Carolyn J. Dean. The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. ix + 203 pp. $18.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8014-4162-2.

Reviewed by Michael Meng (Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Published on H-German (August, 2005)

Empathy after the Holocaust

Does our exposure to the images and memories of mass murder--above all the Holocaust--numb our ability to empathize with the victims of persecution? Has our consciousness of genocide become so ever present that mass violence seems almost banal, an ordinary, albeit tragic, part of human existence that fails to capture our attention or even our compassion? Several months ago, just after a tsunami wreaked havoc across South East Asia, the ABC-News program Nightline, hosted by veteran journalist Ted Koppel, broadcast an episode on why so many Americans were contributing money to aid organizations. The program questioned this outpouring because Americans (and the U.S. government) rarely donate willingly to other catastrophes, particularly those that involve genocide and ethnic cleansing.[1] For instance, the ongoing conflict in Sudan hardly provokes much attention from most Americans. Several important reasons were given, but one stood out in particular: since the tsunami provided images hardly ever seen--village after village completely flattened--the general public perceived it to be a truly extraordinary event in stark contrast to mass murder, which appears often enough to seem almost normal. A surfeit of memory and images has dulled our capacity to empathize with the victims of genocide. This result is, of course, the reverse of what memory is supposed to generate. In the case of Holocaust memorialization, remembering the Shoah is supposed to stimulate awareness about the fragility of human compassion on its most tragic and catastrophic level. But as Peter Novick has provocatively observed, the opposite has occurred: "For many years we've been talking about the culpability of bystanders and the crime of indifference. And over those years very few have thought that our standing by in the face of the preventable, if unholocaustal, deaths of millions of children annually has any connection to the 'crime of indifference.'"[2]

In The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust, Carolyn J. Dean is interested less in exploring whether or not such a failure of empathy actually exists (though my sense is that she thinks it does) and more in how historians, writers, and intellectuals have thought about its origins and effects. In this short, probing volume, she provides insightful, provocative analysis of an important and largely under-researched topic. She uncovers roughly three central attempts to understand the failure of empathy within the specific case of the Holocaust: the use of the word "pornography" by writers, historians, and social critics to describe the trivialization of Holocaust memory; the term "indifference" to understand the behavior of German bystanders during the unfolding of Nazi persecution toward Jews; and the tendency of some cultural critics to associate Nazism with homosexuality as a way to comprehend the origins and policies of the Third Reich.

The first two of these cultural-intellectual discourses are arguably the most important and comprise no less than three-fourths of the book. Dean begins by dealing with the issue of pornography. A large number of writers and scholars, including George Steiner, Ruth Klüger, Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Paula Hyman, and Tim Cole, have used "pornography" to describe images, museum exhibitions, artistic portrayals, and historical works that they perceive have trivialized the memory of the Holocaust. Since the 1960s, pornography has become a catchall word to denote the degradation of Nazi victims typically through images, the voyeuristic fascination with the destructive force of the Third Reich, and the overall commercialization of Holocaust memory. The word captures a perverted, improper response to the Holocaust that fails above all to empathize with its victims. "Pornography continues to suggest," Dean writes, "a relationship between sexual, moral, and political perversion that it establishes now by reference to 'desensitizing' trends, the mass media's assault on historical memory, and its transforming Jewish victims of Nazism into consumable things, all of which undermine healthy empathic identification" (p. 24). In the end, Dean criticizes the use of this term, arguing that pornography obscures more than it explains; it is a vague, opaque concept that has little analytical power.

But despite its clear limitations, pornography continues to be used, as Dean shows in a compelling chapter on the debate about Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. Many reviewers called the book "pornographic" and "voyeuristic" for its repeated discussion of the murder of Jews and its "perverse appeal" among the public. They claimed that its graphic depiction of violence numbed the reader's ability to empathize with the victim. Moreover, the book put the reader in the odd position of identifying not just with the victim, but also with the perpetrator who carried out the senseless violence narrated over and over again. But by describing Goldhagen's book as pornographic, Dean notes in an important observation that historians failed to explore the core issue of how best to write about the Holocaust. Historians missed an ideal opportunity to discuss the epistemological and ethical questions about Holocaust narration.

Dean briefly points to some ways of addressing this lacuna. She turns first to Inga Clendinnen's Reading the Holocaust , but then in a more compelling move, to Omer Bartov's Mirrors of Destruction as examples of accounts that "mobilize empathic identification without also generating numbness" (p. 60). It is perhaps hardly surprising that Dean looks to her fellow colleague at Brown University for inspiration. As one of the leading historians of the Holocaust in the United States, Bartov rarely fails to produce thoughtful, stimulating, and elegant prose. He has also led those scholars calling for a stronger focus on the victims within Holocaust historiography. Thus in Mirrors of Destruction Dean finds a carefully conceived work that identifies with the victims without producing numbness. Bartov renders meaningful the deaths of Holocaust victims by inserting their suffering within a universal framework. He takes the death of specific victims and turns it into a symbol of universal suffering, invoking the need to make sure that genocide does not occur again because, as he puts it, "murder is in our midst." Dean finds Bartov's narrative strategy appealing because it does not make us "comfortable" in the fact that we are distant from the Holocaust, but rather makes us "squirm" in realizing just how close we are to it--just how much murder is among us (p. 75).

