"Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate, is dead at 87." It was a heartbreaking notification to read as I switched my phone on while the credits rolled in a dimly lit movie theatre. I walked out thinking less about the great white shark Blake Lively had outmaneuvered in “The Shallows” and more about the great soul who had just departed the world.
On a whim, I ducked inside a bookstore a few blocks down the street. Taking the elevator to the top floor, I scoured the rare book room for something of Wiesel’s and struck gold—two first-edition works bearing Wiesel’s looping autograph on their title pages.
The best writers have an almost out-of-body quality to their work, a transcendent way with words that allows readers they've never met to feel as though they know the writer intimately. That's the way I felt with Wiesel. So when I saw that he had died, I felt as if a great teacher of mine, a cherished mentor, would have nothing more to write in the notebook of my life.
I trace my interest in human rights to Wiesel's work. Before I read “Night,” I came across a little-known lecture of his called "The Perils of Indifference," which he delivered in 1999 at a White House function billed as a celebration of the new millennium.
The speech was, perhaps, more somber than Wiesel's hosts might have hoped. The aging Holocaust survivor used the occasion to reflect on the monumental evil of the 20th century. He had, after all, witnessed it firsthand as "a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains" forced to grow up all too quickly behind the barbed wire of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
I returned to the questions Wiesel posed in that 1999 speech—"Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned from our experiences?"—at an academic conference co-sponsored by Duke, specifically the Council for European Studies, the Duke Center for Jewish Studies and the Religions and Public Life Initiative at Kenan.
Scholars from four continents—including two Duke undergraduates just beginning to explore the world of academic research and professional scholarship—presented their answers to the provocative question posed by the conference's title: "The Shoah: A Turning Point?" Experts in law, politics, Jewish studies, Christian theology, European history and museum studies all presented papers examining how the Shoah, as the Holocaust is known in Hebrew, had affected their respective fields.
Most in attendance agreed that the Holocaust was a watershed moment in human history. For example, one historian traced the history of the Catholic Church’s relationship with the Jewish people and argued that the Holocaust forced a complete about-face in the Church’s orientation toward the Jews. With the publication of “Nostra Aetate,” the Papal Letter on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, the Church ceased striving to convert the Jews and sought instead to reconcile with them.
Another historian argued to the contrary that the Shoah constituted a particular event and it would be folly to attempt to extract universal lessons from it. Anodyne calls for tolerance and mutual understanding, in his view, were the only universal lessons that could be derived from an event as complex as the Shoah, and these lessons were so obvious before the Holocaust and so obviously ignored after it that it would be foolish to consider the event a turning point in the ugly history of man’s inhumanity to man.
For my part, I held that the Holocaust was a turning point in our understanding of mass murder because the horrors of Auschwitz and Treblinka led to the development of a new term: genocide. Under the definition of genocide provided in the 1948 Genocide Convention, there are five punishable criminal acts, including the straightforward—genocide itself—and the more subtle, such as “complicity in genocide.”
My paper held that genocides require full-scale mobilization of a society, with distinct actors—politicians, propagandists, generals, footsoldiers, ordinary citizens and artists—playing specialized roles with varying degrees of involvement; some of them might have given orders or actually killed, but others merely knew something unspeakably horrific was happening to the Jews and other minorities, and yet continued to support the regime that was responsible for their deaths. The latter class—the indifferent ones—piqued my interest, and within that class one group stood out: artists.
When I study Wiesel's artful prose, I cannot help but imagine the role German artists played on the other side of the barbed wire. While many artists did escape Nazi Germany, some renowned ones stayed and continued to generate art while swastika-blazoned flags flew overhead. Those who remained helped to legitimize a Nazi Empire portraying itself as the one true heir to the rich artistic heritage of Greece and Rome.
How could these German artists not see that it was indifference that drove them to collaborate with a regime they knew to be causing so much suffering? Did they ever stop to examine their own desires, ordinary human desires for career and advancement and recognition, against the extraordinary circumstances of their times? Did it ever occur to them that the record of their names and work might be forever tarnished by the stains of so many lives lost?
That Duke and, more specifically, Professor Malachi Hacohen trusted me to pursue these difficult questions speaks volumes of this institution, the opportunities it furnishes undergraduates and the relationships it fosters between students and faculty. I'm grateful to Duke for sponsoring my time in Israel, the latest adventure in an education dedicated to following the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke's advice to "live the questions now" because perhaps "someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
Two months after my trip to Israel, I’m far from living my way into the answers. I'm still pondering Wiesel's questions, only now I also think about the questions I raised at the conference. Maybe the link between art and harm is too tenuous to consider criminal. Perhaps this expectation—that artists should be wary of their complicity with regimes and movements that inflict unimaginable suffering—is an excessive, unreasonable burden on freedom of expression.
Then again, the issue of “reasonableness” gets at some of the great questions of the Holocaust: Has human nature really changed since then? Do standards of justice change in response to the events we’ve witnessed? Might what is “reasonable” in one age be considered unreasonable, even criminal in the next?
Matthew King is a Trinity junior. In the fall, his column will run on alternate Mondays.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.