Michael Marrus is a senior fellow of Massey College and the author of The Holocaust in History.
Tuesday's 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, where Hitler's minions murdered about a million Jews, marks a moment when what we call the Holocaust is slipping from the lived experience of individuals and their societies into history, taking its place along with other historical landmarks such as the French Revolution or the First World War.
During two postwar decades, things were very different, and historians had little to say about the Nazis' slaughter of European Jewry. Yet today, no one contemplating the 20th century can neglect it. Moralists and political theorists, sociologists and religious thinkers must, sooner or later, examine the Holocaust. As the late Tony Judt put it, "by the end of the 20th century, the centrality of the Holocaust in Western European identity and memory seemed secure." I would say the same for the rest of the industrialized world.
Most important, the effort to eliminate an entire people, defined as a major objective by a highly developed industrial society, can now be seen as a genuine possibility – not only for European civilization, but for humanity itself. In the past, peoples have constantly been cruel to one another and fantasized horribly about tormenting their enemies. But there were always limits – imposed by politics, technology, geography, military capacities, humane sensibilities or religious scruples. During the Second World War, mankind crossed a terrible threshold. Nazi Germany operated without historic limits until crushed by military force.
As a result, we have a new, horrifying sense of human capacities. Some who miraculously survived draw the bleakest conclusions. "Every day anew I lose my trust in the world," survivor Jean Améry wrote not long before his suicide. Others see the direst of warnings. Primo Levi's message from Auschwitz was: "It can happen, and it can happen everywhere." Mr. Levi too ended his life, but while he lived, he argued that reflecting on the Holocaust might prevent another catastrophe. Whatever one's view, the Holocaust has become a major reference point for our age, a new standard for state-sponsored wrongdoing.
As students of the Holocaust appreciate, describing it requires a voice appropriate for a new generation, including young people. Holocaust history is like all history in this respect; it must constantly be rewritten if it is not to lose the significance properly ascribed to it. Interpreters address a public that is constantly coming forward with new interests and new unfamiliarity. And as with all history, historians frequently disagree about how to comprehend the Holocaust. This conforms to the vigour of writing about it and the canons of historical explanation – one price of which is a degree of trivialization that seems to accompany any widely accepted discourse.
There is another explanation for disputation about the Holocaust, and this touches upon why we study history in the first place. Our world is in turmoil, and much of its present upheaval concerns Jews. But we should avoid the temptation to use the past, even a terrifying past, to provide easy explanations. As befits a vibrant field, there are lots of opinions about the murder of European Jewry, and an abundance of authorities. Survivors have special preoccupations, although these are less easily collapsed into a single analysis than is customarily assumed. Civic leaders may speak with one voice on public occasions, but there are plenty of dissenters, and not all agree with each other. Some adapt Holocaust history to fundraising or political mobilization; others are revolted by such efforts. Some promote "lessons of the Holocaust" to energize Jewish identity or advance political strategies, but others warn against defining oneself as a perpetual victim or using mass murder to validate partisan assessments. Non-Jews are all over the map as well. Some have had enough. Some dig deeper to uncover new levels of culpability. Some ethno-national communities worry about how understandings of the Holocaust might reflect upon themselves. There are also different clusters of lessons on the left and right. Media offerings vary, from the meretricious to the clumsily worded.
Without resolving these issues, this commemoration is a moment to reflect on humanity's terrible potential and the urgent duty to try to understand. To all of those concerned to see that such events might be prevented, I think we have something more durable than formulaic lessons, which are bound to change with the passage of time. Since the Holocaust has become history, discourse about it means writers around the world applying themselves to the task of understanding. There is no alternative, I conclude, but to keep at it. This is the way, in our culture, that historical memory is preserved. As to the "lessons," no one knows whether what I am promoting can enable societies to avoid the catastrophes of the past. All I can suggest is that we are better equipped to do so than if we abandoned such an effort. Studying the Holocaust deepens appreciation of human reality, and that, in a general sense, makes us more mature, wiser, more experienced observers of the human scene.