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Moral Tourism: Bad Poetry after Auschwitz

Martin Amis, Elie Wiesel, Avraham Sutzkever, and others have managed to write literature about the Holocaust, arguably in a way that does justice to its horrors. But the Holocaust has also become the subject of much bad fiction. Adam Kirsch reviews a recent example, The Death’s Head Chess Club, which focuses on the relationship between a somewhat benign SS officer and a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz, and their reunion in Amsterdam two decades later:

Auschwitz remains central to our imagination of evil, but the experience of evil itself has grown remote, so that thinking about Auschwitz threatens to become a kind of moral tourism. We make mental excursions there, just as we make physical pilgrimages to the site, because we feel it’s good for us to spend some time in the company of the abyss. But just as tourists at Auschwitz inevitably means “selfies” at Auschwitz—because not everyone who visits has the patience, or courage, or knowledge, to understand what they are doing there—so writing about Auschwitz means that we will get mediocre, self-satisfied books on the subject. . . .

If the Auschwitz sections of [The Death’s Head Chess Club] err by trying to make misery “interesting,” the Amsterdam sections are actively offensive in the way they recycle the age-old equation of Judaism with stubborn vengefulness and Christianity with loving forgiveness. Emil, [the inmate], holds on to his grievances like Shylock, while we are meant to take [the SS-officer] Paul Meissner’s postwar embrace of a Catholic vocation as proof of his essential goodness. This is an especially unfortunate plot device for anyone who remembers the role that the Catholic Church actually played after the war, helping some of the most hardened Nazis to evade Allied justice. . . . And the novel’s concluding scene, when Emil scatters Paul’s ashes at Auschwitz while saying kaddish, is pure kitsch.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Arts & Culture, Auschwitz, Catholic Church, Chess, Holocaust, Holocaust fiction

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic