The Holocaust History Podcast
The Holocaust History Podcast features engaging conversations with a diverse group of guests on all elements of the Holocaust. Whether you are new to the topic or come with prior knowledge, you will learn something new.
The Holocaust History Podcast
Ep. 39- Philosophy and the Holocaust with John K. Roth
Philosopher Theodore W. Adorno famously said that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Here he gives an example of the way that many thinkers and philosophers struggled with the post-Holocaust world. In this episode, I talked with philosopher and Holocaust scholar John K. Roth about the ways that philosophy approaches the Holocaust and how Nazi genocide challenges our understanding of the world.
John K. Roth is Edward J. Sexton Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Claremont McKenna College.
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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.
Waitman Beorn (00:00.89)
Hello everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waytman Bourne. And today, I'm not going to lie, we are going to be asking some big questions. And the topic that we're covering today is philosophy and the Holocaust. Maybe philosophy of the Holocaust, maybe philosophy in spite of the Holocaust. And I really can't think of a better person, a more preeminent scholar in this area to talk to us about this.
than John Roth, who I'm really, really excited to welcome to the podcast. John, thanks so much for coming on.
John K Roth (00:37.442)
Well, thank you, Waichman. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.
Waitman Beorn (00:42.988)
can you start by just telling us, guess, really briefly or not briefly, but however long you need sort of how you got interested in the Holocaust as a subject, coming from, from your background as a philosopher.
John K Roth (00:57.838)
Okay, I want to start by going back to 1985. And in 1985, an important philosopher, Emil Falkenhayn, was his name. He'll be familiar to some of your listeners, I think. He was a person who
was in Germany during Kristallnacht and was actually arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen for a time. And then he was able to get out of Nazi Germany and ended up in Canada and went on to have a very strong and influential career in philosophy and religious studies.
In 1985, Falkenhayn published an article that began by asserting that philosophers have all but ignored the Holocaust. Philosophers have all but ignored it. And he was both right and wrong about that, I believe.
He was wrong about it because there were actually a lot of philosophers who had had thought about the Holocaust at some length and some of their names are important in the history of philosophy. These would include people like Martin Buber and Theodore Adorno, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt. You could even include Albert Camus in that list.
So there were people who had reflected on the Holocaust from a philosophical perspective, but Wachenheim was correct in suggesting that the Holocaust had not been, for most academic philosophers at least, anything like a central focus or focal point for their reflection.
John K Roth (03:03.054)
and he had some thoughts about why that was the case, including one that said that philosophers kind of have trouble dealing with radical evil.
So that's part of the context for how I got into philosophy and the Holocaust. So just a word about my experience, but maybe we also ought to take a minute to identify what philosophy is, if we can do that.
So the kind of working definition that I would suggest would be that philosophy is critical inquiry about reality, knowledge, and ethics. So it explores what is, what can be known, and what ought to be. Now a lot of fields do that same work, but philosophers have in their toolkit
Waitman Beorn (03:47.46)
Sure.
John K Roth (04:17.506)
a fundamental instrument which is questions. And philosophers are the ones who keep pressing the questions, who will keep asking, well how do you know that? Or what does your claim about whatever it is suggest about the nature of reality or existence or experience?
And then there's always the ethical dimension about, well, when we look at what's going on in human experience in particular, is there a difference, a fundamental difference that can be distinguished between right and wrong, justice and injustice, good and evil, things of that kind? That's the heartbeat of philosophy. It has to do with
persistent questioning, inquiry that just depends on dialogue and argument and persuasion and debate about anything and everything.
And it's not the only field that does that, but philosophers and philosophy have a history of being persistent and unrelenting about it. At least they do when philosophy is at its best. Now, just a word about me that kind of will fit in with both of those points about what philosophy is on the one hand and Wachenheim's assertion.
in 1985 that philosophers have all but ignored the Holocaust. I'm an old man, as you know, Waitman. I'm in my 80s and I was trained first in my graduate study in philosophy with an emphasis and an interest in American topics and philosophers. So I worked on
John K Roth (06:20.728)
people like William James and John Dewey and I spent time studying the Federalist papers and you know the tradition of American thinking that in the field of philosophy carries the identification of American philosophy. That's where I was and I had a good career going in that field that didn't involve the Holocaust.
And then in my early 30s one day, a former philosophy teacher of mine, we lived in the same town and worked in the same place and we often saw each other and he came to me one day and he said, John, I think you might be interested in reading the writings of Elie Wiesel. Elie Wiesel, as your listeners will know, was a Holocaust survivor as a
teenager, he had been in Auschwitz. He survived, most of his family did not. He went on to become a writer and a thinker and humanitarian and eventually received the Nobel Peace Prize to recognize his contributions. So, as I often say to my students, I always follow the suggestions of my teachers about things I should read.
So I started reading Elie Wiesel and in a few months I read everything that was available at that time. This is in the early 1970s. I read everything of Wiesel's that was in English translation that I could get. And the impact of that reading experience was that my life changed. I often say of myself that I'm a person who's
whose life has been deeply affected by reading. So anyway, here's what happened for me. I realized that, yeah, I had a kind of awareness of the Holocaust, but I didn't know about its history in any detail or I hadn't studied it. And yet as a philosopher, I knew from reading Wiesel,
John K Roth (08:44.984)
that there was something in his writings that was drawing me to the realization that I had to learn more about the history that was embedded in his life.
and it was partly because Wiesel himself in a good philosophical fashion and a Jewish fashion also I should add he was asking questions all the time about you know what he had experienced as a young Jewish boy man in Auschwitz and afterwards. So I began making what I regard as a kind of
personal and professional turn in my life when I was in my early 30s and I began to Concentrate on the Holocaust. I read history. I Didn't become a historian, but I devoured history But it was always coming for me from a perspective of philosophy So I was I was studying the history of the Holocaust with questions like
Why did this happen? How come people acted the way they did? Why didn't they refuse to act in the way that some of them did? Why did some people resist and some people rescue Jews and most people didn't? These were kind of the questions that were formatting for me and then of course with my own peculiar
kind of philosophical interests. The question of God was constantly lurking in the background at least. Wiesel's writings cause that to be the case. So I'm thinking about these things and I went to work on it and it changed my life and over time I realized that the thing that was really gnawing at me the most as I was bringing my philosophical lens to bear on
John K Roth (10:58.262)
the history of the Holocaust, the thing that was gripping me and nagging at me the most was what had happened to ethics.
What had happened to the traditions and the perspectives that were present in all of the cultures that were involved in the Holocaust that said things like, it's wrong to murder. You shouldn't lie and cheat. You shouldn't treat your neighbor in a way that you wouldn't wish to be treated.
The history I was exploring was suggesting, you know all of that ethical material It looked like had pretty well been trampled on Or had at least proved to be utterly ineffective in in preventing the final solution
And that became for me a kind of thread that I've followed for a long time that is trying to figure out what happened to ethics. Where was ethics before, during, and after the Holocaust? That's kind of been my wheelhouse as a Holocaust scholar. And I often say of myself, and I'll stop after I make this point,
that I'm a philosopher who got tripped up by history and in particular by Holocaust history, which led on into other concerns about genocides that have happened after the Holocaust and genocides that happened before it as well. So I think of myself as a
John K Roth (12:51.896)
philosopher tripped up by history. I think I'm a better philosopher because I have been tripped up by history and I've been required to study it and learn from historians like you and to think deeply about the scholarship that history provides. But I remain a philosopher even if I'm a tripped up one.
And my concern is especially focused on the status, the fate, the destruction, the overriding, the resilience and the persistence of ethics in the midst of atrocity.
Waitman Beorn (13:37.764)
I think that's, that's a fantastic introduction. And I want to think about as we, as we move forward, how history can be tripped up by philosophy, because I feel like, you know, these, kinds of intersections go, go both ways. but before we get there, I kind of want to touch on something that you, you began to talk a little bit about, you know, in your, in your personal intellectual journey as being tripped up by history. But I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how philosophy as a discipline.
was tripped up by the history of the Holocaust in the sense that, you know,
I mean, the famous, the famous quote, which, you I think it's thrown around an awful lot and maybe rightly or wrongly is, is Theodore Adorno's quote that, you know, there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. But, you know, I wonder if you could talk a little about the ways in which as an historical event, the Holocaust presented a challenge or maybe a crisis for philosophy itself, you know, in, in
John K Roth (14:28.375)
Yeah.
John K Roth (14:43.574)
Yes, right.
Waitman Beorn (14:44.258)
and seeming to overturn everything that we at least kind of took as an understood given about the way societies work.
John K Roth (14:51.424)
Right. I would say to start that the holocaust
provides a negative judgment of philosophy. Because you can ask the question,
Where was philosophy as Nazism was rising and as the Second World War began and then as, you know, the things that you have studied so deeply, the Holocaust by bullets and then by industrialized gas chambers unfolded on the European continent. Now, one of the places where philosophy was, was aiding and abetting.
the Nazi project. We often cast attention on the great philosopher Martin Heidegger, who early in his career became rector of a German university, acted in a way that was hostile toward his
teacher, Edmund Husserl, who was Jewish and who, you know, served the Nazi regime and never repented of it, even though he lived for decades after World War II. And he wasn't alone. There was a whole cadre of German academic philosophers who in one way or another curried favor with the Nazi regime. They
John K Roth (16:40.364)
did not dissent and resist, but went along. So they were in the language that we sometimes use in Holocaust studies, they were either bystanders or enablers of the Nazi regime. So one of the ways in which philosophy was involved with the Holocaust was it was implicated in it.
And this even applies in some ways to the history of philosophy in the West, where it would not be hard to locate in some of the people who are canonical figures in Western philosophy elements of antisemitism, even of racist, early kind of racist thinking. So the Holocaust casts a judgment on philosophy.
At the same time, were philosophers during that time and after it who
responded to what had happened in a critical and constructive kind of way and they kind of saved the reputation of philosophy I would say in the aftermath of the events that took place in the 1940s. Here you'd think of people like Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas.
Adorno would be somebody also who would be in that camp. And then there more recent people like myself and younger people too who have realized that the Holocaust is a challenge to philosophy because it raises the questions of what should philosophy be? What can it say?
John K Roth (18:46.38)
What can't it say? What shouldn't it say? This is the point I think where the quotation from Adorno that you mentioned where he said, you know, there can't be poetry after Auschwitz, which he kind of backed away from. And of course, there's been a lot of very fine poetry after and about Auschwitz and the Holocaust even. But I think the larger thing that he was getting at is, okay, given this history,
given the history of the poetic the aesthetic or the philosophical or the theological what is it that can or can't or shouldn't be said and My my perspective on this with regard to ethics is that well The the philosophical tradition of ethics, you know going back to Plato and Aristotle
And and with a lot of other thinkers in between them and current times that you can't just Proceed as if it's business as usual as if there wasn't this event that created a kind of rupture and a cataclysmic Effect on what it is to be human what it is to think What it is to? speak
and write responsibly and with accountability in the aftermath of this atrocity.
So it's maybe not surprising that Falkenhaym had the feeling that philosophers had all but ignored the Holocaust. There might be a kind of sense that, and I think historians encounter this sometimes too, the Holocaust, this is one of the things that has struck me kind of in the macro level as I have thought about it and worked.
John K Roth (20:48.27)
on it for a long long time. I'm always impressed by how huge and vast this was. You know, it was not only continental in scope, but it was engulfing of all sorts of traditions and patterns of thinking and
creativity. So it left things kind of in ruins.
And the task for all of us who work on it is to see, what can we make of it? How can we mend the fragments?
