THE TWISTED ROAD TO AUSCHWITZ
By V. R. BERGHAHN; V. R. Berghahn teaches history at Brown University. The author of several books, he has written widely on modern German history.
Published: February 19, 1989
WHY DID THE HEAVENS NOT DARKEN? The ''Final Solution'' in History. By Arno J. Mayer. 492 pp. New York: Pantheon Books. $27.95.
Given the enormity of the crimes perpetrated by Nazi Germany during World War II, the title of Arno Mayer's new book raises a question that many people will have asked themselves as they remember, and try to comprehend, the Holocaust. Our task would be less difficult and agonizing, if the heavens had actually darkened. Since they did not, we must search for the roots of the ''final solution'' in man-made history. The task is to understand the structures and the dynamics of a now extinct regime which resorted to genocide; the task is also to investigate what murderous drives motivated the executioners and their accomplices. It is hard to imagine a more taxing research assignment, not least because reading those sickening files compiled by meticulous bureaucrats is emotionally so exhausting.
Notwithstanding these obstacles, scholars from many countries and academic backgrounds have greatly advanced our knowledge of the subject during the past 20 years or so. Most of them have done so from a deeply held conviction that the victims of Nazi crimes must never be forgotten and that there are profound lessons to be learned from their murder. Yet, however strong the sense of a common purpose, there have also been disagreements over the meaning of the evidence. Perhaps the most significant development was the collapse of the early postwar consensus that, with anti-Semitism forming the hard core of Nazism, there was a straight line of continuity between Hitler's verbal threats in the 1920's and 1930's and the gas chambers of the early 1940's. While not denying the importance of Nazi racism and Judeophobia, by the 1970's many scholars had become skeptical of this ''intentionalist'' interpretation of the Holocaust.
Their investigations had found that, far from being a monolithic Fuhrer state, the Nazi dictatorship had been racked by constant feuding among different governmental and party agencies. Behind the goose-stepping columns and the facade of order there reigned administrative chaos and anarchy. Instead of being a determined leader, Hitler was found to be vacillating, often merely reacting to changing situations, many of which were not of his own making. The implications of this ''functionalist'' view of the Third Reich's power structure should be clear: the factories of death were not envisaged from the start. Although Hitler had designated the Jews as Germany's greatest enemies, the regime's anti-Jewish policies remained disputed and incoherent even beyond 1939. The ''final solution'' grew out of wartime developments in the course of which preferred alternative routes had become blocked, thus finally leaving the field to the exterminationists.
Arno J. Mayer, the Dayton-Stockton Professor of European History at Princeton and author of several books, does not explicitly locate his weighty and uncompromising study within this debate. Though scholarly and drawing extensively on published sources and the secondary literature, ''Why Did the Heavens Not Darken'' has no footnotes and is addressed to a wider readership. But these readers may wish to have a few signposts in order to know where Mr. Mayer follows earlier interpretations and where he develops his own perspectives.
At a most general level, it might be said that this important book synthesizes recent research without being a conventional synthesis. Rather, it offers something much more thought-provoking and, at least to some, also upsetting. In fact, Mr. Mayer would probably feel misunderstood if the gauntlets he is throwing in different directions were simply overlooked by readers turning directly to the gruesome story he has to tell. To begin with, he challenges those ''avant-garde professional historians [ who ] continue to make a virtue of the fragmentation of their discipline and all but eliminate politics from it.''
For him, ''the mass murder of the Jews, more than any other single event, points up the importance of returning to the contextual study of short-term events. In the wake of Treblinka and Auschwitz it is difficult not to scorn Fernand Braudel's characterization of short-term events as mere 'dust.' Braudel went so far as to imply that short-term events were not worth studying since, unlike long- and medium-range events, they 'traverse history as flashes of light' destined instantly to 'turn to darkness, often to oblivion.' Pace Braudel and his epigones, I have tried not only to contemplate the circumstances in which millions of Jews - along with millions of non-Jews - were reduced to 'dust' in seconds of historical time, but also to recapture the evanescent 'light' of their torment to illuminate the historical landscape in which it occurred.''
The author is gentler with those who argue that ''only survivors who actually passed through the fiery ordeal of the killing sites, ghettos, and camps are in a position to speak to it.'' He openly admits that their reminiscences ''remain an essential source of information and insight for anyone pondering'' the Jewish catastrophe and that ''they also help to preserve and pass on its memory for later generations.'' But wherever ''the reflective and transparent remembrances of survivors'' have been woven ''in a collective prescriptive 'memory' unconducive to critical and contextual thinking about the Jewish calamity,'' Mr. Mayer wishes to reassert the primacy of the ''Muse of history'' who ''is sworn to certain ideas and rules for recording and interpreting'' the past: