I'm starting a new job next week, so I don't know when I'll have time to blog again soon. With hope, I'll be in a new course in September and will blog regularly then; in the meantime, I'm offering the below.
The first course I took when I went back to school in 2015 was a hisoriography course, for which the below was one of my assignments, i.e., a review of one of the books I would be including in my term paper for the course, which I posted earlier. Figured I'd post this now, since my academic studies have taken a bit of a pause.
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Mayer, Arno J. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History. New
The first course I took when I went back to school in 2015 was a hisoriography course, for which the below was one of my assignments, i.e., a review of one of the books I would be including in my term paper for the course, which I posted earlier. Figured I'd post this now, since my academic studies have taken a bit of a pause.
=====
Mayer, Arno J. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History. New
York:
Pantheon, 1988.
This book[1]
makes a curious, albeit mostly baffling, contribution to the intentionalist-functionalist
debate. Mayer, who is currently professor emeritus of history at Princeton and
holder of an endowed chair, began his academic career specializing in World War
I and its aftermath, writing his dissertation at Yale on the relationship
between the war and the Russian Revolutions of 1917. He went on to publish a
book on the Paris Peace Conference and Treaty of Versailles and volumes on European
revolution and counter-revolution before trying his hand at the Final Solution.
The result commits the dual errors of advancing a thesis even too radical for
most functionalists and of failing to substantiate his argument with sufficient
primary and secondary sources and documentation. The result is a text that
ultimately has greater worth as a curiosity than as an addition to either the
history or the historiographical debate.
The problems with Heavens begin with Mayer’s nomenclature and compound from there. First, Mayer elects to eschew the two most common terms to refer to the extermination of Europe’s Jews during World War II, Holocaust and Final Solution, in favor of “Judeocide,” a term unused by historians before Mayer and largely ignored since. While his complaint about the term “Holocaust,” i.e., that it has religious connotations and that its emphasis on survivor memory incurs fundamental problems with critical analysis,[2] is well-worn ground, but his rejection of the term “Final Solution,” particularly given the predominant use of the term among functionalists emphasizing the Nazi government’s agency over the victims’ perspectives, seems poorly founded. In addition, Mayer proposes and applies a three-fold paradigm of anti-Semitism, with “Judeophobia” connoting personal prejudice, “anti-Semitism” connoting institutionalized prejudice against Jews, and “anti-Judaism” connoting hostility toward the Jewish faith.[3] That he relegates his explanation to a footnote rather than offering a more incorporated explanation of his terminology for his reader seems frankly hostile.
Moreover, on a macro scale, Mayer chooses to present the “Judeocide” within the broad context of what he calls the “Second Thirty Years War,” covering both world wars and the interwar period. In a lengthy prologue that strays far from the central subject matter, Mayer draws broad analogies between the period from 1914 to 1945 and that from 1618 to 1648, the “First Thirty Years War.” Sharing in common the explosion of widespread violence in central Europe in the context of a general social and economic crisis, Mayer clearly sees strong similarities between the periods, but his discussion of the Thirty Years War – not to mention his discussion in the same prologue of the first Crusades – seems more like a justification for an historian specializing outside the Nazi period to write about the Final Solution than an ideological framework, which it ultimately is not. That the three periods – the Crusades, the Thirty Years War, and the first half of the twentieth century – involved the commission of grave acts of violence by German-speaking people against civilian Jewish populations is not in dispute; rather, the relevance of the similarities feels strained, particularly when this framework is not sustained throughout the work, except for in the repetition of particular contrived terms.
The result of this decision to use non-standard terminology adds a level of density to an already challenging read. Mayer frequently uses German terms without translating them, and although his vocabulary in English (which is not his first or second language, it bears noting) is extraordinary, both of these points communicate a certain hostility toward the non-specialist. These choices by the author are particularly stunning given Mayer’s highly controversial choice to eschew the use of footnotes entirely, even in cases of direct quotations. According to historian Richard Breitman, when challenged during a symposium on his non-use of standard citation methods, Mayer defended himself by claiming that he had no need to “prove his manhood.”[4] With three words, Mayer somehow managed to offend women, conscientious historians, and, it must be pondered, tenured professors, given Mayer’s presence at Princeton for 27 years by the time this book appeared.
