The Persistence of Evil

In the hall of Names at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, memory is preserved in Pages of Testimony, which contain brief biographical sketches of less than half of the six million Jews killed in Europe during the Nazi era. In this circular space, the history of the ‘stranger’ is a tragedy that continues to be renewed in the mind of the visitor. Here, every face from the ceiling, reflected in the water at the bottom of the bedrock on which this museum is built, tells a story to which you have little access, and it is that knowledge that makes you humbler—and aware of the pursuit of inhumanity. What linger in the hall are fragments of life unlived, and it’s our intrusion into their secrets and joys that keeps the hall alive.

The Holocaust is a living testament to the possibilities of politics that seek domination through elimination. It is a permanent enquiry for the living, and in the pages of writers such as Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel and WG Sebald, it is a tragedy transferred through generations, and still retaining an element of incomprehension—how could it have happened, and how could one man, driven by an idea of destiny and destruction, lead the massacre? Hundreds of books have been written, great movies have been made (particularly Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah), but scholarship—or imagination—is not exhausted by the Holocaust.

Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale University, has been here before. His previous book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, is a much-appreciated comparative study of evil. He is one of those historians who turn the darkest pages of the past into luminous meditations on the present, imperfect and dangerous, and that too in a language that is polemical, poetic and philosophical. He makes history an intimate argument.

And it is the originality of his argument that elevates his new book from historiography to memorial service with a dire message attached. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books, 462 pages., $30) revisits the charred remains of the Jewish tragedy—and the Nazi horror— with a deeper understanding of the present and its fault lines. Before we step into the ‘bloodlands’ of Europe, where one man’s sanguineous fantasy became an extraterritorial terror story, we need to linger for a while in the mind of the man itself.

The historian’s lobotomy on Hitler kicks off Black Earth. In Hitler’s worldview, the Jews were not part of the species, which consisted of races. The Jews were a ‘nonrace’ or a ‘counterrace’, striving to dominate the entire planet through their ideas of human order. For Hitler, nature was politics, a bloody struggle for the soil, and only the strongest and the purest of races would prevail. ‘The world’s problem, as Hitler saw it, was that Jews falsely separated science and politics and made delusive promises for progress and humanity. The solution he proposed was to expose Jews to the brutal reality that nature and society were one and the same. They should be separated from other people and forced to inhabit some bleak and inhospitable territory.’

It was a struggle for Lebensraum, the living space, or habitat,which was being contaminated by Jews with crazy ideas about politics and science. In the beginning, prior to the Second World War, he only wanted to deport them to the remoteness of Siberia or Madagascar. That would not happen; Europe, the home, would become killing fields. Most of the pages in Black Earth are devoted to how Hitler’s idea of a Final Solution was implemented across Europe by the complicity of others—remember, most of the six million Jews were killed outside Germany. Most of the killed were not German citizens, but citizens of states destroyed by Germans. As Snyder argues, Hitler would achieve this—the expansion of Lebensraum and the subsequent exclusion of the non-race— through seven innovations of his essential militarism: ‘the party state, the entrepreneurship of violence, the export of anarchy, the hybridization of institutions, the production of statelessness, the globalization of German Jews and the redefinition of war.’

War was racial struggle, nature itself. The elimination of Jews, at the industrial level, would happen where the state was non-existent. The original German-Polish-Soviet axis of evil would set the stage (though Moscow would turn against Berlin after it was invaded). The destruction of the state and sovereignty began with the German invasion of Poland. There were no institutional structures to protect the Jew, and if anyone survived, it was because of the kindness of people who risked their lives by daring to be human. Auschwitz, the most abiding byword for the Holocaust, does not represent the scale of the killing, but it says a lot about the nature of the killing. ‘Millions of European Jews who were condemned to die at Auschwitz survived because they never boarded a train. Jews under German control who were supposed to be sent to Auschwitz were more likely to survive than Jews under German control who were not supposed to be sent to Auschwitz,’ and Snyder calls it the ‘Auschwitz paradox’. As the war progressed, Hitler could not keep the benefits of the destructed states in the face of Soviet occupation. ‘Auschwitz demonstrates the universal design to kill Jews. It also demonstrates the general significance of statehood in protecting them.’

It was the strangeness of the Other, encapsulated in a belief that racial existence was a relentless struggle against the humanising intruder, that powered the Nazi bloodlust. For the Führer, politics was biology, and biology was destiny. There were other mass killings in history, legitimised by the politics of hate—racial, ethnic, and nationalistic. The Holocaust was unique because it was powered by a philosophy of planetary change. It reimagined in blood the idea of politics itself—and of man as a social animal, literally.

Are we past the evil? In his conclusion, Snyder is not optimistic; his warning is almost apocalyptic. He tells us that the quest for Lebensraum, the land of others as desirable habitat, is in vogue again: ‘In much of the world, the dominant sense of time is coming to resemble, in some respects, the catastrophism of Hitler’s era.’ Antisemitism is still visible in Europe, but the real threat, Snyder warns us, could be about habitat and national anxieties. A water war? A war generated by ecological imbalance? A struggle for natural resources? Could China, Africa and Russia be the next battle zones for domination as well as termination? ‘We share Hitler’s planet and several of his preoccupations; we have changed less than we think. We like our living space, we fantasise about destroying governments, we denigrate science, we dream of catastrophe. If we think that we are victims of some planetary conspiracy, we edge towards Hitler.’

Snyder is an argumentative historian who balances his scholarship with his humanism. Black Earth takes us back to the geography as well as the history of evil so that we won’t forget after such knowledge. ‘Understanding the Holocaust is our chance, perhaps our last one, to preserve humanity,’ Snyder writes. Tomorrow will be more comprehensible if we can grasp the sorrows and savageries of yesterday, and this book makes it easier in the most compelling manner.

AuschwitzBlack EarthHitlerJewish tragedyNazi horrorPolandTimothy Snyder