Fackenheim’s notion of radical evil differs in that it is not contingent on, not the result of, a struggle within the human soul, but the kind of evil “that can never be overcome,” evil that is “transcendent, unsurpassable, absolute,” as one commentator on Fackenheim describes it, evil that cannot be explained away, even atoned for, but can only be “resisted” by its victims, however hopelessly.
One problem with Fackenheim’s argument—the problem with others who, like him, strenuously argue that the evil of Auschwitz is absolutely unique, never before committed or experienced—is that it can seem to issue from a kind of inverse narcissism: My evil, the evil I suffered from, is worse than your evil, worse than his evil, any other evil. This can lead to tortuous ratiocination devoted to proving that, for instance, the Armenian genocide falls short or the Stalin-inflicted famine and slaughter is less worthy of uniqueness—a preoccupation with comparative demonology that divides rather than unites victims of evil—and can absolve the actual perpetrators of responsibility. “The insistence on the Holocaust’s uniqueness and inexplicability,” Elizabeth Domansky wrote of this position in the journal History and Memory, “allowed the West Germans to see the Holocaust as something that could not be explained even in the context of the Third Reich. The Holocaust thus [is] transferred to the realm of the a-historical and [thus] renders the question of responsibility obsolete.”
Still, Fackenheim’s insistence on the absoluteness of Hitler’s evil defines one pole of the debate; it helps explain Fackenheim’s resistance to the very idea of explanation. Explanation, in Fackenheim’s view, if not evil itself, nonetheless can verge on ameliorating, excusing, even colluding with evil.
Which brings us to Fackenheim’s point of attack on the Hitler-explanation enterprise: the “Jewish blood” crux. That was the next firecracker this contentious philosopher threw across my path that afternoon in Jerusalem: his peculiar take on this disturbing strain of Hitler lore—the attempt to explain Hitler’s hatred of Jews as a form of self-hatred, as a product of the maddening doubt he had about his own “racial identity.”
While more sophisticated versions of this long-standing but still outré and disturbing notion have been gathering adherents since the seventies—particularly among psychoanalytically oriented Hitler explainers—I was surprised to find Fackenheim not resisting but almost embracing it as an explanation. Until I saw how he turned it into the spear point of his attack on explanation itself.
The subject arose when I asked him about Milton Himmelfarb, and he responded with a story about a playmate of Heydrich.
“What is your view of the statement, ‘No Hitler, No Holocaust?’” I asked him, in regard to Himmelfarb’s insistence that Hitler’s personal will alone, rather than abstract historical forces, was the necessary if not sufficient factor in making the Holocaust happen.
“Is that Milton Himmelfarb? Yeah, I think he’s probably quite right. Although I recently wrote there might have been one exception—Heydrich could have done it. And that strikes very close to home. I came from the German town of Halle, and when I had to write my memoirs, which aren’t complete yet, I entitled the first section about Halle ‘From George Frideric Handel to Heydrich.’ And did you know that for three weeks my mother lived under the same roof where Heydrich played?”
“Really?”
“Because when Kristallnacht happened and I was at school, my brother and my father were [taken] away, my mother was all alone, our best friends asked her to move in with them, the Levines—their daughter Ilse was just visiting me—well, Kurt Levine was the only Jew in the whole city who wasn’t taken. Because he was protected by his neighbor Heydrich. So I just asked Ilse Levine recently, ‘Did you know Heydrich when you were younger?’ She said, ‘Oh, sure, he came to our house all the time. When his sister was in trouble with her parents, we used to look after her.’
“And it shocks you absolutely. Because Heydrich was reputed to be the only man who could have followed Hitler. Incidentally, about Heydrich, they also say that he had a Jewish ancestor.”
More than incidentally: Many accounts of the life of Reinhard Heydrich, “the evil young god of death,” portray him as a kind of double doppelgänger of Hitler. He was a twin in the fanatical single-mindedness of his drive to exterminate the Jews—he was, after all, the man to whom Hitler entrusted the planning and execution of the Final Solution (until Heydrich’s assassination by Czech partisans in 1942). But, also like Hitler, Heydrich was rumored to have had a special Jewish doppelgänger haunting him: a shadowy alleged Jewish ancestor, rumors of whose existence gave rise to the widespread reports that Heydrich felt personally plagued by a putative Hebraic shadow.
