The German Genius

pled guilty to delivering two speeches in Austria in 1989, sixteen years before his trial, in which he had denied that Hitler was aware of the Holocaust and that millions of Jews had been murdered. Irving was arrested in November 2005, when he reentered the country, where it has been a crime since 1946 to deny the Holocaust. It was by no means the first occasion Irving had crossed the legal line on this matter. He was already banned in a dozen countries from Canada to South Africa for broadcasting these views. In 2000 he was forced into bankruptcy in Britain when he unsuccessfully sued Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic who, in her book Denying the Holocaust , branded him one of the worst culprits. He was ordered to pay £3 million in legal costs and forced to sell his home in the fashionable Mayfair area of central London. 15
    Irving’s trial came barely two months after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, called the Holocaust a “myth,” claiming he did not believe that 6 million Jews had perished at the hands of the Nazis. Given the incendiary context of Middle Eastern politics, President Ahmadinejad’s statement is perhaps not strictly comparable with David Irving’s—we do not hold politicians to the same level of truth (unfortunately) as we do historians. But these two nearly contiguous events do underline how the Holocaust has become—and continues to be—an important focus of debate, even now, more than sixty years after it happened. If we are obsessed with Hitler, as we seem to be, can it be said we are likewise obsessed with the Holocaust?
    At first sight that may seem a contentious and insensitive statement in itself. Can the murder of 6 million people—simply because they were members of a particular ethnic group—ever not be an important focus of debate and memory, however long after it occurred? But there is more to it than that. Of particular relevance is the fact that the Holocaust was not a focus of debate for many years immediately following World War II. It has become so only in recent decades, to the point where, it will be argued here, this “focus” (if it is not an obsession) is also distorting our view of the past, especially in the United States.
    T HE H OLOCAUST : A N O BLIGATION TO R EMEMBER; THE R IGHT TO F ORGET
     
    In his level-headed study, The Holocaust in American Life (published in Britain as The Holocaust and Collective Memory ; 2000), Peter Novick examines—as he puts it—how “the Holocaust has come to loom so large in our life.” He begins with the observation that, generally speaking, historical events are most talked about shortly after their occurrence and then, about forty years afterward, they “fall down a memory hole where only historians scuttle around in the dark.” This was true about events such as the Vietnam War, he says, but “with the Holocaust the rhythm has been very different: hardly talked about for the first twenty years or so after World War Two” but, from the 1970s on, “becoming ever more central in American public discourse—particularly, of course, among Jews, but also in the culture at large.” 16 He records how, in recent years, “Holocaust survivor” has become an honorific title, “evoking not just sympathy but admiration, even awe.” This was by no means the case in the immediate aftermath of war, where the status of Holocaust survivor was far from being honorific. Novick quotes the revealing comments by the leader of one American community in Europe, in a letter to a colleague in New York: “Those who have survived are not the fittest…but are largely the lowest Jewish elements, who by cunning and animal instincts have been able to escape the terrible fate of the more refined and better elements who succumbed.” 17 No less a figure than David Ben-Gurion, Novick says, wanted to play down the magnitude of the tragedy because of the effect he thought it would have on Zionism—it might seem to others there would not be enough Jews to create Israel. In the United States, in 1946, 1947, and 1948, the main Jewish organizations (including the Jewish War Veterans) unanimously vetoed the idea for a proposed Holocaust memorial in New York City, on the grounds that such a monument would result in other Americans thinking of Jews as victims, and the monument become “a perpetual memorial to the weakness and defencelessness of the Jewish people.” In the first postwar years, “much more than nowadays,” the