Review: YOU ARE NOT OF THE CASTLE, YOU ARE NOT OF THE VILLAGE, YOU ARE
NOTHING
Reviewed Work(s): The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945
by Saul Friedländer
Review by: Peter Heinegg
Source: CrossCurrents , SPRING 2008, Vol. 58, No. 1, DORRIEN DISSECTS WEST (SPRING
2008), pp. 177-180
Published by: Wiley
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24461662
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YOU ARE NOT OF THE their attempts to cross the Swiss bor
CASTLE, YOU ARE NOT OF der and were deported and gassed in
THE VILLAGE, YOU ARE Auschwitz. After the war Friedländer
NOTHING (who briefly thought of becoming a
Saul Friedländer priest before learning of his Jewishness
The Years of Extermination: Nazi and the fate of his parents) made his
Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 way to Israel, where he became a his
HarperCollins, 2007. xxvi +870 pp. torian, later dividing much of his time
$39.95 between Tel Aviv University and
U.C.L.A. He has written a heart-wrench
The line deserves to be quoted in the ing memoir (in French) When Memory
original German—as Friedländer does Comes (1978) and, among his many
with many crucial statements by the other books, the brilliant predecessor
Nazis in this indispensable history: "Sie to this one, Nazi Germany and the Jews,
sind nicht aus dem Schloß, Sie sind Volume I: The Years of Persecution, 1933-39
nicht aus dem Dorfe, Sie sind nichts." (1997).
The words come from the landlady, Amid the vast and spreading
speaking to the protagonist in Kafka'sexpanse of Holocaust literature, the
The Castle. Before being quoted by Fried three volumes of the late Raul Hilberg's
länder, they were also memorably Destruction of the European Jews (latest edi
invoked by Hannah Arendt in her 1943 tion, 2003) stand as the single greatest
essay, "The Jew as Pariah." (The land monument; but Friedländer's work
lady goes on to say, "But unfortunately bears comparison to it. (He had fuller
you are something: a stranger, someone access to ex-Soviet archives than Hil
who's superfluous and everywhere in berg, as well as to the enormous histori
the way.") It is the perfect epigraph forography that Hilberg himself helped
the Holocaust, that untellable story thatgenerate.) Friedländer stresses three
generations of writers keep trying to getintersecting dimensions of the Holo
a grip on. The broad outlines and count caust: the ideological, the institutional,
less details of the Shoah may now be and the personal (from witnesses who
"known," but the bafflement continues. survived, like Primo Levi, Otto Klemper
Friedländer is, of course, one of er and Filip Müller, and others who did
not, like Etty Hillesum and Calel Per
those most distinguished of such writ
ers. Born in Prague to a highly assimi
echodnik), building them into a grand
tragic narrative in a style at once pas
lated, German-speaking Jewish family
sionate and controlled.
in 1932, he survived the war disguised
as a Catholic at the boarding school of Friedländer sees Hitler as above all
a prophet of "redemptive anti-Semi
Saint-Beranger in Μοηΐΐιιςοη in central
France. His parents (he was an only tism," preaching "three different and
child) were not so lucky: they failed in suprahistorical creeds": "the ultimate
SPRING 2008 ■ (77
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purity of the racial community, the avoiding the excesses of Daniel Jonah
ultimate crushing of Bolshevism and Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners
plutocracy, and the ultimate millennial (the latter's "ordinary Germans" were
redemption." The last of these, need- greatly aided by ordinary people from
less to say, derives from Christianity, every country in central and eastern
and Friedländer illuminates the hor- Europe, quite apart from the French),
rific irony of the practically total fail- Friedländer demonstrates the innumer
ure by European Christian leaders to able ways in which the Fuehrer's
resist or even criticize Nazism. Conven- demonic message was welcomed and
tional wisdom looks for a convenient its dictates enforced against the Jewish
symbolic launching of the Final Solu- "world-enemy." What, one can only
tion (such as the Wansee Conference), wonder, was going through the minds
and then leaves Hitler behind to of the bosses at the Reich Ministiy of
recount its "technical" implementa- Education who declared that Mischlinge
tion in Einsatzgruppen shootings and of the second degree (one Jewish
the death camps. By contrast, Fried- grandparent) could work as doctors,
länder shows how closely Hitler fol- dentists, and pharmacists, but not vet
lowed the progress of the genocide, erinarians; or what the 100,000 or so
and how until the last moments of his citizens of Hamburg felt in that same
life he continued to preach (to wild year of 1942 about the 27,227 tons of
applause) his demented vision, for goods (stolen from Dutch Jews) that
example in a speech given on May 26, they snapped up at auction ("simple
1944, to a group of newly appointed housewives...were suddenly wearing
"National Socialist guidance" officers, fur coats").