Waitman Beorn (21:41.836)
I mean, yeah, I think this is of the things that's challenging, you know, at least. And again, this is also kind of an interesting exercise in regional focus as well, because of course, you know, are similar events that predated the Holocaust, you know, that arguably don't cause philosophers to rethink the way they approach their work. You know, there are other genocides. There's
Imperial and colonial genocides that that don't force a sort of reevaluation Until you sort of have this event where it sort of comes home in a Western European sense And so I'm wondering, know, then is there this Is there a sense of sort of nihilism after after the Holocaust that like what are we doing here? You know, what are what are these debates? That we've been having for we being, you know Western European based historians
have had or philosophers have had for hundreds of years when in the end it results in, it doesn't have anything to do with stopping this thing. Does that make sense as sort of as a challenge?
John K Roth (22:50.434)
Yeah, right. I think this would take us a little more into the weeds and bushes of philosophy. I'll go in two directions here that are important. In the 20th century, the second half of the 20th century,
in the English speaking philosophical world, there was a sense in which its interests became increasingly abstract. There was a lot of attention on language and on how language is used, but it wasn't grounded in history.
It wasn't studying the language of hate and antisemitism and racism. It was more removed from that. was about how do statements, propositions relate or not relate to the reality that they purport to be in contact with or describe or assess. So there was a level of abstraction.
which was enough to prevent the field of philosophy from engaging with history. And that was a defect in philosophy. And it was one of the reasons why I am so grateful that as a philosopher I got tripped up by history.
because it held me to account to say, John, it isn't sufficient to be philosophical unless your work is connected to history, to what is happening, to what has happened. Particularly when the history that you engage, if you're thinking about the second half of the 20th century and now into the 21st century is so full of
John K Roth (25:07.539)
violence and repression and tyranny and genocide.
So there was that. Then the other thing about the history of philosophy that I think Kant people up short was that the German tradition in philosophy has been so powerful and normative for Western thinking. The figure of Immanuel Kant just looms very large.
in the Western philosophical tradition. And then you have Hegel and then Nietzsche.
just to name three. mean, these are gigantic influencers would be our term today in terms of the thinking of Western civilization, I would say, from the Enlightenment onward. But the Kantian tradition and the Hegelian tradition and Nietzsche did not prevent or stop
Nazism and the Holocaust. In fact, there are arguments that some scholars make that say they actually help to facilitate it. So the tradition has accounting to do with regard to itself. And some of that is happening and it continues to go on. But it kind of means, among other things, that you can't just do philosophy in
John K Roth (26:52.334)
in the old way, as if these tragic, rupturing, violent, destructive events haven't happened. And I think it leaves a tradition like philosophy kind of...
rightfully giving pause with regard to its own agenda. Now here I'll go back and mention something that's always been important for me since I heard it first time and it serves as a kind of warning to me as a philosopher. I'm referring to Raoul Hilberg and his famous dictum when he was being asked about
you know how he went about his scholarship on the the details of the holocaust or what he liked to call the minutia of the holocaust and hillberg said something like i've always attended to the the details and to the minutia because i've been afraid of big questions for fear that if i tried to deal with them i would come up with small answers
Waitman Beorn (28:18.222)
Yeah, I mean, and I got to say that that's one of my favorite quotes. It's in my most recent book. It's one of the epigraphs for it, you know, because I've never wanted to ask big questions because I was always afraid of coming up with small answers. So yeah, sorry, go ahead.
John K Roth (28:18.658)
So.
John K Roth (28:21.985)
you
John K Roth (28:26.103)
Right.
John K Roth (28:32.674)
Yeah, so you can imagine just from our conversation here what a challenge this is to philosophers because philosophers I mentioned the toolkit of the philosophers basically questions and some of those questions are about small things but some of those questions are big questions like what is justice or how do we know anything or you know things like that and so I
When I'm asking my questions about ethics and the Holocaust, I'm always remembering, at least when I'm at my best on this, I'm remembering Hilberg who said, be careful of the big questions so that you don't come up with small answers. And so I'm not afraid about, I'm not suggesting that Hilberg makes me give up on the big questions. I think the big questions are important.
But I have to be cautious or bold enough, I would be the flip side of it, to make sure that I don't come up with small answers. And of course the small answers, ironically, could be the big grand answers that sometimes philosophers have reached for in their work.
Waitman Beorn (29:55.28)
mean, it's interesting to hear you coming at it from the philosophical perspective, because for me, as an historian, the reason that I love that quote so much is that while I certainly hold, you know, ideology and big, movements and big sort of ideas as important, I often think that if I really want to see what's happening and what the true nature of the event is, I have to look at
You know, the, the, the smallest level where people are interacting with other people and people are actually moving a thing from one place to the other, which is what Hilberg is looking at, but also just, you know, very, very specific things. because I feel like that, that helps me then to actually come up with bigger answers because then I'm actually, I actually have something to hold onto. You know, I can actually say that, you know, in this instance, this, you know, antisemitism looked like this.
John K Roth (30:49.89)
Right.
Waitman Beorn (30:54.954)
or in this instance, complicity looked like this. And that maybe helps us to then blow that back out to something big, but starting small. And so I guess it helps you to create generalizations, which you can feel better about because you haven't started with generalizations, if that makes sense.
John K Roth (31:15.96)
Right, now here's a point where I think there's an interface between history and philosophy. So I'll go in two directions here.
John K Roth (31:33.792)
The a philosophical question that a historian faces is when does my study of the particular permit me to make a reasonable generalization? Now that I would argue that's not a historical question That's a philosophical question Because it's related
to the question of when is it right for me to say I know something? And you can't get the answer to that question by going to an archive and consulting a document.
So, and I believe this now, just as I'm a philosopher who is tripped up by history, I think that historians, when they're at their best, also have to be philosophers. And the quality of their history will depend on whether they're good philosophers or not. So.