To some, then, Heydrich was not only a potential successor to Hitler, he might be a possible explanation—in the sense that his struggle with this Jewish-blood shadow might be a clue to a similar dynamic in Hitler’s psyche. Rumors about “Jewish blood” pursued Heydrich from Halle to the Naval Academy at Kiel, where fellow midshipmen are reported to have taunted him as “Izzy Süss” (Süss being a derisive surname of caricatured Jews), followed him even into the SS, when Himmler put him in command of its intelligence division, the SD, in 1932, a post that would later lead to his being given command of the Gestapo in 1934.
Heinz Höhne, the historian of the SS, cites a communication from a local Gauleiter (regional party leader) in Halle who wrote to party headquarters in 1932: “It has come to my ears that in the Reich Leadership, there is a member named Heydrich. . . . There are grounds for suspecting that Bruno Heydrich of Halle, said to be the father, is a Jew.”
Höhne reports that although no solid evidence was found in a subsequent investigation, “the higher Reinhard Heydrich . . . climbed on the National-Socialist ladder, the more persistent became the rumour that [he] . . . was of Jewish origin.”
In a memoir, a League of Nations official who came to know Heydrich reported a probably apocryphal but nonetheless representative story: Heydrich had become so tormented by the fear of the “Jew within” that one night, in a drunken fit, he stared into a mirror, thought he actually glimpsed the shadowy Jew within somehow emerge in his reflection, and promptly fired his pistol into the mirror image, hoping to extinguish it. Unable to extinguish the doubt about a Jew within, the logic of this theory goes, Heydrich had to prove his purity by engineering the extermination of the Jews of Europe.
One reputed source of this theory was none other than Heydrich’s boss Himmler. Fackenheim cites Himmler’s belief that Heydrich’s devotion to the Final Solution came from the “fact” that he had “overcome the Jew in himself . . . and had swung over to the other side. He was convinced that the Jewish elements in his blood were damnable; he hated the blood which played him so false. The Führer could really have picked no better man than Heydrich for the campaign against the Jews.”
Despite the fact that these “thoughts” of Himmler come to us from his only-sometimes-reliable confidant, the masseur Felix Kersten, Fackenheim believes their essential truth. “You know Ilse said this, too,” he told me, referring to Ilse Levine, whose home was spared Kristallnacht because the young Heydrich had frolicked there as a child. “She thinks [the Jewish blood rumor] is true. She knew, of course, Heydrich’s father very well. He looked very Jewish and he ran a conservatory of music.”
In fact, both Heydrich and his father were highly accomplished violinists, but according to my own analysis of the multiple, overlapping, and conflicting accounts of the Heydrich Jewish-blood question, the truth might be more absurd and ironic than even the presence of “actual” Jewish blood in this architect of the Final Solution.
It seems Bruno Heydrich had a stepfather who, although impeccably Aryan, bore the stereotypically Jewish surname Süss. A perhaps malicious music-world rival, compiling an entry for Bruno in a directory of Germany’s musical elite, went out of his way to make it appear that Bruno’s last name was Süss, as it apparently had been for a time when growing up in his stepfather’s house (much as Hitler’s fat
her’s surname for the first forty years of his life was Schicklgruber, after his unmarried mother’s surname; Adolf’s never was).
And it also seems that Bruno’s strategy for deflecting the whispers about his heritage proved to be a self-defeating one. He was known to do a mean comic Yiddish accent at parties, perhaps to demonstrate he had nothing to fear or hide. If so, this penchant of his for playacting the Jew backfired: The more he did his Jewish impressions, the more he fostered the impression he really was a Jew.
The irony is that Reinhard, Bruno’s son, fit every criterion Nazi “racial science” had established for pure Nordic appearance but was shadowed, plagued (perhaps even turned into a mass murderer) by a rumor based on his father’s comic impressions. Of course, “irony” is an inadequate term for the idea that such horror could grow from such origins. In discussing this and the idea that a similar spectral struggle with a phantom Jew underlay Hitler’s obsessive hatred, we have gone beyond conventional irony. We are really in Kafka territory again.
