Postwar

drew attention to certain prominent Jewish politicians—Leon Blum, Jules Moch, Rene Mayer—in order to contrast them with the parliamentarians of his own party: ‘We Communists have only French names’ (a claim as unseemly as it was untrue).

In these circumstances, the choice for most of Europe’s Jews seemed stark: depart (for Israel once it came into existence, or America after its doors were opened in 1950) or else be silent and, so far as possible, invisible. To be sure, many of them felt an overwhelming urge to speak and bear witness. In Primo Levi’s words, he was driven by an ‘absolute, pathological narrative charge’ to write down what he had just experienced. But then Levi’s own fate is instructive. When he took Se questo e un uomo, the story of his incarceration in Auschwitz, to the leading left-wing Italian publisher Einaudi in 1946, it was rejected out of hand: Levi’s narrative of persecution and survival, beginning with his deportation as a Jew rather than as a resister, did not conform to uplifting Italian accounts of nationwide anti-Fascist resistance.

Se questo e un uomo was published instead by a small press in just 2,500 copies—most of which were remaindered in a warehouse in Florence and destroyed in the great flood there twenty years later. Levi’s memoir was not published in Britain until 1959, when If This Is a Man sold only a few hundred copies (nor did the US edition, under the title Survival in Auschwitz, begin to sell well until twenty years later). Gallimard, the most prestigious of the French publishing houses, for a long time resisted buying anything by Levi; only after his death in 1987 did his work, and his significance, begin to gain recognition in France. Like his subject, then, Primo Levi remained largely inaudible for many years: no-one was listening. In 1955 he noted that it had become ‘indelicate’ to speak of the camps: ‘One risks being accused of setting up as a victim, or of indecent exposure’. Giuliana Tedeschi, another Italian survivor of Auschwitz, made the same point: ‘I encountered people who didn’t want to know anything, because the Italians, too, had suffered, after all, even those who didn’t go to the camps…. They used to say, “For heaven’s sake, it’s all over,” and so I remained quiet for a long time’.[416]

Even in Great Britain the Holocaust was not discussed in public. Just as the representative concentration camp for the French was Buchenwald, with its well-organised committees of Communist political prisoners, so in post-war Britain the iconic image of a Nazi camp was not Auschwitz but Bergen-Belsen (liberated by British troops); and the skeletal survivors recorded on film and shown in cinema newsreels at the end of the war were not typically identified as Jews.[417] In post-war Britain, too, Jews often preferred to maintain a low profile and keep their memories to themselves. Writing in 1996 of his English childhood as the son of camp survivors, Jeremy Adler recalled that whereas there were no taboos at home about discussing the Holocaust, the topic remained off limits everywhere else: ‘My friends could boast of how dad had fought with Monty in the desert. My own father’s experiences were unmentionable. They had no place until recently. The public cycle from repression to obsession in Britain took about fifty years’.[418]

In retrospect it is the universal character of the neglect that is most striking. The Holocaust of the Jews was put out of mind not only in places where there were indeed good reasons not to think about it—like Austria, say (which had just one-tenth the population of pre-war Germany but supplied one in two of all concentration camp guards), or Poland; but also in Italy—where most of the nation had no cause for shame on this score—or in Britain, where the war years were otherwise looked upon with pride and even some nostalgia. The rapid onset of the Cold War contributed, of course.[419] But there were other reasons too. For most Europeans, World War Two had not been about the Jews (except in so far as they were blamed for it), and any suggestion that Jewish suffering might claim pride of place was deeply resented.

The Holocaust was only one of many things that people wanted to forget: ‘In the fat years after the war… Europeans took shelter behind a collective amnesia’ (Hans-Magnus Enzensberger). Between their compromises with Fascist administrators and occupying forces, their collaboration with wartime agencies and rulers and their private humiliations, material hardships and personal tragedies, millions of Europeans had good reasons of their own to turn away from the recent past, or else mis-remember it to better effect. What the French historian Henry Rousso would later dub the ‘Vichy syndrome’—the decades-long difficulty of acknowledging what had really happened during the war and the overwhelming desire to block the memory or else recast it in a usable way that would not corrode the fragile bonds of post-war society—was by no means unique to France.

