We hear a lot about the "implosion of meaning" nowadays-the idea that, in a post-modernist world, the proliferation of information, rather than leading to greater understanding, leads to more confusion. One cannot create a narrative that could encompass everything in today's society-the senseless violence, the progress, the miracles, the atrocities.
There is perhaps no clearer example of this idea applied to recent history than that of the Holocaust. No matter how much research is done, no one will ever make sense of how such a thing could ever happen in a modern Western society.
In her book "Reading the Holocaust", Australian anthropologist Inga Clendinnen attempts to find some wisdom. She is in no way attempting to comprehend everything; rather she seeks to "arrive at a clearer understanding of at least some of those persons and processes (of the Holocaust) to be confident that the whole is potentially understandable." She wants to extract the recognizably human from an event that is undeniably beyond the sphere of human understanding.
Although she is an academic, she makes it clear from the start that she is not writing as one. Except for the presence of footnotes, her elegant, emotional style clearly expresses that she is writing as a reader and not as a scholar. She researched by reading textbooks and literature, fiction as well as nonfiction.
One of the first questions Clendinnen attempts to answer is why outsiders such as herself are without fail so fascinated by the events of the Holocaust, or why, more specifically, the Holocaust "remains a peculiarly Jewish tragedy." Why is there, it seems, more outsider interest in the Jews killed in the Holocaust, rather than the Gypsies? Why do so many of us feel more poignantly the pain of the Holocaust than of the millions killed in African tribal wars or in Communist China or Russia?
For Clendinnen, the answer goes beyond the scale of the event, in terms of either numbers of deaths or the monstrosity of horrors inflicted. According to Clendinnen, the reason that our sense of loss is so strong is that it is intimate-the Jews as well as their murderers are terribly human. Also, it may be easier for most of her American, Australian and European readers to identify with these people because of race. In this way, she is no longer an "outsider writing for outsiders" but a white person writing for white people.
Because this book is such a personal account, the author's identity comes through. Sometimes her opinions provoke interesting questions. In her chapter "Leaders" she attempts to get behind the actions and ideas of those leaders of the Nazi Regime.
Clendinnen believes so-called "extra-human capitalizations," meaning Evil, cannot be used to explain human action. She attributes the actions of the leaders, the SS and the "ordinary men" to the eternally reinforced anti-Semitic culture of that society.
Although she attempts not to, she seems to cushion the decisions of these men by saying that the Nazis did not think what they were doing was evil. But if we live in a moral void where evil is culturally or personally subjective, why bother writing the book? What is the point of digging deeper if humans randomly do horrible things to each other as a result of the firing of neurons and group beliefs?
Herein lies Clenndinnen's troublesome contradiction. Her mission, as stated in the beginning, is to "look the Gorgon in the eye." We must remember in order to prevent anything like this from ever happening again. But what is a Gorgon but a symbol of evil? And if the whole of the Holocaust can be represented as an evil monster, then aren't the individual human actions which make it up included in the classification?
The pages analyzing Nazi motives are the murkiest. They often rely on shock value, as she relates strings of brief sketches of sickening cruelties. To shock into awareness was not the author's stated intention.
She returns to her initial task at the end, in "Representing the Holocaust." She examines representations of the Holocaust through different genres in art. This is by far the most interesting part of the book. Unfortunately it is also the shortest. She contrasts and compares the novel and the nonfiction historical writing, the different ways each provokes the reader, the different roles each plays. She concludes that it is our duty to "see the Gorgon sufficiently steadily to destroy it." We do this by "disciplined, critical remembering."
Clendinnen's journey of discovery and remembering is documented in this book.