In a subtle, yet powerful way, Dean is advocating here for writing the Holocaust from the perspective of the victims. She develops this point perhaps most clearly in her discussion about the scholarly discourse of "indifference" that has developed to describe the actions of German bystanders. In an excellent chapter that alone is worth the price of the book, Dean carefully analyzes recent attempts by historians such as David Bankier, Robert Gellately, Otto Dov Kulka, Ian Kershaw, Hans Mommsen, Marion Kaplan, and Saul Friedländer to understand why so many Germans showed so little empathy toward Jews. (Oddly, the work of Eric Johnson is not discussed.) Most historians have used the word "indifference" to describe the actions of ordinary Germans, some going further to call it "passive complicity" or "tacit consent." Although Dean acknowledges the important contribution this research has made, she concludes that it generally fails to capture the agency and responsibility of German bystanders. She suggests that indifference is not just an unwillingness to know or an inward retreat from the outside world, but a form of active complicity. Dean comes to this conclusion by analyzing a selection of Jewish-Gentile encounters reported by Victor Klemperer, Mihail Sebastian, and Marcel Reich-Ranicki. By looking through the perspective of the victim, "indifference" takes on a whole new meaning for her. The result is startling: Dean argues that the persecution of Jews had become so banal, so ordinary that Germans came to accept it; hatred toward Jews had become so embedded in daily life that the suffering of the victim had lost all meaning. As she writes in a powerful passage, "indifference does not require an unusual interpretation ... because it is nothing more and nothing less than antisemitism. But indifference isn't only antisemitism, respectable or vulgar, fashionable cocktail party conversation or unspeakable sentiments kept to oneself. The indifference recorded by both Klemperer and Sebastian more accurately describes how this antisemitism manifests itself as a normalized prejudice. Thus it describes not only the sinister antisemitism that became so predominant, but also how society assimilated it, learned it, performed it, believed it, and thus came to conceive it and live it as normal" (p. 101).

In my view, this is important point that opens up a larger question that deserves to be on the agenda of future Holocaust research: How did antisemitism become "normalized" in the first place? I would argue that a broader perspective is in order here. It is, of course, critically important to understand the failure of empathy in Germany, but it is also necessary to study its collapse in other parts of Europe, not least in Poland, where the continent's largest Jewish community perished. Moreover, an approach with a longer time-line might be useful. One of the most intriguing areas of Holocaust research unfolding today is the study of interethnic relations in the years before and during World War II.[3] The research is still in its early stages, but it appears that the interwar years were crucial in the development of a "normalized prejudice."[4] Although Dean does not formulate these points (that is not her aim), her close, sensitive reading of Gentile-Jewish encounters provides a highly useful model for historians moving into these new areas of research.

Dean has thus written an important, insightful book. Her account is most relevant to the study of the Holocaust, but the important questions it raises could also be applied with much profit to other genocides in the twentieth century. If pressed to criticize it, I might point out one flaw: Dean's last chapter on attempts by historians, intellectuals, and writers to understand Nazism in terms of homosexuality is intrinsically interesting, but does not fit clearly into the study's overarching claims. In addition, I am not entirely convinced that it is nearly as pervasive and significant a discourse as those about pornography and indifference. But this criticism certainly does not detract from the many insights that this impressive work has to offer.

Notes

[1]. On the reaction of the United States to genocide, see Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

[2]. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. 257.

[3]. Shimon Redlich, Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians 1919-1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Omer Bartov is currently working on interethnic relations in the city of Buczacz, Ukraine.

[4]. Recent research on Gentile-Jewish relations and antisemitism in East Central Europe suggests this fact as well. The literature is extensive, but see among other titles: William W. Hagen, "Before the 'Final Solution': Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Anti-Semitism in Interwar Germany and Poland," Journal of Modern History 68 (1996): pp. 351-381; Olaf Bergmann, Narodowa Demokracja wobec problematyki zydowskiej w latach 1918-1929 (Poznan: Wydaw. Poznanskie, 1998); Jolanta Zyndul, Zajscia antyzydowskie w Polsce w latach 1935-1937 (Warsaw: Fundacja im. K. Kelles-Krauza, 1994); Dirk Walter, Antisemitische Kriminalität und Gewalt: Judenfeindschaft in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: Dietz, 1999); Till van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer: Die Beziehung zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen Großstadt von 1860 bis 1925 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2000).

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Citation: Michael Meng. Review of Dean, Carolyn J., The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust. H-German, H-Net Reviews. August, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11106

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