Whose Holocaust?

Mira Siegelberg

A Holocaust Controversy:
The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France
Samuel Moyn
Brandeis University Press, 220 pages

Samuel Moyn's latest work is an attempt to uncover the roots of our present perception of the Holocaust and its place within contemporary scholarship by examining one pivotal episode in postwar France. More than simply describing the evolution of current historical understanding, A Holocaust Controversy bears on the question of how the past should be used, or mobilized, if at all. Moyn speaks not only as a historian, but also as someone concerned with what it means to be a moral actor in the present.

A Holocaust Controversy examines the heated debates that followed the 1966 publication of Jean Francois Steiner's Treblinka: The Revolt of an Extermination Camp. The son of a Jewish Zionist activist who was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, Steiner argued, indirectly in Treblinka and more explicitly in a subsequent controversial interview, that it was necessary to differentiate between what had been coined the Nazi's "concentration camp universe" and the genocide of European Jewry. Treblinka provoked a controversy not only because of its claims that Jews had to be considered separately from other categories of victims, but also for its assertion that the Jewish victims were somehow implicated in their own demise. In his book, Samuel Moyn carefully shows how Steiner battled to draw a more positive and heroic message from the Holocaust and to respond to the disturbing question of why the Jews seemed to have passively accepted destruction. Steiner's depiction of the Jewish revolt at Treblinka as a triumphant moment of action arising out of the depths of passivity was, according to Moyn, a way for the author to shape a new conception of Jewish identity. "Out of dissatisfaction with one Jewish memory," Moyn writes, "Steiner set out to replace it with a counter-memory, if he could find one."

Using words in place of weapons, the numerous individuals whose reactions to the novel Moyn canvasses—both well known intellectuals like Simon de Bouvoir and minor French intellectuals that will probably be unfamiliar to most readers—actively battled to shape the collective memory of Nazi criminality in postwar France. The result is that the debates between these thinkers becomes much more than academic, as Moyn describes how they contributed to our current historical understanding. While Steiner sought to draw attention to the idea of Jewish extermination camps, others clung to a more universalistic vision of Nazi victimhood.

This rift can in turn be situated within a broader historical context. The idea of the "Holocaust" is a relatively recent construct, as Peter Novick and others have informed us, and the priority of Jewish victimhood in collective memory only arose around twenty years after the fact. The narrative that has been canonized by works like Novick's The Holocaust in American Life and largely confirmed by A Holocaust Controversy is that the memory of Nazi criminality in the immediate aftermath of the war was of generalized victimhood, with few distinctions made between different ethnic groups that suffered under Nazi persecution. Moyn charts this now forgotten moment in the 1960's and deftly negotiates between the various facets of the debate, which took on different forms depending on the individuals and groups who read the novel.

In the preface to A Holocaust Controversy, Moyn explains that his interest in the dispute emerged out of his contact with a later Holocaust controversy involving Daniel Goldhagen's work Hitler's Willing Executioners. Though Steiner's intention in writing Treblinka is important, the central focus of A Holocaust Controversy is the story of how people received, read, or misread Steiner's novel. The study of the collective memory of the Holocaust as Moyn tells it is a saga of continual conflicts, rather than an evolving consensus, as different thinkers and different victim groups stake a claim on the horror of the war years.

The central drama of A Holocaust Controversy is the antagonistic relationship between Steiner and David Rousset, an author and a survivor of a Nazi camp, who popularized the notion of the "concentration camp universe." Rousset rejected Steiner's affirmation of a particular identity in favor of a more general conception of victimhood that he thought would lend itself to universalistic vigilance. Moyn distances himself and the reader from both positions by contextualizing and historicizing the idea of a universe of victims, and particular victimhood, privileging neither in his analysis. He acts as a mediator between the two extremes of Rousset's universalistic vigilance on the one hand and the claims of Steiner's particularism on the other.

Moyn makes it clear, however, that Steiner's position eventually won out. In this regard, one of Moyn's most interesting and perhaps major discoveries is the broader cultural shift between the 60's and the 70's as people became disillusioned with radicalism and turned toward cultivating their particular ethnic or cultural identities. Disaffected with the politics of 1968, many people opted for an ethnocentric particular identity over a vision of generalized humanity. "The participants in the controversy," Moyn writes, "stood on the brink of an era in which particularist difference, once unpopular, came to be prized, not simply by Jews and not simply in France." This ability to unearth the underlying logic of an era and to explain intellectual and cultural change is part what makes the book so powerful.

Aside from demonstrating how Treblinka lay the groundwork for the French publics later reception of another controversial book on the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, Moyn presents a compelling case for the importance of this event in French intellectual life and for placing the Holocaust at the center of postwar memory. More than simply charting the contours of the debates that the book inspired, Moyn reopens the questions about identity that were at the heart of the controversy, forcing a new generation of readers to re-evaluate the role of memory and history in shaping contemporary ethical and political concerns.

Unlike other scholars like Peter Novick whose The Holocaust in American Life also traces the creation of Holocaust memory, Moyn steps back to survey the myriad issues that the Treblinka Affair encapsulated and to enumerate the questions that the controversy continues to raise without jumping headlong into the fray. Novick took a clear stance against the way that American Jews rooted their identity in the memory of the Holocaust. But Moyn dispassionately referees these debates, only explicitly addressing contemporary concerns at the very end of the work.

