Timothy Snyder is the Housum Professor of History at Yale University and a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which received the literature award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding. Snyder is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement and a former contributing editor at The New Republic. He is a permanent fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences, serves as the faculty advisor for the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and sits on the advisory council of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
This exchange focuses on Professor Snyder’s critically acclaimed new book Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books, 2015). You can find part one right here.
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Dear Professor Snyder,
In part one we focused on your reading of Hitler’s attitude toward the state, which seems to debunk the idea that Hitler was an extreme nationalist. Another common belief that you take on in your book is the notion that the mass killing of Jews in eastern Europe was heavily reliant on primitive outbursts of anti-Semitic id and on the local populations’ traditional hatred of Jews. In a thought-provoking paragraph you write the following:
It is tempting to imagine that a simple idea in the minds of simple people decades past and thousands of miles away can explain a complex event. The notion that local east European antisemitism killed the Jews of eastern Europe confers upon others a sense of superiority akin to that the Nazis once felt. These people are quite primitive, we can allow ourselves to think. Not only does this account fail as an explanation of the Holocaust; its racism prevents us from considering the possibility that not only Germans and Jews but also local peoples were individual human agents with complex goals that were reflected in politics.
In your book you describe the intricate political subtleties that made some locals in some regions participate in the atrocities more than residents of other regions. The differences, according to your reading, were largely political: the locals who participated in pogroms against the Jews usually had something to prove or something to gain, and the regions where the local population cooperated with the Nazis against the Jews were actually not the ones where traditional anti-Semitism was more prevalent.
It seems that your description of the Holocaust makes it a much more calculated crime, a result of particular political and historical complexities more than a manifestation of mass hate and ignorance. Of course, this complicates the picture as far as Holocaust education and genocide prevention are concerned: hate and ignorance are something you can combat; political and historical complexities seem inevitable. How do you think your reading of Eastern European participation could inform Holocaust education? In what way can your findings help recalibrate our understanding of genocide (and our idea of genocide prevention)?
Yours,
Shmuel.
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Dear Shmuel,
I’m not sure I would accept the opposition in the question of “hate and ignorance” versus “complexities and subtleties.” The basic demand is this: if we want to teach about the Holocaust we first have to know what it was, where it was, who took part, and have some idea of why. Teaching just one element of the story, or indeed teaching the Holocaust wrong, can have effects that we might not want. So, for example, teaching only that ideology or bad ideas (“hate and ignorance”) was the problem can lead to a false sense of security. We can tell ourselves that, so long as we are not driven by bad ideas, then all will be well. But what if these bad ideas can suddenly seem resonant in certain settings?
What you are calling “complexity” in this question is actually a process that we can understand, that of the deliberate destruction of states and political institutions. What we see very clearly is that in all states, and perhaps especially in states where antisemitism was a pre-war problem, the preservation of conventional political institutions was very important. And so we can draw the lesson that, let us say, political predictability is desirable, and changes of borders, state failure, regime change, and anarchy are risky. This, by the way, is the consensus of the mass of studies that deal with ethnic cleansing and genocide. There is no contradiction here. Of course we should teach ethics, and especially teach people to go against the grain. The rescuers during the Holocaust were people who were able to stay true to themselves despite changing circumstances. But we should also teach the value of institutions, since for the vast majority of us they are what is crucial.
