The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian

by Raul Hilberg

This is the poignant memoir of a man who has spent most of his lifetime immersed in the evidence of one of the great horrors in human history. It is both a record of how it affected him and a revelation of the surprising ways in which his monumental work was received by his contemporaries. Even after thirty-five years, Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews remains the most distinguished and comprehensive analysis of the Nazi destruction process. Yet at the time it was written, as Mr. Hilberg recounts in The Politics of Memory , both the manuscript and its subject matter were rejected by major publishers and university presses; and in the wake of publication the author faced a hostile reception from those who refused to believe that the Jews were less than heroic in their journey to the gas chambers. How his study was used and abused―especially by Hannah Arendt, Lucy Dawidowicz, and Nora Levin―draws Mr. Hilberg's attention, as does the more admiring reception for Destruction in Europe than in America. The Politics of Memory brings full circle a scholarly enterprise that in many ways has been a terrible calling.

Genres: Holocaust, Nonfiction, History, Biography, Germany, Memoir, Israel

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Raul Hilberg was an Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the world's preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as a seminal study of the Nazi Final Solution.

Reviews

[Aleix · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raul Hilberg must have been a bit of a strange man, a very idiosyncratic individual. What made him remarkable, especially considering his circumstances, was his stubborness in the face of fearsome opposition.

He is now, I would think, the foremost scholar of the nazi genocide, a giant of the 20th century, yet reading this book you're left with the feeling that he never got to enjoy that position during his life. Like all trailblazers, his success came after him. He was a man of honesty, independently minded. He wanted to know about the world, about himself and his people, for good and bad, and he paid the price for it. Early Cold War politics made his topic of choice an uncomfortable issue, to be avoided. Even later, when the West was more prepared to talk about the Holocaust, it was all too willing to listen to imbeciles like Lucy Dawidowicz, who provided easy consolation at the expense of facts, rather than serious historians like Hilberg, who came up with the inevitably complex picture and a number of uncomfortable truths. He simply wasn't content with the stories and recollections of survivors as officialdom would want him to be. He took those and went beyond them, far beyond, always uphill. He faced formidable difficulties when it came to publishing his magnum opus for the first time, when it came to finding finance for research, when it came to researching for subsequent editions and projects, when it came to publishing said reeditions. He overcame them all, and he seemed to have taken pride in his accomplishments, but he was never completely satisfied. Indeed, he became a totem in his field, but he spent most of his career, you might say, "stuck" in a relatively minor post in Vermont.

Institutions like the Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Memorial strike the reader as heavily politicized. The Palestinian Yishuv despised the "exilic" spirit of the genocide survivors (and of the victims as well, of course) but the state of Israel later found in their canonisation a very useful political tool, so Hilberg's "The Destruction of the European Jews" was an elephant in the room for the ruling elites, both in Israel and in the Jewish circles of the U.S.

The book also provides insight into the role of the historian in our societies, as opposed to so-called philosophers like Hannah Arendt. The way I see it right now, it would be incorrect to take Hilberg and Arendt as an example of the relationship between philosophy and "the rest" of the sciences. Hilberg was a phenomenal historian in the mould of Thucydides - meticulous, accurate, honest, sober, never moralising - whereas Arendt comes across as a self-contented, lazy blatherer. I still have her "Origins of Totalitarianism" pending to read, but I have read her "Eichmann in Jerusalem" and I have seen what she did to Hilberg's work and legacy. I think her intelligence was more nimble than Hilberg's, but the way she despised him in her private correspondence as a mere collector of facts and as "stupid" and "crazy" because of an alleged "death wish" he was supposed to ascribe to the Jews (he never did such a thing) really makes one suspect she felt entitled by her position as a "philosopher", even if that position was cemented precisely thanks to Hilberg's findings. You might think that's the role of philosophy, to lean on the other sciences to move forward, like the brain relies on, say, the hands. However, for all her gushing about, I still have to see her reach very different conclusions from Hilberg's, or much deeper. She was just a more boisterous writer. Norman Finkelstein, while very supportive of Hilberg, said that it was a tad unfair of him to call her "unoriginal". When I get to read the "Origins of Totalitarianism" I guess I'll be able to tell. So far, what I can say is Hilberg got a rougher treatment even though he was the one who did the charting. Arendt took advantage of his work (that she herself undermined before it was finally published!), gave him next to no credit, didn't take a particularly innovative stance and went on to become an icon.

