Who Is a Holocaust Perpetrator?

©Copyright 2012 Or Rogovin Created in the Image? Holocaust Perpetrators in Israeli Fiction Or Rogovin A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2012 Reading Committee: Naomi Sokoloff, Chair Leroy Searle Adam Rovner Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Comparative Literature University of Washington Abstract Created in the Image? Holocaust Perpetrators in Israeli Fiction Or Rogovin Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Naomi Sokoloff Near Eastern Languages and Civilization This dissertation studies aesthetic, political and ethical dimensions of the representation of Holocaust perpetrators in Hebrew and Israeli fiction published since the mid-1940s. Drawing on recent scholarship by Holocaust historians, such as Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen, and on classical and post-classical theorists of narrative, such as E. M. Forster, Wayne Booth, and James Phelan, I examine modes, models, and possibilities applied in the treatment of Nazis, Nazi collaborators, and Germans in this fiction. My dissertation demonstrates that in Hebrew and Israeli fiction published before the mid-1970s, the dominant – but not exclusive – mode of characterization renders Holocaust perpetrators as relatively simple, stereotypical, and marginal characters. In contrast, as of the mid-1980s, the dominant mode of perpetrator characterization in Israeli fiction renders Nazis and Germans as significantly more complex, nuanced, and central characters, and the conventional boundary between them and their Jewish victims is blurred. These observations are based on a comprehensive survey of the major Hebrew and Israeli texts responding to the Holocaust, and more specifically on Ka-Tzetnik’s Salamandra as a case study of earlier writing, and on David Grossman’s See Under: Love and A. B. Yehoshua’s Mr. Mani as case studies of recent fiction. As I show in detail, these contrasting literary approaches towards the perpetrators correspond to developments in other venues of Israeli public discourse, such as political speeches, journalism, and textbooks. My discussion also explores various ethical commitments and implications involved in the aesthetic and mimetic choices this fiction makes in its treatment of evil, as well as evaluating accomplishments and future developments in Israeli literary construction of the perpetrators. Although focused on Israeli fiction, the principles of inquiry utilized in my dissertation may contribute to understanding how other literatures respond to the Holocaust. Furthermore, my study can promote our understanding not only of how Israel perceives the Holocaust, but also how it perceives itself. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………………………………………………1 History, Aesthetics, and Ethics in the Literary Representation of Holocaust Perpetrators…………………………….………………….………………………....10 Holocaust Perpetrators in Israeli Fiction, mid-1940s-mid-1970s……………………….49 Holocaust Perpetrators in Israeli Fiction, 1986 Onwards………………………….……92 Ka-Tzetnik’s Salamandra……………………………………………………………....148 David Grossman’s See Under: Love and A. B. Yehoshua’s Mr. Mani……………...…190 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...………245 Notes…………………………………………………………………………………....261 Works Cited…………......……………………………………………………………...270 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the scholars and institutional units at the University of Washington, which supported me throughout this project: to the Graduate School, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the Samuel & Althea Stroum Jewish Studies Program, for their extended long-term support; to Prof. Yomi Braester and Prof. Barbara Henry, for their involvement in earlier stages of the project; to Prof. Marshall Brown for his illuminating comments on my research proposal, as well as for the profound impact he made over the years on my work in the field of literature. I am grateful to my doctoral committee: to Prof. Paul Burstein who served as a Graduate School Representative, and to Prof. Adam Rovner, who agreed to join the committee in time of need, and commented critically and insightfully on this dissertation. It is a pleasure to thank two committee members, not only for their contribution to my dissertation project, but also for their personal, intellectual, and professional friendship. Prof. Leroy Searle introduced me to the beauty and wisdom of American literature, and over endless discussions, which probably amounted to months, insistently challenged my critical, creative, and philosophical thinking. Finally, I would like to express my deep appreciation and gratitude to Prof. Naomi Sokoloff, who has been my mentor since my earliest days at the UW. Without her unshakable confidence in my success, her relentless efforts in promoting my study, and her rigorous criticism of my work, I would not be the scholar I am today. ii 1 Introduction No no: they definitely were human beings: uniforms, boots. How to explain? They were created in the image. (Dan Pagis, “Testimony”) Bitterly, with agonizing irony, the Hebrew poet Dan Pagis utilizes the Biblical verse “God created man in his image” (Gen. 1:27) to reply to an implied argument, which expresses a prevalent conception: that the Nazis were monsters and demons, rather than humans, and as inhuman they committed the genocide against European Jewry, which came to be called the Holocaust. Classifying Nazis as exceptions to humanity, or, at least, classifying Germans as nationally distinct in a way that enabled their violence in the Holocaust, was a popular perspective in the aftermath of WWII. Under the traumatic impact of the horrors conducted in the camps and ghettos, with the growing Jewish but also wider public sense of guilt, rage, and helplessness, excluding the Holocaust from history and the Nazis or even the entire German people from humanity seemed reasonable. It is also somewhat comforting to think that mass-murderers, such as Eichmann or Hitler, are fundamentally of a different make-up, of another – distorted – psychology, if not a different species. Positioning such a rift between victims and victimizers was also a way to maintain confidence in the human race, while knowing what one group of people did to another only a few years earlier. Considering this perception of the Holocaust and its perpetrators, which manifested (and continues to manifest) itself in various vehicles of cultural expression, the recent shift in the shaping of Holocaust memory is remarkable. In the decades following the war, studies of 2 Holocaust perpetrators concentrated mostly on leading Nazi figures and on the Nazi ideological and institutional mechanisms. Among the dominant texts published between the forties and sixties, one finds, for example, various psychological studies of high ranking Nazis and the Nazi dictatorship as a whole by Gustave Mark Gilbert, who served as a psychologist for the Nuremberg prisoners; Raul Hilberg’s monumental The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), which portrays the destruction and its mechanism on a very large scale; and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). In the past three decades, there has been a stronger focus on the victimizers who are less central, often anonymous, individuals and collectives. Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men (1993) and Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) were both especially popular studies of one relatively unknown police battalion. Films, such as Schindler’s List (1993) and Valkyrie (2008) and novels, such as Bernhard Schlink's The Reader (1995), and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (2006), present the same fascination with the mostly untold story of anonymous individuals and groups in the Nazi service. “What is evil?” and “what makes a person a Nazi war criminal?” are two of these texts’ central underlying questions, made more relevant than ever by the atrocities of our own time, from the Balkans to Rwanda. Within this cultural development, which incorporates the Nazi into the human realm, or, in any case, complicates the conventional opposition between victims and victimizers of the Holocaust, literature finds itself in a position of both privilege and duty because of its imaginative ability to explore the private and inner world of the individual. It is the dialogue of perspectives and voices, as Mikhail Bakhtin argues, which defines the novel, and Dorrit Cohn finds the presentation of mind the distinctive quality of 3 fiction. While perceiving perpetrators as inhuman tends to confine their literary embodiment to flat and marginal characters, usually limited to their historical role in the Nazi death machine, their inclusion within the human realm finds a strong mimetic manifestation in the embodiment of perpetrators as literary individuals, central characters that may be as complex as their victims. William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (1979), David Grossman’s See Under: Love (1986), Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones are dominant examples of novels that aim to explore the complex inner life of perpetrator characters. However, the unique privilege of a fiction writer to imagine with detail where a sociologist will only surmise and a historian can say very little bears ethical responsibility. Plato was the first to warn against the influence of mimesis, but Wayne Booth’s fundamental observation is more precise in this context. “Inside views,” he argues in The Rhetoric of Fiction, “can build sympathy” and force us to see “the human worth of

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