Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Of course, Lanzmann is not alone in his impulse to make post-Holocaust commandments. Emil Fackenheim offered one: Thou shalt not grant Hitler any posthumous victories. But Fackenheim has the humility not to insist that after his book further discussion is forbidden, nor has he forbidden actual survivors from raising questions about their experiences, as Lanzmann did when he used his celebrity power to silence Auschwitz survivor Dr. Louis Micheels in a humiliating public attack.

  It was in preparation for a scheduled interview with Lanzmann in Paris that I came upon some disturbing transcripts and memoirs of that episode, which occurred on the night of April 11, 1990, at Yale’s Becton Engineering Laboratory auditorium before an audience of one to two hundred academics and psychoanalysts. After immersing myself in it, I found myself forced to ask the forbidden “why” about Lanzmann: What could possibly explain his behavior that evening? Before describing my tense encounter with the sage in Paris, some further background is appropriate.

  To begin with, Lanzmann was a latecomer to Jewish identity. According to the laudatory introduction at Yale by his admiring acolyte, “Claude Lanzmann was born in Paris . . . to a Jewish family that had cut its ties with the Jewish world. During the Second World War he was a student resistance leader in France organizing, at the age of seventeen, his fellow high school students as a resistance group against the Nazis.”

  There is something of the zeal of the late convert in his behavior. One observer of the crusades Lanzmann and his circle have pursued so relentlessly against those who violate the commandment against asking Why suggested that the “late-conversion phenomenon” might be responsible for the fanaticism of the cult surrounding him as well: “Many of them are Lacanian psychoanalysts who have lionized Lanzmann, having themselves only come to Jewish identification through Shoah.” Again, not through the Shoah but through Lanzmann’s film about it.

  One source of the fanaticism on the question is the combative style of the engagé French intellectual. Lanzmann rose in that world by serving first as private secretary to Jean-Paul Sartre and then later as lover of Sartre’s onetime great love Simone de Beauvoir, who anointed him editor of Les temps modernes, a position equivalent to that of pope of postexistentialist, poststructuralist Parisian intellectuals, one that encouraged the issuance of intellectual papal bulls and proscriptions.

  The style calls for a kind of moralizing, even criminalizing rhetoric of ethical and aesthetic matters. My favorite example of Lanzmann’s edicts in this respect is his reply to a questioner at a seminar at Yale about the “crime” of certain camera angles. “I wanted to show the village of Chelmno, and the cameraman told me there is only one way: by helicopter. I said, ‘Never. There were no helicopters for the Jews when they were locked in the church or in the castle.’ This would have been a crime—a moral and artistic crime.”

  Maybe yes, maybe no. One wonders if the dead of Chelmno would be as exercised as Lanzmann on this helicopter-shots issue or as appreciative as his self-congratulatory tone suggests they should be.

  Still, the zeal of the convert and the arrogance of the Parisian intellectual are not sufficient to explain Lanzmann’s rage, the violence of his attack on the idea of explanation. Certainly, the eleven-year ordeal of making Shoah, of living with the horror as he did, helps make the passion he brings to these questions understandable. Once, in the course of researching a story on the bitter controversies over the origin and meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls—and the potentially momentous implications their decipherment might have for both Judaism and Christianity—a prominent Scrolls scholar, the head of the Prince ton Theological Seminary Dead Sea Scrolls publication project, began ticking off for me a casualty list of some of the most brilliant of the Scrolls scholars, men who had been driven to madness, drink, religious conversion, suicide, and heretical visions by the long years they’d spent trying to piece together some meaning from the hellish jigsaw puzzle of the fragmentary scraps of scrolls that remained to be linked up. The attempt to find some ultimate Lost Revelation, perhaps the very fingerprints of God in these tattered scraps of ancient parchment, drove all too many over the edge. It’s surprising it hasn’t happened more often among those like Lanzmann trying to piece together the truth about the nature of ultimate evil from the fragmentary scraps of evidence that are our only clues.