"If our opponents are victorious in this But perhaps the most stunning
struggle, the entire German people feature of Friedländer's panoramic
will be eradicated. Bolshevism would story is the meticulously recorded fail
slaughter millions and millions and ure of the Christian churches in the
millions of intellectuals. Anyone not face of unmitigated evil—not exactly
dying through a shot to the neck news, but perhaps seen here in the
would be deported. The children of the greatest breadth ever. Bishop Clemens
upper classes would be taken away Count von Galen of Muenster famously
and eliminated. This entire bestiality spoke out—to some effect—against the
has been organized by the Jews." Nazi euthanasia program in 1941, but
The Holocaust was also a supre- Galen was otherwise a fanatical anti
mely "cultural" crime in that it Bolshevik German patriot and never
required the massive coordination of said a single word about the Jews,
military leaders, common soldiers, Catholics played leading roles in Ante
bureaucrats, educators, lawyers, medi- Pavelic's Ustashe (and Franciscan friars
cal and scientific personnel, and citi- joined in the killing of Serbs and Jews
zens of every description. While at the Jasenovac death camp), in the
178 · CROSSCURRENTS
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BOOKS
Slovak Hlinka Guard, named after material under lock and key. Ernst von
a priest (Slovakia itself was ruled by Weizsäcker, state secretary of the For
Fr. Joseph Tiso, hanged after the war eign Ministry, reported from Rome in
for collaboration with the Nazis), in late 1943, "In the Pope's view a power
the Hungarian Arrow Cross, and in the ful German Reich is quite indispens
Romanian Iron Guard—all paradigms able to the future of the Catholic
of monstrous, religiously tinged—or Church I gather that the Pope, in
soaked—brutality. Protestant church- reply to a question as to what he
men were, on the whole, not a whit thought of the German people, replied,
better, as the Evangelical Church of "They are a great nation who, in their
Germany behaved with a mixture of fight against Bolshevism, are bleeding
supine conformity and rabid Chauvin- not only for their friends, but also for
ism. And then there was the silence of the sake of their present enemies."
Pius XII. When the Pope finally did intervene in
Not as shameful, but in its own favor of the Jews with
way more depressing was the hesitant of Hungaiy in Jun
tone of the few Christian anti-Hitler the full trust that y
protesters when it came to the Jews, ness will do everythi
The "White Rose" resistance group in to save many unfortu
Munich passed out a flyer that noted, further pain or sorr
"We do not intend to say anything to avoid mentioning mass murder or
about the Jewish question in the even the word "Jew."
broadsheet; nor do we want to enter a Throughout this heroic account
plea in their defense." A still more eel- Friedländer never once speaks about
ebrated martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, his own personal experiences of loss,
wrote: "The Jew keeps open the ques- Careful readers may have noticed that
tion of Christ. He is the sign of the the book jacket of his first volume has
free mercy choice and of the repudiat- a partly obscured image of his dead
ing wrath of God. 'Behold therefore father's German passport; but that is
the goodness and severity of God'" it. And as one final proof of his even
(Rom. 11.22). In other words, Jews handedness, Friedländer is unsparing
counted more as part of a superses- in his judgment of the Jews in the Yi
sionist schema than as mere human shuv who did remarkably little for
victims. their dying brothers and sisters in the
Still, it is probably safe to say that Reich. (Friedländer, w
Pius XII is (or remains) Friedländer's aboard the notorious
bete noire (his Pius XII and the Third Reich: Irgun fighters on
A Documentation dates from 1966); and 1948, had his most
he might have even more to say on his father's Schaffhau
the subject if the Vatican were not still by a fellow passen
keeping so much Holocaust-related landed.)
SPRING 2008 · 179
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BOOKS
America too has its share of guilt And so the unbearable bottom line
for the Holocaust, and Friedländer to Friedländer's magnum opus, as to
naturally covers the miserable exploits any fair-minded assessment of the
of anti-Semites like Breckinridge Long Holocaust, has to be the eerily pro
of the State Department and John J. phetic words of Kafka (d. 1924), who
McCloy of the War Department in never suffered any direct violence
blocking any assistance for the Jewish because of his Jewishness, but who in
victims of the Nazis. FDR belatedly ere- his hypersensitive way seems to have
ated the War Refugee Board in January seen it all coming: in the eyes of the
1944, but his own response to the world, with precious few exceptions,
Holocaust was, to put it generously, the Jews were nothing,
standoffish. Any people who had to
look to helpers as relatively powerless -Peter-Peter
Heinegg
Heinegg
as Chiune Sugihara, Oskar Schindler,
and Raul Wallenberg was, by any defi
nition, in desperate straits.
180 · CROSSCURRENTS
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