Whereas the comparability or noncomparability of the Nazi and Bolshevik exterminations became the quintessential issue in the “historians’ controversy,” what I had been served at the dinner was something quite different: provocative questions about the Jews as such and about issues relating to them. Bolshevism was not even mentioned. As the anti-Jewish dimension of our discussion was not known, it became only implicitly apparent in Nolte’s Nazism versus Bolshevism arguments. The controversy ultimately became an internal political confrontation between left-leaning German intellectuals and conservative ones, dressed up as a scholarly historical debate, during a brief period just preceding the unification of Germany.
It started slowly. Over the spring of 1986, no large-scale response to Nolte’s article appeared: with a few exceptions such as Heinrich Winkler, left-liberal historians were mute, while Nolte garnered quite vocal support from the conservative side. Finally, in July, Die Zeit published Jürgen Habermas’s counterblast under the title “Eine Art Schadensabwicklung” (“A Kind of Settlement of Damages”). I was in Geneva when Habermas’s article appeared; for me, reading and rereading it was an immense relief, although my other Berlin problems continued to weigh on me more than ever. Habermas’s voice represented a clarion call, soon followed by those of liberal German historians suddenly intervening — and massively so. By the end of 1986, the “historians’ controversy” was calming down, although to this day it still flickers on, mainly in Europe.
4
My Berlin experience had a profound impact on the further course of my life. In the next chapter I will tell why at first I refused the appointment to the Chair in the History of the Holocaust at UCLA after teaching there for a semester in 1982–83. But in 1986, following Berlin, I had no hesitation anymore.
I wrote to the UCLA dean of humanities that, after thinking it over, I was interested in the position. In early 1987, I was invited for a “job talk” and, following the ritual meetings and quizzes, plus the necessary confirmations at all levels of the University of California system, I was appointed as the first permanent incumbent of the UCLA “1939 Club” Chair in the History of the Holocaust.
My German concerns were far from over. During my stay at the Kolleg, I had read an article that Martin Broszat had published in the highbrow monthly Merkur; its title: “Ein Plädoyer für die Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus” (A Plea for the Historicization of National Socialism); its date of publication: May 1985. In short, it belonged to the salvo of books and articles demanding a change of approach to the historical representation and interpretation of the Third Reich, forty years after its demise.
In concrete terms, Broszat pleaded for a cancellation of the limitations imposed by the dates 1933 and 1945 on German history and a reinsertion of those twelve years within the wider framework of German economic and social developments in the twentieth century; in short, he pleaded for a distinction between the initiatives taken by the Nazi leadership of the Reich and the everyday life of the immense majority of Germans, practically untouched, according to him, by Nazi ideology and propaganda. This looked like Edgar Reitz’s Heimat on a historiographical level, and it was, most probably, the perception many Germans still had of their recent history, forty years after the fall of the Reich. The word “Auschwitz” did not appear in Broszat’s essay, nor did any reference to Nazi crimes as a dimension to be “historicized,” given that Broszat implicitely considered them as belonging to the thin political layer at the top.
I didn’t like Broszat’s “Plea” and responded in a lecture at the University of Essen, upon Dan Diner’s invitation. The lecture was published in German and English. It came to Broszat’s attention. He felt challenged and suggested an exchange of letters between us — three letters each — that would be published in the periodical of Munich’s Institute of Contemporary History, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (Quarterly Journal of Contemporary History), the most widely read professional publication by historians of the Third Reich. I accepted.
As far as I could judge, Broszat allowed the subtext of his position to emerge toward the end of his first letter (he started the exchange and I would end it): the memory that the victims (the Jews) and their descendants kept of the Third Reich demanded respect, he wrote, and could eventually contribute to our understanding; yet, it was a “mythical memory” that constituted a “coarsening [vergröbend] obstacle for a more rational German historiography.” This was, in its very bluntness, an astonishing statement. Broszat considered the subjectivity of the victims “and of their descendants” — in short of Jews — whenever and wherever they spoke of Nazism, as leading to fictitious renderings of this history. I had no choice but to ask him, in my response, whether he did not think that former members of the Hitler Youth generation (like himself) weren’t also carrying a burdened subjectivity in their perception of those years. The exchange was published in early 1988.
As at that same time I had started teaching at UCLA, I invited Broszat — who was on an American lecture tour — to come to Los Angeles and present his ideas to the faculty and the graduate students of the history department. The debate that took place in early 1989 was memorable both on the spot and even more from hindsight: Broszat argued that resistance against an oppression like the Nazi one was impossible and that Germans in their great majority rather opted for Resistenz (impermeability, immunity) in the face of the regime’s propaganda and ideology; it allowed the bulk of the nation to remain untouched by the regime’s blandishments and, until very late, ignorant of its crimes. A few months after Broszat’s lecture, the population of East Germany rose against the Communist regime and brought it down.