Beyond the problems of nomenclature and shoddy scholarship, Heavens has the additional problem of some statements that Mayer makes that simply cannot be justified in the context of the available scholarship. In perhaps the best-known of these statements, Mayer writes about the Nazi concentration/extermination camp Auschwitz in southwestern Poland, where one million people were murdered, the majority of them Jews, “[F]rom 1942 to 1945, certainly from Auschwitz, but probably overall, more Jews were killed by so-called ‘natural’ causes than ‘un-natural’ ones.”[5] Given the established fact that the majority of Jews killed by the Final Solution were dead by the end of 1942, this statement seems particularly ludicrous. Similarly inane is Mayer’s contention that the Einsatzgruppen – the mobile killing squads deployed against political operatives and civilians in the wake of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union – “killed few Jews in the buffer zone, and even once they penetrated Russia’s [sic] pre-1939 borders, they initiated their infamous butchery only upon reaching towns and cities captured after heavy fighting.”[6] In fact, the Jewish casualties in the areas abutting the 1939 border were enormous, particularly in Latvia and Lithuania, where the Nazis faced virtually no resistance from the Soviet Red Army, which had fled in the face of the invasion.
All of these significant shortcomings of Heavens relate in some fashion to Mayer’s highly controversial thesis, which is that the “Judeocide” of World War II was not ultimately so much an expression of anti-Semitism (or “Judeophobia”) as the result of the conflation by Hitler and the Nazis of Jewish identity with Bolshevism, i.e., Judeobolschewismus. In short, had the Nazis’ not primarily targeted the Soviet Union among their war aims and had they not primarily done so because of their intractable hatred of Soviet communism, then Jewish casualties would have been significantly fewer. It should be stipulated that the latter part of this proposition – that the Nazis turning toward extermination as a policy toward Europe’s Jews was intimately linked to the fortunes of the military campaign against the USSR – is a fundamental assumption of functionalism. That the Nazis’ anticommunism outweighed their hatred of Jews is not.
While it is not unusual, particularly in the functionalist camp, for a thesis greatly at odds with the prevailing scholarship to be introduced, for it to be introduced in the absence of justification among the pre-existing literature is unheard of. In this sense, the errors of Mayer’s technique and the outlandishness of his central thesis are fundamentally connected. For example, less than twenty pages after making his statement about natural vs unnatural causes of Jewish deaths, Mayer writes, “Seemingly discontinuous with the intrinsic social amalgam and tactical ambiguity of the Nazi project, as well as uninformed by precedent, the extermination sites [the Aktion Reinhard camps and Chelmno] defy explanation.”[7] Yitzhak Arad’s seminal study of the Aktion Reinhard camps – Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka – was published in English in 1987,[8] and it was incumbent upon Mayer as a responsible historian to be aware of the major scholarship in the field and to revise his own writing accordingly. That Mayer failed to acknowledge the very explanation of the Reinhard camps that Arad provided is almost criminally negligent.
These very large negative aspects of Heavens notwithstanding, Mayer, as a self-described Marxist, is an able historian of European anticommunism and anti-Sovietism, and while these passages of the book are similarly unsourced, they are nevertheless not at odds with the established scholarship. Moreover, the framing device of the Second Thirty Years War is potentially enlightening, but as noted above, Mayer does not sustain this framework sufficiently to qualify his book as an essential reading on those particular grounds. Readers in search of a radically functionalist point of view have a rich literature to consult that can both communicate the functionalist thesis and serve as bases for further research. Heavens sadly does neither.
The problems with Heavens begin with Mayer’s nomenclature and compound from there. First, Mayer elects to eschew the two most common terms to refer to the extermination of Europe’s Jews during World War II, Holocaust and Final Solution, in favor of “Judeocide,” a term unused by historians before Mayer and largely ignored since. While his complaint about the term “Holocaust,” i.e., that it has religious connotations and that its emphasis on survivor memory incurs fundamental problems with critical analysis,[2] is well-worn ground, but his rejection of the term “Final Solution,” particularly given the predominant use of the term among functionalists emphasizing the Nazi government’s agency over the victims’ perspectives, seems poorly founded. In addition, Mayer proposes and applies a three-fold paradigm of anti-Semitism, with “Judeophobia” connoting personal prejudice, “anti-Semitism” connoting institutionalized prejudice against Jews, and “anti-Judaism” connoting hostility toward the Jewish faith.[3] That he relegates his explanation to a footnote rather than offering a more incorporated explanation of his terminology for his reader seems frankly hostile.
Moreover, on a macro scale, Mayer chooses to present the “Judeocide” within the broad context of what he calls the “Second Thirty Years War,” covering both world wars and the interwar period. In a lengthy prologue that strays far from the central subject matter, Mayer draws broad analogies between the period from 1914 to 1945 and that from 1618 to 1648, the “First Thirty Years War.” Sharing in common the explosion of widespread violence in central Europe in the context of a general social and economic crisis, Mayer clearly sees strong similarities between the periods, but his discussion of the Thirty Years War – not to mention his discussion in the same prologue of the first Crusades – seems more like a justification for an historian specializing outside the Nazi period to write about the Final Solution than an ideological framework, which it ultimately is not. That the three periods – the Crusades, the Thirty Years War, and the first half of the twentieth century – involved the commission of grave acts of violence by German-speaking people against civilian Jewish populations is not in dispute; rather, the relevance of the similarities feels strained, particularly when this framework is not sustained throughout the work, except for in the repetition of particular contrived terms.