You know, is the generalization that you're wanting to draw is you feel like you've got to get down, you know, in what Christopher Browning liked to call the weeds and the bushes. How do you know when do you know you're on firm ground in moving from the weeds and the bushes to a more macro level?
Waitman Beorn (33:04.932)
I mean, that is the challenge, right?
John K Roth (33:05.516)
Now historians will have, they will talk to each other about this, but my sense is very often without always recognizing it, that when they do that, they're talking philosophically as much as they are historically. Now the second thing I was thinking about is,
What about the vocabulary that we use to try to understand something historical? And you know, you and I know that Holocaust studies has its vocabulary. We talk about perpetrators, we talk about victims, we talk about bystanders, we talk about enablers, we talk about, you know, one thing and another. And so it's always a question, and I think we all know when we work on this, do we have the right vocabulary?
Do we need some different concepts or some new concepts? Or do we need a more critical perspective on the concepts we're using? And I think this is another place where history and philosophy converge and they need each other. Because when you're arguing over whether you have the right concept,
John K Roth (34:26.646)
Again, you can't go to an archive and get a document that answers that. You have to think about it. You have to reflect on, what are the options and alternatives? How do I know that the fit is right between my concept and the data? So this is where I think we all know who work on this that if you're gonna tackle something as big as the Holocaust and try to
somehow get your head around it and think about it, it requires lots of perspectives. And the perspectives that philosophy can bring, I would say are, first of all, unavoidable. And secondly, the quality of the scholarship and the discussion that's carried out will hinge in part on the quality of the
philosophical reflection that's in engaged with these inquiries. I don't know if you'd agree with that as a historian or not, but that's my take on it.
Waitman Beorn (35:33.378)
Well, I think so. I think just as an example, you know, one of the areas that I think is one of the clearest examples of this problem is the word of the Holocaust itself in the sense of of of what what does that mean and who does it include or exclude and and then what are the stakes of that sort of boundary drawing? You know, it's something that, you know, I've been very sort of
John K Roth (35:45.421)
Yes.
John K Roth (36:00.439)
Yes.
Waitman Beorn (36:04.048)
I've sort of struggled with it, I think, in some of my work and to the extent that I've kind of started to use the Nazi genocidal project as my umbrella term, you know, and which, then that includes a lot of other groups without having to sort of make an argument about it. But that is very much, I think, a philosophical question about what you believe is the sort of, you know, essential nature of the event, if that makes sense.
John K Roth (36:13.548)
Uh-huh.
John K Roth (36:18.391)
Yes.
John K Roth (36:31.394)
Right. yes, of course, I think that's absolutely right. And this is where the historical research definitely affects the conceptual framework that we use. And I like your notion of the Nazi genocidal project because as we learn what that project included and entailed,
It changes our understanding of what the assault on the Jews was, I think. I mean, I think it becomes a vaster kind of mix that we're looking at. And, you know, then, of course, there's always the...
Waitman Beorn (37:22.704)
It also, in a certain sense,
Sorry, go ahead. mean, it also sort of, sorry, we're talking over ourselves. I mean, it also ends up being kind of a lens too, right? Because we can look at groups like the disabled or the Roma. And you know that I was having a conversation with another guest who was talking about archives and how a lot of, example, the Roma, they don't have their own archives.
John K Roth (37:27.618)
No, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say...
Waitman Beorn (37:57.006)
You know, they show up in Holocaust related archives, which are often created from the perspective of dealing with Jewish victims of the Holocaust and they sort of are included. And then what does that mean for, for their story and, their, and not only how their story is told and remembered, but also the way in which they're the Nazi project against them is the scene, you know, read against or with the, the, Nazi project.
against the Jews, you know, and the same thing with, with the, you know, the disabled that, that, you know, I'm reading a really interesting book by Dagmar Herzog, who's going to be on the show later, about this, you know, and one of things that she's arguing already is that, you know, oftentimes the Nazi program against the disabled was seen as a precursor to the Holocaust or the Nazi genocide against the Jews.
But that in a certain sense is not a helpful way of thinking about it either, that it is its own thing. And it was its own program that came from its own biases. And it should not be just sort of relegated as like the opening act or the experimental process before it was perfected for the Jews.
John K Roth (38:56.887)
Yeah.
John K Roth (39:07.619)
Right.
Right. Yeah, this is where, you know, the ongoing historical research
I'll put it this way, it keeps tripping me up as a philosopher. I mean, you know, I feel obliged to do my best to, you know, keep abreast of what's going on in the historical scholarship about the Holocaust. And it affects, you know, how I...
How I think philosophically about it. I mean, I there's this constant, you know give and take For me that you know keeps things keeps things in ferment and and changing
Waitman Beorn (40:03.384)
And so maybe we can move now to one of our other small questions, AKA giant questions. You mentioned God earlier in religion. You know, what, what is the challenge of the Holocaust as historical event to theology? And here, obviously we're talking about Christian and Jewish, which, which obviously take different, perhaps different lessons or different challenges to it.
John K Roth (40:27.341)
Yeah.
Waitman Beorn (40:33.712)
Can you talk a little about those two things post-Holocaust?
John K Roth (40:41.772)
Right. Well, let me start with my own experience. My religious tradition is Christian. so back when I was reading Weasel early on and saying to myself, I have to find out more about this,
One of the things that I learned more deeply, I wasn't unaware of it, but I learned more deeply how my own religious tradition was implicated even instrumental in the destruction of the European Jews. And there's a long story there. But...
That certainly led me to kind of have to rethink my relationship to my own tradition. Which of course eventually involved some reflections about well who do I think God is or is there a God? Things of those kinds of questions. Then...
There's a passage somewhere in one of Wiesel's writings where he says, speaking about the Holocaust, he says, sooner or later, you will have to encounter the question of God.
And I think what he was getting at in making that statement was that
John K Roth (42:30.444)
the targets of the final solution, the Jews, even if they aren't adherents or practitioners of the tradition,
come from a tradition that is deeply rooted in ideas and claims and propositions about divinity.
