Part III: Repositioning the Reader: Narrative Strategies that Focus on the Holocaust Victims' Suffering and Dignity
Analysis of Inga Clendinnen's Reading the Holocaust and Omer Bartov's Mirrors of Destruction
This final piece is the third installment of essays based on Carolyn A. Dean’s The Fragility of Empathy After the Holocaust, published in 2004. The other essays inspired by her book can be read here and here.
Two well-acclaimed histories, Inga Clendinnen’s Reading the Holocaust and Omer Bartov’s Mirrors of Destruction, do not overlap when analyzing the Holocaust. Yet, Dean chooses these two works for three reasons. First, they both consider the horror of the Holocaust. Second, their studies “were well-reviewed and well-received by historians,” unlike Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which was overwhelmingly denounced as turning the Holocaust into “pornography” by the academy. Finally, both historians tacitly and unambiguously want their readers to come away with a strong awareness of the victims’ suffering and their dignity.1
Since this series has delved into history-making, it’s also important to contextualize their accounts within the historiography itself, i.e., what sort of history are the two writing?
In terms of the form of history they are creating, Dean states:
They . . . represent a genre of synthetic essays that is as much self-conscious cultural commentary as history, and for the most part they favor a narrative mode and yet keep their subject anchored in its historical particularities. I will argue that their ability to represent the Holocaust in universalizing terms even as they stay close to the events of genocide itself is crucial to their ability to represent victims’ suffering in emotionally compelling and yet bearable terms [unlike Goldhagen’s account].2
Inga Clendinnen’s work on the Holocaust is to avoid the paralyzing effects caused by emotions and analysis.3 As Clendinnen states, she wants to overcome the “Gorgon effect.” This effect refers to mythological Greek figures, the Gorgons, the most famous one being Medusa, whose hair was made of snakes; if anyone looked at one of them directly, they’d turn to stone. It’s also a metaphor for being paralyzed by fear, experiencing “frozen mimicry,” when encountering something inexplicably terrifying. The Holocaust, with all its horrors, was just that.
In setting out to overcome this effect, Clendinnen wants to do away with the notion that the Nazis were monsters; thus, she attempts to humanize them. She also suggests we approach the period by refraining from moral judgment, while also focusing on the facts. In so doing, she does not engage with theories of empathy in drawing the reader into her narrative. By approaching the victims and their actions, or lack thereof, against their perpetrators in this way, she “marshals in [a] chilly pragmatism unexpectedly against those who would judge the victims for having not sufficiently resisted, attributing such attitudes to an unfortunate penchant among scholars to entertain ideas about how human beings should behave that have no place in historical inquiry.”4
Clendinnen’s primary goal is to normalize the horror of the Holocaust. In so doing, and paradoxically, this normalization and refusal to demonize the perpetrators “turns them into monsters.” Dean explains:
[I]n the midst of this exceedingly banal world in which killing has become routine, there appears the pathology of anti-Semitism: ‘The anti-Semitism enacted inside Auschwitz was pathological. It bore not the least resemlance to the pallid antagonisms, the weary jokes, and unwearying condescension we might associate with the term. Rather it was the active conviction that Jews were not human at all, but Untermenschen,5 vile creatures whose aim was to contaminate everyone in their proximity.’6
As for the overarching goal of Clendinnen’s work, Dean sees an implicit tension in how she banalizes and normalizes the camps, while also humanizing the SS guards. The most pronounced example is a soccer match between the SS and Sonderkommando (these were camp inmates who were tasked with disposing of the burned corpses after they had been murdered) at Auschwitz. In this reading, she’s flipping Primo Levi’s infuriated reaction to a survivor’s story of the game. As Levi remarked, in Auschwitz, he “‘heard the echo of ‘Satanic Laughter’” in this game played ‘as if on a village green and not at the gates of hell.’”7 Clendinnen suggests, instead, that all the men for that short period of time simply saw one another as human beings. Although “both teams knew that at some unspecific team in the future one would eliminate the other.”8 Dean contends that Clendinnen isn’t trying to show us humanity in a mundane soccer game, but instead is trying to convey the camp in terms of “redemptive humanness.” So, as Dean notes, Clendinnen is trying to convince us that the SS are just a “bunch of bad guys,” but they’re also “imcomprehensible, monstrous, and finally ‘pathological.’”9
Furthermore, the scene described of the victims playing football with the SS is seen as redemptive, as the victims “hold their composure, and they carry the most profound and wrenching knowledge [of their demise] humbly and discreetly.”10 In short, before their deaths, they acted with dignity, plus the perpetrators could have hearts at times. Ultimately, Dean sees Clendinnen’s work as a “morality tale,” one that downplays the motives of the perpetrators as well as their “pathological anti-Semitism.”
