The Problem of Evil

By Tony Judt
New York Review of Books, February 14, 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

In 1945, Hannah Arendt wrote that "the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe — as death became the fundamental problem after the last war."

After World War II, the worship of violence largely disappeared from European life. During this war violence was directed not just against soldiers but above all against civilians. And the utter exhaustion of all European nations left few illusions about the glory of fighting or the honor of death. What did remain was a widespread familiarity with brutality and crime on an unprecedented scale.

In the aftermath of Hitler's defeat and the Nuremberg trials lawyers and legislators devoted much attention to the issue of "crimes against humanity" and the definition of genocide. But while the courts were defining the monstrous crimes that had just been committed in Europe, Europeans themselves were doing their best to forget them.

Far from reflecting upon the problem of evil in the years that followed the end of World War II, most Europeans turned their heads resolutely away from it. The Shoah was for many years by no means the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.

In Eastern Europe there were four reasons. In the first place, the worst wartime crimes against the Jews were committed there. There was a powerful incentive in many places to forget what had happened, to draw a veil over the worst horrors. Secondly, many non-Jewish East Europeans were themselves victims of atrocities and when they remembered the war they thought of their own suffering and losses.

Thirdly, most of Central and Eastern Europe came under Soviet control by 1948. The official Soviet account of World War II was of an anti-fascist war. The millions of dead Jews from the Soviet territories were counted in Soviet losses but their Jewishness was played down or even ignored. And finally, after a few years of Communist rule, the memory of German occupation was replaced by that of Soviet oppression.

In Western Europe there was a parallel forgetting. The wartime occupation was a humiliating experience and postwar governments preferred to emphasize the heroic resistance movements, national uprisings, liberations, and martyrs. In postwar West Germany, the initial national mood was one of self-pity at Germans' own suffering. And with the onset of the cold war and a change of enemies, it became inopportune to emphasize the past crimes of present allies.

I can confirm the lack of interest in the Shoah in those years from my own experience, growing up in England. And even though I am Jewish and members of my own family had been killed in the death camps, I did not think it strange back then that the subject passed unmentioned.

Everything started to change after the 1960s. By the 1980s the story of the destruction of the Jews of Europe was becoming increasingly familiar. Since the 1990s and the end of the division of Europe, official apologies, national commemoration sites, memorials, and museums have become commonplace.

Today, the Shoah is a universal reference. The history of the Final Solution, or Nazism, or World War II is a required course in high school curriculums everywhere. Hannah Arendt's prophecy would seem to have come true: the history of the problem of evil has become a fundamental theme of European intellectual life.

Let me suggest five difficulties that arise from our contemporary preoccupation with what every schoolchild now calls "the Holocaust." The first difficulty concerns the dilemma of incompatible memories. Western European attention to the memory of the Final Solution is now universal. But the "eastern" nations that have joined "Europe" since 1989 retain a very different memory of World War II. Greater attention has been paid to the ordeal of Europe's eastern half at the hands of Germans and Soviets alike.

A second difficulty concerns historical accuracy and the risks of overcompensation. For the first decades after 1945 the gas chambers were confined to the margin of our understanding of Hitler's war. For today's students, World War II is about the Holocaust. In moral terms that is as it should be. But for historians this is misleading. There were only two groups for whom World War II was above all a project to destroy the Jews: the Nazis and the Jews themselves. For practically everyone else the war had quite different meanings.

My third problem concerns the concept of "evil" itself. Modern secular society has long been uncomfortable with the idea of "evil." We prefer more rationalistic and legal definitions of good and bad, right and wrong, crime and punishment. But in recent years the word has crept slowly back into moral and even political discourse.

In recent years politicians, historians, and journalists have used the term "evil" to describe mass murder and genocidal outcomes everywhere. Hitler himself is frequently conjured up to denote the "evil" nature and intentions of modern dictators.