John K Roth (42:59.566)
So for somebody like Wiesel or Falkenhayim, who I referred to earlier, thinkers who are cognizant and engaged with their tradition in Judaism, the Holocaust as a historical event was a...
Well, I've used the term rupture a few times already, I'd use that term again here. It ruptured the tradition. And so the dilemma, I think for both Jews and Christians, it's deeply philosophical question is, what do we do with the tradition now that this happened?
John K Roth (43:56.814)
And the responses to that question can go in a variety of ways. All the way from kind of reaffirming, you know, the tradition, not as if the rupture hadn't happened, but that the tradition somehow is still intact even after it.
To other views that would say, we have to totally rethink this if we want to continue to be Jews or Christians. To views that would say enough is enough. This happened. can't accept any of this tradition anymore. I won't do it. I refuse.
So all of those views are still at play today in the reverberations and aftermath of what we call the Holocaust. And the thing that's interesting about it is that it's produced
However you come down, you know, religiously or spiritually about it, it's produced an amazing literature and debate and discussion that, you know, continues, you know, on and on. This is where Adorno's, what seemed to be his dictum against poetry after Auschwitz was, you know, it was a kind of fool's errand to say that because if,
If there's going to be poetry, what else would it be about except, you know, the Holocaust?
Waitman Beorn (45:34.67)
Mm.
John K Roth (45:38.914)
That's why we have literature as well as history and philosophy about the Holocaust. These are events that call out to human creativity and the human spirit to try in some way to respond to them.
Waitman Beorn (45:39.58)
Yeah, that's good.
Waitman Beorn (45:58.702)
Yeah, I mean, that's, that's, that's a really, really nice way of putting it. and I'm, curious, cause we have this idea of, of moving on a little bit, this idea of things, can things ever be the same again? Right. There's no, there's no unringing the sort of historical bell that was Auschwitz that was the Holocaust. And I'm curious to go back to, to bring it back a little bit back to your, your ideas and your work, you know,
John K Roth (45:59.682)
It's.
Waitman Beorn (46:29.474)
Is there ethics after Auschwitz in the sense of something that everyone will be sort of familiar with, because of current events, this idea of, trusting the guard rails, right? That, there are guard rails that exist to prevent us from going off in these horrible ways. And I suspect that there were people even in the thirties and forties that were thinking, well, you know, we have all of these ethical safeguards, you know, for example, in the medical profession.
John K Roth (46:41.047)
Right.
John K Roth (46:55.736)
Right.
Waitman Beorn (46:56.84)
You know, the do no harm and Hippocratic oath. We have these guard rails and then, you know, as, as you pointed out and others, the Holocaust, you know, and I guess ultimately genocides in all different contexts point out that these, guard rails are, largely or maybe largely sort of imaginary when the rubber meets the road, because they, don't really stand in the way of, of stopping anything. and
In a certain sense, I'm thinking back again to the T4 program, so called euthanasia program. In some sense, these guard rails become off ramps because even the Hippocratic oath gets twisted so that now murdering your patients actually becomes a good thing because you're, you're sparing them from a life of misery, et cetera, et cetera. So can you talk a little about that, that idea?
John K Roth (47:39.32)
Yes.
John K Roth (47:44.835)
Right.
John K Roth (47:49.824)
Yeah, well this is this kind of thing is right at the center of my study of ethics during and after the Holocaust. There's a whole litany of shorthand ways of describing what happened to ethics during the Holocaust and you've touched on some of them. Ethics was ignored, it was subverted, it was
used in ways that as you pointed out led to the idea that it was actually good to you know destroy useless lives as they came to be you know thought of because that it was economically efficient to do that and it even was healthy for the body politic to do it. ethics is weak, it's vulnerable, it's
subject to subversion and abuse. And yet, and this is where philosophy and the toolkit of questions keeps coming back, ethics has a kind of persistence and potential resilience because it retains the authority of
the question So the question you know people could have asked about the t4 program Is this right? Is this just and even when the answer came back and said well, yeah, it's good because it's economically efficient and It'll it'll save us. So we have a pure Aryan race The questions could still be asked, you know, well, why do you think that is it good?
to place economic efficiency over the value of a human life. ethics has lots of kind of pushback effects that it can make use of, but fundamental to them, I think, is the power of the question, the ethical question that always is there to hold us to account.
John K Roth (50:18.476)
because of.
Unless we allow the questioning to be silenced, it has the power that it has when we ask. And questions are essential to resistance and to opposition to things.
So ethics is tremendously fragile, but it also has a kind of strength. everything, I would say, wait, depends on whether we act responsibly toward the ethical or whether we abandon it and give it up.
And those are the only guardrails as far as I can see. It's how we respond to the questions about what's right, what's good, what's just, what's fair, things of that kind.
Waitman Beorn (51:30.224)
And I want to come back to this at the end.
John K Roth (51:30.44)
and and you know we you Well, and you and I know that there there was such a thing as the so-called Nazi ethic You know which eventually would have said well, it's a good thing to kill Jews And if somebody wants to say that then you have to say wait a second. What do you mean? It's good What makes it good? Show me
Because among other things we know that antisemitism fundamentally rests on a tissue of lies. It's not resting on sound evidence that anybody could put forward. And you and I know that versions of these kinds of questions are facing us right now in 2024, 2025 in the Western world and in the world where
democracy is trying to survive and flourish.
