Words of Welcome: Holocaust Education Center Reception and Exhibit

 

I am delighted to be included on the program this evening for several reasons. First I respect greatly the work of the Center in disseminating information about an important part of history that pertains to the murder of millions of European Jews. I consider this education aspect to be important not only for Jews, but for all human beings concerned with human rights, ethnic prejudice, and the genocidal behaviors that we have witnessed too often in our own lifetime.

But I am also pleased to be included because the Center and this exhibition relate to a field of study that touches on my own. I studied German culture, its intellectual and literary history, and in the twentieth century National Socialism and its racist policies leading to the Holocaust were of central interest to me. One of my standard courses dealt with how Germans came to terms with the Nazi past after the Second World War, and I also developed and taught a course on Holocaust and film, which included illustrations from many different countries and traditions.

From my own experience I am therefore very well aware of the need for education regarding the Holocaust. When I spoke with students, even students who were otherwise well informed and intelligent, I often found that they lacked elementary knowledge of the events surrounding the destruction of European Jewry. Many believed that the majority of Jews killed were German, and that the death camps were located inside German borders. Others had never considered the context of the war and how it enabled the horrific events. Most had no idea about resistance, about the ghettoization of the Jews, about Hitler’s precise role in the Holocaust, about collaboration and anti-Semitism in countries other than Germany, or about countries in which there were efforts to help Jews escape and avoid death. Education is essential if we are to have an appropriate understanding of not only the causes and events of the Holocaust, but also the nature of prejudice and the slippery slop from the denial of an essential humanity in a group to its extermination as a blight on a national or ethnic purity.

Although education is necessary, we have to recognize that even today we do not have final answers to all the questions surrounding the Holocaust, and that there are some issues that will probably be forever embroiled in controversy. What role did the Jews themselves play? How much was Hitler involved? What did the Germans or citizens of other countries really know? These questions and many others still invite different answers from divergent perspectives.

Indeed, the very notion of the Holocaust is itself controversial. We know, of course, that Holocaust comes from Greek roots; it combines “holo” or whole, entire, with “caustos” burnt. The word was introduced, I believe, to provide a term of Greco-Latin origin for the Hebrew Shoah or destruction. I’m not entirely sure who coined the term, but it became current in the 1960s to refer to the destruction of European Jewry. The OED gives definitions pertaining to the Nazi genocide prior to this time and as early as the 1940s, but the historical record indicates that it was not commonly used to refer to the events it refers to today much before that time.

It is a word used originally in English in early versions of the Bible, or the English translation of the Bible, in connection with Isaac’s sacrifice, and it means there an entirely burnt offering or sacrifice. We meet the term occasionally in English literature as well; for example, it appears in the works of John Milton. Some people dislike the term merely for its religious overtones, since the events that took place were not a sacrifice to God and therefore very much unlike the earlier uses of the term.

But others feel that the term itself fosters a misrepresentation of the historical occurrence. The reason for this sentiment is simple: “Holocaust” refers specifically and solely to the victims, and it places them in a implicitly passive role with regard to their fate. Burnt offerings, sacrifices, victims – these are the elements contained in the word Holocaust from its earlier appearances and its etymology. The perpetrators of the deed, the Nazis, as well as their willing collaborators, are not named. Nor is the real crime or the goal called by its proper name: the Holocaust must be understood as a paradigmatic case of genocide, the attempt to exterminate an entire people. I have met individuals who therefore insist that the only proper way to refer to the Holocaust is with the lengthy phrase “Nazi genocide of the Jewish people of Europe.”

These people are not wrong in a technical sense. But words, in my view, have a life of their own. Anti-Semitism is the wrong word for what it has come to refer to, since what we really mean is Judeophobia, not an opposition to Semitic peoples. Indeed, at the time of its invention, in the early 1880s in Europe, we find “anti-Semites” protesting that it is an inaccurate designation for what they actually advocate, and someone like Friedrich Nietzsche, who opposed anti-Semitism, referring to such individuals as “misojuden,” or haters of Jews in his notebooks. But anti-Semitism is understood today, however inaccurate it is as a designation, as a word referring to anti-Jewish sentiments, and similarly the Holocaust, no matter what we may think of its attributes, history, and implications, is commonly understood as a word denoting the murder of European Jewry in the final five years of World War II.

Today we are honoring a Center devoted to the education of the Holocaust and celebrating an exhibit co-sponsored by that Center and by our own Department of Art, Architecture, and Art History, that presents to us recent images commemorating the destruction of European Jewry during the Second World War, as well as the opening of a second exhibit presenting documentation from one particular village in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s. These exhibits should remind us that we bear a tremendous responsibility as educators, and that our task is not complete until we have opposed effectively the type of sentiments that could lead to such appalling outcomes.

I thank you for coming today and welcome you to the gallery on behalf of a campus committed to education toward a future that promotes understanding, diversity, and the end of all ethnic and cultural strife.