Nevertheless, just as hacks like Dawidowicz are back to being nonentities, I expect Hilberg to occupy his rightful place in the history of humanity. He made a supreme effort to unearth and understand, he dared to face the truth, he refused to cave in to transient political interests and he gave us everything we need to interpret one of the biggest disasters to ever befall Europe, against the will of those that want to sacralize it and put it out of history and understanding for political and economic profit.

This book also explains why he would support unpopular contenders like Norman Finkelstein. They're in the same line of thought. Hilberg had to fight during all his career the same nasty types that Finkelstein denounced. Finkelstein was run down by those types, but of course they couldn't lift a finger against a colossus like Hilberg (can you imagine the ADL calling him an antisemite or a self-hating Jew?). Still, they've managed to silence his quite open endorsement of Finkelstein's indictment of what he called the Holocaust Industry. Hilberg's generous support in that case gives an enormous amount of authority to the accusations and speaks volumes about his character.

[Eric_W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilberg is the author of the famous work on the Holocaust: The Destruction of the European Jews His book recognized the vast coordinated enterprise that was needed to accomplish the Final Solution. Tens of thousands of bureaucrats were essential parts to this great machine, and if any of these parts had failed “to do their duty”, the machinery would have ground to a halt.

Hilberg and his family fled Austria in 1939 following Hitler’s annexation of that country. They traveled to the United States via Cuba, and Raul remembers traveling by bus to New York and seeing all the “For Whites Only” benches in the south that reminded him of the “For Aryans Only” signs in Germany and Austria. He served in the army during World War II, and after the war returned to college where he decided to specialize in political science. It was there that he read Franz Neumann’s Behemoth The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944 who’s theme was that Nazi Germany had no political theory; it sought no converts. The result was four independent groups: the civil service, the army, industry, and the party. They interacted with each other through “social contracts”. The result was an anarchical, organized chaos with “complete freedom to march into uncharted areas of action”.

There was, Hilberg observed, a logical progression that evolved into an effective machinery of death: definition, concentration, and annihilation. Outbursts of uncontrolled violence like :Crystal Night” could never be effective. But by defining first what a Jew was, they could then be concentrated, segregated, isolated physically and economically, and then eliminated. Hilberg’s original book explored the role Jews played in their own destruction. Without their active assistance he argued the Holocaust could never have occurred. The Germans relied on “the Jews to follow directives”. This books is about the academic storm that followed the publication of his work.

Hilberg had managed to get a job working at the War Documents Center on Long Island. The Allies had collected every scrap of German paper -- and the Germans were nothing if not efficient document processors -- and stored and organized these papers into 28,000 linear feet of files. Hilberg realized he had a treasure trove of historical evidence, records of actions, what people had done. These could reveal German processes and he realized after reading thousands of the documents how the German decision-making process had changed under Hitler: laws gave way to decrees, decrees to announcements, to written orders, oral orders and then to no orders at all. “The functionary who sensed the purpose of the operation had come into his own.”
Hilberg makes some interesting observations. He notes that there was little interest in the Holocaust in the United States until the late sixties, and not until the late eighties in Germany. He suspects that the Vietnam War was the catalyst in the United States “when a new generation of Americans was searching for moral certainties and ... The Holocaust became a marker of an absolute evil against which all other transgressions in the conduct of nations could be measured and assessed.”

Following years of negotiation and searching for a publisher -- most university presses at this time insisted on subsidies so as not to lose money in what they considered to be a limited market -- his book was published in 1961. His thesis that the Holocaust was a German national act because of the bureaucratic nature of its enforcement machinery, was not particularly controversial, at least among reviewers, but his observation that Jewish institutions were a part of the German community and bureaucracy and that Germans relied on their cooperation was not welcomed by Jewish readers.

