Holocaust Hyperbole as a Warning Sign

Making hyperbolic and apocalyptic comparisons that evoke the Holocaust, having a tendency to escalate disagreements by using extreme and irreconcilable terms, way out of proportion to the immediate situation, these are some of the rhetorical similarities between mad shooters and political extremists that have nothing to do with gun laws. The Holocaust is the definitive extreme case in any debate, worse than global nuclear war because it has actually happened, the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki aside. The Holocaust has rhetorical power because it readily spreads into any number of Old Testament comparisons. So it becomes easy to slide from Scripture to genocide for some people. This then is a first sign that someone is imbalanced--when they start speaking in such end of the world language to describe a much more ordinary confrontation. If a problem with a professor, leads a student to suggest genocide, then he is seriously off the beam. If a politician evokes medieval pogroms to cast herself as the victim of unfair rhetoric, than she, too, has clearly lost all sense of proportion. And it is these slips , these moments when the mask of normalcy slips, when the hugely disproportionate metaphors stream out, that you worry about what is going in the speaker's mind. The link between Palin and the shooter is now coming out after the fact--in the tendency to make eerie and unfitting comparisons between their own personal troubles and the historical murder of the Jewish people. In her denial of any connection to the shooter, she shows just how her reasoning and rhetoric share a common tendency.

German-Jewish Marriage

A fascinating interview with Christiane Kubrick, the German widow of director Stanley Kubrick, about their marriage, her family and making a film about the Holocaust. She speaks about her uncle who was notorious for having filmed Jud Süss at Goebbel's behest and about the difficulty Kubrick had putting together a film about the Holocaust. What's also impressive his the ease with which all these topics flow in the conversation. Allows you to have another look at Kubrick, which is a treat in itself.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/video/2010/aug/10/christiane-kubrick-stanley-dancer

Christiane Kubrick's notorious uncle was Harlan Veit, who directed numerous films for the the Nazis and was specifically picked by Goebbels to direct Jud Süss, the appalling anti-semitic film. In his trial after the war, Veit claimed that he was forced to work with Goebbels, or he and his family would have been killed. There were protests against the court's decisions even at the time, and calls for a boycott against Veit's post-war films. Greg Eghigian recommends taking a look at the documentary "Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss," which details how Veit's family dealt with their unrepentant father. You can catch a preview of the documentary here: http://www.myvideo.de/watc

h/6513553/Video_des_Tages_Dokumentarfilm_Harlan_Im_Schatten_von_Jud_Suess

Repeating History

There are universities where no one, as far as I can tell, teaches the Italian Renaissance. There are Liberal Arts Colleges where the origins of the liberal arts does not merit a faculty member devoted to its study.

History is not a matter that is finished once it has been explained.

Some universities may feel that the Renaissance in Italy has been well covered, and it has, but the reality is that education requires repetition. Someone needs to repeat history.

Cutting edge academic work often means working on subjects few have considered before, and if we were racing for a cure to cancer or marketing the next new thing, who could disagree. However, the lessons of the Thirty Year's War or the many Sacks of Rome are soon lost on the next generation. Unless some grey hair takes it upon themselves to return to the well-trodden field, it will disappear.

The lesson that history is really a repetitive performance is shown most obviously in Holocaust studies, a vibrant historical discipline constant rediscovering arguments made decades before. So much has been written about the German killing of the Jews, that there is little that has not been documented, but since Daniel Goldhagen the cycle of interpretation has turned to the zero point. At first Goldhagen revived that old thesis that the Germans had been for centuries inherently anti-semitic. This argument had been already presented during the war by Hans Kohn, but it received a revival in the 1990s.

Now there comes Timothy Snyder's claim we have forgotten the Einsatzgruppen who in the first Nazi invasion of Poland and Russian slaughtered Jews, Communists and resistance fighters of any stripe. Anyone familiar with Holocaust studies has read about the devastation of the Einsatzgruppen, but apparently there are NPR listeners and general readers who are so focused on the horrors of Auschwitz that they do not recognize the massive killings carried out by the earliest Nazi campaigns against Jews.

Who could really have really forgotten this supposedly forgotten moment in the Holocaust? The Einsatzgruppen have long been recognized as the hands-on brutal beginning of the Holocaust.

Even Bernhard Schlink's The Reader recounts the example of a notorious photograph of the EInsatzgruppen killing heartlessly in Poland.

So who has forgotten? Presumably an undefined group of younger scholars who never learned the story in the first place.

The point is that history needs to be repeated in order not to be forgotten: this applies to the Italian Renaissance as much as it does to the Holocaust. Courses need to be taught that repeat already documented history. The obvious needs to be restated, repeatedly, not just for the worst, but also for the best moments