Omer Bartov’s work, Mirrors of Destruction, despite having a synthetic narrative much like Clendinnen’s study, uses the incomprehensible nature of the Holocaust as something to accept, rather than something that must be rebutted.11 Further, Bartov provides us with deep contextualization, beginning with the Great War, when he first explains, “‘All soldiers who kill in war are motivated, at least in part, by precisely this fear [of death]. . . . We may say that in war many soldiers discover the pleasure of killing; some will rebel against that pleasure (and become pacifist); others will yearn to perpetuate it (and become fascist).’”12 Thus, a new type of individual emerged in this context after World War I. The discovery of this new individual “represented a ‘readaptation’ to the machinage age of the warrior-hero.’ Dean continues, “Industrialized warfare [also] created a new technocratic elite prepared to wage war, and it de-individuated persons so dramatically that different sides could claim to have been ‘victimized’ by a war whose perpetrators were elusive because they themselves could only be distantly if at all implicated in killing.”13
If both sides claim to be victims, but one clearly is not (the fascists), how does one properly attribute accountability to them? Bartov seeks to answer this question in Mirrors of Destruction. Returning to the pre-World War II era, Bartov illuminates the way in which both the French and the German perpetrators created new enemies while perceiving themselves as “victims.” His book then “charts the fantasmic creation of enemies and victims in rhetoric that manipulates both categories of meaning in accord with the nation’s need to affirm sovereignty or expand borders.”14 (In the case of Germany, it was relentless in its need to expand, best known as the Lebensraum15 plan, which the Nazis established for a Greater German Reich.)
Using Bartov’s logic, and applying it to Clendinnen’s claims of the incomprehensibility of the Nazis’ acts, along with attempting to humanize the SS, it becomes impossible to “locate” the perpetrators, thus, essentially, allowing them to be absolved of their guilt, relinquishing them from their accountability for the crimes they committed against humanity. This approach also renders the victims invisible, “eras[ing] the victims and thus continu[ing] the perpetrators’ work by other means.”16
This offers the perpetrators a safe space and power to reframe not only the past, but the present, as well as the future.17 Thus, perpetrators cast their delusional fantasies forwards and backwards, “transforming [their victim] into an enemy and thinking of themselves as the ‘real’ victims.” Dean adds, “from Bartov’s perspective, the perpetrator has successfully rewritten history in the image of his own fantasies, and the loss of boundaries between the identities of the perpetrator and victim represents a form of perpetrator psychosis-fluidity born of ‘cope with trauma.’”18
So, if fascist perpetrators can control the narrative, as I say, backwards and forwards, how do we reposition the actual victim’s true reality? Bartov, understanding the difficulty of doing this, states that one must maintain “an undistorted position ‘outside’ these fantasies, which engulf entire populations.”19
Grimly, Bartov makes it clear to us, “‘murder’ . . . ‘is in our midst.’” He continues:
‘and the idea of humanity so fragile that it is never a question of normalizing perpetrators but rather of understanding how to hold onto reality. In this account, perpetrators are abundantly human precisely by virtue of their very distorted, defensive response to perceived threats to identity, but the question of their ‘normality’ is neither here nor there, since they are and are not so clearly ‘normal.’’20
Bartov counters the perpetrators’ fantasmic distortions by instead centering the Holocaust survivors’ stories. Dean adds, “he recasts victims’ suffering as a lesson, not about resilience and nobility but about human fraility and the fragility of human dignity.”21 The mirror of which Bartov speaks is that of the perpetrators’, which distorts time and the truth, tricking us into seeing things as if we were in a house of fantastical mirrors filled with horror. In Bartov’s writing, Dean notes, there is an underlying longing for humans never to suffer again, which is a noble sentiment. However, he does not go as far as Clendinnen, who treats the victims as secularly sacrificial. Instead, Bartov “tells the story about humanity’s unfulfilled potential to do good.”
One thing their works have in common is that they do not evoke moral outrage or moral numbness, such as Goldhagen’s. Instead, they show us that the victims’ lost lives were not erased, but rather restored to dignity. And, as Dean repeats Bartov’s early remarks, the killing continues; we know that. Indeed, murder is always in our midst. But, as Bartov notes, “our passivity, [our numbness to it], is our nemesis.” We must resist it.
Carolyn J. Dean, “Empathy, Suffering, and Holocaust ‘Pornography,” in The Fragility of Empathy After the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 60.
Ibid., 60.
Ibid., 61.
Ibid., 61.
Untermensch [sin.] and Untermenschen [pl.] in German literally translates as “underman,” but it also means “subman” and “subhuman.” It’s a highly charged, pejorative term.
Carolyn J. Dean, “Empathy, Suffering, and Holocaust ‘Pornography,” in The Fragility of Empathy After the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 64.
Ibid., 65.
Ibid., 65.
Ibid., 68.
Ibid., 66.
Ibid., 68.
Ibid., 68.
Ibid., 68.
Ibid., 69.
Lebensraum or “living space” is the philosophy or concept of German expansionism. The term was first coined in 1901. The Nazis adopted this as a goal to expand a Greater German Reich.
Carolyn J. Dean, “Empathy, Suffering, and Holocaust ‘Pornography,” in The Fragility of Empathy After the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 70.
For example, as Dagmar Herzog points out, it took decades for those with disabilities to be recognized in Germany as being victims of the Nazis (the Nazis killed 300,000 individuals with physical and cognitive disabilities during their rule, and forcefully sterilized 400,000 others). Meanwhile, the perpetrators of the crimes, such as the doctors, were even celebrated, while the victims and their family members were shamed. See my recent piece, published on 6 September 2025, “On the Urgency of Unlearning Eugenics: Dagamar Herzog’s Work on the Entanglement of Sexuality, Reproductive Rights, and Disability Rights in Post-Nazi Europe,” as well as Dagmar Herzog’s recent book, The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024).
Carolyn J. Dean, “Empathy, Suffering, and Holocaust ‘Pornography,” in The Fragility of Empathy After the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 70.
Ibid., 71.
Ibid., 71.
Ibid., 71 - 72.