PERSECUTION, DAY BY DAY

Historians who lived through the Holocaust don’t often write memoirs, preferring to examine the past with more academic detachment. Saul Friedlander, however, openly ponders the connection — and the “unsettling dissonance” — between personal memory and the still-inadequate historical accounts of the Holocaust. Born in Prague in 1932, Friedlander suffered greatly at the hands of the Nazis. His memoir When Memory Comes recounts how his Jewish parents saved his life and lost their own. Desperately fleeing the Germans, they placed their little son in a French Catholic seminary, where he lived out the war under a false identity. His parents attempted to escape to Switzerland but were turned back at the Swiss-French border, and ultimately murdered in concentration camps. Friedlander’s description of the moment of final separation from his mother and father, which took place in the sterility of a hospital room, is unforgettable:

My parents had put me in a safe place, but here I was . . . unable to bear being separated. Could I be dragged away from them a second time? I clung to the bars of the bed. How did my parents ever find the courage to make me loosen my hold, without bursting into sobs in front of me?

It has all been swept away by catastrophe, and the passage of time. What my father and mother felt at that moment disappeared with them; what I felt has been lost forever . . .

This rare sensibility also graces the first volume of Friedlander’s history Nazi Germany and the Jews, which covers the period 1933-39. Friedlander has wrestled the evermore-vast literature on the Holocaust into a forceful, coherent account, choosing the best elements from current approaches while delicately, even tactfully, discarding the rest. So it is with his adaptation of the German “everyday history” (Alltagsgeschichte) method Those who have written the history of the Third Reich by using the day-to-day experience of average Germans have rightly been criticized for obscuring the forest of a genocidal regime behind the innocuous trees of daily banalities. Friedlander, however, relates the stories of Germany’s Jewish citizens, who every day faced disenfranchisement, vilification, and impending mortal peril.

By placing the victims at the center of the story, Friedlander offers a damningly minute examination of Nazi ideology as actually implemented by the regime’s bureaucracies after 1933. Nazi measures against the Jews sought to disentangle and then erase centuries of Jewish participation in German life. This process began with the thoroughgoing “de-Judaization” of German culture. Even the Handel oratorio Judas Maccabeus was retitled The Field Marshal: A War Drama, and new words were composed for three Mozart operas because both their Italian and German librettists had had “Jewish blood.”

With the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 began the tortured examinations of ancestry, the fractional designations of “Mischlinge” of the first or second ” degrees.” Ironically, even SS-men had to submit to these laws by proving their own and their wives’ impeccable “Aryan” lineage. In 1936 Himmler dreamed aloud for the SS: “Until October 1 of this year, the goal [for the family tree] is set at 1850; by next April 1, it will be set at 1750, until we achieve . . . for the whole SS . . . the goal of 1650.” (In the end, they had to settle for 1800.) Shortly before the war, when Jews were compelled into forced labor, one Nazi bureaucrat protested to the Reich labor minister: “The assignment of Jews to work on the Reichsautobahnen . . . cannot in my opinion be in accord with the prestige given to [them] as Roads of the Fuhrer” — i.e., Jews were unworthy to perform slave labor on the Autobahn.

Prompted by his interest in the relationship between memory and history, Friedlander has spent some time at play in the fields of postmodernism — and has managed to distill a useful approach from its linguistic “representations” and “shifting subjectivities.” In Nazi Germany and the Jews the narrative moves from the organizational to the individual, “to juxtapose entirely different levels of reality . . . with the aim of creating a sense of estrangement.” Friedlander intends this estrangement to evoke “the perception of the hapless victims . . . of a world altogether grotesque and chilling under the veneer of an even more chilling normality.” Thus he recounts simultaneously the evolution of anti-Jewish policies and — through occasional vignettes — their impact. He presents the various responses and debates within German Jewish organizations, Orthodox to Zionist, none of which could predict or conceive what was in store.

He also examines the silence of the German churches, institutions, and intellectuals in the face of Jewish suffering; burgeoning anti-Semitism throughout Europe; and the limited actions of the outside world such as the 1938 Evian conference on Jewish refugees. These varying perspectives are not as innovative a technique as Friedlander implies — but they certainly capture well the excruciating events as they unfolded, and portray the period 1933-39 in all its complexity rather than as a simple prelude to war and genocide.