[Noel Cisneros · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilberg nos cuenta su vida y las tribulaciones de su vida académica, por una parte muestra cómo, nacido en Viena, descendía de los judíos del centro de Europa (su padre luchó con los austriacos en la Primera Guerra Mundial) y tuvo muchos parientes que murieron bajo el nazismo (él y su familia se salvaron por poco) para después, llegado a Eua ingresar al ejército y volver a Europa a luchar contra los alemanes. A su regreso comienza su vida académica, la investigación que terminó siendo su obra cumbre y las peripecias para publicarla y el tibio recibimiento que tuvo, cómo fue siendo acogida poco a poco en Europa (cómo fue fagocitada por investigadores e incluso por personajes como Hannah Arendt).

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE PREEMINENT HOLOCAUST HISTORIAN PROVIDES A ‘PERSONAL STORY’

Historian Raul Hilberg wrote in the Preface to this 1996 book, “Much of my life has been devoted to the study of a subject that in fundamental ways is different from any other: the destruction of the European Jews. Often enough, acquaintances as well as strangers have wanted to know why I undertook such an exploration and what sort of reactions I encountered in the course of my work. In this account of my experiences I have consolidated and elaborated my answers to these questions. The result is a personal story but one which touches upon a range of phenomena that are part and parcel of the politics of memory in America, Israel and Europe from the late 1940s to the early 1990s.”

After military service, he enrolled in graduate school: “I was able to enroll in classes of two highly knowledgeable men. One was Salo Baron, who had set himself the task of writing about the entire sweep of Jewish history, in twenty volumes if need be… I came away from Baron’s course with a impression of Jewish apartness, of a long-lived community that had to cope with the new expectations of governments and that had become vulnerable as it emerged from the ghetto. Already I was thinking of Jewish defenselessness under the Nazi regime… I had already decided to write about the German perpetrators. The destruction of the Jews was a German deed… I was convinced … that without an insight into the actions of the perpetrators, one could not grasp this history in its full dimensions. The perpetrator had the overview. He alone was the key. It was through his eyes that I had to view the happening, from its genesis to its culmination. That the perpetrator’s perspective was the primary path to be followed became a doctrine for me, which I never abandoned.” (Pg. 60-62)

He recalls, “an order signed by Göring, the Number Two Nazi, to Reinhardt Heydrich… on July 31, 1941… [It] charges Heydrich with organizing the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe. I took this order to mean that Hitler himself had decided that day to annihilate the Jews… My reasoning was not altogether wrong… But THIS piece of paper was not one of [Hitler’s] orders.. My misunderstanding was already in print … when Uwe Adam … demolish[ed] the Göring letter thesis. If a written order had been issued, he reasoned, it would have been handed by Hitler to Himmler, not by Hitler’s subordinate Göring to Himmler’s subordinate Heydrich.” (Pg. 78-79)

In 1958 he sent his manuscript to Yad Vashem for review, but was told “‘while the manuscript possessed numerous merits, it also had certain deficiencies… Your book … does not utilize primary sources in … Yiddish or Hebrew… Jewish historians … make reservations concerning the historical conclusions which you draw… expert critics who know the history … might express hostile criticism of the book.’ … Here was the first negative reaction to my manuscript, and these bullets were fired at me from Jerusalem. For ten years I had imagined that the Jews, and particularly the Jews, would be readers of my work. I was for them I labored. And now this.” (Pg. 110-111)

He recounts, “I had included the behavior of the Jewish community in my description because I saw Jewish institutions as an extension of the German bureaucratic machine. I was driven by force of logic to take account of the considerable reliance placed by the Germans on Jewish cooperation. I had to examine the Jewish tradition of trusting God, princes, laws, and contracts. Ultimately, I had to ponder the Jewish calculation that the persecutor would not destroy what he could economically exploit. It was precisely this Jewish strategy that dictated accommodation and precluded resistance.” (Pg.. 126-127)

He observes, “It has taken me some time to absorb what I should always have known, that in my whole approach to the study of the destruction of the Jews I was pitting myself against the main current of Jewish thought, that I did not give in, that in my research and writing I was pursuing not merely another direction but one which was the exact opposite of a signal that pulsated endlessly through the Jewish community…. To begin with, there is an insistence that the major effort of Jewish learning and remembrance must be focused on the Jews, THEIR circumstances and THEIR experiences. Placing the victim rather than the perpetrator at the center of attention is the cornerstone of virtually all … encyclopedias, institutes, or museums.. which have been created in the United States and Israel.” (Pg. 129)