  But what’s surprising about Lanzmann’s post-Shoah crusade is not the passion of his own views but the violence of his attack against views of others. It’s not enough to refute their logic or question their assumptions; they must be hounded into silence or oblivion, branded as guilty of virtual complicity in the Holocaust. Consider the way Lanzmann virtually branded Rudolph Binion of Brandeis, the son of a Jewish mother, as “a Revisionist”—a Holocaust-denying Nazi sympathizer. As editor of Les temps modernes, it wasn’t enough for Lanzmann to publish an acolyte’s vituperative assault on Binion’s book Hitler Among the Germans, an attack that nearly caused cancellation of a planned French edition of the book. But Lanzmann could not resist putting a blood-red banner across the otherwise sedate cover of that issue for a promotional blurb:

  RUDOLF BINION AND ADOLF HITLER: PSYCHOHISTORY AS FIG LEAF FOR REVISIONISM?

  Binion believes the misspelling of his first name as “Rudolf” rather than “Rudolph” was a sly covert effort to make it conform visually with Adolf. Whatever the case, the overt content of the promotional blurb is an assault in itself: In asking whether Binion’s Hitler explanation is a “fig leaf for Revisionism,” Lanzmann comes very close to branding Binion himself as a Revisionist, the clear implication being that his work is a deliberate attempt not merely to explain but to exonerate Hitler. Indeed, Lanzmann’s belief is that all explanation is, de facto, exoneration; but he can’t resist the imputation that in Binion’s case the explainer’s thinly veiled goal is the same as that of neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers. Binion told me he took Lanzmann to court in France for the Revisionist slur, but that after winning a preliminary judgment that he was entitled to a full-scale trial he had to drop the suit because he couldn’t afford to pursue it on his Brandeis professor’s salary.

  “‘Revisionist’ is a strong word to use,” I said to Lanzmann in the course of our encounter in his Paris office.

  “I don’t know if it’s a strong word,” he said, “but the ruling enterprise of Binion is obscene.”

  Why obscene?

  “Because he believes you can explain it.”

  Obscenity: it is the epithet of choice for Lanzmann and his devotees when attacking those who ask the question Why. “Binion doesn’t shrink from formulating the question . . . ‘Why did they kill the Jews,’” writes Sabine Prokhoris, the author of the article heralded by the “fig leaf for Revisionism” blurb. “The obscenity of this question is stressed by Claude Lanzmann,” she says, as if that settles the matter all by itself.

  But obscenity only begins to limn the rhetoric of abuse that the Lanzmannites heap on those such as Binion who ask the question Why. Consider this partial catalogue of insults that Prokhoris heaps on Binion and his work:

  • “confounding stupidity”

  • “epistemological monster”

  • “bizarre”

  • “despicable”

  • “active ignorance”

  • “destruction of thought”

  • “scandalous”

  • “perversity”

  • “de facto justification of the Holocaust”

  • “his [Binion’s] hero, Hitler”

  • “annihilated history”

  • “destroyed psychology”

  • “fascist discourse”

  • “poisonous imposture”

  This catalogue of abuse, used to support the familiar Lanzmann argument that to attempt to explain Hitler psychologically is to empathize and excuse him, builds to a final vicious thrust. Binion is guilty, Prokhoris claims, of using explicatory “method as final solution,” a charge that goes beyond calling Binion revisionist or an apologist for Hitler; it is tantamount
to identifying Binion as Hitler: both of them executors of a horrific Final Solution, with Binion as what Prokhoris calls, in a final epithet, a “paper Eichmann.”

  And so I shouldn’t have been surprised, I suppose, when it turned out that in person Lanzmann proved as combative and intemperate on the subject as the buzz-saw prose he and his disciples use to assault those who dare to ask Why.

  It was an ill-starred encounter in several respects, beginning with what in retrospect seems like a symbolic misunderstanding over “the codes.” Lanzmann’s assistant had written me, in reply to my request for an interview, suggesting that I contact Lanzmann when I reached Paris. After several days of missed connections, Lanzmann instructed me to meet him in his office at 7 P.M. one evening. But when I arrived there, a little early, I found a darkened building. There were no names identifying the two dozen or so buttons on the intercom, and Lanzmann had not given me an apartment number. The outer door was locked. There was a numbered and lettered keypad beneath the buzzers that, I later learned, was used to punch in the access code to the building lobby.