Friedlfinder demonstrates that anti-Jewish policies fulfilled the direct intentions of Hitler, rejecting the (amazing) view of certain eminent historians — mostly in Germany — that such measures evolved haphazardly out of the “chaotic” structure of Nazi bureaucracy. This “functionalist” school sees a “twisted road to Auschwitz,” and claims that “competing bureaucratic fiefdoms” vied to please their erratic and opportunistic Fuhrer by improvising the Jewish persecutions his rhetoric had promised. Friedlander shows instead that obsessional, murderous antiSemitism — albeit tempered at times by “bureaucratic constraints . . . the influence of German opinion at large and even . . . foreign opinion” — was the real driving force of the Third Reich.

As Friedlander takes a thoughtful part in historians’ debates on the Holocaust, so he addresses himself to Daniel Goldhagen’s thesis that ” ordinary Germans” were not only “willing executioners” of the Jews, but also that their anti-Semitism was no less genocidal than that of Hitler and his cohorts. No one should pass over Friedlander’s superb book on the grounds of having already read Goldhagen — although a full comparison of the two historians’ views cannot be made, of course, until Friedlander’s volume on the war and the Holocaust appears.

While Goldhagen contends that all Germans thirsted to “eliminate” the Jews, Friedlander holds that such radical anti-Semitism was more or less confined to Nazi party members. According to him, the German public did not initiate actions against the Jews but did greet them with approval:

The German population, the great majority of which espoused traditional anti-Semitism . . . did not demand anti-Jewish measures, nor did it clamor for their most extreme implementation. Among most “ordinary Germans” there was acquiescence regarding the segregation and dismissal from civil and public service of the Jews . . . and there was some glee in witnessing their degradation. But outside party ranks, there was no massive popular agitation to expel them from Germany or to unleash violence against them.

Many Germans maintained economic ties to Jews (buying from Jewish-owned stores, for example) after the regime had dictated they be severed. This was not out of love, certainly, but neither could it have occurred if all people had seen Jews as repulsive and demonic, as Nazi ideologues did.

Friedlander also rejects Goldhagen’s category of “eliminationist” anti- Semitism, proposing instead a “redemptive” antiSemitism that emphasizes not only its murderousness but also the “idealistic” appeal of Nazi ideology — which envisioned a Germany purified, reborn, and redeemed through liberation from the Jews. Friedlander devotes a chapter to non-German anti-Semitism as well, with a focus on Poland and France, which gives an important comparative context missing from so many accounts, including Goldhagen’s.

All across Europe, Friedlander argues, “the upsurge of anti-Jewish passion . . . prepared the ground for active collaboration by some, and passive acquiescence by many more, in the sealing of the fate of European Jewry only three or four years hence.”

In contrast to the boastful and mercilessly repetitive prose of Goldhagen (and the stiff jargon of so many historians), Friedlander’s clear and measured writing should be celebrated. While Goldhagen may be credited with returning moral outrage to Holocaust history-writing, Friedlander brings to the subject the dignity, complexity, and restraint it requires. He never shrinks from the truth that there is something unknowable at the core of the Nazi genocide.

Out of the massive planning and execution of the Holocaust, Friedlander believes, “the only concrete history that can be retrieved remains that carried by personal stories . . . individual fates.” In fact, this work would have been enriched by many more of these stories. Here Friedlander is perhaps too restrained; he mistrusts language as a means of conveying the ineffable. At the end of his memoir, he wonders, “Have I succeeded in setting down even so much as a tiny part of what I wanted to express?” For “of this heartbreak,” he says, “there remains only a vignette in my memory.”

In fact, Friedlander is one of the rare writers to have found an appropriate way to write about the Holocaust. As his memoir succeeded, so does this book succeed in linking these individual fates to the broad sweep of a terrible history. One would only ask from Nazi Germany and the Jews a more extensive portrait of German Jewry in its last years, and more scenes from individual lives — that is, more of what it already has.

Molly Magid Hoagland is a writer living in New York.