Synopses & Reviews
Prompted by the suicides of Jean Amery and Primo Levi, Harold Kaplan sought to ask what the Holocaust can be said to affirm even even in the face of its overwhelming negation of meaning. "I wrote this book," he explains, "to translate the Holocaust out of the moral and intellectual shock which contemplates the alienation of humanity from itself. I wished to understand the 'crime against humanity' as a viable category of the moral reason. And I wished to respond to the written testimony of Holocaust victims and survivors as if the issue of their survival were present to us today."
Kaplan simulates the response to a long visit to the new Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., which, crucially for Kaplan, is sited in direct view of the Jefferson and Lincoln monuments, powerful symbols of humanist democracy. He insists the Holocaust be viewed not only in terms of personal ethics but modern political ethics as well: for Kaplan the affirmative legacy of the Holocaust is its focus on the dangers of nationalism, racism, and all forms of separatist group identities. It challenges the historicism, cults of power, and scientistic politics of modernity. And it challenges the moral passivity and relativism of mass politics in Western and Eastern societies.
The opening of the Holocaust museum has sparked a debate that reflects a larger debate over the Holocaust's "meaning," its translatability for ordinary understanding. Some deny any possible response except that of overwhelming grief and horror. For others, the "lesson" of the Holocaust implies, in the words of Robert Nozick, that "mankind has fallen. . . . Humanity has lost its claim to continue." The moral life and political institutions will remain endlessly tormented by the Holocaust. That, Kaplan tells us, is the ultimate content of its "meaning," and is what makes the discussion of "meaning" much more than a mourner's symposium.
The Museum itself, according to Kaplan, has become an impressive memorial to the principle of humanism, instructing the collective memory of this democracy and that of nations everywhere which aspire to civil existence. Out of its awful darkness the Holocaust throws the light of conscience for those capable of receiving it.
Description
Includes bibliographic references (p. 189-207) and index.
About the Author
Harold Kaplan was professor of English at Northwestern University from 1972 to 1986 and now lives in Bennington, Vermont. He is the author of
The Passive Voice: An Approach to Modern Fiction, Democratic Humanism and American Literature, and
Power and Order: Henry Adams and the Naturalist Tradition in American Fiction.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. A Museum for Conscience and Memory
2. Crimes against Humanity
3. Three Myths of Modernity: The God in History
4. Three Myths of Modernity: The Metapolitics of Nature
5. Three Myths of Modernity: The Cult of Power
6. Victims: The Metaphysical Jew
7. Redemption and the Life of Meaning
8. Existential Democracy and Human Rights
Notes
Index