Waitman Beorn (52:30.896)
And this is something that I wanted to bring up because I found it personally really inspirational. And so for those of you that wouldn't know this because you're just our listeners, I was at a conference that's held every two years called Lessons and Legacies, which is sort of one of the preeminent Holocaust studies conferences. John was giving a talk there, a really
I think a really inspirational one. one of the things, you said two things that really stood out to me. One of which you've just mentioned, which is this idea that.
there is a such a thing as truth in a certain sense and that historians and guess philosophers as well are in search of a truth, which is not to say that,
It's, is not to of throw out the sort of postmodernist or, or structuralist critiques of, the idea of truth. I mean, obviously truth has been mediated and you know, there are ways in which things aren't due, but at a certain level, there are certain things that are just true. Like for example, the Holocaust happened and you know, Auschwitz existed, cetera. That's the one thing I want to come back to in a second. And the second that I found really, really inspirational, was your comment that
teaching about the Holocaust in this time is an act of protest. In the context of the Trumps of the world, of the Erdogans, of the undemocratic people that are trying to of subvert things. And I think this goes, I took it certainly as going beyond just classroom teaching because one of the things that I think is really important is sort of the
Waitman Beorn (54:28.526)
the public outreach that I'm able to do in the various ways that I do it. And I think that's also teaching about the Holocaust. I think in the background of our entire conversation and not in a forced way, but has been, as you put it at the conference, how do we teach the Holocaust this time and this time and place?
John K Roth (54:53.773)
Right.
Waitman Beorn (54:55.376)
And I'm wondering if you could expand, you know, for our listeners a little bit more about what this means, because, you know, one of the things that I see with the sort of growing, you know, anti-intellectualism and also dealing with the Holocaust itself is this idea of just the facts. Like, just tell the story, you know, don't moralize, you know, in schools the students should just be exposed to like the facts of the history, which already
is a problematic concept, but and not be sort of told what is right or wrong. But I suspect that you would say that actually at some point there are things that are right and wrong and we do need to tell people what they are.
John K Roth (55:38.445)
Yes.
Right, I do believe that. But I'd also say that the facts speak for themselves, as we sometimes like to say at least, and that if we're doing our job as educators and we're focused on helping people to understand.
Not only that the holocaust happened but but what that what it means what did happen? Who did it? You know, how did it happen all these things? these are
inquiries that reveal and depend on a belief in facts, not alternative facts, but the ones that can be supported by evidence. And when we focus on those things with regard to the Holocaust, lo and behold, we discover that the Holocaust happened because people had beliefs
that were racist, anti-Semitic, and lethal.
John K Roth (56:55.942)
And I think in most cases, the presentation of the facts contains the ethic.
John K Roth (57:08.928)
unless people are prepared to receive these facts and an account of what happened and say, yeah, that was all good, that was right, we should pursue policies like that again. Most people I think aren't gonna go there. So yeah, I'll take the challenge of, well, just teach the facts.
because I think the facts have messages in them that don't have to be moralized or preached about, they just have to be honestly presented.
John K Roth (57:51.768)
Sometimes it takes a little, you know nudging beyond that too, but in my experience as a teacher for decades I think that the best teaching that I could do with regard to Holocaust education was to present the facts as best I knew them and and could could document and support them along with the questions
that the facts raise.
John K Roth (58:27.084)
That's a pretty potent package.
Waitman Beorn (58:27.536)
I think that's a really nice way of thinking about it in the sense of, you know, I was having a conversation with someone online about the Wehrmacht and the Holocaust. you know, was all these, they're making all these comments about, well, you know, the people that they were shooting were potentially partisans and they were potentially enemies. And, you know, maybe they were wrong, whether they were or not, but,
You can't blame them. and ultimately one of the ways that sort of seemed the best way to defuse that was simply to say, okay, but what about the tiny children? Because you could make the argument that, okay, yeah, the, the, the 18 year old Jewish guy could possibly be seen as a potential, you know, military threat. I mean, obviously it's not, and that's still a stretch, but you can't make that argument about the two year old.
John K Roth (59:17.262)
Threat, yeah.
Waitman Beorn (59:26.786)
And so then, you sort of say, if you document, if you say, if you present the facts that, you this two year old was murdered and then you have to ask the question, you know, okay, why, and can you, can you, the, listener, the student, can you justify this? Can you find a way in which this was okay? You know, and if not, then, then you have arrived at
John K Roth (59:27.095)
Right.
Waitman Beorn (59:53.762)
at the moral, the quote, moralizing part of it, but you've done the work yourself. It's not, it clearly wasn't right.
John K Roth (59:55.714)
Right, right, right. It's kind of there. And yeah, I think your example is excellent. Sure, the 18 or 20 year old standing in front of the pit maybe could be understood as a threat. But how about the 80 year old woman or the six month old child who's also gonna be murdered and shot?
it's a stretch, except, and this is where you get to the next layer, except that all of those people were regarded because of the theories behind the Nazi project as threats. So of course they all had to be killed, but that reveals when you explore it, I would say,
It doesn't take too long to to manifest the bankruptcy the corruption of of that way of thinking And I think you don't have to preach about it I think you just you know detail. Well, why would it be that? You know, then the Nazis would order the the shooting of babies
John K Roth (01:01:15.288)
And then you can quote Himmler, you know, yeah, it was hard work, but we had to do it because, you know, if we didn't kill the infants, they would grow up and they'd take revenge on us. It's in, you know, the judgment against themselves is contained in their own statements very often.
Waitman Beorn (01:01:29.486)
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good, yeah.
Waitman Beorn (01:01:40.079)
Yeah.
Well, it's interesting, you know, because one of the things to bring it, know, and again, I'm, I am actually, I'm quite comfortable doing this, you know, in bringing it back to the sort of modern context, you know, because there, on the one hand, there's a very bizarre phenomenon where, certain political groups like to compare others to the Nazis. we saw this under COVID,
You know, often the far right will compare what the government is doing to what the Nazis did. Well, at the same time, it's in that sense, they're they're inhabiting the role of the victim. But at the same time, what they're proposing puts them very much in the role of the perpetrator and not in and not in sort of really abstract ways. You know, I mean, speaking of, you know, alien elements within society and.
John K Roth (01:02:24.96)
Yeah.
John K Roth (01:02:29.71)
Yes.
