Anti -Semitism: George Steiner on Humanity's Bad Conscience

Ron Rosenbaum
I asked Steiner about his argument that the Jews were killed because they tortured the conscience of mankind.
"You seem to be saying that something about the Jews--that there is a rational hatred--"

George Steiner
"No--it is--no. Call it, if you want, an intuitive (hatred)--I believe that explanations for anti-Semitism of a sociopolitical nature are fine as far as they go, but they tell you nothing about two things. About Jew-hatred where there are no Jews (in contemporary Poland, for instance) and about the ontological decision that one must kill the human person because of its being. And hence I put forward this image, this hypothesis that our invention of God, of Jesus, our invention of Marxist utopia, has left humanity so uncertain inwardly that it is trying to banish its own bad conscience."

Ron Rosenbaum
"Are you saying, then, that the torture of conscience is worse than the torture in the camps even?"

George Steiner
"Over the long run," he says, "to feel yourself at fault probably builds up unbearable hatreds, self-hatreds, to feel yourself found out."

Explaining Hitler
THE SEARCH FOR THE ORIGINS OF HIS EVIL
Ron Rosenbaum
Chapter 17
George Steiner: Singling out the Jewish "Invention of Conscience"
page 316 

David Olère (1902 – 1985, Polish-born French), Artist

The Revolt Of Sonderkommando At Auschwitz-Birkenau 

On Sonderkommandos:

Primo Levi: The Gray Zone

                                              

Dr. Elchanan Elkes, Chairman of the Kovno Judenrat

He was murdered at Dachau. He wrote his 'last testament' to his son and daughter who lived in London. The letter was retrieved along with his diary after the liberation of Kovno.

"I am writing this in an hour when many desperate souls--widows and orphans, threadbare and hungry--are camping on my doorstep, imploring us, (the council) for help. My strength is ebbing. There is a desert inside me. My soul is scorched. I am naked and empty. There are no words in my mouth." 

from Nazi Germany and The Jews

by Saul Friedlander

Chapter 14: Total Extermination

Fall 1943-Spring 1944

George Kadish, photographer

Wolf Mishelvski was 21, in his first job as an Engineer, when the Germans invaded Lithuania. This book is a personal account of his experiences in the ghetto, supplemented by a detailed chronology of happenings in the Kovno Ghetto. This book also includes a translation of the infamous Jaegger Report, detailing day by day the systematic murders carried out by Einsatzkommando 3, from July 4 to November 25, 1944. William W. Mishell, Kaddish for Kovno; Life and Death in a Lithuanian Ghetto 1941-1945 

Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel talks about dignity

Our life is beset with difficulties, yet it is never devoid of meaning. The feeling of futility is absent from our souls. Our existence is not in vain. There is a Divine earnestness about our life. This is our dignity. To be invested with dignity means to represent something more than oneself. The gravest sin for a Jew is to forget what he represents.

We are God's stake in human history. We are the dawn and the dusk, the challenge and the test. How strange to be a Jew and to go astray on God's perilous errands. We have been offered as a pattern of worship and as a prey for scorn, but there is more still in our destiny. We carry the gold of God in our souls to forge the gate of the kingdom. The time for the kingdom may be far off, but the task is plain: to retain our share in God in spite of peril and contempt. There is a war to wage against the vulgar, against the glorification of the absurd, a war that is incessant, universal. Loyal to the presence of the ultimate in the common, we may be able to make it clear that man is more than man, that in doing the finite he may perceive the infinite. 

The Earth Is the Lord's

THE INNER WORLD OF THE JEW IN EASTERN EUROPE

George Walker Bush in a Dream

In 2000, shortly before the presidential election I had a dream . George W. Bush and I were in Berlin. We were standing on a balcony of the Reichstag.

 He was smiling and laughing in a cordial way. I was enjoying his personality despite the fact that he was not my choice for president. As we chatted, a change in the atmosphere occurred. It felt as though a presence quite unearthly had come to join us. It was not an angelic visitation. We both turned, for it was at our backs. There was no person, no creature, no vision. It was a living thing and a dead thing: not corporal but alive with deadly intent, an intention to annihilate the human race. 

That was my dream. I suddenly came awake, chilled with awareness: It was to be President George W. Bush and he was going to meet the Beast.