He continues, “I shall not dwell upon the fact that the proponents of Jewish sources have paid relatively little attention to the contemporaneous correspondence of the Jewish councils… My critics are primarily interested not in those records but in the testimony of survivors… There is, however, a sharp built-in limitation in this undertaking… The survivors are not a random sample of the extinct communities, particularly if one looks for typical Jewish reactions and adjustments to the process of destruction.” (Pg. 132-133)

He reports, “When relatively isolated or episodic acts of resistance are represented as typical, a basic characteristic of the German measures is obscured. The destruction of the Jews can no longer be visualized as a process. Instead the drastic actuality of a relentless killing of men, women, and children is mentally transformed into a more familiar picture of a struggle---however unequal---between combatants… When I was testifying in a Toronto case [of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel] against a purveyor of literature asserting that a holocaust has not occurred in the first place, I heard echoes of Stroop’s report in questions posed by the defendant’s attorney. The Germans, he estimated, had acted as the responsible authority in an occupied city when they put down the Warsaw rebellion.” (Pg. 135-136) Later, he comments, “Lucy Dawidowicz, I am sure, was careful not to enter courtrooms. She was content to leave testimony in war crimes cases, including answers in cross-examinations, to people like me.” (Pg. 145)

He says of Hannah Arendt’s ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,’ “She did not recognize the magnitude of what this man had done with a small staff, overseeing and manipulating Jewish councils … She did not discern the pathways that Eichmann found in the thicket of the German administrative machine for his unprecedented actions. She did not grasp the dimensions of his deed. There was no ‘banality’ in this ‘evil.’ (Pg. 149-150)

He continues, “When Hannah Arendt wrote her postscript to the second edition of her Eichmann book, she had grown bitter… On March 24, 1964, [Karl Jaspers] asked her whether I had defended her. She wrote back… ‘I have heard nothing about Hilberg taking my side. He is pretty stupid and crazy. He babbles now about a “death wish” of the Jews.’… The American translation [of this correspondence] … did not contain the sentence with the words ‘stupid and crazy'. Curious, I inquired about this omission and was told that the statement was struck on legal advice.” (Pg. 154-155)

He adds, “She went back to Germany at every opportunity after the war, resuming contacts and relationships. With Heidegger, who had been her lover in her student days and who was a Nazi in Hitler’s time, she became friendly again, rehabilitating him. But in dismissing my ideas she also made a bid for self-respect. Who was I, after all? She, the thinker, and I, the laborer who wrote only a single report, albeit one which was indispensable once she had exploited it: that was the natural order of her universe.” (Pg. 157)

Of his masterwork, he comments, “I had chosen a medium that was different from the traditional writing of political scientists. My focus was no longer the closed realm of the political decision-making apparatus. I was now posing a question that was at once smaller and larger than my previous quest… because I wanted to encompass everyone who stood on stage during the Hitler catastrophe. I did not intend to omit any man or woman solely for his or her political insignificance. Adolf Hitler rated a chapter by himself.… [but] now and then the smallest individual was given equal space.” (Pg. 190)

This book will interest those wanting to know more about Hilberg’s works, and his writing process.

[Schopfi · Rating 3 out of 5]

the transformation of history into a text, that is remembered in it's stead, as necessary as it is paltry and pathetic, the struggles within academia; the shape of public discourse at a specific time and place that define the size of a books (texts) impact, are some of the topics of this professional autobiography. hilberg was a pioneer, stepping into a field burdened to an extreme degree with cultural and societal tension, who attempted to remain objective, whatever that means.

[Leif Barron]

Still reading this text at the moment, but thus far it is a somewhat elegiac semi-autobiography from the greatest Holocaust scholar ever. Hilberg is precise and deliberate with his text, which although occasionally dry, provides for clarity and insight into one of the most important and vital scholarly careers of the 20th century.

[Brandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book from Hilberg. All of the major Holocaust scholars seem to really dislike eachother. All of the animosity just takes away from their arguments, in my opinion.

[Elzira Rai · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is tragically ridiculous that a scholar who is now widely regarded as the foremost authority on the Holocaust felt the need to write a memoir bitterly demanding credit for his work and quoting praise from his peers and critics alike. Yet Hilberg's account of the Shoah establishment’s backlash against his theses offers many insights into the evolution of Holocaust discourse, the tensions that surround it, and the ideological foundations of Israel's apartheid regime and ethnic cleansing program. It is difficult to believe that Hilberg failed to hear echoes of Nazi policies toward Jews in Zionist theory and practice, raising unsettling questions about the foundations of his unwavering support for Israel and the extent to which his indictment of European Jewry’s passivity in the face of genocide (now deeply embedded in both Israeli and diasporic narratives) has contributed to justifying the genocide of Palestinians.

[Mrs. Hassig · Rating 5 out of 5]

I work 1 night every week in the local Holocaust library. As a teacher and member of the Holocaust teaching cadre I'm fully aware of the tragic books that surround me - very few are uplifting but all are profound. I am a huge admirer of Raul Hilberg and used his book "Perpetrators, Victims and Bystanders" in a lesson with my 8th grade students several years ago. His take on the Holocaust and the Jews gave him a lot of grief in his career. Sometimes it is the hardest thing in the world to tell the truth but it's also the most important thing in the world when you do. Raul always told the truth and used documentation to verify and justify his thoughts. He was a master historian and researcher. I loved the quote by H.G. Adler at the beginning of the book and am using the first half of it for my own book about the American POWs held in the Philippines by the Japanese in World War II.

[KATIA Patrón · Rating 3 out of 5]

Una crónica de los estudios de un historiador que investiga la no resistencia de los judíos en el holocausto, las dificultades a las que se enfrenta en su investigación y sus teorías mientras rememora su vida.

[Mikel Mancisidor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Por el poco recomendable (para los autores) medio de un obituario en prensa me enteré de la exitencia (paradójico) de Raul Hilberg y de su obra. Me enteré de que es el historiador primero, de referencia y más minucioso del Holocasuto judio, me enteré de su vida y de su obra, de sus polémicas y de sus posiciones que no terminan de agradar ni a unos (los que prentender rebajar la excepcionalidad de la dimensión del horror) como otros (los que quieren utilizarlo para edificar otros fines).

Tiene obras muy sesudas y para un aficionado como yo tal vez una tanto excesivas por prolijas, pero me hice con su “The Politics of Memory” que viene a ser algo así como una biografía cruzada con el origen y la justificación de sus posiciones ante el holocausto, sus causas, la actuación del pueblo alemán, la actuación de las comunidades judias y sus líderes, la de los funcionarios de la muerte, etc. Así que, sin conocer en profundidad toda su obra, me atrevo a afirmar que puede ser una buena introducción, un buen resumen de su obra, de su investigación de toda una vida… y lo que es más importante para conocer posiciones sólidas y argumentadas sobre algunas claves fundamentales del mayor crimen del siglo XX en Europa, de cómo fue posible, de cómo reaccionaron y reaccionamos ante ellos. No pocas enseñanzas prácticas podemos sacar aún hoy de esta lectura. Un libro muy bueno. Por desgracia me parece que no está editado en castellano.

[Kristy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This story depicts the struggle Hilberg had with publishing his popular work, "Destruction of the European Jews." Having never read the previous work, maybe it would have helped. Still, many people claim his problem was that he was too early since the Holocaust was still too fresh in everyone's mind at the time

[Christine]

I already read parts of this -- but considering his recent death, I feel the need to revisit it. It's the end of an era, and I need to have some kind of personal tribute.

[Aldean · Rating 3 out of 5]

An very readable account of a life spent in heroic research of the great crime of the twentieth century, by the author of one the first great comprehensive accounts of the Holocaust.

[Rayne Holm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Should be called "great stories happen to those who know how to tell them." Hilberg is overdramatic and does a fair amount of mud-slinging, but does note several important issues.

[Stip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ieder moment vermakelijk door de voortdurende tegenslagen.