Comments on Weisberg's "Avoiding Central Realities" and Richards' "Terror and the Law"

Abstract

The two excellent papers presented here open up the conceptual and methodological boundaries of Holocaust research in a manner that will enable scholars to gain a quite different perspective on that tragic event. At the same time the papers, presumably unintentionally, also share a number of explicit and implicit assumptions that make comparison particularly rewarding. At the outset it may be useful to underscore a number of the historiographic assumptions with which both authors work; otherwise, they may be overlooked in the context of their often very sophisticated arguments. To begin with, Professors Weisberg and Richards do not take the Holocaust as an historic event that should be studied solely in terms of the politics and mechanics of the killing operations. Rather, both authors set the Holocaust in a much wider societal context, essentially asking why did German and European society permit the Holocaust to happen? Implicit in that question, of course, is the assumption of an ideal societal paradigm in which horrors such as the Holocaust would (and could) not occur. The two papers also stretch the methodological and chronological boundaries of research on the Holocaust. Chronologically, Professor Weisberg asks us to go far beyond the Great Depression or even the origins of World War I to search for the antecedents of the Holocaust mentality, while methodologically he turns to literature to illuminate the cause of the Holocaust. Professor Richards looks to the centuries-old legal positivist tradition in Europe to explain the failure of intellectuals to oppose the outrages of the Nazi period. Finally, the two authors share a refreshing outlook on what might be called the moral imperative of historical experience. Unlike most jaded historians, including the present speaker, Professors Weisberg and Richards