Fackenheim’s take (his double take, it might be called) on the Jewish-blood explanation of Hitler and Heydrich is a concession to Kafka as description but a resistance to Kafka as explanation.
Fackenheim first addressed the question in his 1982 work To Mend the World, where he took up Robert Waite’s formulation of the Jewish-blood theory. Waite’s thesis (Hitler needed to exterminate the Jews to exterminate his doubts about a Jew within himself) “supplies solutions of sorts to problems which otherwise would seem totally intractable,” Fackenheim writes. “Why did Hitler attack Russia, thereby wilfully creating the long-dreaded, unnecessary two-front war? Why did the plan to ‘remove’ the Jews turn into a vast system of murder, more important than victory . . . To such questions psycho history gives more plausible answers than either psychology without history or history without psychology.”
Having thus set up Waite’s theory as the best of all possible explanations, Fackenheim then subverts any complacency about its having really “explained” Hitler. “It gives its answers, however, only at the price of raising still more intractable questions.” Quoting Herbert Luethy’s 1954 Commentary essay, he asks, “How shall one ‘reconcile the gravity, the catastrophic magnitude of the event with the vulgar mediocrity of the individual who initiated them?’”
These questions, Fackenheim goes on to declare, “assume a dimension of utter absurdity. . . . Were six million actual ‘non-Aryans’ and many additional honorary ones butchered and gassed because the Führer hated his father and thought of him as a half-Jew?”
The disproportion between absurd cause and catastrophic effect is unbearable: Waite’s thesis, then, is defective precisely because it pretends to the possibility of plausibility: “The more plausible psychohistory becomes the more it points to an ultimate absurdity.” Fackenheim writes, “The mystery remains.”
“Utter absurdity,” “ultimate absurdity”—the abyss between the horror of the tragedy and the near-comic absurdity of the explanation—in other words, the illogic of the Kafkaesque, the rationale of irrationalism. Fackenheim both accepts and resists the Kafkaesque as Hitler explanation. The absurdity might be true, but it is not enough. Fackenheim dismisses the best of Hitler explanations in the same way Theseus dismisses the absurd clowning of the Mechanicals’ play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “The best in this kind are but shadows”—all actors are bad actors if they aspire to give us the “truth” of the world; similarly, all explanations are bad explanations if they aspire to give us the truth of Hitler.
Any explanation, however plausible in human terms, that pretends to proceed logically from comically finite human psychological sources to the tragic infinitude of the horror of the camps is prima facie absurd, Fackenheim seems to be saying. Fackenheim’s almost visceral repugnance at the absurdity of explanation is a rejection of Kafka as the “author” of history, of the idea of God as Kafka. Still, Fackenheim recognizes that his unwillingness to see God as Kafka opens the way to the even more unthinkable notion Yehuda Bauer had broached: God as Satan.
“The mystery remains,” Fackenheim says. The usual suspects have been rounded up and found wanting. The unusual suspects—a spectral Jew here, a medical mesmerist or a billy goat there—have been arraigned and dismissed for lack of evidence, leaving only the prime suspect standing, the Prime Mover, God himself.
Fackenheim’s courage lies in following the logic of his attack on explanation, in following the logic of monotheism to frame an indictment of the God of monotheists. The refusal of God to speak in his own defense, his refusal to take the stand, so to speak, at his own trial, cannot be ignored by those who profess to believe in or worship him, Fackenheim insists. Caution rather than courage, however, is evident in how Fackenheim structures what might be called the jury-deliberation process in the trial of God.
Elie Wiesel is famous for a stunning image of what might be called the capital punishment of God. For having described in Night the horrific spectacle of a young boy hung from the gallows by the death-camp guards. And for having cried out that the hanged boy dying in the noose was, for him, God—God dying to him. (In a Yom Kippur 1997 essay, Wiesel wrote that, after half a century, he wanted to “make up” with the God he abandoned on the gallows, although “Auschwitz must and will forever remain a question mark” that no “theological answers” have yet explained.)