The result of this decision to use non-standard terminology adds a level of density to an already challenging read. Mayer frequently uses German terms without translating them, and although his vocabulary in English (which is not his first or second language, it bears noting) is extraordinary, both of these points communicate a certain hostility toward the non-specialist. These choices by the author are particularly stunning given Mayer’s highly controversial choice to eschew the use of footnotes entirely, even in cases of direct quotations. According to historian Richard Breitman, when challenged during a symposium on his non-use of standard citation methods, Mayer defended himself by claiming that he had no need to “prove his manhood.”[4] With three words, Mayer somehow managed to offend women, conscientious historians, and, it must be pondered, tenured professors, given Mayer’s presence at Princeton for 27 years by the time this book appeared.
Beyond the problems of nomenclature and shoddy scholarship, Heavens has the additional problem of some statements that Mayer makes that simply cannot be justified in the context of the available scholarship. In perhaps the best-known of these statements, Mayer writes about the Nazi concentration/extermination camp Auschwitz in southwestern Poland, where one million people were murdered, the majority of them Jews, “[F]rom 1942 to 1945, certainly from Auschwitz, but probably overall, more Jews were killed by so-called ‘natural’ causes than ‘un-natural’ ones.”[5] Given the established fact that the majority of Jews killed by the Final Solution were dead by the end of 1942, this statement seems particularly ludicrous. Similarly inane is Mayer’s contention that the Einsatzgruppen – the mobile killing squads deployed against political operatives and civilians in the wake of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union – “killed few Jews in the buffer zone, and even once they penetrated Russia’s [sic] pre-1939 borders, they initiated their infamous butchery only upon reaching towns and cities captured after heavy fighting.”[6] In fact, the Jewish casualties in the areas abutting the 1939 border were enormous, particularly in Latvia and Lithuania, where the Nazis faced virtually no resistance from the Soviet Red Army, which had fled in the face of the invasion.
All of these significant shortcomings of Heavens relate in some fashion to Mayer’s highly controversial thesis, which is that the “Judeocide” of World War II was not ultimately so much an expression of anti-Semitism (or “Judeophobia”) as the result of the conflation by Hitler and the Nazis of Jewish identity with Bolshevism, i.e., Judeobolschewismus. In short, had the Nazis’ not primarily targeted the Soviet Union among their war aims and had they not primarily done so because of their intractable hatred of Soviet communism, then Jewish casualties would have been significantly fewer. It should be stipulated that the latter part of this proposition – that the Nazis turning toward extermination as a policy toward Europe’s Jews was intimately linked to the fortunes of the military campaign against the USSR – is a fundamental assumption of functionalism. That the Nazis’ anticommunism outweighed their hatred of Jews is not.
While it is not unusual, particularly in the functionalist camp, for a thesis greatly at odds with the prevailing scholarship to be introduced, for it to be introduced in the absence of justification among the pre-existing literature is unheard of. In this sense, the errors of Mayer’s technique and the outlandishness of his central thesis are fundamentally connected. For example, less than twenty pages after making his statement about natural vs unnatural causes of Jewish deaths, Mayer writes, “Seemingly discontinuous with the intrinsic social amalgam and tactical ambiguity of the Nazi project, as well as uninformed by precedent, the extermination sites [the Aktion Reinhard camps and Chelmno] defy explanation.”[7] Yitzhak Arad’s seminal study of the Aktion Reinhard camps – Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka – was published in English in 1987,[8] and it was incumbent upon Mayer as a responsible historian to be aware of the major scholarship in the field and to revise his own writing accordingly. That Mayer failed to acknowledge the very explanation of the Reinhard camps that Arad provided is almost criminally negligent.
These very large negative aspects of Heavens notwithstanding, Mayer, as a self-described Marxist, is an able historian of European anticommunism and anti-Sovietism, and while these passages of the book are similarly unsourced, they are nevertheless not at odds with the established scholarship. Moreover, the framing device of the Second Thirty Years War is potentially enlightening, but as noted above, Mayer does not sustain this framework sufficiently to qualify his book as an essential reading on those particular grounds. Readers in search of a radically functionalist point of view have a rich literature to consult that can both communicate the functionalist thesis and serve as bases for further research. Heavens sadly does neither.
[1] Arno J. Mayer, Why Did
the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History (New York:
Pantheon, 1988).
[2] Ibid, 16.
[3] Ibid, 5, footnote.
[4] Richard Breitman, The
Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Knopf,
1991), 26.
[5] Mayer, 365.
[6] Ibid, 270.
[7] Ibid, 377, emphasis mine.
[8] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec,
Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987).
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