Clio’s Psyche Understanding the "Why" of Culture, Current Events, History, and Society Volume 6, Number 3 December, 1999 Holocaust Consciousness, Novick’s Thesis, Comparative Genocide, and Victimization How Hollywood Hid the Holocaust Reflections on Through Obfuscation and Denial Competitive Victimhood Melvin Kalfus David R. Beisel Psychohistory Forum Research Associate SUNY-Rockland Community College In the decade following the Second World Review of Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American War and our initial confrontation with the Holo- Life. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999. caust in all of its enormity, the motion picture in- ISBN 0395840090, 373 pp., $27. dustry continued to be dominated by “the Jews Peter Novick is a fine historian who has who invented Hollywood.” It was these Jews who written a fine, if flawed, study. In The Holocaust had created the myths that helped Americans cope in American Life he asks many of the right ques- with the enormous trauma of the Great Depression tions and offers some insightful answers. As I read (Continued on page 106) along, I found myself nodding in agreement at IN THIS ISSUE Life Is Beautiful Is Not a "Romantic Comedy"......... 114 Flora Hogman How Hollywood Hid the Holocaust: .............................89 “Vicitm Olympics”: The Collective Melvin Kalfus Psychology of Comparative Genocides................. 114 Ralph Seliger Reflections on Competitive Victimhood .................89 Review Essay by David R. Beisel Forgiveness and Transcendence............................ 116 Anie Kalayjian Response to David Beisel.....................................93 Peter Novick The Holocaust as Trope for "Managed" Social Change..................................... 119 The Memory of the Holocaust: Howard F. Stein A Psychological or Political Issue? .........................94 An Israeli Psychohistorian: Avner Falk ................ 122 Flora Hogman Paul H. Elovitz Holocaust Saturation in America.............................97 Deconstructing Hillary Clinton’s Stab at Psychohistory 126 Eva Fogelman H. John Rogers Response to Eva Fogelman.................................100 Male Violence towards Women ............................ 127 Book Review by Andrew Brink Peter Novick Knafo’s Schiele ..................................................... 128 From Denial to Remembrance...............................101 Book Review by Dan Dervin Ellen Mendel In Memoriam: Robert G. L. Waite ........................ 129 Personal Reflections on Coping & Trauma in Poland ... 103 Thomas Kohut and John M. Hyde In Memoriam: H. Stuart Hughes ........................... 131 Eating and Being in the Holocaust ........................105 Paul H. Elovitz Bulletin Board ....................................................... 132 Page 90 Clio’s Psyche December, 1999 many points while imagining the howls of outrage answer outside the boundaries of traditional social provoked by his several challenges to current or- and political categories. thodoxies. For example, Tony Judt -- an unusually Novick's chronological reconstruction balanced scholar and one of my favorite historians seems correct. No one talked or thought much -- found Novick's book to be "dense, carefully re- about the Holocaust in the 1940s and 1950s be- searched, and rather irritating" ("The Morbid cause, he says, Jews fought hard not to be identi- Truth," The New Republic, July 19 and 26, 1999). fied as victims; the immediate post-war years were The book stirred up my own thoughts on competi- an upbeat time; tales of horrific suffering were too tive victimhood. depressing to listen to, anyway; and West Germany Psychohistorians will find here some useful had become an ally in the Cold War (no repression observations. In an interesting chapter on Holo- here). Even the 1950s success of the book, stage caust consciousness in relation to the newly emerg- play, and film versions of The Diary of Anne Frank ing phenomenon of competitive victimhood (the made Anne into a universal, not Jewish, symbol. tendency among various non-Jewish groups to pro- Things changed, says Novick, with press coverage mote their own victimizations), he speaks of of the capture and trial of Adolf Eichman. In the "Holocaust envy." In a couple of places, he notes 1970s came viewings of the television mini-series, that the Holocaust has become a kind of "moral The Holocaust. These two events in particular and ideological Rorschach," "a screen on which were what brought the Holocaust forward into people [have] projected a variety of values and American consciousness. Moreover: "When a high anxieties." And he acknowledges that "in the spe- level of concern with the Holocaust became wide- cial case of Holocaust survivors, the succession of spread in American