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George Steiner lectures at the Oxford University Chabad Society on the ‘Rationality of the Holocaust’

Thursday, 3 November, 2011 - 5:06 am

The Oxford University Chabad Society hosted last night the annual Perl Grunzweig memorial lecture by world renowned Professor George Steiner on the subject ‘North of the Future: Is it possible to speak intelligently of the Holocaust?’

 

IMG_5494.jpgThe lecture took place at the Slager Jewish student centre in central Oxford in front of a capacity audience of around 120 students and faculty. All were keen to take advantage of this rare opportunity to hear Professor Steiner, currently Extraordinary Fellow at Churchill College at the University of Cambridge, formerly Professor of Comparative Literature and Fellow at the University of Oxford, and widely recognised as one of the greatest literary minds living today.

 

(Pictures taken by Joe Herman, Oxford)

 

The memorial lecture series was established by Professor Larry Wolff in memory of his mother, Holocaust survivor Perl Grunzweig, who was born in Vamesta, Hungary. Perl was deported to Auschwitz in June, 1944, with her family, and survived, despite having lost both her parents upon selection, as well as two younger brothers. A woman of enormous vitality and courage, Perl never lost her hope and belief and trust in G-d, the good within man and the beauty of nature.

 

Professor Steiner was welcomed by Rabbi Eli Brackman, director of the Oxford University Chabad Society, and introduced by the Society President, Oleg Giberstein of St Anthony’s college.

 

Professor Steiner's lecture centred on the question of the ‘singularity’ of the Holocaust. He asked what made the Holocaust unique amongst other atrocities that have taken place throughout history since ancient times, sometimes on a much larger scale, particularly during the twentieth century.

 

IMG_5497.jpgEmphasising that very few had predicted that the 20th century would bear witness to such mass killings and unspeakable horrors, Professor Steiner suggested that, with the enormous intellectual productivity of the enlightenment in Germany and the West, the 'civilised world' may have yearned for a more primitive form of expression.

 

Equally, argued Steiner, during the nineteenth century industrialization had to some extent succeeded in obliterating identity, turning people into machines, as alluded to in the premonitory commentaries of Engels.

 

This provoked a counter thesis identifying the uniqueness of the German people represented in Hitler’s view of the third Reich, whilst simultaneously setting the scene for the bureaucratic dehumanisation of the Jews.

 

The thrust of his argument was that the singularity of the Holocaust lies with its execution by highly intelligent and cultured members of an enlightened society, who listened to Schubert and read German philosophy in the evening, and killed men, women and children in the morning; the tortured cries of the Jews of Belgium, taken by train along tracks passing by the concert hall, were simply ignored as the audience continued to enjoy their music.

 

Professor Steiner quoted the book by Browning and Goldhagen who documented how 'ordinary' men were in a large part responsible for the brutality of the Holocaust.

 

Steiner suggested that this kind of enlightened evil is what makes the Holocaust singular, and that this particular combination cannot be explained rationally. He further argued that the Holocaust, like other massacres of horrific magnitude, cannot be adequately comprehended by the rational mind, quoting the unfortunately apposite comment of Josef Stalin that one death may be a tragedy, but a million is a statistic.

 

IMG_5493.jpgUltimately, argued Steiner, it is not possible to speak rationally about the Holocaust. He quoted Primo Levi, who witnessed a prisoner in Auschwitz gasping for some water; when the prisoner was about to take a sip of water from a glass, the Nazi officer spilled it out on the ground. When the prisoner asked the question, with almost his last breath, ‘why?’, the Nazi answered ‘here there is no why.’

 

Steiner closed his lecture by wondering whether, despite the enormous amount of literature still being published on the Holocaust, the obsession will eventually end, and whether the active memory of 'never forget' will fade into a passive remembrance of things past.

 

He urged that every student search for ten names of people who died in the Holocaust and recite them every week to make sure their memory will not be forgotten.

 

George Steiner was joined at the lecture by his wife Professor Zara Steiner, who is a leading historian of Europe between the wars, and Emeritus Fellow of Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge.

 

 

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