From the Claremont Review of Books:
* I have observed substantial variations among schools in their approach to the Holocaust. Jewish schools are more likely to place the Holocaust in historical context by reviewing the long history of European anti-Semitism, including medieval Jewish ghettos, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, and the Russian pogroms of the 1800s and early 1900s—sometimes including a gratuitous showing of Fiddler on the Roof (1971), which students at Jewish schools have already seen too many times. The Jewish schools also are more likely to complete the unit with an exploration of the role played by Holocaust survivors in launching the state of Israel. Schools with a Protestant or Catholic affiliation typically portray the Holocaust as a manifestation of pure evil, putting Adolf Hitler alongside mass murderers and serial killers. Schools without a religious affiliation, both public and private, commonly present anti-Semitism as one kind of prejudice, and sometimes set the Holocaust alongside the genocide of Native Americans and the treatment of African-American slaves in the South before the Civil War. Twenty U.S. states now require the Holocaust to be taught in schools. In some schools, it’s painfully clear that the teachers are assigning Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl (1947) merely to fulfill this requirement; serious in-depth discussion of the origins of the Holocaust is absent.
But in almost every case, whether the schools are Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, or secular, public or private, the Holocaust is taught using books and media in which most of the German characters are cardboard caricatures of evil.
* Most of us have a desire to belong to something bigger than ourselves. Whether it’s cheering at a football game, singing in a choir, or line-dancing at a wedding reception, there is a domain of human experience that can be enjoyed only in the company of many of our fellow creatures. Watching a football game on TV with a buddy at home is fine, but it’s not the same as singing the team fight song in a stadium in unison with 90,000 other fans. Maschmann’s memoir shows how the Nazis understood and exploited this primal human longing. Nazi mass festivities—such as the yearly Harvest Festival at Bückeberg attended by 500,000 or more; the Mayday celebrations; and of course the days-long Nuremberg rallies—were skillfully crafted to elicit and sustain this transcendent ecstasy.
It is popular today among intellectuals to devalue tribal experiences. Instead of group ecstasy, we moderns focus on individual fulfillment, self-actualization rather than self-transcendence. But this emphasis on the individual impoverishes and flattens the human experience. To transcend oneself, to sacrifice oneself for others, to love all the world, can indeed be a pinnacle of moral experience. Millions, be you embraced! This kiss for all the world!
* In March 1940, six months into World War II and nine years before the publication of his dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell wrote, “Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues.” The Nazis, Orwell realized, understood something that the democracies did not:
“Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades…. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people, “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them, “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.”