  

the laughing hitler

Christian W Staudinger, artist

Text from Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum

Chapter 20

Lucy Dawidowicz: Blaming Adolf Hitler

It is possible to reconstruct Hitler's personal portrait of his extermination of the Jews in the progression of his chilling images of laughter--the extermination of the Jews in the extermination of their laughter.

We begin with his January 30, 1939, speech, in which the "resounding" laughter of the Jews is now resoundingly choking in their throats. In 1941, he imagines the laughter of the Jews still sounding, if not resounding, but "the coming months" will change that. And twelve months later, he professes no longer to know if the Jews "are still laughing." But whether they are or not, he says he's confident "if their laughter has not already subsided," it soon "will subside" everywhere. And, finally, he confirms for us that not only the laughter but those who once laughed have been exterminated: "Countless ones no longer laugh today, and those who still laugh now will perhaps in a while also no longer do so." 

Dawidowicz cites these passages for the "slips" not for the laughter, for Hitler's retrospective fusion of the January 10, 1939 threat to annihilate the Jews with the September 1, 1939 declaration of war that launched his armies east and made Auschwitz possible. But it might be argued that the laughter imagery is itself a kind of slip that vindicates Dawidowicz's thesis about Hitler more powerfully than his confusion or conflation of dates of declarations and speeches. It seems to vindicate her vision of Hitler as someone who knew always what he wanted to do with the Jews, not someone who hesitated and doubted and suffered nervousness about the enormity of the idea. Rather someone who knew what he was doing and laughed about it.

The unspoken displacement in these passages is, I'd suggest, not so much from one speech date to another, but from one species of laughter to another. The laughter Hitler incessantly conjures up dying in the Jews' throats is reborn in his own. The laughter suffusing those passages is not the Jews laughing but Hitler laughing. It's not the laughter of someone suffering from trepidation about what he's doing. It's not the laughter of someone who still, at an even later date, could think, "My dear Heinie...Would it be possible?"

It's the laughter of someone who knows what he's doing and relishes it to the bone, relishes the coded way he speaks of it, relishes the fact that the relish of the joke is only shared by an esoteric few. It's the very same relish with which he and Heydrich and Himmler, the three architects of the Final Solution. relish their ostensible dismay at the scurrilous "rumor" that the Jews are being exterminated, in that passage in the Table Talk in which the chief perpetrators of the Holocaust share a private joke about both their complicity and their cover-up.

Nor is this the laughter of someone "convinced of his own rectitude," as Trevor-Roper would have it. It's the laughter of someone savoring a secretive triumph, whose pleasure is clearly enhanced by an awareness of its profoundly illicit nature, whose pleasure can only be truly be savored by the cognoscenti aware of the magnitude of the illicit acts that are concealed by esoteric references to mass murder as "subsiding laughter." This is not something whose "enormity" Hitler feared, but something he relished, with obscene gleefulness.

Once I heard a parable about a Jew going into battle who asks a rabbi what he should do if he's captured by the enemy and his only alternative to starvation is to eat pork. The rabbi counsels him that, yes, to save his life he can do what would otherwise be a transgression, an enormity: He can eat the pork. But don't the rabbi adds, relish it: "Don't suck the bone." With his laughter, the laughter he sucked from the dying Jews' throats, Hitler was expressing his obscene relish at the enormity of his transgressions. With his laughter, Hitler reveals extermination is not a matter of rectitude to him, a difficult task done for a stern ideal. With his laughter Hitler reveals he is both aware of and wallowing in the illicitness of his transgression, his conscious evil. With his laughter he is "sucking the bone."

Pseudo-Antipathy as a Corruption of Conscience

Vocabulary

Guilt

Intuition
Corruption
Conscience
Scapegoat
Atonement

Pseudo-Antipathy is a way of robbing a human of their humanity. It is an ancient way of appeasing the gods with a symbolic sacrifice instead of facing the responsibility of personal atonement.

For explanations of Pseudo-Antipathy read the following posts:

March 7, 2015 Sophie Bryant and Pseudo-Antipathy

April 3, 2015 Sophie Bryant Says More About Pseudo-Antipathy

 

Conscience Corrupted by Pseudo-Antipathy

Vincent Gawron

artist

Hitler's world view grew out of his radical selfishness. He did not see himself as a part of a whole. His identification with Germany was a vehicle to save his own self from being Nothing. This Nothing was Hitler using Pseudo-Antipathy. Hitler hated everyone and everything.