History's black hole.

AuthorBell, David A.
PositionBlack Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning - Book review

Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015), 480 pp., $30.00.

Seventy years after it ended, the Holocaust remains the black hole at the heart of modern history. We possess mountains of meticulously collected information about it. Historians have produced libraries' worth of sober, careful and often quite remarkable analysis. Even so, something about this evil still slips out of our grasp, resists interpretation and refuses illumination.

Timothy Snyder, the latest historian to propose an overall account of the Holocaust, is no stranger to the subject. His highly acclaimed book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin traced the immensity of the slaughter that took place between 1933 and 1945 in the spaces where the old German, Austrian and Russian empires bumped up against each other. It did not really try to explain why the Holocaust happened, but it did make an argument about how the slaughter became possible. In order to carry out the murder of the Jews, Snyder suggested, Adolf Hitler depended on Joseph Stalin. Stalin not only provided a model of large-scale terror and murder that the Nazis learned much from, but also destroyed civil institutions throughout the western Soviet Union (especially Ukraine), and then in the Polish and Baltic territories he annexed in 1939 and 1940. It was precisely in these areas where the Nazis could begin the genocide in 1941. Here, in these lands of destruction, not only did they meet with little institutional resistance, but they could also count on the active connivance of desperate local populations. Without in any sense denying Nazi Germany's ultimate responsibility for the Holocaust, Snyder cast the event as part of a larger pattern of mass death that also encompassed Stalin's deliberate starvation of Ukraine in the 1930s and the mammoth wartime atrocities committed during the war itself against prisoners of war and civilians of all ethnicities.

Now, in Black Earth, Snyder has taken on the Holocaust directly. He brings to the subject the same passion that infused Bloodlands, along with his impressive expertise in the history and languages of Eastern and Central Europe. The book effortlessly sifts through sources in Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and German. It is not a narrative history. Snyder takes largely for granted knowledge of the basic events of the war, and of the chronology of the Holocaust itself. Nor does the book amount to a sustained piece of analysis, with a clear thesis statement bolstered by the systematic marshaling of facts. It is more of a meditation on the Holocaust, written in language that occasionally veers in the direction of lamentation or even prophecy. "Understanding the Holocaust is our chance, perhaps our last one, to preserve humanity," Snyder writes in his conclusion. While most historians, if pressed, would probably confess that they hope to make a small contribution toward humanity's preservation by seeking to increase its self-understanding, this is setting the bar very high indeed.

Unfortunately, Snyder does not surmount it. While his account displays flashes of brilliant insight, the different sections fit together poorly, and too much has been left out for the rest to be convincing. Black Earth feels like the fragments of a larger book. It does bring part of the Holocaust into sharp and revealing focus--but for the most part it does so by restating more clearly the arguments first made in Bloodlands. The book is also distorted by its inordinate attention to the secondary question of Polish gentile participation in the Holocaust. Such attention comes naturally to Snyder, a historian of Poland who has never disguised his affection for the Poles--especially those who struggled against Communism. But it leads him to some rather strange emphases and omissions.

Snyder begins with a rapid summary of Hitler's worldview. Drawing from Mein Kampf later writings, speeches and the work of the Nazi "crown jurist" Carl Schmitt, Snyder claims, plausibly enough--although without actually demonstrating the point--that there was a fundamental, career-long consistency to Hitler's thought. Whether Hitler really did have a master plan for domination and the annihilation of the Jews or proceeded more fitfully is a question that historians will probably never answer definitively. According to Snyder, Hitler conflated science and politics, seeing the world in radically social-Darwinist terms as a death...

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