Can all of this be compensated by the sense of freedom you get in this vast anonymity, by living your life, teaching your classes, and writing your books while geographically away from a constant reminder of the past? During the early years, I wasn’t convinced.
What I just wrote about the reminder of the past may appear contradictory. On the one hand, I left Geneva to devote more time to writing and teaching the history of the Holocaust, while on the other hand I found a saving grace in Los Angeles in the relative absence of that past in the environment and common discourse.
My reasoning may have been tortuous, but it followed some logic nonetheless. Staying in Geneva was no longer a viable option. I could have chosen to remain in Tel Aviv, but even there, a regular course on the Holocaust may have encountered difficulties, as it was already being taught in the Jewish history department. And I simply cringed at the idea of regularly teaching a subject that carried the possibility of political exploitation, particularly by the nationalist right that I abhorred. Finally, being only in Tel Aviv was difficult, as usual: I had to have an exit strategy. Thus for the following ten years, I divided my time between Tel Aviv and Los Angeles before moving exclusively to L.A. when mandatory retirement from Tel Aviv became imminent.
During the earliest phase of my stay, I was mostly alone, as Hagith had to take care of an ailing father. From the second or third year on, she would stay in L.A. for three months at a time. We rented a town house in Santa Monica and usually managed to sublet it when both of us were back in Israel.
Santa Monica, April 1992. We turned on the television for the evening news, while awaiting the arrival of some friends for dinner. We watched some scuffles next to a van that had stopped in the middle of a street in what appeared to be a predominantly African-American neighborhood. Our friends arrived, and within minutes we were all glued to the TV screen: the L.A. riots had started as a reaction to the acquittal of the four policemen responsible for viciously beating an African-American, Rodney King, following a high-speed freeway chase.
I don’t remember whether it was on that first night or later on that houses were set on fire and wide-scale looting began. You saw it all live as it happened, and yet, for us, this dramatic outburst of violence appeared unreal, as if occurring on another planet. There was no contact, no proximity (geographically and socially) between Santa Monica and South Central L.A.: these two worlds simply never met, which, obviously, was at the heart of the problem. On my first stay in the States, in 1957, I skimmed through Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma; it carried a pessimistic view of the evolution of race relations in the United States. As seen from the perspective of the 1992 riots, it was still to the point. Immense progress had been made since the fifties and yet, deep down, a chasm remained and remains between both worlds.
2
I hadn’t personally met one of the most brilliant advocates of the Palestinian cause, the Palestinian-American professor of English literature at Columbia, excellent music critic, and fiery public intellectual, Edward Said, before our UCLA encounter in early 1994. We had participated in a written exchange in a French periodical a few years beforehand and even earlier Said had written a moderate review of Arabs and Israelis (although positive only regarding Mahmud Hussein and negative as far as I was concerned). The Center of Comparative History and Social Theory had organized a debate between the two of us. The organizers were well-known Marxist historians, Robert Brenner and Perry Anderson.
The debate took place in the euphoric atmosphere following the 1993 Oslo agreements and in the perspective of peace between Israel and the Palestinians on the basis of a two-state solution to the conflict. Said was a great debater, I still had some energy left, the personal contact between us was good, and a very attentive audience packed Royce Hall. It is then, however, that I noticed what had already been told to me previously about Said’s position: he rejected the two-state solution and advocated a general “right of return” of Palestinian refugees to what was now Israel; it meant the extinction of Israel and the emergence of a binational state as the only possible outcome. To me this was completely unrealistic; thus, notwithstanding the friendly rapport, we fundamentally disagreed.
As time went by, post-Oslo euphoria gave way to increasing pessimism among the moderate Israeli left, which had pinned its hopes on the feasibility of the two-state solution. Pessimism was capped by tragedy when, on November 5, 1995, a right-wing religious fanatic assassinated Itzhak Rabin, the prime minister who could have convinced the majority of the population to accept some difficult decisions for the sake of peace. His successors, including Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak, did not inspire the same trust. Furthermore, when Barak took the huge risk of agreeing to almost all of the Palestinian demands in exchange for peace and was rebuffed by Yasser Arafat at Camp David in July 2000, the belief spread among Israelis that there was no partner on the other side.
