The Thinking Person’s Guide to the Holocaust

A Way To Begin

Following that article, I have added a few of my recommendations.

It is very good to have Améry, along with Shoah by Lanzmann, and Primo Levi. They know that one CANNOT understand anything about the Shoah, the prerequisite for any “inquiry.”

I would add some other key works/authors – and why keep bringing the idea of a religious sacrifice, martyrs by furthering the word Holocaust even in 2011… Agamben has made the point very clear.

So:

1. Night and Fog – within a half hour, time travel master filmmaker Resnais, does not wince in looking at the camps, the better to propel us into a clearly unknown future (a student ran out of my classroom once saying “I did not know”). Its only pitfall, it barely mentions Jews..

2. … which bring us to former Israeli MK’s Abraham Burg and his The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise From its Ashes – another vital work for Jews, Israelis and anyone else interested in seeing what LIFE can offer, among which this important lesson: “‘Never again’ is not just never again for Jews only. It is never again for anyone who is being victimized.”

3. Marcel Ophuls’ masterpiece is Hotel Terminus. This is what I wrote when the Icarus DVD was released last fall:
One of the greatest films on the Holocaust (and beyond). Helps one understand how one conjugates “To Lie and To Deceive (Oneself and Ohers)” in a variety of languages/locations. Learn a little French, German, English and Spanish… The lure of vacuous (and criminal) optimism is most salient when Klaus Barbie is arrested; he appears to be such a gentle person, and we would like so much to believe…

4. Prophets Without Honor by Frederic V. Grunfeld, one of the best books about Jews in Germany/Austria between the two wars. A way to know some of the extremely rich life that existed.

+ and my late friend, the scholar, Judith Doneson’s The Holocaust in American Film.

I could not NOT add the words of Primo Levi:

It is the duty of everyone to meditate on what happened. Everybody must know or remember that Hitler and Mussolini, when they spoke in public, were believed, admired, adored like gods. They were “charismatic leaders”; they possessed a secret power of seduction that did not proceed from the credibility or the justice of the things they said but from the suggestive way in which they said them, from their eloquence, from a subtle dramatic art of theirs, perhaps instinctive, perhaps patiently practiced and learned. The ideas they proclaimed were not always the same, and in general were aberrant, or silly, or cruel. And yet they were acclaimed with hosannahs, and followed all the way to death by millions of the faithful.

It is therefore necessary to be suspicious of charismatic leaders, or rather, of those who seek to convince us with other tools than reason: we must be cautious about delegating to others our judgment and our will. Since it is difficult to distinguish true prophets from false, it is as well to regard all prophets with suspicion. It is better to renounce revealed truths, even if they exalt us by their simplicity and their splendor, or if we find them convenient because we can acquire them gratis.

It is better to content oneself with other more modest and less exciting truths, those one acquires painfully, little by little and without shortcuts, with study, discussion and reasoning, those that can be verified and demonstrated.

Primo Levi