Two Historians Look to Other Disciplines for Insight Into the Incomprehensible

 

Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories
By Omer Bartov
Cornell University Press, 248 pages, $18.95.

Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective
By Dan Michman
Vallentine Mitchell, 435 pages, $29.50.

 

At several Holocaust conferences in recent years, the distinguished literary scholar Lawrence Langer has murmured in frustration: "Why don't historians read something other than history?"

 

He should know. A professor of literature, Langer first approached literary theory using the tools of the Holocaust. As he drew closer, he used his understanding of literature to comprehend the Holocaust. Still later, he read wider and wrote deeper, using his keen mind and insights to explore the event. He wrote of literature, but of far more than literature — of art history and the Bible, psychology and sociology, as well as history — in an effort to comprehend the world of the camps and the testimony of survivors in its aftermath.

 

My first impression as I began reading Omer Bartov's impressive collection of essays, "Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories," was that Langer had finally met his type of scholar. Bartov is a historian who has read widely and thought deeply about the Holocaust, its impact and implications. He traverses multiple disciplines with ease and seeks understanding from history and sociology, from film and literature — even poetry — and is able to bring the insights of many disciplines to bear on the event he seeks to understand. An Israeli by birth, a German military historian by training and a scholar teaching in the United States for many years, he offers insights not only into the scholarly understanding of the Holocaust, but also into its public role in Israel, the United States and Europe — especially Germany and France. He is both an insider and an outsider, understanding enough to pick up all the nuances of the debate, but far enough removed to remain a dispassionate observer.

 

Bartov writes with rare understanding of the intersection of military history and Holocaust history. He probes the correlation between the two wars the Germans fought, the world war and the war against the Jews. Most German military historians write only of the world war without going near the Holocaust. Lucy Dawidowicz argued that although two wars were fought at the same time by the Germans, the Allies only perceived the world war — yet she only wrote on the war against the Jews. In contrast, Bartov writes with authority on both and on the intersection between war and genocide.

 

Bartov sees the racial war waged in the East as directly and operationally linked to the Holocaust. The German tactic of blitzkrieg, or lightning war, Bartov argues, was an attempt to avoid the recurrence of the static, costly and unwinnable war experienced on the Western front in World War I. As a tactic, blitzkrieg depended upon the impression it made on the enemy of confronting overwhelming force and certain defeat. Early German victories blinded Germany to the limitations of its own strategy, including the severe industrial and manpower constraints it faced that were to hamper it later in the war. Once the blitzkrieg failed in the assault on the Soviet Union, German production, industrial capacity, material and manpower resources, organization and technical skill became more important than its tactics, training and courage. Germany responded by doubling its number of tank divisions but reducing the number of tanks per army division and thus went into battle in a weakened condition.