"Selling the Holocaust"

By Michael Kress

To Elie Wiesel, writes Tim Cole, there is something inherently unknowable and unapproachable in the Holocaust, something which defies every attempt at replicating or representing the horror. Yet, Jewish attempts to memorialize and commemorate the loss of six million have led to countless attempts at just that, replicating and representing the gas chambers and concentration camps of Eastern Europe in films, plays, novels, and museums. claiming to offer "authentic" Holocaust experiences. Cole, a scholar in residence at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, takes aim at the shortcomings of those attempts at representation and replication in his important new book, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History Is Bought, Packaged and Sold. Here, the British historian devotes a chapter each to exploring the myths and realities surrounding Anne Frank, Adolf Eichmann, Oskar Schindler, Auschwitz, Yad Vashem, and the U.S. Holocaust Museum.

Despite the fact that Selling the Holocaust, from its title to its press materials, purports to attack the commercialization of the Holocaust, it is the "packaging," or presentation, of the Holocaust, the shifting character of the Holocaust narrative, that most concerns Cole. For all of the people and places he deals with, Cole shows how they have been used to advance specific ideological slants on the Holocaust, each furthering the agenda of those doing the portraying, and each saying more about the cultures in which they were created than about the Holocaust itself. He finds that most American Holocaust portrayals, such as Schindler's List and the museum on the Mall in D.C., focus more on survivors than on the dead, ultimately finding in the tragedy of the Holocaust a message of redemption and the triumph of good, a sort of feel-good take on the Shoah despite the tears they evoke. He finds that Israeli portrayals of the Holocaust display a split, especially in recent years. Cole writes: Right-wingers find Zionist and nationalist lessons in the Holocaust, leading to hawkish views on Israeli foreign policy, while left-wingers see universalist messages of the need for tolerance, leading to dovish views on the Arab-Israeli conflict. In short, Cole argues, historical narrative always reflects the times, priorities and agendas of those doing the telling and the culture in which they live. To see any such narrative as definitive or baggage-free is to obscure the historical truth and to do a disservice to ourselves and to the people affected by that history.

Cole's specific points about the Holocaust are well taken. Any representation of the Holocaust is inherently incomplete, and emphasizing survivors, however horrific and heartbreaking their stories may be, falls short of the wrenching truth that surviving was the exception, destruction the rule. While tales of righteous gentiles, heroic Jewish partisans and dogged survivors are uplifiting and point to the never-ending capacity for good in people, to use these exceptions to find in the Holocaust any overriding message of redemption is to ignore the senseless, unprecedented, and irrevocable loss of individual and communal life.

Cole is at his best when attacking Schindler's List, which he rightfully says has been turned into a primary document of sorts, considered almost documentary, the ultimate sacred Holocaust text. The movie, though, presents a Hollywood-ization of the story, in which the battle is waged between clearly delineated and easily spotted forces of Good and Evil, with no gray areas in between, and with good ultimately triumphing over evil. History, of course is not so clean, and Cole illustrates his point by poignantly comparing two Holocaust perpetrators: Eichmann and the Schindler's List villain, Goeth. The latter is villainous through and through, sadistic and violent, hateful and bent on murder. The former is a bureaucrat who exemplifies, in Hannah Arendt's famous phrase, "the banality of evil," a man who is murderous by phone calls and signed papers, not gunshots or whippings, a man interested in genocide for career advancement, not sadistic satisfaction. Goeth is easier to digest. We can spot him, hate him, cheer at his demise, and most importantly, convince ourselves that He is not Us. Eichmann, though, is more historical, since most Holocaust victims "weren't killed by psychopaths, but by civil servants," as Cole writes. In this model of death, we the observers and investigators of history cannot escape so freely. We can dismiss Goeth as Them, unmitigated Evil, but can we do the same with the careerist killer Eichmann the Banal? We can assure ourselves that we would never support a Goeth in our midst, but can we do the same with an Eichmann? There is little doubt why Goeth is the villain in the quintessential Holocaust film, while Eichmann is the stuff only scholarly books are made of. Such Hollywood optimism helps Americans believe in their own goodness and in the cliché that mere knowledge of the Holocaust prevents its repetition. However, the examples of Bosnia, Rwanda, and so many other post-Holocaust genocides belie such naïve wishful thinking.

Cole, unfortuantely, offers little in the way of suggestions for fixing the problems he so successfully illuminates. Those solutions he does offer deal mostly with helping the public understand the shifts of narrative history, such as his idea that a new Yad Vashem building being currently planned be opened alongside, rather than instead of, the old museum, allowing visitors to see how Holocaust representations have evolved from the museum's early years to the present. The idea is fascinating for the historical perspective it offers but does little to improve the inadequate state of current Holocaust memorialization. In his unrelenting critique of Holocaust culture, Cole fails to assert any support for the basic notion of Holocaust commemoration or any acknowledgment that the creators and certainly the consumers of most cultural Holocaust memorials, museums and films have the best of intentions, even if those cultural creations are misguided. Cole believes the Holocaust should not be seen as "the iconic event of the twentieth century," but considering his own views on the depth and darkness of the tragedy, this opinion is curious. The iconic status of the Holocaust should be a spur to commemorate and memorialize the loss in a manner that is appropriate to that status and to the ultimate incomprehensibility of the Shoah. Perhaps the book's best suggestion is one Cole borrows from James Young, who writes that the best memorial to the Holocaust may be the discussion itself, the "never-to-be-resolved debate over which kind of memory to preserve, how to do it, in whose name, and to what end." Alternately, contemporary rabbis are experimenting with various ways to fold the Shoah into traditional Jewish ritual and liturgy, a strategy which acknowledges the mystery and importance of Shoah memory without elevating the Holocaust to a status of ultimate and unparalleled importance in the religion. Those rabbis, and anyone else interested in preserving a meaningful and accurate memory of the loss of the six million Jews, would do well to read Cole's book before continuing their efforts.

Michael Kress is a Cambridge, MA-based freelance writer who covers religion and spirituality.