Preempting the Holocaust

Professor Lawrence Langer has collected a series of essays pertaining to interpreting the Holocaust and issued them in a slender volume of enormous importance. Preempting the Holocaust is a warning, an interpretation, and a "re-visioning" of that horrific event. Using his considerable skills in oral history, Professor Langer has little hopeful or comforting to say; in fact, he constantly admonishes us against interpreting the Holocaust through modern Christian values. Thus, he argues that there is nothing redemptive about the suffering of the victims of the Holocaust, that superficial analyses of many survivors' accounts could have future students blaming the victim instead of the perpetrators, and that those who suffered from the Holocaust relive the experience in what he terms "durational" time.I found Professor Langer's theses convincing and distressing. I share with him his praise of Daniel Goldhagen's assertion that hatred can be used as the means by which we understand the motivation of the killers. Indeed, I think his introductory essay was the strongest of the collection, for in it, Professor Langer summarizes the conclusions of the following essays. His assertion that: "The very image of machinery [the Holocaust as done by a "killing machine"] rather than man as the primary instrument of liquidation tends to absolve individual offenders and obscure the identity and the catalyst of the very culprits who initiated and carried out the crime."Both scholars and people of conscience would do well to include this volume in their libraries.