a picture to be shown back home, a snapshot of Auschwitz, proof of "I was there."

There are bizarre experiences.  Half way through the tour, after having glanced at the frightful toilet "facilities" of the inmates and given a two-minute graphic description of the overall lack of hygiene in Auschwitz, each group makes use of a spanking-clean bathroom in a broom-clean barrack.  On emerging, one is assured one can buy snacks and drinks in a short while, as soon as the tour is over.  But there is a souvenir book store inside Auschwitz strategically located at the juncture where all group tours happen to pass.  It is no different from buying picture postcards at Pompeii.

On leaving — after the noise, the pushing, the hurrying, the throngs, the psychic abuse, the souvenirs, the fast food stalls, the half-informed guides, the sanitized barracks — after "seeing" scratched messages by prisoners, bullets-scarred walls, gallows, gas chambers, cells, latrines, etc. — what has one experiences?  Truth?  Reality? History? Shock? A moral awakening?  A renewal of faith?  Hatred?  Re-affirmation?  Of what?

The ride back to Krakow, to a hearty lunch or dinner, was filled with the initial question: to visit?  or not to?  Having done so, the question answers itself.  "Do not go!"  Not having gone, however, could have left the answer in doubt.  One has to go to know it was all unnecessary.  Auschwitz is no longer there; it resides forever in the mind.  The place I visited was not Auschwitz.  Like Pompeii, it lies buried in the heart; once excavated, it is another place, a schein-Auschwitz, a tourist sop, a photo opportunity.

As you near Auschwitz, caveat emptor!  Go, but do not go.

Henry R. Huttenbach

The Memory War: Germany and the Politics of Remembrance

How to come to terms with the Nazi past has been a German question since 1945, ironically replacing the so-called Jewish question.  For half a century, the fact of the twelve years' 1000-year-Reich has been a trip-wire in German national memory.  Some have leap-frogged over the decade, moving nimbly from 1933 to 1945 in a demonstration of mental amnesia; others have become hopelessly immersed in the quagmire of the Final Solution, unable to extricate themselves from its dreadful clutches.  Hardly helpful have been the remorseless arrivals of anniversaries: 10, 25, 40, and now 50 years.  These gatherings have, in turn, been nightmares for those staging these events: who should be invited and who not?  Even the government gets enmeshed, wittingly and unwittingly. 

Who can forget the best forgotten Bitburg imbroglio?  Yet who remembers the more recent, carefully staged June 1994 national, solemn commemoration of German resistance to Nazism?  Meters of books — repetitive of the same scant information, expanded, elaborated, exaggerated — were prominently displayed in every book store in each small town, and strategically advertised in newspapers, national and local.  Germans were literally overwhelmed by a tidal wave of books hailing the existence of a "good" Germany beneath the jackboots of the "bad" Germans.  What was in fact a pitifully thin thread of resistance, if it can be called that at all, was hyper-inflated into a non-existent massive resistance.  Many towns found a "hero" whose courage was sung by compliant local archivists, historians, journalists and eager term-paper writing high-school students.  Irony of ironies, this orgy of self-congratulation was further nourished by the earlier (March 1994) showing of Schindler's list which compelled thousand of tear-filled viewers to emerge concluding, with much relief, "that there were decent Germans after all! Why didn't they tell us?  No doubt there were many more."  But the press made no mention of that fallacious grass-roots response.  Instead, it built on it three months later with a spate of editorials and articles on the heroism of German resistance. 

And now comes 1995, a literal nightmare for the government.  May 8 looms large.  Should the united nation of eighty million (sixty million born after 1933) wallow in guilt?  Should it assume the mantle of responsibility, not for the deeds of their ancestors but for the duty of perpetual remembrance?  Or should it celebrate the beginning of a democratic era?  President Roman Herzog on January 27 advocated nourishing a tradition of national responsibility, free from guilt.  Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the architect of Bitburg, however, has been far more "pragmatic."  Since Bitburg, he has preferred a steady path of "reconciliation" by putting the past "behind us."  Towards that end Kohl has enthusiastically promoted a grand museum of German history, a kind of mausoleum for an "official" version of Germany's past, including the "awkward" years, 1933-1945. 

We can already see some of the outlines of the Christian Democratic Union's version.  In a recent bitter debate over whom to include in the official ranks of the anti-Nazi resisters, Kohl and his party strongly opposed mention of the communists, even though they were the first arrested, incarcerated, tortured and killed by the Nazis in Dachau in 1933 and were the backbone of the concentration camp underground resistance, such as  in Buchenwald at its closing in 1945.  The recent massive and defiant turn-out in east Berlin in memory of the January 16, 1919, assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht has to be seen in this context as a potentially wrenching national struggle for the German past breaks out. 

The debate and its outcome bear watching by students and teachers of the Holocaust.  It is an unfolding drama, as decades-old taboos and fears triumph or are overcome.  The memory war will engage politicians (of course), the press (inevitably), academicians (unavoidably), and all fringes of society from charlatans to cynics.  Germany and the Germans are far from free of "that" past.  No more than Wagner can be officially played in Israel, can an edition of Mein Kampf be published — no matter how scholarly its format — in a very nervous Germany, where the book has been banned for fifty years.  Similarly, an exhibition of photos of Hitler had to be cancelled in Berlin after vocal protests from the capital's Jewish community . 

The memory war will last a long, long time.  The shadow of Auschwitz is much longer than fifty short years, extending far into the twenty-first century.  This generation of Germans is but another condemned to live in the half-darkness caused by the Final Solution, a state crime done in their name, even though they were not yet born and uninvolved personally.  Nevertheless, they must suffer for a crime whose evil will not leave their midst by the sheer passage of time.  Instead it continues to stalk them.  Even the day , that heady day the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, was marred: it fell on November 9, none other than the 51st anniversary of Kristall Nacht!  The calendar is just too full of hidden trip-wires to permit the memory war to come to a quiet end.

Henry R. Huttenbach