Every occupied country in Europe developed its own ‘Vichy syndrome’. The wartime privations of Italians, for example, both at home and in prison camps, diverted public attention from the suffering Italians had caused to others—in the Balkans, for example, or in Italy’s African colonies. The stories that the Dutch or the Poles told themselves about the war would sustain the national self-image for decades—the Dutch in particular setting great store by their image as a nation that had resisted, while forgetting as best they could that 23,000 Dutchmen volunteered for the Waffen SS: the largest contingent from Western Europe. Even Norway had somehow to digest the memory that more than one in five of its military officers had voluntarily joined Vidkun Quisling’s neo-Nazi Nasjonal Samling (‘National Rally’) before or after April 1940. But whereas liberation, resistance and deportees—even heroic defeats like Dunkirk or the Warsaw Rising of 1944—could all be put to some service in compensatory national myth-making, there was nothing ‘usable’ about the Holocaust.[420]

In certain respects it was actually easier for Germans to engage and acknowledge the scale of their crime. Not, of course, at first: we have seen how ‘de-Nazification’ failed. History teaching in the early Federal Republic stopped with the Wilhelminian Empire. With the rare exception of a statesman like Kurt Schumacher—who warned his fellow countrymen as early as June 1947 that they had better learn to ‘talk for once about the Jews in Germany and the world’—German public figures in the Forties and Fifties managed to avoid any reference to the Final Solution. The American writer Alfred Kazin remarked upon the fact that for his students in Cologne in 1952 ‘the war was over. The war was not to be mentioned. Not a word was said by my students about the war’. When West Germans looked back it was to memories of their own sufferings: in polls taken at the end of the Fifties an overwhelming majority identified the Allied post-war occupation as ‘the worst time of their lives’.

As some observers had already predicted in 1946, the Germans successfully distanced themselves from Hitler: evading both punishment and moral responsibility by offering the Fuhrer to the world as a scapegoat. Indeed there was considerable resentment at what Hitler had wrought—but at the harm he had brought down upon the heads of Germans rather than because of what he and Germans had done to others. Targetting the Jews, as it seemed to many Germans in these years, was not so much Hitler’s greatest crime as his greatest error: in a 1952 survey, nearly two out of five adults in West Germany did not hesitate to inform pollsters that they thought it was ‘better’ for Germany to have no Jews on its territory.

Attitudes like these were facilitated by the relative absence of nearby reminders of Nazi atrocities; the Nazis had carefully located their main death camps far from the ‘Old Reich’. Not that proximity in itself was any guarantee of sensibility. The fact that Dachau was a suburb of Munich, a tram-ride from the city centre, did not in itself advance local understanding of what had taken place there: in January 1948 the Bavarian parliament unanimously voted to convert the site of the Nazi camp there into an Arbeitslager, a forced labour camp for ‘work-shy, a-social elements’. As Hannah Arendt observed on visiting Germany in 1950: ‘Everywhere one notices that there is no reaction to what has happened, but it is hard to say whether this is due to an intentional refusal to mourn or whether it is the expression of a genuine emotional incapacity’. In 1955 a Frankfurt court acquitted one Dr Peters, the general manager of a company that provided the SS with Zyklon-B gas, on the grounds that there was ‘insufficient proof’ that it had been used to kill deportees.

At the same time, however, Germans—uniquely in Europe—could not deny what they had done to the Jews. They might avoid mention of it; they might insist upon their own sufferings; they might pass the blame up to a ‘handful’ of Nazis. But they could not sidestep responsibility for the subject by attributing the crime of genocide to someone else. Even Adenauer, though he confined himself in public to expressions of sympathy for Jewish ‘victims’ without ever naming those who victimized them, had been constrained to sign the reparations treaty with Israel. And whereas neither the British, nor the French, nor even his fellow Italians showed any interest in the memoirs of Primo Levi, The Diary of Anna Frank (admittedly a more accessible document) was to become the best-selling paperback in German history, with over 700,000 copies sold by 1960.

The trigger for German self-interrogation, as we have seen, was a series of trials prompted by belated