Waitman Beorn (01:02:41.282)
removing them, deporting them. You know, these are not, it's not a stretch to compare them to other instances where people have tried to cleanse their society of unwanted elements, you know, by deporting them. But yet there's a, the sort of claim then, you know, the way that, that, that I think these groups try to sort of get around this is to then begin to nitpick the details about, this thing is different. That's different. You know, I had a conversation with somebody
John K Roth (01:02:51.48)
Sure. Sure.
John K Roth (01:03:09.101)
Right.
Waitman Beorn (01:03:10.564)
you know, who said, you it can't be a fascism in America because it doesn't look like Nazi fascism. Without sort of recognizing that, you know, we can have our own. It doesn't have to be, you know, eating broad-verse and wearing lederhosen. You know, I mean, it can be an American version of this and that we need to sort of come to terms with this.
John K Roth (01:03:19.565)
Yes.
John K Roth (01:03:25.325)
Right.
John K Roth (01:03:33.272)
Right.
And I think, you to go back to your point earlier about how, you know, teaching the Holocaust today has to be looked at a bit as an act of protest. I was just thinking when you mentioned the point, thinking back about, you know, my own by now pretty long history in doing this, I would say
I think teaching about the Holocaust has always been an act of protest. Because it's, we're dealing with an event, mean the category isn't quite right, but we're dealing with a history where there were immense amounts of injustice, suffering that was un...
warranted murder You know it just accumulates in in an overwhelming kind of way when you think about it and so as as we think about that I think nearly always scholars are are asking What were the conditions that made it possible for this to happen?
What were the incentives that led people to act in the way they did? What were the policies and postures of the government? And when we learn about what those were,
John K Roth (01:05:17.078)
I think it's not a very long move to say my teaching about this is a protest against those powers and policies. Not just in the past, but wherever they're found.
John K Roth (01:05:39.79)
So I think it's probably a good thing for those of us who work in this field to realize that especially in the mid 2020s, what we're doing is, if we're doing it right, it needs to be thought of as an act of protest and resistance.
Waitman Beorn (01:06:01.072)
I think this leads into sort of another larger question, which I think has gained increased relevance and urgency, which is this idea of lessons. know, people often talk about, well, you know, what the Holocaust has taught us. And, know, on the days that people that I'm in particular, other people are feeling very cynical.
John K Roth (01:06:18.189)
Yeah.
Waitman Beorn (01:06:29.892)
You know, we'll say, what, what lessons, you know, we haven't, we clearly haven't learned because, you know, we've had, we've had similar events and we've had, you know, events that are not as severe, but are analogous to the Holocaust since the Holocaust. so, you know, the cynic would say, what are the lessons in it and are there lessons and have, and have we learned them? and then I think for many of us,
And I'm going to, I'm going let you respond, but for many of us, we're sitting around thinking at a certain level without being too sort of trite about it. But, know, is this what Weimar was like? You know, is this, is this what the, late thirties was like where people were sitting around going, gosh, you know, things are getting kind of, kind of crazy around here. you know, but it's the, it's the, the frog in the, in the boiling water, you know, pan that.
John K Roth (01:07:13.282)
Yeah.
John K Roth (01:07:28.163)
Right.
Waitman Beorn (01:07:28.356)
The temperature is slowly increasing, but we don't notice it. But we should because gosh, you know, we study this. Like how do we, how have we missed it? You know, kind of thing.
John K Roth (01:07:34.178)
Yeah, right.
Yeah, yeah, I have a kind of ambivalent relation to the concept of lessons when we apply it to the Holocaust, as I think is characteristic of a lot of us who, you know, work in this field. The ambivalence is partly that it seems to trite and banal and
not sufficiently serious just to talk about the lessons of the Holocaust on the one hand. On the other hand, if there aren't some insights or some conclusions to be drawn from a careful study of the Holocaust, then that's probably not a good place to be either.
So that's why I kind of instead of you know talking about the lessons I like to I guess it's it's the adage about Show don't tell you know I mean it's it seems to me like the lesson part of the lesson is Okay, think think carefully about why it is that the shooting squadrons are shooting everybody
that's lined up, not just the young men. That's where something like the lesson is to be found, I think. But to kind of reduce it to a lesson seems like it trivializes it somehow.
Waitman Beorn (01:09:27.056)
And I think it also gets, it gets back to that. The question we talked about earlier, this idea of, of big questions, small answers, you know, I mean, one of the areas where I think it comes from a good place, but where sort of education has attempted to of universalize Holocaust experience is kind of in this sort of anti-bullying, you know, that like bullying is bad and, you know, the Holocaust had some elements of
John K Roth (01:09:35.297)
Yeah.
John K Roth (01:09:49.077)
Yes, yeah.
Waitman Beorn (01:09:55.696)
bullying in it and therefore this is a lesson from the Holocaust of like don't be a bully which which I think is a textbook example of one of these small answers you know that like That no one of the cool lessons of the Holocaust isn't you know don't bully people at school I mean, you know, it's good that you don't bully people at school, but like Distilling distilling that entire complex event down into something like like that Does seem to be reducing it almost in significance?
John K Roth (01:10:05.655)
Yeah.
John K Roth (01:10:20.899)
Yeah.
And the attempt to do that is what has led to some of the on-target criticism of Holocaust education, I think.
I've had the experience in my local community here in the rural northwest of the United States of working from time to time with seventh graders with 13 year olds who are doing a unit that is last for five or six weeks where teachers are.
reading the diary of Anne Frank with their students. And I get invited in to kind of provide some of the historical background and context. It's very interesting to try to do this with 13 year olds. And you know you're failing because you know it's way more than they can comprehend. But it is possible with an age group like that not to hit them with
quote, the lessons, but to get them to see the importance of asking questions.
John K Roth (01:11:39.362)
You know, having them look, for example, at a Nazi propaganda poster and getting them to learn how to look at something like that in a way that can decode it, can begin to see, okay, what are the messages that this thing is trying to convey? And then you can ask the question, what do you think about that?