Fackenheim wants to get God down from those gallows. His vision of a God who was not a “commanding” presence in the death camps but a silent one is somewhat more complex than Yehuda Bauer had it when he caricatured it as “a God who is present and cries with you.” Rather, Fackenheim recuperates God’s presence in the acts of heroism, endurance, love, and faith the inmates of the camps manifested in the face of radical evil. He calls this the commanding voice of Auschwitz, the voice that forbids posthumous victories to Hitler.
But Fackenheim himself does not argue that this notion of a silent presence resolves the mystery of God’s shift to silence when those who prayed to him were most massively in peril. It’s just that the alternative is, to Fackenheim, intolerable. Intolerable not so much because it would mean acceding to Bauer’s syllogism in which God is either Satan or nebbish, but because that accession, that dismissal or rejection of God by Jews, will have, in effect, been dictated by Adolf Hitler. Giving Hitler, in death, the ultimate victory over the Jews he was denied in life. An extermination of belief more complete than the extermination of believers. For Fackenheim, I believe, to give in to the stark logic of Yehuda Bauer’s syllogism—if God is all-powerful, he permitted the Holocaust to happen, in effect caused it—is to make God Hitler or Hitler God.
It was Fackenheim’s revolt against this impossible dead-end choice, his revolt against letting Hitler dictate what Jews believe about God, that led him to conceive of his “614th commandment.” A dictum I hadn’t fully understood until that afternoon in Jerusalem when he gave me a dramatic description of the moment he confronted the unbearable gravamen of the evidence for the case against God—and how he came to formulate his famous 614th commandment about Hitler as a kind of “limiting instruction” to the jury.
It was April 1967, just after Purim, a holiday celebrating Jewish deliverance from slaughter, but one that found Fackenheim sickened both physically and spiritually by the sudden cloud shadowing the future of the Jewish state.
With Egyptian president Nasser about to blockade Israel’s ports, a growing threat of the three-front attack to come, with the world indifferent if not hostile, it looked to Fackenheim as if a second Holocaust was in the works.
“There was a symposium in New York on Purim, which coincided with Easter. And I was morally pressured by a friend of mine to participate. I had never written anything about the Holocaust before, because it was too frightening. And not only that, among the other participants was Elie Wiesel, and I held him in great awe. It was a real crisis moment and I knew it myself because I was sick before.”
Sickened by the prospect that God could permit a second
Holocaust, he says, “that was the crisis where I first put forward the 614th commandment”: Jews are forbidden to grant posthumous victories to Hitler.
It’s a commandment whose power I’d long felt, but the implications of which I had questioned or (as I came to feel after listening to Fackenheim describe its genesis) misinterpreted. A commandment designed to deny Hitler a certain kind of power that I’d misinterpreted as in some perverse way restoring to him another kind of power.
Think about it: Its implications are obvious and nonproblematic if one takes it to mean one should resist and combat anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and other manifestations of Hitler-like hatred in order to deny Hitler and Hitlerism a posthumous resurrection and life. But, on the other hand, as a habit of thought for Jews, for anyone, it paradoxically could be seen giving Hitler a continuing life, a defining presence, a central presence if not a commanding one—although one could almost say a commanding one by negation. If one feels compelled to refer all one’s actions in relation to all significant post-Holocaust phenomena to Hitler—in the sense of how will such acts or stances affect Hitler’s legacy—one comes close to submitting oneself to a putative Hitler’s judgment: How would this or that act or stance make Hitler feel? Would Hitler consider it a posthumous victory if I chose x or y? Hitler becomes, if not the ruling principle, then the ultimate referent.
But, in fact, when Fackenheim places the genesis of the 614th commandment in the specific context of his 1967 crisis of faith, in the context of post-Holocaust theodicy, of the impulse to demand that God explain Hitler in the face of the potential advent of a second Holocaust, the commandment can be seen as an inspired gesture of defiance, a kind of Higher Stubbornness, a repudiation of Hitler as ultimate referent.
Explaining Hitler Page 48