I should have previously mentioned that when the Gulf War started in early 1991 and Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles were launched at Israeli cities, I decided to skip a week at UCLA and fly back to Israel. It was a gut reaction, an imperative expression of solidarity, although the danger was minimal and the missiles did not hit any of their intended targets. Some Scuds were shot down by batteries of Patriot antimissile missiles that the Americans had transferred to Israel, others fell into the sea or in uninhabited areas, and a few hit houses in Ramat Gan, a city bordering Tel Aviv, but, rather miraculously, without directly killing anybody. Nonetheless, people were frightened and when sirens announced an oncoming Scud, many took refuge in sealed rooms and put on gas masks (the assumption being that some of the Scuds may have been carrying gas-filled warheads, which they were not). A few persons died of heart attacks, others left Tel Aviv for safer areas, particularly in Europe.
Israel did not react, to avoid hampering the Arab anti-Saddam coalition set up by the United States. In the Palestinian territories, the population cheered the Scuds and celebrated the destruction of the Jewish state.
Within days, I was back in L.A. Yet, for my leftist colleagues, rushing to Israel meant that I was not on their side of the barricade. Nonetheless, I was asked to debate Said three years later. Over the following years, however, the hostility toward Israel that spread among some faculty members became painful to watch. Edward Said came again and his speech was much more aggressive than the first time. It was enthusiastically greeted. I did not attend.
3
January 1993. I had just returned to L.A. from my semester in Tel Aviv. It was the first Saturday of the month and within four days my lecture course would start. The weather was mild, I was in good spirits and decided to drive from Santa Monica to Westwood, the area surrounding UCLA, to park there and walk the rest of the way to the research library. I didn’t get very far. As I was crossing Gayley Avenue, a car that had begun a left turn ahead of the green arrow hit me hard enough to propel me a few meters away. I didn’t lose consciousness, but remained sitting in the midst of the street while the female driver stood next to me, howling, “Oh my God, what did I do, what did I do!” Within minutes I was at the UCLA hospital emergency room, diagnosed with a fractured kneecap but without a brain concussion. This was the good news.
The cardiologist who saw me before the knee operation (as my file indicated heart problems) gave me the bad news: it was high time for open-heart surgery to replace an aortic valve, defective from birth, which had substantially deteriorated. The surgery was scheduled for late April, once my knee would allow me to stand up and even walk around on crutches.
Strangely enough, I remained rather indifferent to this fourth major surgery of my life. As I was exchanging jokes with the anesthetist, I heard, “Wake up, Mr. Friedländer, wake up! All went very well.” I woke up, and four days later I left the hospital. As I am writing, exactly twenty-two years later, the artificial valve is still nicely clicking and I still swallow a blood-thinning pill every day. As for the knee, the surgeon had warned me that I could get arthritis some twenty year
s after the operation; he was right, on the dot.
In the early eighties, our two boys were almost on their own, Eli at the Hebrew University and soon at Harvard, David, almost out of Lebanon, on his way to Paris, to Langues Orientales. Only Michal, a teenager by then, was still at home: in a sense she was keeping the family together, as our marriage was slowly flickering out. Soon though, Michal would also be gone, to the army first and then to the New England Conservatory of Music, for a degree in piano performance.
Although Hagith and I traveled together to faraway destinations — Japan, China, Mexico — the lengthy periods we spent separated did not help. And yet we remained married into the early years of the new century. Naturally, Hagith was with me after the car accident and the two surgeries that followed. Later, as I said, she would spend three or four months every year in Los Angeles. We spoke of separation, although then we may not have believed in it.