  I stared up at the unlit windows above me and, wondering if I’d gotten the address wrong, then repaired to a nearby brasserie to call Lanzmann. I reached only an answering machine, left a message about my problem, and returned to the building to see if Lanzmann might have been waiting downstairs to let me in, thereby missing my call. Still no sign of life, much less of Lanzmann. I returned to the brasserie to call, reached the answering machine again, repeated the fruitless trek several times for a full half hour, until finally I left a despairing message on Lanzmann’s machine apologizing for any misunderstanding and telling him I was returning to my hotel, a good distance away in another district. Trudging unhappily through the streets in search of a taxi, I ducked into a laundromat and decided to give Lanzmann one more call.

  This time, Lanzmann answered, but in a belligerent, annoyed voice asked me where I’d been, insisted he’d been waiting for me. I said I’d been waiting outside the building but didn’t know how to get in.

  “But I gave you the codes,” he said, meaning the access code.

  “No,” I said truthfully. “You didn’t give me the codes.”

  “I gave you the codes,” he insisted.

  When I asked him if I could come up and talk to him anyway, he said no, now it was too late.

  But, I pleaded, I’d come all the way to Paris just to see him.

  Finally, he relented, gave me the codes and the apartment number, and I headed back.

  Later, after the interview had concluded and I had a chance to wonder about what went wrong, something odd about Lanzmann’s version of the misunderstanding occurred to me. If he’d been waiting there for me, why hadn’t he picked up the phone during the repeated calls I’d made over a half-hour period when I reached only his answering machine? And why did he only pick up the phone and answer after I’d left a message that I was leaving the district and returning to my hotel?

  It’s a minor thing. I’ve done it myself to avoid encounters. And it’s possible that he really did think that he gave me the codes, but I found the episode puzzling, particularly in light of what seemed like a continuing hostility when I finally arrived. Out of breath and a bit flustered, I sat in one of the chairs across from Lanzmann’s desk, put my overcoat on an adjacent chair, and, trying to make the most of the time remaining, hastily slotted a cassette into my tape recorder. Before I could begin, Lanzmann stopped me and ordered me to remove the overcoat from the chair and take it out of sight into another room.

  I complied without asking the forbidden why. Perhaps Lanzmann was trying to establish an atmosphere of “Here There Is No Why,” his primal commandment against explanation. Later, I came to think of our exchange about the codes as emblematic of Lanzmann’s commanding voice-of-Sinai attitude toward all other discourse on the Holocaust: I gave you the codes, in Shoah. After the giving of the codes, all other attempts to gain access to the mystery are fruitless at best, obscene at worst.

  And to ask why such attempts must be called obscene, as I did that evening, is to compound the obscenity: I suspect that in addition to the contretemps over the codes, my encounter with Lanzmann might have gotten off on the wrong foot because my first question involved the use of the word “obscenity” and veered directly into an uneasy discussion of that evening in 1990 when Lanzmann tried to silence the Auschwitz survivor.

  “You have spoken of the obscenity of understanding—” I began.

  “No, no, I never said this,” Lanzmann barked at me. “Forget that quote.”

  I was a bit taken aback by this, but fortunately I had brought with me the account of that “Evening with Claude Lanzmann” entitled “The Obscenity of Understanding,” from American Imago, the quarterly of the Association for Applied Psychoanalysis. I read to Lanzmann a passage from his spoken remarks that night.

  “You said, ‘There are some pictures of Hitler as a baby too, aren’t there? I think that there is even a book written by a psychoanalyst about Hitler’s childhood [Alice Miller’s book, he later told me], an attempt at explanation which is for me obscenity as such.’”

  “Where did I say this?” Lanzmann demanded.

  I showed him the photocopied pages. “This is called ‘An Evening with Claude Lanzmann,’ it’s entitled ‘The Obscenity of Understanding.’”

  “Show me this,” he ordered me, “where did it appear?”

