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ETTY HILLESUM's STANDARD of HUMANITY Brendan Purcell

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ETTY HILLESUM's STANDARD of HUMANITY Brendan Purcell FOUNDATIONS FOR A JUDGMENT OF THE HOLOCAUST: ETTY HILLESUM’S STANDARD OF HUMANITY Brendan Purcell (University College Dublin, Ireland) We are well aware of the relatively recent and somewhat inconclu- sive attempt at coming to terms with the National Socialist regime in Germany known as the Historikerstreit of the 1980s. Central to that his- toriographic quarrel was the approach of historian Ernst Nolte, who suggested, as Charles Meier notes, “that even though it was unique, the Final Solution was one terrible deed among others.”1 Joachim Fest defends Nolte in the light of other 20th century genocides,2 yet Nolte’s generalizing of the genocide of some six million Jews tended to lessen the responsibility of the perpetrators. On the other hand, a decade later, Daniel Goldhagen’s sweeping accusation of all Germans for ‘eliminative’ if not ‘exterminative’ anti-Semitism ran the risk not only of a counter-racism, but of the historical determinism of a whole peo- ple that paradoxically would excuse from personal guilt those National Socialist mass murderers who were German.3 Both approaches to the Holocaust—locating it in the apparently wider historical context, and Goldhagen’s unargued-for historical determinism—missed out on what is central to any adequate judg- ment of the Holocaust. Because to judge an action as objectively evil, we need a standard of goodness. I’ll suggest that Etty Hillesum had 1 Charles S. Meier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Iden- tity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 66. 2 Cf. Joachim Fest, “Encumbered Remembrance: The Controversy about the Incomparability of National Socialist Mass Crimes,” in: Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the controversy concerning the singularity of the Holo- caust, trs. James Knowlton & Truett Cates (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), 63–71. For a wide-ranging examination of German responses to the Holocaust, see Ernestine Schlant, The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust (Routledge: New York, 1999). 3 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holo- caust (London: Little, Brown & Co., 1996); cf. Geschichtswissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit: Der Streit um Daniel Goldhagen, eds. Johannes Heil & Rainer Erb (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1998). 126 brendan purcell arrived at that standard, and will try to articulate it as unfolding in three dimensions—that of the human person, of human society and of human history. In the cumulative light of all three dimensions, it seems that an adequate judgment of the Holocaust is possible. Since Etty Hillesum’s diaries and letters were never intended as sys- tematic articulations of such a judgment, I’ll invite a few classic phi- losophers and some modern writers into conversation with her within an interpretative framework of those three dimensions: personal, social and historic. This conversation between Hillesum and these others is offered as a help towards understanding her judgment on the persecu- tion of her people. 1. Towards a Judgment of the Holocaust: The Personal Dimension To help explore the core personal dimension underlying any judgment of human activity, we’ll touch on its cognitive, moral, and anthropo- logical aspects. Cognitive Diagnosis By cognitive we are not referring here to matters of information, but to what Aristotle—when he opened his Metaphysics with the program- matic “All men by nature desire to know”—had already marked out as defining what it is to be human. It is in this sense our orientation towards truth, or our sliding into the lie—accompanied by the more or less elaborate construction of what is been called a ‘second reality’ occluding the genuine truth of human existence—is essential to our personal being. Philosopher of history Eric Voegelin has a persuasive reading of that statement as “All men are by nature in quest of the ground [of their existence].”4 And in his commentary on Plato’s Repub- lic, he notes its diagnosis of the greatest corruption when the accent of reality shifts under the pressure of social power from truth to the lie.5 In Voegelin’s Hitler and the Germans lectures, he provides literary 4 Eric Voegelin, What is History? and Other Late Unpublished Writings, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 28, eds. Thomas Hollweck & Paul Caringella (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 99–110, esp. 104. 5 Eric Voegelin, Plato and Aristotle (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), 79..
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