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4.5
This is a somewhat eccentric book. Bartov's most famous book, "Hitler's Army," was a devastating emprical study of the complicity of the German Army in Hitler's crimes. This is a somewhat more theoretical work, and its weaknesses show. Much of it is construed from essays Bartov has written over the past few years. The first chapter "Fields of Glory" deals essentially with Germany's path to the war and its subsequent self-pity. The second chapter, "Grand Illusions," does the same for France, while the third "Elusive Enemies," deals with elusive enemies as an element in the rise of Nazism. The fourth deals with "apocalyptic visions," which argues that the persistence of utopia and apocalypse was also crucial to the existence of modern genocide. A conclusion deals with the German novelist Bernhard Schlink's "The Reader" and a partial defnse of Binjamin Wilkomirski's controversial and probably fraudulent "Fragments."As the sum of these parts "Mirrors of Destruction," leave much to be desired. It is somewhat repetitive, (parts of chapters one and two are recapitulated in chapter three), and more important it is often abstract and vague. Although it has excellent footnotes, with exhaustive references to the recent literature (oddly enough, only Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life, is missing) it is not clear that the books assist Bartov's argument. As an example, in chapter three Bartov seeks to discuss the utopian impulse, and discusses such phenomenon as nostalgia of the past, the expansion of European influence, imperialism, Darwinism, the inherently totalitarian nature of gardening (I'm only slightly joking--see page 151), apocalyptic thought, Soviet totalitarianism, population control, capitalist overconfidence, the mass media and the rise of musuems, colonial cruelty, modern warfare, the crisis in modern historiography, scientic rationality and many others. The main problem with this list is that it dilutes the concept of utopia and apocalypse to something so ubiquitous, that it has no more explanatory power than the weather. There are many questionable comments, such as on page 149 that "universal utopia assumes the ultimate eradication of boundaries, between sexes or races, classes or faiths, the present and the future." Now aside from the many utopian impulses who had no interest in doing any of those things, and confining ourselves to the Nazis who are the subject of this book, it is clear that they wished to reinforce boundaries between sexes, and their interest in removing class boundaries was substantly less in simply redefining them out of existence.At one point Bartov argues that the special agony of the Holocaust is that most of the perpetrators got off very lightly, while the survivors suffered from guilt over their "good fortune." But clearly this does not distinguish the Holocaust from a large number of atrocities which have been inadequately dealt with. And survivors will feel guilty even after natural disasters where humanity could not be held responsible. There is at times a certain sententiousness in Bartov's work, such as that which lead Peter Novick to comment that "The problem with most of these lessons is not that they're wrong but that they're empty, and not very useful." "...what--short of moving to the woods--does one do with the `lesson' that the Holocaust is emblematic of modernity?" Likewise Bartov's account of German and French reactions to the Holocaust are not helped by his abstract and theoretical account. Although Bartov offers qualifications, he also speaks of "the Germans," and "the French" and speaks of complicity in such a way that the distinctions between anti-semitic thought and anti-semitic deed are conflated, as is anti-semitism and learning German and publishing under Vichy. There are risks about such a promiscuous notion of complicity: it could encourage an Anglo-American sense of superiority to the European continent. Such reflections on evil has encouraged fatuous Christian apologists of the ilk of C.S. Lewis that 6 million Jews died so to vindicate the Christian doctrime of original sin. Like most discussions of the horrors of the Twentieth century, Bartov does not really discuss the cruelties of the Showa Dictatorship (it gets a paragraph on page 138). This I believe is a mistake: Japan is not a minor country, Asia is not a minor continent, certainly not this century, and the millions of deaths attributable to the armies of the Rising Sun should not be ignored simply because their evil did not have the purity of essence of the Nazi or Armenian genocides.What does give this book an importance larger than these flaws comes from Bartov's discussion of Israel's own tortured reaction to the Holocaust. Instead of the account of France's failure to confront Vichy, which has become almost commonplace in the last two decades, we meet interesting accounts of Hannah Arendt, Raul Hilberg, Tzvetan Todorov, Wolfgang Sofsky, and Christopher Browning. At the end of the fourth chapter we find a long discussion of the Israel writer Ka-Tzetnik. Ka-Tzetnik is a juvenile writer, pornographic, mentally disturbed. Yet his account provides a special knowledge of the atrocity not provided by any other writer. More so than much discussion, Bartov's discussion gives at least a partial truth to his statement "that when we look in the mirror of the Holocaust, we see our own reflection."