Moyn does, however, present the reader with a third way between the extremes represented in the debates by Steiner and Rousset by presenting the philosopher Emanuel Levinas' role in the controversy. Unlike Rousset who rejected Steiner's claims in the name of a higher notion of a unified humanity, Levinas, as Moyn persuasively demonstrates, in the end imagined that there is a particular Jewish essence that became manifest in the Holocaust. But for Levinas, Jews are essentially ethical, and the lesson of the Holocaust is ethics rather than revolt and action, as Steiner claimed. Again, as with the debate between Steiner and Rousset, when discussing the debate between Steiner and Levinas, Moyn presents the actors as knowing agents of change. Thus, "Both Steiner and Levinas saw themselves facing the same historical challenge. Both of them were writing in response to the problem of what meaning the Holocaust should acquire for the new generation who had not lived through it." The implication of each debate is how the Holocaust, and memory more generally, can and should be utilized in the present. Though he plays the figures against one another, getting to the core of the debates, Moyn presents a dispassionate pose in this particular debate, rejecting both Levinas' and Steiner's premise that there could be an essential Jewish identity, much less that there could be one that emerged during the Holocaust.

In an earlier foray into the subject of Holocaust memory in The Journal of American History, Moyn (responding to the historian Omar Bartov) suggested that there were two regimes of Holocaust memory: the first represented a broad array of anti-fascist victims, subsuming the Jewish experience into this larger category and a second, which placed priority on Jewish victimhood.

While it had major and undeniable vices, the approach also has had some noteworthy virtues (antifacist memory). It implicitly or explicitly recognized that there had been a mosaic of victims during World War II. In addition, it may have succeeded, far better than the more divisive regime that followed at including vast numbers of non-Jews in world wide moral reflection and reform. Inasmuch as every regime of memory is equally a vision of the future, the construction of the war in this first style emphasized intercultural cooperation, rather than ethnic self-defense. A closer examination of the first, international style in post Holocaust culture, notably in France, may prove more rewarding than Bartov suggests, as intellectuals work toward a world in which enemies and victims finally become things of the past.

Though in this earlier piece Moyn acknowledges the problems of anti-fascist memory, which distorts the fact that Jews were killed as Jews in the Holocaust, he seems to follow Rousset in imagining that a more profound moral lesson can be drawn from the idea of a broad range of victims. The assumption here is that memory is inevitably a way of constructing the future, so it is better to adopt the more inclusive memory that will promote a more inclusive vision of community.

Moyn adopts a subtly different position in A Holocaust Controversy. Here, he more persuasively leaves the issue of memory's function as an open question, casting doubt on the ability of memories of traumatic events to forge integrated identities or to spur activism in the present. If our parents belonged to Steiner's generation, the book leaves one wondering how we as the third generation fit in. And if the third generation is the unspoken audience of the work, the unspoken issue is Darfur. Though never explicitly mentioned, the book raises the question of how we should relate to present quandaries—we without an utopian ideology to guide us, left only with the sometimes hollow claims of human rights as a guide for action.

Caught in this dilemma between irony and commitment, Moyn himself seems to straddle these two alternatives. Moyn questions the legitimacy and the validity of using the past to promote a moral vision of the future. He writes, "Sometimes the present needs to be haunted by its own novelty." Yet he stresses the inevitability of sometimes needing to draw on the past to "help find moral direction." The problem is how to know when it is necessary to draw on the memory of the Holocaust. While Moyn began by participating in a debate about how to use the past, he ends up expressing skepticism at the whole enterprise. Using the past is inevitable, framing an identity on the past is also unavoidable, but Moyn raises the possibility that focusing on the past too much to understand present controversies might divert us from finding a new and better alternative.

It is not that focusing on the Holocaust might exclude other victim groups now, but that a comparison with any past horror might limit our ability to assess the novelty of the present.

A sense that the Holocaust and Nazi criminality in general will always serve as a site of contest dominates the work and leaves the reader by the end of the work exhausted and somewhat frustrated by the impossibility of answering the questions that Moyn raises throughout the text. It is initially difficult to get into the story and navigate the many names involved in the debate. But for the committed reader the book is truly absorbing and revelatory, both from an intellectual perspective and in terms of making us aware of the broader cultural framework that oftentimes, if not all the time, dictates the way we think and interact with the world. A Holocaust Controversy has a paradoxical effect-—through the lens of analysis and history we are distanced from the struggles of memory, and yet Samuel Moyn continually reminds us that we are enmeshed with it and fully implicated in it. Moyn transcends the bounds of the historian to reflect on the difficulties of moral action. The aloofness of analysis and interpretation exists alongside an underlying message about activism: how to engage the problems of the present, and whether history can be used to promote moral vigilance. It is a history of our own consciousnesses, and Moyn does a wonderful job of clarifying and explaining our present predicament.

MIRA SIEGELBERG is a Columbia senior majoring in history with a special concentration in human rights. She is the editor of The Columbia Undergraduate Journal of History which published its inaugural issue in January