Jewry, it was, given the impor- trauma, repression, and return of the repressed of- tant role that Jews play in American media and ten seems plausible." That, however, is about it, opinion-making elites, not only natural, but virtu- psychologically. Novick soon becomes defended: ally inevitable that it would spread through the cul- "the available evidence," he says, "doesn't suggest ture at large." (We know what he means, but one that, overall, American Jews (let alone American may hear in these words disquieting echoes of anti- gentiles) were traumatized…."; he concludes that Semitic statements like "The Jews run Holly- historical explanations do not involve "conjuring wood.") up dubious" notions like a "social uncon- Novick finds this renewed emphasis on scious" (which he puts in quotes). Indeed, he casts Jewish consciousness the result of "survival anxi- doubt on the realities of repression itself while ety," fears that secularism, materialism, and out- seeming to allow for it. "(Even here … survivors group marriage in the late 20th century were erod- in the late 1940s frequently wanted to talk about ing Jewish identity. When Novick turns to other their Holocaust experience and were discouraged contributing factors, he broadens his analysis to from doing so.)" Passages like these suggest that include other recent social and intellectual trends, Novick has an inadequate understanding of trauma; mentioning the related growth of "the new ethnic- one guesses that he does not know, or accept, that ity" and "identity politics." Although he writes embedded in the repressed trauma is also the wish that the "roots of these many-sided phenomena to express it. And, like many writers on the Holo- were various and tangled -- too complex to be de- caust, he flees from any psychological explana- tailed here," he does offer some brief observations. tions. (See my "Resistance to Psychology in Holo- caust Scholarship," the Journal of Psychohistory, The threatened "loss of identity" in the U.S. -- Vol. 27, No. 2, Fall 1999, p. 124.) and not only among Jews -- produced a quest for "a new identity of experience[d] collective disadvan- Even though he is not a psychohistorian, tage." The new identity became a victim identity. Novick does ask important psychohistorical ques- Causes included new media images of blacks in the tions: Why here? Why now? Why has the Holo- post-civil rights era as "trapped in despair and caust, which "took place thousands of miles from hopelessness in the urban ghettos. A new focus on America's shores" and affected only "a small frac- spousal abuse and child abuse," the homeless who tion of one percent of the American population," flooded city streets, and "a strong emphasis in his- become a central part of late-20th-century Ameri- torical and literary works on the experience of los- can consciousness? This is a truly important issue, ers." yet one of the things which makes Novick's work so frustrating is that he is unable to provide any All of this helped the Holocaust move "to the center of American culture." In the 1970s it December, 1999 Clio’s Psyche Page 91 "came to seem an appropriate symbol of contem- On the whole, Novick's is a good effort at porary consciousness" because the assassinations traditional historical explanation. But when he of the 1960s, the hopes for a Great Society which gets, finally, to an emotion — to the passages "had all been dashed," and Vietnam and Watergate quoted above about abuses and "diminished expec- had raised doubts about America's idealism and tations" — that Americans became "depressed" what constituted the real bases of U.S. culture. In about, he has to leave it there, and moves quickly this environment, the Holocaust "became an aptly on to other issues. bleak emblem for an age of diminished expecta- Psychohistorians will want to know more. tions." But what Novick leaves out here is the cru- The emergence of a new widespread phenomenon cial role of Christian fundamentalists and the grow- which prizes the victim identity is a startling devel- ing apocalyptic expectations, studied by Strozier opment and is not "self-evident." To identify is to and others, that this is the End Time and that the describe and it is a description of a process, not a imminent Second Coming of Jesus is connected in cause of things; it cries out for deeper explanation. some way with the birth of the State of Israel. He misses the possibility that the consciousness of How to approach the emerging culture of many Christians turned to Jews and to recent Jew- competitive victimization psychohistorically? One ish history not merely because Christianity empha- way to mark the onset of a depression (I remember sizes "suffering and redemption." reading somewhere in the psychoanalytic litera- ture) is when an analysand