Does that seem like a good thing to do? Because 13-year-olds have, they have in some ways more innocent and in a good sense naive moral sensibilities than some of us who are adults. So it's instructive to try to tap into that kind of thinking capacity that they have.
Waitman Beorn (01:12:08.954)
Mm-hmm.
Waitman Beorn (01:12:38.18)
Yeah. mean, and that's, I think that's always the challenge when you deal with, with those audiences, you know, the, remember, you know, was, I was talking to a, I had a, I had a, a teacher on here on the podcast. I read reasonably and she, you know, she's, she's a PhD in education, but she focused on the Holocaust. She teaches at, you know, middle schools. And, know, she said that one of the, you know, one of the challenges
And not something we can cover tonight, but is, this idea of this naive sense of right and wrong, you know, where, where you can describe sort of what happens in the Holocaust. And some kids will just say, well, why didn't they just leave the Jews alone? Because you know, in, their world, they're taught, you know, if you don't, if you don't like somebody or that they do something to annoy you, you just kind of, leave them alone. Like you just, separate yourself from yourself from situation. And so it's almost like you have to kind of.
John K Roth (01:13:20.035)
Right.
Waitman Beorn (01:13:35.472)
or your your moved to kind of burst their bubble, but you don't you don't necessarily want to do that because obviously they're children. But that takes us in a completely different, completely location. And I know we've we've taken up a lot of your time already. So I kind of want to close with our with our final question. I'm really excited to sort of hear what you think, which is, you know, what is one book on the Holocaust that you recommend?
that's been particularly impactful for you. And obviously, you know, this could change if I asked you tomorrow or the day after, but today, you know, what is the one that you might recommend?
John K Roth (01:14:10.722)
Right.
John K Roth (01:14:15.414)
Okay, I found I couldn't settle for one wait man. So I've got three and I'll try to be really brief. The first one is a book. There's a is a book a novel actually that I read when I was in college a long long time ago that left a lasting impression on me. And it it could be debated about how much it's explicitly about about the Holocaust or not but
Waitman Beorn (01:14:22.448)
I'll give you three, it's fine.
John K Roth (01:14:43.606)
It's certainly relevant to thinking about the Holocaust. And I'm referring to Albert Camus' novel called in English, The Plague, The Plague by Albert Camus. We know that Camus was working on this novel when he was in France trying to recover from illness and he was living in a village where he knew
that there was an active community of people who were rescuing Jews, who were hiding them from the Germans. So that's one, Camus the Plague, a novel. A book that has left an important impression on me and I found it affected students very deeply is the trilogy
kind of memoir trilogy by Charlotte Delbo, a French resistance person who was not Jewish but who nonetheless was swept up in the Nazi roundups and deported to Auschwitz. And she survived and wrote a trilogy that is called Auschwitz and After.
and I found that my college students who studied that text with me were deeply moved by it. So that's a second one I would recommend. And as you can see, my choices here are not kinds of contemporary scholarly studies, but they're more coming from what could be regarded as the classical writings that emerged out of this genocide.
And so the third one I mentioned is actually by a philosopher, John Amory, was the pseudonym he used. And it's a small book called At the Mind's Limits. Amory was a person who was tortured by the Nazis. He was also deported to Auschwitz. He had a tattoo on his arm and
Waitman Beorn (01:16:43.568)
Hmm.
John K Roth (01:17:04.246)
He said that whenever he looked at the tattoo on his arm, he lost trust in the world. And that's been an important image for me as a person who is a philosopher tripped up by history and who thinks about ethics. Because I think the Holocaust did produce immense, it still produces immense
distrust in the world. We don't know who or what to trust. And the challenge, the ethical challenge from Amoreen's vision of the tattoo on his arm and how it made him feel is what, if anything, can we do to restore trust among ourselves and in our world?
Waitman Beorn (01:17:58.224)
And I'd have to second the Amari as well because there is this, I mean, it's just an amazing moment and it's so insightful about what the impact of torture, not just in the context of the Holocaust, but in any context. And he says something, and again, for readers, you should definitely check this book out, but he says something like, the first time someone hits you, you lose...
John K Roth (01:18:15.053)
Yes.
Waitman Beorn (01:18:26.552)
It's an assault, like a rape that you sort of lose your trust in the world because, and essentially I'm paraphrasing now, but essentially, you you've, grown up your whole life with this implicit contractual or more moral understanding that no one can hit you and that's not okay. And it's not allowed. And as soon as it happens to you, you realize that, that, that sort of all the things that you thought were true about.
John K Roth (01:18:29.025)
Right.
John K Roth (01:18:43.63)
Right.
Waitman Beorn (01:18:55.14)
human interaction and morality and the ethics of that kind of thing don't apply. it's sort of, as you suggest, it's this massive and immediate loss of faith in everything, in humanity and in all the rules that you thought were true. And it's something that once it happens to you, there is, again, as you suggest, there's no easy way back from it.
John K Roth (01:19:10.316)
Yeah.
John K Roth (01:19:25.496)
Right, the challenge that, right, the challenge embedded in Ahmari's testimony is both the crisis and the challenge for ethics after the Holocaust. It shows the guard rails are down, but at the same time, because they're down, it becomes clear that there's a need for them.
Waitman Beorn (01:19:25.614)
Because once you know that it's happened and it can happen...
John K Roth (01:19:55.798)
a desperate need for respect and courage and resistance and protest.
Waitman Beorn (01:20:07.92)
Well, John, thank you so much for your comments. mean, this is just as always an amazing enlightening experience for me as well. I'm sure it is for our listeners. For our listeners, again, thank you so much for listening to the podcast. Please, if you have a chance, give us a rating, give us a comment. These things help us moving forward. And again, John, thank you so much for your time and your insights.
John K Roth (01:20:35.276)
Thank you, Waittman, and thank you for doing the podcast. so important.