soc.history.war.world-war-ii

Don Phillipson wrote:
> British historian Tony Judt concluded the 2007 Hannah
> Arendt lecture: "After 1945 our parents' generation set
> side the problem of evil because -for them-it contained
> too much meaning. The generation that will follow us is in
> danger of setting the problem aside because it now contains
> too little meaning." Full text at
> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21031
>
> Judt's specific thesis is that (for four listed reasons) the
> Holocaust was generally ignored in Europe for roughly 25
> years after 1945. But he cites only two items of evidence:
> (1) Primo Levi's 1946 memoir of Auschwitz was declined by
> most Italian publishers and, when printed, sold few copies;
> (2) "As late as 1966, when I began to study modern history at
> Cambridge University, I was taught French history-including
> the history of Vichy France-with almost no reference to Jews
> or anti-Semitism."
>
> I suggest this is misleading -- omitting as it does those
> books published 1945-1960 which narrated the Holocaust in as
> much gruesome detail as was then known. Examples are
> Judge Russell's The Scourge of the Swastika (1954), The Knights
> of Bushido (1958), Miklos Nyiszli's Auschwitz (1946, published in
> English 1946), Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews
> (first edition 1961) and so on. British academics may indeed have
> spurned in 1966 many of these early books as "atrocity literature,"
> no more valuable to the scholar than I Flew for the Fuehrer or
> The Great Escape: but even by 1966 not much war history of
> lasting value had yet been written. Deciphering was still a state
> secret, the economic and technical history of radar and other
> hardware was unfinished, no serious second thought had
> yet been give to major campaigns, like the bombing of Germany
> or the last six months of the European war, and no one yet knew
> exactly why and how Japan surrendered. I doubt the Holocaust
> was ignored so much as merely shelved alongside so many
> other aspects of WW2, until some investigator could produce
> either new data or new narrative ideas -- as in the Eichmann
> trial, when Hannah Arendt suggested "the banality of evil,"
> Judt's topic in 2007. If it "now contains too little meaning"
> it is no longer for lack of either ideas or data.

I saw Ralph Hochhuth's play, "The Deputy" in London. I
don't recall the year, but the play was first staged in
Germany in 1963, and I think I saw it soon after. The
audience was stunned. When the curtain closed at the end,
there was no applause. The audience just sat quietly, then
people got up one by one and walked out. My wife was not
with me, so when it opened in New York I saw it again with
her. The audience reacted at the end as it would to any
drama. By that time, I think most New Yorkers knew about
the Holocaust. Perhaps the London audience was just hearing
it vividly for the first time?