Fetisch Holocaust: Die Judenvernichtung--verdrangt und vermarktet (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fetisch Holocaust: Die Judenvernichtung—verdrängt und vermarktet Lawrence Birken Fetisch Holocaust: Die Judenvernichtung—verdrängt und vermarktet, by Richard Chaim Schneider. Munich: Kindler Verlag, 1997. 286 pp. Out of print. R. C. Schneider’s Fetisch Holocaust is essentially a long essay on the “use” of the Holocaust in modern Germany and Israel. There are neither recognizable chapters nor explanatory footnotes. Rather, the book employs several different typescripts to illustrate the author’s personal reflections and scattered reminiscences. It needs to be said at the outset that Schneider is not only a German Jew, but also one who proudly proclaims his roots in the “ostjüdischen Tradition” (p. 248). According to the book jacket, Schneider was born in Munich in 1957 and studied German literature, theater, art history, and philosophy in preparation for his later work as a journalist in the print and broadcast media. He is also the author of Zwischenwelten: Ein jüdisches Leben im heutigen Deutschland, a title that nicely sums up the dilemma of being a citizen of a country which once tried to exterminate his people. Whatever the merits of his other work, Fetisch Holocaust is essentially a “think-piece” rather than a work of scholarship. At the core of the book is Schneider’s conviction that dead Jews are often worth more than living ones. But the opening mood is more one of cynicism than of anger. The very first section thus begins with a bizarre hymn to the death camps, transformed from charnel houses into the gleaming jewels of a new cult. “If it [the Holocaust] had not happened,” Schneider proclaims, “one would have invented it” (p. 9). Instead, what was invented was the image of the Shoah in literature, in monuments, in film, in scholarship. It is this obsession with image over substance, signifier over signified, that suggests the book’s title, Fetisch Holocaust. Fetishism, whether sexual or commercial, Freudian or Marxist, depends on a kind of repression or displacement in which something real disappears only to reappear as a symbol. Historically, Schneider’s argument is supported by the way in which the memory of the six million was repressed (verdrängt), only to reappear in the commercialized (vermarktet) Shoah of the eighties and nineties. By then, the Holocaust became big business, political business, “Shoah business.” Although the political uses of the Holocaust are most important in Germany and Israel, its image has been increasingly shaped by American aesthetics. Schneider thus criticizes the Holocaust’s “Hollywood-ization” by moguls like Steven Spielberg. Perhaps because media-savvy critics like Schneider often overemphasize the importance of aesthetics, his discussion of the Shoah’s commercialization is less interesting than his delineation of why it was commercialized in the first place: In both Germany and Israel, the Holocaust satisfied political needs. In Germany, Schneider notes, the German publikum fell in love with Daniel J. Goldhagen, at the very moment that the intelligentsia rejected him (p. 22). While the former praised his book without reading it, the latter hated his work without thinking about it. So the entire controversy became a kind of morality play, with the good-looking [End Page 154] young Jewish-American scholar on one side and a bunch of mousy old intellectuals on the other. “Envy,” Schneider notes, “played a not wholly unimportant role” in this controversy (p. 82). Meanwhile, Hitler’s Willing Executioners became a kind of “coffee table book” which everybody had to have. In the end, “Shoah Business” became more important than the “Shoah,” and Goldhagen a better self-promoter than a scholar. For the German intelligentsia, Victor Klemperer’s Tagebücher were the perfect antidote to Goldhagen’s Executioners. While Goldhagen described a Germany single-mindedly dedicated to Holocaust, Klemperer portrayed Nazism as Undeutsch. The novelist Michael Walser thus saw Klemperer’s Diaries as proof that an anti-Nazi but pro-German nationalism was not only possible but also desirable. For his part, Schneider not only challenges Walser’s expropriation of the Tagebücher, but condemns Klemperer for sacrificing his own Jewish ancestry on the altar of Deutschtum (pp. 243–45). Yet, as Schneider’s book suggests, both Goldhagen and Klemperer functioned as unifying forces in Germany...