We are losing the capacity to distinguish between the normal sins and follies of mankind and genuine evil. We have lost sight of what it was about twentieth-century political religions of the extreme left and extreme right that was so seductive, so commonplace, so modern, and thus so truly diabolical.

My fourth concern bears on the risk we run when we invest all our emotional and moral energies into just one problem. Anti-Semitism, like terrorism, is an old problem. And even a minor outbreak reminds us of the consequences in the past of not taking it seriously enough. But anti-Semitism, like terrorism, is not the only evil in the world.

My final worry concerns the relationship between the memory of the European Holocaust and the state of Israel. Ever since its birth in 1948, the state of Israel has negotiated a complex relationship to the Shoah. On the one hand the near extermination of Europe's Jews summarized the case for Zionism. Jews could not survive and flourish in non-Jewish lands and they must have a state of their own. On the other hand, Israel's initial identity was built upon treating the Jewish catastrophe as evidence of a weakness that it was Israel's destiny to overcome.

But in recent years the relationship between Israel and the Holocaust has changed. Today, when Israel is exposed to international criticism for its mistreatment of Palestinians and its occupation of territory conquered in 1967, its defenders prefer to emphasize the memory of the Holocaust.

By emphasizing the historical uniqueness of the Holocaust while at the same time invoking it constantly with reference to contemporary affairs, we have confused young people. And by shouting "anti-Semitism" every time someone attacks Israel or defends the Palestinians, we are breeding cynics.

We have attached the memory of the Holocaust so firmly to the defense of Israel that we are in danger of provincializing its moral significance. Yes, the problem of evil in the last century took the form of a German attempt to exterminate Jews. But it is not just about Germans and it is not just about Jews. The problem of evil is a universal problem.

In short, the Holocaust may lose its universal resonance. We need to find a way to preserve the core lesson that the Shoah really can teach: the ease with which a whole people can be defamed, dehumanized, and destroyed. But we shall get nowhere unless we recognize that this lesson could indeed be questioned, or forgotten.

There is no easy answer to this problem. The last time I visited Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, bored schoolchildren on an obligatory outing were playing hide-and-seek among the stones.

Meanwhile, we should all of us perhaps take care when we speak of the problem of evil. For there is more than one sort of banality. There is the notorious banality of which Arendt spoke — the everyday evil in humans. But there is also the banality of overuse — the numbing effect of seeing or saying or thinking the same thing too many times.

How can we ensure that the problem of evil remains the fundamental question for intellectual life? It is the question Hannah Arendt asked sixty years ago and I believe she would still ask it today.
 

Germany Confronts Holocaust Legacy Anew

By Nicolas Kulish
New York Times, January 29, 2008

Most countries celebrate the best in their pasts. Germany unrelentingly promotes its worst.

The enormous Holocaust memorial that dominates a chunk of central Berlin was completed only after years of debate. But the building of monuments to the Nazi disgrace continues unabated.

On Monday, Germany’s minister of culture, Bernd Neumann, announced that construction could begin in Berlin on two monuments: one near the Reichstag, to the murdered Gypsies, known here as the Sinti and the Roma; and another not far from the Brandenburg Gate, to gays and lesbians killed in the Holocaust.

In November Germany broke ground on the long-delayed Topography of Terror center at the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters. And in October, a huge new exhibition opened at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. At the Dachau camp, outside Munich, a new visitor center is set to open this summer. The city of Erfurt is planning a museum dedicated to the crematoriums. There are currently two exhibitions about the role of the German railways in delivering millions to their deaths.

Wednesday is the 75th anniversary of the day Hitler and the Nazi Party took power in Germany, and the occasion has prompted a new round of soul-searching.

“Where in the world has one ever seen a nation that erects memorials to immortalize its own shame?” asked Avi Primor, the former Israeli ambassador to Germany, at an event in Erfurt on Friday commemorating the Holocaust and the liberation of Auschwitz. “Only the Germans had the bravery and the humility.”