  “In this publication, American Imago,” I said, handing him the photocopied sheets.

  At this point, two minutes after it had begun, Lanzmann tried to end the interview. “Explain to me,” he said, using the forbidden word, “what are you doing exactly?”

  I repeated to him what I’d written in my original letter to him that had resulted in the invitation to meet with him in Paris: that I was writing a book that would focus in part on the debate over the explicability of Hitler, a debate I first became interested in through my conversations in Jerusalem with Yehuda Bauer and Emil Fackenheim. “I thought it was an interesting debate about whether explanation is possible or explanation is perhaps wrong. That’s why I was interested in your remarks—”

  “You don’t speak French,” he said, interrupting me.

  “No.”

  “You should. You should learn. I have written about this.”

  After agreeing with him that indeed I should, I explained that my book involved conversations with people in the controversy about questions they might not have addressed in written works.

  At this point, he again tried to end the interview, claiming that he did not have time—because of my mistake about the codes, of course—to address this long and difficult matter, but finally he relented and began to respond to my original question about his characterization of the very attempt to explain Hitler as obscene.

  He began by saying something surprising and paradoxical, something I hadn’t seen, read, or heard him say before on the question. “I don’t say that the Holocaust is an enigma,” he told me. “I don’t say this. I do not think so. It is an historical event which took place. It is not an event which took place out of history. In a way, it is a product of the whole story of the Western world since the very beginning.”

  Before going further, it’s important to note that Lanzmann has made two important and perhaps contradictory points. First, he’d conceded that he has called the question Why an obscenity. And second, he had nonetheless offered a kind of answer to the forbidden question, offered an implicit explanation: Hitler and the Holocaust are “a product of the whole story of the Western world,” which has engendered the six million murders. Implicit therein is the assumption that there is something built into the very mode of thought and feeling, into the institutions, language, the deep structure of Western civilization that inevitably produced the Holocaust, an event described specifically as a “product.” Implicit as well is the assumption that Hitler himself is not an agent so much as a product. The formal cause of the mass murder is not the mind or will of Adolf
Hitler but the mentality of Western culture.

  Except that Lanzmann is somewhat inconsistent: Once having declared that it’s not an enigma, that it can be explained as a product of history, he then turns around and reiterates to me his belief that the Why of explanation is obscene.

  “You can take all the reasons, all the fields of explanation, whether it is psychoanalytic explanation, an opposition between the German spirit, the German geist and the Jewish one, Hitler’s childhood, and so on. You can take the unemployment in Germany, the economic crisis, whatever you want. You can take all of these fields of explanation. And every field can be true, and all the fields together can be true. But these are conditions. Even if they are necessary, they are not sufficient. A beautiful morning you have to start to kill, to start to kill massively. And I said that there is a gap between all the fields of explanation and the actual killing. You cannot give birth—in French we say engendre—you cannot generate such an evil. And if you start to explain and to answer the question of Why you are led, whether you want it or not, to justification. The question as such shows its own obscenity: Why are the Jews being killed? Because there is no answer to the question of why.” Because, in other words, any answer begins inevitably to legitimize, to make “understandable” that process.

  Lanzmann leaps from the epistemological inadequacy of explanation to condemning the moral inadequacy of those who try to explain, assuming accusatorially that they’re acting in bad faith, that in attempting to explain they intend to excuse.

  One of Lanzmann’s critics in France, an expatriate American psychoanalyst named Sean Wilder, who had observed the havoc Lanzmann and his acolytes have wrought over this issue—their assault on a respected Parisian psychoanalytic institute that had the temerity to invite Binion to speak resulted in the implosion and dissolution of the Institute over the question—offered a commonsense critique of Lanzmann’s position: “I think the question of ‘why’ is a fundamental human function. For Christ’s sake, what do they think people are going to do? You put food in somebody’s mouth, and if he chews and swallows it, he is going to digest it. The question ‘why’ is the mental or intellectual equivalent to the process of digesting. You get information, and unless you are a bloody idiot you work on it, and one of the fundamental intellectual processes is this question Why. I think it is one of the nobler acquisitions of the human mind and should be considered as such.”