In the mid-nineties, however, I met Orna Kenan. Orna, still married, was the mother of two teenage boys, Gil and Amir. She was born in Israel — as Hagith had been — and, after years in London, followed by an interlude back in Israel, she had arrived in Los Angeles with her family in the mid-eighties, as her husband had been assigned to the L.A. branch of the commodities company for which he worked. At some stage, Orna resumed the studies she had interrupted for many years: after a stint in English history, she opted for Jewish studies and more specifically for the history of the Holocaust. In 1994 she became my doctoral student and chose to work on the early phase of the Israeli historiography of the Shoah, before the Eichmann trial.
Shortly after we met, I discovered that Orna’s marriage was in no better shape than mine; we found each other. It took us years to decide, though, and while Orna’s husband asked for a divorce quite some time before I did, I eventually followed. As I am writing this, more than twenty years have gone by since I met Orna.
During the emotional roller coaster of the nineties and the early years of the new millennium, work went on, more focused now on the major project I had planned after Berlin and Broszat. At the outset of that period, however, I took it upon myself to convene a conference that would have its intellectual significance as far as I was concerned — and possibly for some others as well. My initiative came on the spur of the moment and was triggered by a debate involving two main protagonists: Carlo Ginzburg and Hayden White.
Carlo had joined the Department of History at UCLA more or less at the time I did, and like me, he spent a few months every year teaching at another university, in his case in Bologna. To historians, Carlo’s name is familiar: he’s the founder of “microhistory,” and his early book The Cheese and the Worms remains a classic. His erudition was (and is) formidable and his mind a constant font of new ideas. Add to it an exuberant and highly engaging personality and lectures that were (and are) intellectual adventures, with unexpected twists and turns, leaving the audience pondering many riddles. He and I, and his wife Luisa, became friends.
Our friendship was strengthened by the fact that, albeit unbeknownst to me for quite some time, he had found a copy of When Memory Comes, liked it, and passed it on to his mother, the well-known Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg. (I had read two of her autobiographical books, Tutti i nostri ieri [All Our Yesterdays] and Lessico famigliare [Family Sayings].) She translated my memoir into Italian. This touched me deeply. We twice agreed to meet and twice it became impossible. The first time, as I was in Rome for a short visit, a meeting of the Council of Europe close to where she lived set the area out of bounds for two days or so. Alas, the second time Carlo informed me that his mother had been hospitalized for what was to be a terminal illness.
I keep a handwritten letter from Natalia Ginzburg asking for some explanations about this or that tiny detail in my book; it is also an answer to a letter of thanks I had written to her. She uses a quaint French that gives her words a particular charm; her letter ends as follows: “I too would be very happy to make your acquaintance. Yet I have the impression of knowing you so well already, through the pages of your book! It is I who thanks you. I hope it is well translated, or at least not too badly. At times it was a little difficult. I think of you with much friendship.”
As exuberant and engaging as Carlo could be, he did not hide his feelings when some irritation arose. This is precisely what happened in 1990, on the occasion of Hayden White’s lecture on history and fiction (I don’t remember the exact title of the lecture). The gist of White’s argument was that, necessarily, every historian has to adopt a specific rhetorical mode — a literary category — for his or her narration (tragic, comic, ironic, etc.). The mode thus chosen determines the historian’s specific selection of facts and the subsequent narrative (“emplotment”) and interpretation. In other words, each historian opts for his or her rhetorical mode and thus for his or her own “objectivity.” Ultimately, the generic distinction between history and literature (fiction) disappears. White had been developing his thesis for almost twenty years, since the publication of Metahistory in the early seventies; the title of one of his more recent books said it all: The Content of the Form. For Carlo, this was too much.
The exchange between Hayden and Carlo, following White’s lecture, took epic proportions in front of a mesmerized audience. On the morrow of the confrontation, I asked Hayden whether he would be willing to participate in a conference that would put his ideas to the test in a discussion of the historical representation of Nazism and of the Holocaust (if one pushed his theories to their limit, it would make it difficult to reject the Holocaust deniers’ narratives). He agreed, as did Carlo and a phalanx of scholars from various domains. The conference took place in 1991. I introduced it and later edited a volume of the texts entitled Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution.”