Later on the day of Broszat’s visit, I showed him the craziness of the Venice boardwalk, while his wife and daughter were lured to Disneyland. Our conversation became friendly; he told me about some of his experiences with the right-wing historians of the sixties, such as Gerhard Ritter, and of his worries about the future of the institute. We had found the human level at which much could be understood and taken in stride. A few months later, Broszat died of cancer. I wrote the obituary for Die Zeit. Nobody knew then that he had been a Nazi Party member.
My stay in Berlin had convinced me to turn entirely to the history of the Holocaust. The debate with Broszat pointed to some of the questions I needed to deal with. What mattered immediately was getting rid of the feelings of guilt that the incident at the Kolleg had triggered and redirecting my life toward new aims in teaching and writing.
PART IV
America
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A Sense of Exile?
In the summer of 1987, my twenty-six years as student and teacher in Geneva came to an end. I haven’t written enough about our everyday life there: the friends we made, the vacations we spent in some of the most beautiful areas in the world, the white Fendant wine and the fondue bourguignonne that I loved, as well as the bistros where you could find the best of both.
When you live long enough in a place like Geneva, you discover hideouts not too far away that are off the tourists’ track; thus, sometime in the late 1960s, the two boys, Hagith, and I ventured into the Jura mountains, above Neuchâtel, the Franches-Montagnes, where yet untamed horses roam in freedom and tiny towns surprise you when you follow some valley you had never heard of. That’s how we arrived in Sainte-Ursanne, to an inn whose name I forget; there you really ate the best cheese fondue ever, while the house parrot (or was it a blackbird?) whistled the entire march from The Bridge on the River Kwai.
Years later, I was driving alone from Geneva to Basel, sometime in the fall. I took a roundabout way via Château d’Oex and Gstaad, and toward evening, as I entered the foothills of the Berner Oberland Alps, the copper, red, and gold of the surrounding forests suddenly overwhelmed me with a sense of exhilaration, while Jessye Norman’s magnificent voice in Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs merged with the shimmering colors of the landscape. I never forgot that moment of pure bliss.
Thus, after a di
fficult early period, Geneva had become a haven, a peaceful retreat, despite the usual problems with this or that colleague or this or that doctoral student (in short, the usual vagaries of academic life). Nonetheless, the stay couldn’t last once I decided to concentrate on the history of the Holocaust; my teaching had to be as close as possible to the intended writing. Moreover, the institute as such was changing.
Small institutions flourish or wither according to the quality and efficacy of their leadership. Freymond had retired in the late seventies and the directors who succeeded him kept the institute afloat, but did not innovate. I left during that lackluster transition period. A few years later, the institute entered — and radically so — into a remarkable new phase.
The quaint charm of Hautes Études Internationales (or HEI as it was called in short), typified by the villa on the lake, gave way to a “new realism” represented by impressive structures of glass and steel built inland, close to the United Nations. The traditional courses were replaced, in great part, by teaching adapted to the challenges of a global international scene. Under the guidance of my former doctoral student Philippe Burrin, the brilliant historian of “the fascist drift” in France, of France under the Germans and Nazi Anti-Semitism, the institute rushed into the twenty-first century, while I remained fixated on the first half of the twentieth. In that sense, the appointment at UCLA made things easier.
1
My first visit to UCLA had taken place over ten years before my definitive appointment. In 1975 or 1976, I had been invited to discuss History and Psychoanalysis in the Department of History and Arabs and Israelis in Political Science as well as with a Jewish students’ organization. On that last occasion, a question came up that had often crossed my mind and bothered me considerably. “Why is it,” one of the students asked, “that someone who survived the Shoah as you did, has become so ‘dovish’ toward the Arabs? Generally, Jews who survived the Shoah take a hard line about the Israeli-Arab conflict.”
It was true, in most cases. And I knew that by teaching, speaking, or writing about the Shoah I was reinforcing the nationalism of those Jews, in Israel or in the Diaspora, whose motto, Never again!, was misused to reject any compromise or, worse, who used the Shoah as a pretext for harsh anti-Palestinian measures. To avoid any misunderstanding, I argued on every possible occasion that the only lesson one could draw from the Shoah was precisely the imperative: stand against injustice, against wanton persecution, against the refusal to recognize the humanity and the rights of “the others.”
It is, incidentally, what I declared in the opening lecture I gave to the hundreds of scholars assembled at the Hebrew University for the tenth International Congress of Jewish Studies in August 1989. As I specifically mentioned our attitude to the Palestinians, many silent, angry faces greeted me at the end. A few days later, though, the president of the Congress and preeminent historian of rabbinic thought, Ephraim Urbach, told me of his complete agreement.
In the fall of 1982, I was invited to return to the history department at UCLA to teach for a semester as visiting professor within the framework of the newly established Chair in the History of the Holocaust (no permanent appointment had yet been made). Amos Funkenstein initiated the invitation.
