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Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics (review)

696 Levi—clearly one of his favorites—and critiques Tzvetan Todorov’s too-easy equation of the Gulag and the Nazi death camps. In a few skillful paragraphs, he provides a critique of the nowfashionable Carl Schmitt, linking his concept of the political as the need to produce enemies to the murderous, totalitarian impulses of the Nazi regime. He deftly compares the Enlightenment-inspired writings of the western, secular Jews, Levi and Jean Améry, with the east European, Orthodox and Kabbalist-influenced Elie Wiesel and Ka-tzetnik. But Bartov’s mode of writing also leaves one wanting some more careful, sustained attention to particular people and groups. Sometimes Mirrors of Destruction reads like a history without human agents, only large collectives. “Nations” remember; “Western Civilization” lies in crisis; “Total War” creates apocalyptic visions. It is part of the seamlessness of his history, from World War I to World War II and the fractured memories of the present. Yet there needs to be place in this history also for contingency and for paths not taken, for the actions of specific individuals and groups. I confess to a certain unease with the universalizing claim that “when we look in the mirror of the Holocaust, we see our own reflection” (212). What precisely does this mean? Is it that we are all potentially perpetrators of violence? Or potentially its victims? Or perhaps both? However often Levi’s comment about the “grey zone” is cited, however much the uncertainty of greyness suits modern sensibilities, we still need to remember as distinctly as possible the line that divided—and still divides—those who organize genocides and other atrocities and those who are their victims. Bartov himself is deeply attentive to this line, but his drive to render a total history that includes victims and perpetrators and his desire for large truths results, at times, in formulations that are too universal to be convincing. Bartov offers consideration of many more issues in his book. He discusses the slow, halting destruction of the Resistance myth in France and the troubled efforts to come to terms with the realities of collaboration under Vichy. He analyzes the often painful and conflicted Israeli engagements with survivors and the meaning of the Holocaust. He explores the unceasing strife over German identity and the memorialization of the Holocaust. Bartov writes knowledgeably and smoothly about the ethical and political situations in the three countries, and adds some acute side references to the United States as well. Mirrors of Destruction provokes one to think with and against it: one cannot ask for more from a book.