The conference was quite successful by the standards of such events and some of the presentations would be widely quoted over the following years. Yet, on the spot, one “performance” left me amazed, that of Jacques Derrida, the guru of deconstruction. I knew Derrida from his annual seminars at UC Irvine, some of which I attended. They were ritualized occasions: the master preached but mostly listened to the discussions and kept silent, surrounded by the veneration of his disciples. Otherwise, in our frequent conversations over lunch, Derrida behaved like an affable mortal. I invited him to give the keynote lecture at the conference and he accepted.
I assumed that although the lecture was scheduled for a midweek evening, it would be well attended. I reserved a hall of four hundred seats and at about 8 p.m. went to fetch Derrida at the UCLA Guest House. We walked to the hall, and when we came near, we saw a huge throng of people blocking the entrance, trying to push their way into the packed auditorium. Students were sitting on every possible spot: in the seats, on the floor, in the aisles, on the stage. Unfazed, Derrida reached the podium while the crowd inside and outside fell silent. Without any introduction, he launched directly into a two-hour lecture on a notoriously opaque text on violence that Walter Benjamin had written in the early twenties. Nobody moved, nobody left. The crowd hung on to words that the immense majority certainly did not understand. I had never seen the like of it. Derrida strung interpretation upon interpretation like some venerated rabbi commenting on a particularly difficult Talmudic text to his awestricken followers.
A few years beforehand, Derrida had spent two weeks in Jerusalem. When an interviewer asked him about his background, he answered, “Je suis juif, probablement” (I am a Jew, probably). Deconstruction doesn’t allow for any certainty.
4
I started writing Nazi Germany and the Jews in 1990 and completed the second volume in 2006. When I happened to mention the project to my colleagues, either one of two reactions was common: “What can be said that isn’t already known?” or the slightly derisive “You’re biting off more than you can chew.” I well remember these remarks, not so much out of annoyance (after all, colleagues are colleagues) as rather because, in my heart of hearts, I shared the s
ame doubts.
The motivation that sustained the project was, as I already mentioned, my recurrent sense of not having fulfilled what I felt as a deep obligation. The immediate triggers were Berlin and Broszat. The appointment to the chair at UCLA offered the “window of opportunity.” In short, the very early nineties were indeed the right time (and, objectively, the last possibility) to start.
The conception of the history I was planning had occurred to me long before I seriously undertook to write it. Such a history had to be global and integrated; it had to include and render the intertwined evolution of Nazi policies, of reactions stemming from all European and a few other governments and societies (be they initiatives or abstentions), and, even more so, of Jewish attitudes and reactions, from wherever they came, throughout the entire period. I presented that conception of Holocaust history to the conference that took place in New York in March 1975 in a lecture entitled “Aspects of the Historical Significance of the Holocaust.” Then I promptly forgot about the conference and about the idea. The time was not yet ripe.
And yet my teaching and reading over the years had given me detailed knowledge of the evolution of diplomacy and war throughout the Nazi years and, within that overall context, of the changing fate of the Jews of Germany and then of occupied and satellite Europe. Nazi Anti-Semitism and the later acceptance and defense of moderate “intentionalism” (as discussed in relation to the Stuttgart conference) familiarized me with minute details of Hitler’s brand of anti-Jewish ideology (that I defined as “redemptive anti-Semitism”). The work on the Vatican and debates about Swiss refugee policy during the war following the publication of When Memory Comes added to my knowledge of the complex ramifications of diffuse but, more often than not, militant and widespread anti-Semitism in Western society. In short, contentwise, the problems could be overcome. These, however, were but minor difficulties. In any case, I had taken a guarantee against the eventuality that the entire project would never be completed by dividing it into two volumes, beginning with the “years of persecution,” which would essentially deal with policies and reactions before the war and would therefore concentrate on Germany, Austria, and, ultimately, Bohemia and Moravia. This was the “easy” part. As for the war period and the Shoah as such, I had only very tentative insights when I started.
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