Funkenstein was quite an unusual person: a historian at Tel Aviv University and UCLA, a philosopher and mathematician, and an erudite interpreter of Jewish thought — in short a polymath par excellence. According to Carlo Ginzburg, a mutual friend, Amos shared a striking resemblance with Franz Kafka; it was so indeed, but you had to imagine Kafka with a permanent cigarette at the corner of his lips, twisting and twirling a nonexistent side-lock when deep in thought (the remnant of an Orthodox childhood) and springing into action after any public lecture to ask a first question that would often put the lecturer in some difficulty.
Amos shared my thinking about the political situation in Israel; like Uri Tal, he was more blunt than I in his use of historical comparisons. Thus, in an interview in Haaretz, he compared our way of treating the Palestinians to Nazi policies against the Jews in the thirties. I didn’t agree with the comparison, as I knew that “Nazi” immediately evoked “extermination” for most readers, who saw no difference between Nazi persecution of the Jews in the 1930s and Nazi extermination policies in the 1940s.
This first extended stay in Los Angeles left a mixed impression. I migrated from one noisy apartment to the next. I even landed once in a building mostly occupied by undergraduates; I learned what partying meant, soundwise. A few weeks after my arrival, I finally discovered a quiet abode in a hotel on Wilshire Boulevard renting apartments by the week, the month, or the year. The weather was mild, most colleagues friendly and welcoming, students — serious enough.
Yet, facing a large class of undergraduates, I soon understood that I belonged to another world. When I made a joke, nobody laughed; sometimes, as I spoke seriously, everybody burst out laughing. Our associations were thoroughly different; or was it my accent that at times they considered funny? All in all, however, we got along well. Nonetheless, although I liked UCLA and the Department of History, I didn’t accept the offer to become the permanent incumbent of the Holocaust history chair, preferring to return to Tel Aviv and Geneva. As I told, the stay in Berlin changed all that.
The mildly negative impression that I had kept of Los Angeles turned into culture shock once I realized, in early 1988, that I had arrived for good, for over half a year every year. As I write this, I am reminded of my friend George Mosse, an heir to the Berlin German-Jewish media empire Mosse-Ullstein, who managed to flee the Reich in 1933, telling in his memoirs of his reaction when, on his way to teach at the University of Iowa, his first appointment, he descended from the bus onto the main street of Iowa City: he started crying.
Well, I didn’t cry, but I seriously wondered whether I hadn’t made a bad mistake. Regarding the work to which I wanted to devote the following years, I was in the right place; but would I be able to live in that place? For a while I considered the possibility of leaving. I confided in the new chair of the department, the outstanding scholar and unerringly elegant American historian Joyce Appleby. Although she had come to L.A. from nearby San Diego, she told me that at the beginninng she had felt the same way, which meant that I was not the first to face that quandary. I decided that the task ahead was both a scholarly and a moral obligation: it helped me to adapt.
UCLA, a splendid institution, was (and remains) an enclave in an urban immensity that does not reject it, but celebrates very different gods, notwithstanding the links between the university and the city kept by former graduates, sporting events, the film school, the Medical Center, and well-known artistic programs.
The L.A. campus is a small town in and of itself whose students, faculty, and staff number about fifty thousand people; in terms of the architecture of buildings and the layout of gardens, the harmony of the whole is striking; it is possibly the most impressive of the University of California’s ten campuses. As for the Department of History, it was and remains probably one of the largest such departments in the country. Depending on who heads it, keeping this vast medley of historical fields coherently and creatively together is not always successful; I have experienced the best and the worst.
In principle, my chair was part of Jewish history, but in fact I was almost entirely independent and could craft the curriculum as I wished, without having to watch left and right whether I trod on anybody’s toes. At the outset, however, difficulties arose from an unexpected direction: my sponsors.
The “Holocaust chair,” as it was called, had been endowed by members of the “1939 Club” of Los Angeles. Most of the original members of that group were Polish Jews who had spent the war in ghettos, camps, forced labor details, and the like; they had seen it all before reaching the States in the late forties or early fifties. They endowed the chair in the mid-seventies to counter the spread of Holocaust denial, particularly in California.
The core members of the club were activists and wan
ted the chair incumbent to “show results,” like inviting President von Weizsäcker for a lecture or some such event. It took time to convince them that my role was to teach, to foster research, to spread knowledge, and not to cater to “events.” In short, for a few years my sponsors wanted to have a say in the way the chair incumbent was fulfilling his task; they tried to convince the dean of humanities to establish a supervising committee that would guide me. After these rocky beginnings, they came to rely on the way I handled my duties. These were good people, devoted to a worthy goal; they annoyed me at times but I liked them.
As I am writing, I have been living longer in Los Angeles than in any other city in the world, and I have taught here longer than anywhere else. There is some logic in my having ultimately landed in the simulacrum of a real place, in a city that, despite countless areas of natural beauty, (almost) everlasting spring weather, and the magnificent ocean coast, does not touch you, take hold of you, doesn’t make you sigh ecstatically, even for a brief moment. You know the song “I left my heart in San Francisco”; I hardly can imagine anybody singing, “I left my heart in Los Angeles.” It may be the same in Kansas City, St. Louis, or, for that matter, Iowa City.
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